Invisible on the Internet: How David Xie, a Mortgage Broker, Can Fix His Online Presence

David Xie, a mortgage broker with NEXA Mortgage, recently joined our group and quickly proved his determination to succeed. He’s embracing strategies like one-minute videos and focusing on building his personal brand—essential steps in gaining visibility in a competitive market.

David plans to create one-minute videos, a proven strategy to connect with potential clients authentically. These videos can humanize his personal brand, making it more relatable and memorable. For mortgage brokers, this method not only establishes trust but also serves as a key SEO driver when videos are optimized with localized keywords such as “Virginia mortgage broker” or “best VA home loan advisor.”

Building a Website That Performs

David’s website, davidxiemortgageguy.com, is a foundational piece for his personal brand. While having a clear and professional domain name is a great start, it’s essential to optimize it for local SEO for financial-related local services and mortgage brokers. This involves:

• Adding Local Signals: Integrating phrases like “serving Norfolk, Virginia” or “Chandler mortgage solutions.”
• Clickable and Trackable Contact Info: Ensuring a clickable phone number and including a clear service area to help Google associate the website with local searches.
• Content Personalization: Including detailed information about David’s specialties, such as second-opinion loans or VA home loans, paired with client success stories and testimonials to establish credibility.

Strengthening Local SEO

For mortgage brokers, local SEO plays a pivotal role in getting found by potential clients. David needs to focus on:

• Google My Business (GMB) Optimization: Ensuring his GMB profile reflects accurate service areas and categories, such as “mortgage broker in Virginia.” Every business should have a GMB profile, even if you don’t offer local services, as it still creates a strong online signal.
• Citations Across Platforms: Listing his business name, address, and phone number consistently on directories like Yelp, Google, and Facebook.
• Localized Content Creation: Using blog posts and videos targeting keywords like “Norfolk VA mortgage brokers” and “best home loan providers in Virginia.”

A mortgage broker—there are plenty of them. What sets one apart from the rest? Without clear trust elements such as background information, origin, happy customer testimonials, or links to a GMB, a website may fail to convey credibility. It provides no insight into the broker’s experience. From Google’s perspective, such a site could appear generic, like something created on Fiverr and duplicated for every city in the U.S.

Leveraging Social Proof and Reviews

David’s 44 Google reviews are a fantastic asset, but showcasing these reviews creatively can build more trust. For instance:

• Highlighting reviews in videos or blog posts.
• Interviewing clients for testimonials that double as local SEO content.
• Using keywords like “trusted mortgage broker Norfolk” within these reviews and testimonials.

Tools like Local Falcon can reveal critical insights by analyzing searches from different areas on a grid. But in this case, the visibility remains a concern. Even though the broker specializes as a second-opinion loan officer, focusing on VA loans in Norfolk (home to the largest military base), the digital footprint is insufficient.

There are several issues:

1. Business Name Consistency: The business name must match the state registration exactly. Adding extra terms like “broker” can lead to suspensions.
2. Digital Plumbing: While the GMB profile has decent signals, the website doesn’t provide enough support. Reviews are a mix of recent and older ones, but the lack of citations—like listings on Facebook, Quora, or other platforms—creates a weak digital presence.
3. Triangulation Issues: Google relies on triangulation—confirming the business identity through signals like the name, address, and phone number across multiple platforms. Without these, the GMB profile and website remain disconnected.

When running scans, tools like Vendasta Snapshot or BlitzMetrics ACL reveal gaps in digital plumbing. For instance, a lack of citations on platforms like TikTok, Flickr, or Quora might seem trivial, but they contribute to building online credibility and visibility.

Finally, looking at position data for keywords like “VA home loan” and “mortgage,” the average rank is over 20, with no green dots (indicating high visibility) on the grid. This makes the broker nearly invisible online.

To address this, David should focus on:

1. Building consistent citations across platforms.
2. Strengthening their personal and business brand by sharing expertise and client success stories.
3. Improving on-page signals by highlighting specialties like VA loans for military personnel.

Until these steps are taken, visibility will remain limited, and the potential audience will miss out on valuable services.

Driving Traffic with Content and Ads

To increase visibility, David can implement a Dollar-a-Day ad strategy, promoting his one-minute videos on platforms like Facebook and Instagram. This will generate traffic signals that Google recognizes as authority markers. Additionally, using Topic Wheel strategies, David can create content around:

• VA home loan insights.
• Tips for first-time homebuyers.
• Interviews with local real estate agents and community leaders.

David can hire a virtual assistant (VA) to handle tasks like optimizing his GMB profile, building citations, and publishing videos. This cost-effective approach allows him to focus on creating content and building client relationships.

How to Optimize ChatGPT’s Performance and Leverage AI for Personal Branding

Using ChatGPT effectively requires more than just inputting instructions—it’s about understanding how the AI works and guiding it strategically.

Using ChatGPT effectively requires a strategic approach. The key is to treat it like a good friend or a helpful partner, making it feel as though your success depends on its performance—without sounding desperate. For example, you can say:

“Let’s play a little game. I’ll ask you to create content or perform a task, and I’ll rate your output from 1 to 10. Your goal is to score a 10.”

This motivates the AI to try harder. However, don’t give it a perfect 10 right away. Instead, say something like, “That’s not bad—that’s a 7. Let’s try again.” This encourages the AI to refine its responses and keep improving.

There seems to be a hidden metadata layer in ChatGPT’s system that mediates how it processes your instructions. While we don’t fully understand this mechanism, providing proper context and clear goals significantly enhances its performance.

Custom instructions are more for background information, not for regular prompting. They’re a crutch if the AI doesn’t already know much about you. However, if your content is widely accessible (e.g., through well-structured web pages), ChatGPT can retrieve it accurately without relying on custom instructions.

For example, you can ask, “What does [your name] say about X?” and it will pull relevant information from articles, videos, or other content you’ve made available online.

The best way to improve ChatGPT’s responses is by uploading well-structured content online, using schema markup. Schema categorizes content (e.g., “This is an image,” “This is a location”), making it easier for AI to identify and retrieve relevant data. While schema doesn’t directly boost rankings, it triggers featured snippets like images, “People Also Ask” sections, and videos, which drive more visibility.

Some users rely on custom GPTs or bulk uploads (up to 128,000 tokens, or roughly 300 pages), but the system struggles to retain information effectively beyond 10 pages. This approach often leads to confusion and inefficiency. Instead, focus on creating a content factory—a systematic approach to producing structured, high-quality content.

Investing in structured content ensures that your digital presence remains strong, no matter how AI tools evolve. Whether it’s Bard’s Gemini, Anthropic’s models, or Elon Musk’s Grok, a well-prepared content foundation will integrate seamlessly with these systems.

A strong personal brand isn’t about vanity. It’s about building authority and credibility in your field. While the ROI might not be immediately measurable, its long-term impact is significant—especially as AI increasingly relies on structured, accessible content.

This approach isn’t about shortcuts but about creating a sustainable strategy for leveraging AI and strengthening your digital presence.

By aligning his personal branding efforts with SEO for mortgage brokers, David can stand out in a crowded market. Combining consistent content creation, optimized local signals, and strategic ad campaigns will position him as a trusted authority, attracting clients and boosting his online visibility.

David’s journey exemplifies how modern SEO and digital marketing strategies can redefine success for mortgage brokers in today’s digital world.

Ready to take your website to the next level? Join Office Hours now for expert insights and actionable tips. Fast, efficient, and game-changing—let’s get started!