Episode Summary
On this episode of The Out & About Podcast, Tiffany sits down with Josefina, Out & About’s Senior Technical Lead for Digital Solutions, to discuss how AI is changing the way people find and evaluate financial services firms online. The conversation reframes SEO (traditionally understood as search engine optimization) as “search everywhere optimization,” explains why overall clicks may decline while intent rises, and shows how to structure websites so both people and AI can understand who you are, what you do, and why you’re credible.
Key Takeaways:
Search is no longer only about ranking a page. It’s about showing up wherever people look for answers, including AI results, which means clarity, depth, and speed can help financial firms get cited and found.
- As AI interfaces answer more top-of-funnel questions directly, fewer clicks make it to your site.
- When visitors arrive on your website, they are better informed and have higher intent, which can strengthen lead quality and conversion.
- We often hear clients hesitate to be too explicit about who they are or what they charge — preferring to “imply” those details through imagery or broad messaging. That tactic used to work when audiences discovered them through their homepage, but we’re seeing that not work anymore. Today’s search environment rewards clarity. The firms that name their audience, outline their services directly, and include fee transparency are the ones most likely to be cited in AI-generated answers and found by the right prospects.
- A few moments that made us stop and think:
- AI may read your website before a human does. That means structure, clarity, and crawlability shape how your brand is interpreted.
- Clicks might decrease while intent and engagement increase. Fewer visits can actually mean better-qualified leads reaching you faster.
- AI is less forgiving when it comes to errors. A slow site or a misused heading can make your firm invisible in results.
Don’t Miss the ONE Thing You Should Go Do First!
- Images and videos can slow your webpages down. Run a page speed test on your highest-value pages and compress oversized images to help improve the user experience.
Links & Resources
- Firm Wide Marketing and Advisor Lead Gen Support
- Previous Episode [#6]: Financial Services SEO: What You Need to Know in an AI World
- Previous Episode: Positioning for Scale in Financial Services: From M&A Readiness to Hiring Momentum
Join Us!
- Want more practical ideas? Join The Out & About newsletter for fresh insights into financial services marketing and downloadable resources.
Transcript
Josefina (00:10):
Right now you should be thinking you're building for a world where AI will probably read your website before any humans do.
Tiffany (00:18):
I think what's exciting me about this conversation is people are super excited about SEO in a way that they haven't been before. So that's just really fun for me.
(00:34):
All right. Hey everyone. Welcome back to The Out & About Podcast, where we break down all things marketing and financial services. So we're bringing you into the conversation of what we see working and not working. As I always say, no matter how long you've been in that marketing seat, we're here to support you, bring you into all those conversations we're having every day, which is why I'm super excited to have Josefina with us.
(00:57):
We're always having conversations and now you guys get to be in on that. So Josefina is our — tell me if I get this right — Senior Technical Lead for Digital Solutions, is that your title?
Josefina (01:21):
Yes
Tiffany (01:21):
Okay. To me you're just like the wizard of all things like digital technical, but do you want to introduce yourself? I know you and I have been with Out & About for a while, so we’re two of the veterans here.
Josefina (01:22):
That's right. So yeah, I'm Josefina. I'm the Senior Technical Lead at Out & About, and I'm at the intersection between strategy and execution. So my day-to-day activities could be building websites but a lot of auditing websites for performance, security, and accessibility, and I'm also maintaining websites or providing digital recommendations that align to our specific clients' marketing goals.
Tiffany (01:59):
I love it. And you described it so well. You really are that intersection. I was just thinking about how you and I hop on calls with — I won't call any company names — but we like to meet with some of the integration companies for RIAs and other firms and ask them all the hard questions so we know from a strategic side and an integration side how their products work before we recommend them to clients. So those are always really fun.
Josefina (02:28):
Yeah, I love that. I love spreading my role and just incorporating and communicating in different areas.
Tiffany (02:37):
Yeah, I love it.
(02:39):
Oh, I hope you can't hear my dogs. By the way, folks, as you're listing, we just apologize. We're having major technical issues today. Microphones aren't working, internet’s not working, all the things are not working. Ironically, the day we have the technical lead in is when all the technical breaks down. So I apologize if we sound echo-y or not as clear as normal but we're going to get into a conversation. We just want to make sure this happens and we didn't want to delay it one more day. So I'm super excited. We're going to talk about SEO and AI and websites and on-page SEO and all that and just how we are responding, I guess, to this evolution of SEO and AI. As I said in the last episode, we’ll use SEO as a short term or as an abbreviated word for AI. There's just so many words. Maybe you want to tell us specifically which phrases you prefer. There's like AIO or AEO or there's all these different ways to say it. Do you have a preference?
Josefina (03:49):
No. I feel like they all are just layers of it. I think what I like best is not search engine optimization but search everywhere optimization. So I still like SEO.
Tiffany (04:07):
Oh my gosh, I love that. Like I said, I've always just been using SEO like shorthand for all things. So yeah, we'll just call it branding. Yes, because we brand it. I love that so much. And then I just don't have to think about saying when I say SEO, I also mean AI and AIO and AEO, and I mean, yeah, the jargon just gets wild. So we'll just call it SEO.
Josefina (04:32):
Honestly, don't think that's where the focus should be — acronyms. I think what people are just maybe noticing is that clicks are going down, and that sounds a bit scary at first, but when you dig into it, it actually gets a little bit more interesting because you have Google and all of the AI interfaces doing a lot of the heavy lifting right now. They're handling all of the top of the funnel questions, the definitions. How do you do this? What is a Roth IRA? And you're getting an answer right there, no click needed. So people are not going organically to your website, but that doesn't mean they're not finding you. They're just finding your content elsewhere, which means brand building starts before you go to the website. And so people might be going back and forth with their questions and then they might at some point look at the sources or your company might be mentioned. And that's great because by the time they go to your website, they’re just warmer leads. They are people who know a lot about you and they're more ready to engage. So that's something to keep in mind. I would say traffic isn't disappearing — people are searching more than ever, and I would argue better than ever. So it's more like a condensation of traffic that when people arrive to your website, there are less clicks going there but there's a high intent once they're there. And that's actually pretty good because you have less noise and more engagement.
Tiffany (06:19):
I love it. See folks, this is why we need Josefina for this conversation. I'm so excited. I have so many questions if I keep looking over here. I know we wrote a bunch down and we had a couple come in from outside the organization too, but before we dive in, we always say, what are you excited about? What are you saying yes to in SEO or marketing in general? So Josefina, is there anything that just jazzes you right now?
Josefina (06:47):
I am saying yes to AI interfaces and I'm saying yes to clarity, depth, and good content and websites that are structured well. Absolutely.
Tiffany (07:05):
Yeah. I mean, of course I couldn't agree more, especially the content side. And I think what's exciting me about this conversation is what we talked about in the last conversation with Jimmy and what you just said too. People are super excited about SEO in a way they haven't been before. So that's just really fun for me. I think it's a fun opportunity, like you said, to really narrow down, find clarity and then get your message out. It's a really good avenue for that. So I'm just excited we're having this conversation and people actually care about it. I feel like 12, 24 months ago, people are like, well, maybe, I don't know. Do people really find us online? But now they're excited. So yeah. So tell us more about the structure. I don't know, should we just dive into the practical?
Josefina (07:58):
Yeah, absolutely. I think one thing to keep in mind is that in the past, people would organically land on your page, on your homepage, and click around. Right now you should be thinking that you're building for a world where AI will probably read your website before any humans do, and it will extract that content, all that good content, and that content will go to that AI interface. So in SEO your north used to be chasing a click. You have to get clicks, you have to get volume, and you have to get visibility. Now your north should be, we want citations and we want mentions and mentions are better than citations but they're both good. When you are getting cited in a footnote, that is also brand visibility, and that's really how all of the top of the funnel questions will get answered.
(09:00):
Then it will get to a point where someone might say, well, what kind of firm aligns with my kind of research? And then a company gets mentioned right there. That's great, that's a great endorsement because if you do that kind of searching, Google normal, Google old school, first of all, you would get sponsored links. You get, okay, it would be more of a keyword search, not of a semantic search. So you would be like, well, these are the companies. These words are missing. You got listicles, you got a lot of big companies, and it's not what you were searching for. It is what you get. And you have to start digging in through the noise. So the AI interface will cater or tailor to that kind of research you're making. So when you are creating content, I would say be clear, be exhaustive, and just answer all of those questions that come up in client calls and about procedure, about minimums, about fees, and be straightforward because that teaches AI who you are and what you do, and that's how ultimately you're going to get mentioned and the person's going to arrive to your website knowing what you do.
(10:38):
So focusing on the service pages and the money pages, just be very exhaustive and very descriptive about who you are and what you do. Another thing to do — let's just say your topic is retirement planning, let's keep it very broad. Yes, that's your main hub and you're going to have to build a lot of supporting articles that all link back there. So when somebody asks a question that might not be directly related to retirement planning, it is all part of this cluster of content that AI references to synthesize an answer. So being very much in depth and creating supporting articles and creating supporting articles for specific personas so sometimes the advice might be relatively similar, but the two people are very different. So if it is searching for somebody very different from me, what I’m searching, we both somehow find your firm that has expertise on both of us.
Tiffany (11:56):
So I mean, we're just kind of repeating ourselves, which isn't a great thing to have for our podcast, but I feel like a lot of this really goes back to what we talked about in the previous month’s podcast, which was about positioning. So you really have to know those things you just talked about — who you are, who you serve, what services you're actually offering — and really being explicit about that. I feel like in the past we've talked with clients about, oh, it's okay to kind of nod to those things like, oh, we don't want to call out our specific location because we serve nationally. We don't want to call out specific things around our fees. We'll just sort of imply things through the imagery or whatever. And I feel like now it's shifting, like you said, we really have to be very clear and it takes a certain amount of courage to just say, these are the types of people we serve. This is the type of services we're offering, this is how much it costs. All those things. Really being able to be upfront with it.
Josefina (13:02):
I think if you look at a lot of the bigger companies, they get very, very thorough down there somewhere. So maybe another example — you can create situation-specific posts or you can create a new page for FAQs. You don't want to put it there, but it's like somehow, somewhere you have to understand that people will not go to your website right away. So for people to find you, you have to put the content somewhere, somehow.
(13:38):
Adding case studies and building comparison content is content AI loves. And also providing — I know you probably talked about this before — but providing summaries and bullets; these are bite-sized pieces AI quickly can extract and they can be answers on their own. This is the big part. At a technical level, the principles of SEO still apply. Yeah, your website still has to load fast and your images have to be the right format. Your headings have to be in the right order. Sometimes you might want to use an H4 because it is the font I want. No, keep them H1, H2, H3, H4. And also what is good when we audit — pay attention to those silent errors, because AI is less forgiving than a human when it comes to them. If a website may load slowly, I think it's my connection; AI will know, no, it's your image.
Tiffany (14:55):
That's so true. Oh my goodness. Yeah, that was going to be kind of my hot take — sometimes you're going to hear out there a lot as you're ironically searching about SEO and AI that AI is taking over, everything's so different, SEO is dead. We've been doing this for a long time and it's just like you said, a lot of the same principles as SEO has evolved are evolving into AO, AI, whatever. It's all evolving. So the same things we pressed on six months ago, 12 months ago — like you said, good structure, good content, easy for Google to crawl — they're still the same principles. So we're not throwing out SEO for all these new AI concepts.
Josefina (15:44):
I think the principles apply. It is just that a lot of the structure has changed how we search search better than ever.
Tiffany (15:55):
And so be nuanced, like you said, right?
Josefina (15:59):
Yes. I don't know about you, but I am an avid researcher about everything. I've recently had to buy a piano and there's so many questions to ask. Well, we haven't bought it yet, but there's so many questions to ask.
(16:14):
When you buy a piano, are you buying a piano to entertain or are you buying a piano for your desk or whatever? Are you going to be listening with headphones? What's your budget? So many constraints and the same level of specificity you would want in a financial advisor because you're trusting them with your everything. So I want to know before I waste my time scheduling a phone call with you, I want to know all the information about you, everything I can about you. And I want to feel sure that once we get on that call, where I'm going to be opening up about my assets, I know a lot about you.
Tiffany (16:59):
Yeah, exactly. The finance space is so interesting. It is so personal. But yeah, anyway, that's a whole other topic — it can feel so dry but it's so not because it's people's lives. So to go back to some of the structural stuff you were talking about, the FAQs. I feel like that's a question we get with clients a lot. Where do I put the FAQs? Does the whole page need to be FAQs? We were talking with a client yesterday who asked, if I'm writing a blog post, does the title need to be a question? And every subhead need to be a question? Should we just be framing everything in a Q&A style? What are your thoughts on that?
Josefina (17:45):
I think I would say it depends on the context and it depends on your budget. So for me, I would say things could change tomorrow. I find right now search is very egalitarian. I mean many companies could appear if they have the content there. So I would say first put your content there so AI can find it.
(18:14):
Then we'll think about how we can better organize it or whatever. So if you want to dump all the procedure questions, all of those, how do you do these questions? Dump them in an FAQ, and then we'll think of a better design strategy but just dump them there. So you'll get that visibility because if the premise is people are finding out answers on AI, make yourself visible on AI and then start thinking where you put it. As far as blog posts, for me, I prefer summaries that are bulleted and key points at the top or takeaways. And then headers, and then just talk with whatever your tone is, your human person is. So it depends, but for me, it's very important that I don't know what will happen tomorrow, but this is what's happening right now and it's very interesting for a midsize firm and you have a higher chance of standing out.
Tiffany (19:30):
Yes. I love that you said human, because this is opening a can of worms. So I'm trying to sign up, oh, I want to ask this to you but I'm curious your opinion is on, how can I put this? Okay, human-written content versus AI-written content. I'm just opening the can of worms. We'll just rip it open.
Josefina (20:00):
I don’t know how many AI interfaces you have tried. I know you're very anti but I'm not anti.
Tiffany (20:07):
I’m not anti, I'm actually really curious because I can see it working really well. I do see it working really well. Sometimes on the flip side, I see sometimes it looks so robotic that I'm like, eventually just AI is going to not be preferable anymore.
Josefina (20:28):
I think it's like when you are writing with AI, you switch hats all the time. Sometimes they're the editor, sometimes you're the editor. So I have different levels. I like it and I prepare YouTube talks and I love writing. And so for me, first you do go to AI to do your research and also to critique your research and find all the sources and find out where it is wrong. And for that, I prefer ChatGPT, also because I pay ChatGPT and I want to get the most out of my money. So yeah, that's the one I pay for. And I just keep going back and forth, back and forth. And then I don't often like what ChatGPT writes. So from there I tend to move to Claude, which sounds better. Don't ask me why. But even with Claude, let's just say you do a one shot; it's not going to align with every single thing, and it's not going to be perfect on every single paragraph.
(21:37):
So then you start writing yourself and you start fixing it, let me fix this, this, and that. And then you put it to Claude and you write a very good prompt that critiques it. And to write a very good prompt, I go back to ChatGPT and say, help me write for Claude — because they're not jealous of each other — something that addresses all these points. And then I dump it on Claude because I can only do five queries and then I run out of queries, and then I have to wait a few hours. So I want to make sure my query is perfect.
Tiffany (22:13):
Yes.
Josefina (22:13):
And then I just keep working at it; I now critique it — what is missing here? And then once we are at a stage — I literally had Claude tell me, okay, you're done now — I'll start releasing. It's done. But yeah, that's how I go about it. And I sometimes wonder, would it be less torturous if I just wrote it?
Tiffany (22:42):
Exactly. That was exactly what I was thinking. We honestly have clients across the board about how they feel about creating content with ChatGPT or Claude or whoever. But yeah, I think we all agree it has to go through those human iterations changing it to what you want, making sure, especially on our end, there's good CTAs and there's a sense of humanity in there, a sense of narrative or things like that. And so I agree sometimes it's like, would it be faster for the client for us to just write it? And for some clients it is. I don't want to look at it. Just the structure. It needs to have the questions, it needs to answer all of that. But other clients like doing the back and forth, so we go through that too. So go ahead.
Josefina (23:38):
I think whatever approach you choose, it is interesting at the latest stage to see every brand has its own voice; it’s like, does this match the voice of our brand? And then put whatever keywords match that brand, and then it's like, yes, or it’s like, no, this is how you can adjust, especially for more political or contentious posts. That could be good; let's check. Let's do a little test to see if there's something I should remove or something I should add in. And you don't know what to do with it, but it is nice feedback.
Tiffany (24:18):
Yeah, you're right. For some people writing it is just faster, but it is a fun tool to really be able to dig deeper into certain things. So okay, believe it or not, time is just rushing by. Anything else we need to talk about as far as structure of websites, content, any of that good stuff?
Josefina (24:40):
I think we pretty much covered it. I think if there's something people should just keep in mind, just be cited and hopefully be mentioned too. That's how people will find you now. That's brand building before they get to your website. So add that content in, even if it's in an FAQ question, and people will go to your website first, to your homepage. So keep your homepage nice and then keep all your content somewhere and then slowly start organizing it because that's how you'll get visibility.
Tiffany (25:20):
I like it. Okay. So we like to end with one big action step, which I guess kind of is what you just said but maybe not. Is there one thing you think listeners should go and do right now, today, with their website?
Josefina (25:37):
Well, I mean just to keep it more tech, maybe do a page speed and see if your images are not heavy. You'll be surprised. I was going to say you come up against that a lot but many times it keeps coming back. But images slow down a website and that can hurt SEO visibility both at a Google level and at an interface.
Tiffany (26:07):
I love that. I love that because videos too, I think we see a lot where videos will get embedded natively and then it'll slow things or not embed, be uploaded instead of embedding it Anyway, I'm using all your terms but you know what I'm saying. But you're totally right. We see it all the time where people think the website's doing okay, and then we run a page feed and we're like, oh my goodness. So that's a really good place to start. Excellent. So anything else we want to cover, make sure we mention?
Josefina (26:41):
Not much. I think there's going to be a lot of changes in the next year, so as things develop, we can just keep updating on it. I think probably there's going to be changes in Google analytics because if people are not clicking that much on your website, but they're still searching, we need to somehow track those citations and those mentions. And that area is still not that developed yet. There's some tools out there tracking those citations and those mentions, and it's worth taking a look at, but it's not fully reliable. I expect ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, all of those to have better analytics when your website gets cited and mentioned. That should be exciting.
Tiffany (27:33):
That'll be really great. Yeah, we only really have that information from Google at this point, and even that's super preliminary, so excellent. All right, well if you love this conversation, make sure to head over to outandaboutcommunications.com/community. Get on the newsletter list so you'll hear about more conversations coming up. I don’t know if you saw Josefina, but there was an internal Slack this morning about other conversations we want to have with you. So we'll check that out after. So we'll definitely have you back for more of these practical conversations. Yeah, so head over to the website, get on that newsletter list — we'll have the link in the show notes — make sure you subscribe and follow and do all the things, and we'll look forward to having more conversations soon. All right, take care everyone.
