You publish underwriting numbers competitors don't. Search engines and AI answers never see them: 41 ranking keywords at an average position of 48, roughly 34 organic visits a month, and no mention in any AI answer for your own category.
The cause isn't the content. It's structure and trust: no service page for "aircraft financing", no rates page, a mortgage-plugin calculator, no phone number on mobile, and an SSN field before anyone has spoken. The redesign is the right call. This audit is the spec for it.
Weighted across seven categories. The score measures the current site; the rebuild spec below is what moves it.
Not in the weighted total: E-E-A-T 63, UX and conversion 42, Authority and backlinks 22, Keyword visibility 14.
"Aircraft financing", "aircraft loan" and "airplane financing" (1,300–1,600 searches each) land on a how-to blog post at position 46–58. Every top-10 result is a lender homepage or service page. "Aircraft loan rates" has a difficulty of zero and no page behind it.
No phone number on mobile. No street address anywhere a human can see. A 17-field pre-approval form collecting SSNs in plain text before first contact. Two phone numbers, two lender counts, four credit-decision timelines. A finance broker needs the opposite of all of this.
About 90% of the backlink profile is purchased directories and article farms, which is how 995 referring domains produced a Domain Rating of 15. Real earned links: two. Nothing from aviation press, forums, OEMs, dealers or AOPA.
Every competitor with traffic has three things: a calculator in the top 3, a rates page or homepage holding the head term, and model-level pages. Flying Finance is the one to study — a DR 31 site whose single rates page ranks for three of the five target queries. That is reachable.
"Aircraft financing", "aircraft loan", "airplane financing" and "financing a plane" (1,300–1,600 searches each, $8–11 per click) all land on the blog post /how-to-prepare-for-aircraft-financing/ at position 46–58. Every top-10 result is a lender homepage, rates page or service page. Google is being asked to rank a how-to article against landing pages.
DataForSEO Labs, US, 24 Sep 2026. KD 26–37.
"Aircraft loan rates" and "airplane loan rates" (390 searches each) have a keyword difficulty of zero. Flying Finance holds #2 with a dated rate table; Banterra's calculator holds #6–7. The site promises "up-front transparency on rates" and has no page behind the promise. This is the most winnable commercial keyword on the list.
KD 0. Current: calculator at pos 57.
The header tel: link is display:none at the mobile breakpoint. The footer has no phone. No sticky bar, no chat. For a broker whose conversion is a phone call, the mobile site cannot be called.
Chrome capture at 390×844.
17 fields. Full home address required. SSN in an unmasked plain-text input with no security statement, no privacy link and no explanation of why it is optional. Email not required; middle name is. No navigation, footer, phone or way back. reCAPTCHA v2 on a page that already loads v3. Nothing says what happens after submit.
Form not submitted. Two form IDs across hero and pre-approval.
A finance broker collecting SSNs shows no street address on any rendered page; it exists only in an unlinked knowledge-sheet.html. No broker compensation disclosure on core pages. The only fee disclosure ($300 to $15–20K processing, 0.5–3% broker fee) is buried in two blog posts.
YMYL category. Address: 428 Upper Mountain Ave, Montclair NJ 07043 (from knowledge sheet).
A find-and-replace turned "aircraft financing" into "this type of financing" across at least nine posts, including H2 headings. It reads as machine-mangled to readers and to language models.
Live on the Ultimate Guide: "Types of This type of financing Options"; "a reputable this type of financing broker".
50+ lenders on the homepage, "more than 20" on the private jet page. Two phone numbers. 38 reviews vs 40. Bonus depreciation at 60% in one post and 100% in another. Credit-decision timelines of 2 days, 2–3 days, 48–72 hours and 1–3 days on four pages. AI engines surface contradictions; quality raters penalise them.
973-577-4226 vs 862-277-5277.
Susan's Person markup has streetAddress "Street Address" (a literal placeholder) and ZIP 07042; the business is 07043. The About page uses "Essex County" as the city. openingHours is invalid. Five Google reviews are copied into the business's own markup with an AggregateRating, which Google excludes as self-serving. sameAs points at a Manta listing for a different business. Three competing Organization/LocalBusiness blocks per page share no @id. The homepage is typed AboutPage.
sameAs → "The Capital Lenders" (Manta).
The largest element is a 476KB PNG CSS background behind a 440–700ms server response. Desktop LCP already measures 2.2–3.3s with no CPU throttle. The homepage ships 3.06MB across 55 requests, 2.15MB of it JavaScript, 70% third-party: four gtag bundles, reCAPTCHA loaded twice, an unidentified branderblender.com tracker whose beacon times out, ClickCease, 284KB of icon fonts.
Desktop-only Lighthouse via DataForSEO; mobile inferred.
HSTS, CSP, X-Frame-Options and COOP are all absent on a site with lead forms that collect SSNs.
Response headers, 24 Sep 2026.
About 250 links came from one article-farm network placed inside a single week in September 2025. About 35 template directories (metro*, locale*, civic*). Four cloud-stacked HTML copies. Nofollow press-release syndication. Real earned links: nafa.aero and provenexpert.com. Zero from aviation press, forums, OEMs, dealers or AOPA. Do not file a disavow: no anchor abuse, no sign of a penalty. Stop buying packages and replace them with earned links.
Ahrefs: 995 referring domains, DR 15.
Stuck at position 16–26 for a 2,900-volume cluster with keyword difficulty 2. AOPA, Flying Finance and Banterra outrank it. The tool sits below a wall of disclaimer. Defaults: $3,000,000 loan, $45,000 down, 1-year term, $255,346 a month. No aircraft inputs, no CTA on results. "Send to Email" sends the schedule from the plugin, not a lead to you.
Mortgage plugin.
About 250 words in ten paragraphs before the first button. On mobile the quote form starts 1,499px into a 10,954px page and renders over the jet photo. No trust signal above the fold anywhere: NAFA membership, the VREF "Top 5 brokers" listing and podcast, 50+ lenders, 20 years and a 5.0 Google rating are all three to six screens down or on the About page.
Chrome capture at 390×844.
An 8-field hero form and a 17-field pre-approval page post to different form IDs. Visitors can't tell which is the real path, and leads land as different records.
Two form IDs.
/aircraft-financing-information/ and /category/aircraft-financing-information/ show identical content, both indexable and self-canonical. Pages 2–4 exist but no pagination renders. 26 of 36 posts are reachable only from the sitemap and four-card related blocks.
Firecrawl + On-Page crawl.
Three credit posts, three first-time-buyer posts, two rates posts, two valuation posts, two depreciation posts, two charter pages, three loan-option posts, three about-and-process posts. 36 posts should become 19, plus two promoted to service pages.
Consolidation map in the Keywords section.
21 posts share a modified timestamp within one minute on 6 March 2026. A bulk resave, not an update. Google discounts lastmod it can't trust.
Sitemap lastmod cluster, 2026-03-06.
Bylines and dates appear inconsistently, never as a template author box linking to a bio. Susan's bio page has no photo, memberships or credentials, and a meta description that is her LinkedIn headline with three airplane emoji. A second author, Stephen Galgocy, has a post and no identity anywhere. Author archives have the wrong H1 and no bio.
E-E-A-T composite 63.
Homepage title is 118 characters and includes "Insurance Options", which isn't a service. The FAQ title ends in a dangling " -" from an empty brand variable. The private jet title reads "Unlock Business Success". Twelve blog H1s open with the brand name.
Title tags sampled 24 Sep 2026.
Five of its ten site links point to /services/ URLs that return 404: loans, leasing, piston, turboprop, corporate jets. Those slugs are the right information architecture. Build them.
Verified 404s.
No aircraft image. Copy opens with "bespoke financing solutions, catering to discerning clients" and "Embrace the luxury lifestyle". The results page for this query is JPMorgan, Citi, US Bank and PNC.
"private jet financing" pos 48; "business jet financing" CPC $155.99.
The bonus depreciation post gives a $15M worked example with no IRC citation, no legislation named, no CPA reviewer and no disclaimer. Its sibling post is stale. The LSA post predates the MOSAIC rule. No post on the site cites a primary source.
IRC 168(k) uncited.
DataForSEO's crawler received a "One moment, please..." challenge page from an OpenResty proxy in front of Apache. Verify at the host that Googlebot, Bingbot, OAI-SearchBot, Claude-SearchBot and PerplexityBot are allow-listed. If they're being challenged, AI citability is failing silently.
OpenResty challenge on On-Page crawl.
Two H1s on the homepage. Footer legal links marked up as H2. Hamburger 25px, footer links 17px tall. Placeholder-only labels on quote forms. Calculator button contrast about 3:1. The Accessibility Statement names no standard.
DOM and computed-style pass.
Get Pre-Approved has no meta description and 165 words but ships 2.45MB. Homepage og:image is a 1024×366 blog thumbnail; calculator and private jet pages have none. Logo is a 900px PNG served twice per page. WP Rocket's CDN flag is set but no CDN serves anything. WordPress, Elementor, WP Rocket and Site Kit versions leak in meta tags. Duplicate viewport tags. Empty e-landing-page sitemap.
The testimonials page has 38 named reviews with no schema, source link or photos, while the Google review widget appears on five other pages but not there. "What Lenders May Review" appears near-verbatim on three pages. FAQPage markup on the homepage includes a question not visible on the page; Google retired FAQ rich results in May 2026, so keep FAQPage only where the text is visible verbatim, and don't add HowTo.
All photography is PNG. Service pages have no content images at all. Heroes are CSS backgrounds, so they carry no alt text and can't be prioritised for loading.
Images score 31.
Each area says what to build, how you'd know it failed, and one number to watch without re-running the audit.
Build the /services/ structure llms.txt already promised. One hub, /aircraft-financing/, holding the head terms.
Service pages for piston, turboprop, light and business jets, helicopter, Part 135 charter, flight-school leaseback, experimental and LSA, refinancing. Each 1,000+ words with a numbers table (down %, term and amortisation, age limits, minimum loan) and a question-form FAQ.
A rates page at /aircraft-loan-rates/. A rebuilt calculator. Model pages as a series: Cirrus SR22, Cessna 172 and 182, Bonanza, King Air, PC-12, TBM, Citation, Piper.
One path. A two-step pre-approval. Step 1 above the fold on every page: name, phone, email, aircraft type or model, target price, mission, loan type. Seven fields, email required, "No credit pull at this step."
Step 2 after contact, on an authenticated link: address, masked SSN with numeric input, a lock icon, one sentence on data handling, privacy link beside the field, FCRA and e-consent. A thank-you state with next steps, response time, Susan's direct line, a booking link and the document checklist.
Click-to-call in the mobile header. A sticky mobile bar with Call and Get a Quote. Phone, email, street address, hours and the NAFA mark in the footer.
Rates page: an "as of" date, rate ranges by category (piston, turboprop, light jet, Part 135), typical down payment, term and amortisation and balloon structures, worked payment examples, an FAQ. Updated monthly with a real date. This is the page AI Overviews cite.
Calculator: purchase price, down payment as % and $ (15% default), rate prefilled by category from the rates page, term presets of 10, 15 and 20 years plus 5-year balloon over 20-year amortisation, monthly payment. Tool at the top. Sensible defaults ($500K, 15%, 20 years, about $3,200 a month).
A "Get pre-approved for this payment" button that prefills step 1.
Visible name, address, phone and hours on Contact and in the footer.
A "How we're paid" page: broker fee 0.5–3% or lender-paid, processing fee range, what the firm will and won't do, applicable state commercial financing disclosures.
Fix every contradiction to one canonical fact. Move NAFA, VREF Top 5 and the podcast into a homepage trust row. Real photos of Susan and Craig. Three to five permissioned closed-deal case studies with aircraft, year, structure and timeline.
Fix the "this type of financing" corruption before anything else. Run the consolidation map.
Every post gets a template author box (name, title, NAFA, years, photo, bio link), honest published and updated dates, at least two primary-source citations, and a contextual CTA naming the article's aircraft type. Strip the brand from blog H1s.
Expand the FAQ page from 8 questions to 25–40, each answer 40–80 words with the answer in the first sentence and a link to its spoke page. That page is the AI-search hub.
Managed hosting or a static front-end behind a CDN. TTFB under 200ms. HSTS, CSP (report-only first), frame-ancestors, X-Content-Type-Options, Referrer-Policy.
Per-page mobile budget: 600KB total, 150KB JavaScript, one tag loader, one GA4 and one Ads config through GTM, zero icon fonts, LCP image under 120KB AVIF/WebP with fetchpriority high, 30 requests or fewer. reCAPTCHA v3 or Turnstile on form focus only. Remove branderblender unless someone can say what it does.
One blog archive URL with rendered pagination; category URL redirected. Author archives noindexed. Visible breadcrumbs matching BreadcrumbList. One H1 per page, no headings in the footer. Titles 60 characters or fewer, unique metas. A 1:1 redirect map for all 14 pages and 36 posts. Honest lastmod. llms.txt regenerated on each deploy. IndexNow key.
One JSON-LD graph per page, one emitter. FinancialService + Organization at #org with real address, geo, hours, areaServed US, founder and employee Person, memberOf NAFA (NBAA only if evidenced). WebSite. WebPage or subtype. BreadcrumbList.
Person at #susan with her real LinkedIn. Service on each service page with provider #org. BlogPosting with author #susan and publisher #org. No copied reviews, no SiteNavigationElement, no nulls, no placeholders. A filled example is in the full report.
The current site reads as a regional mortgage broker: Montserrat only, pastel sky-blue background, peach gradient, four stock images, no photo of the owner. Premium lenders in the same results go dark or neutral with one accent.
Add a display face or heavier weight for headlines and tabular numerals for rates. Real photography: Susan, Craig, the office, and licensed type-specific aircraft per service page as content images with alt text, AVIF/WebP, width and height, and a 1200×630 og:image per page. Retire CSS-background-only heroes.
Stop buying directory and guest-post packages.
Sixteen targets competitors hold and you don't: Flying Magazine, AVweb, General Aviation News, Plane and Pilot, Aero-News, Business Jet Traveler, Aviation Consumer, Kitplanes, Barnstormers, FltPlan, deeper NAFA involvement, GLADA, type-club forums (COPA, BeechTalk, Pilots of America, Mooneyspace), OEM and LSA dealer partner pages, avionics shops and flight schools, and a real presence on r/flying, which the AI Overview for "aircraft loan rates" already cites.
The current stack (Elementor, six plugins, a shared host behind an anti-bot proxy, no CDN) produced 2.15MB of JavaScript and 221KB of inline CSS. A page-builder rebuild on the same stack will reproduce that.
Webflow or a static build (Astro, Next) with a headless CMS for the blog hits the performance budget by default, ships clean HTML for schema and headings, and puts security headers at the edge. If it has to be WordPress: block theme or hand-built theme, no page builder, managed hosting with a CDN, five plugins maximum. Either way, the rates page needs a monthly editing workflow a non-developer can run.
Each phase unblocks the next.
Before design starts, on the current site. Hours of work.
Before build
Platform and templates
Go-live
After launch
DataForSEO, US, 24 Sep 2026. KD is keyword difficulty 0–100. Model pages (King Air, PC-12, Citation, Bonanza, Piper, TBM) each search under 10/mo for "financing" but target "[model] price" queries at 260–27,100/mo, the way Flying Finance does.
36 posts become 19, plus two promoted to service pages. Three credit posts merge into one 1,800-word qualification guide. Three first-time-buyer posts fold into the Ultimate Guide. Two rates posts become the rates page. Loan-option posts become /aircraft-loan-types/. Charter, helicopter, corporate-jet and process posts move to their service pages.
Keep and refresh: document checklist, broker role, LTV and LTC, balloon payments, utilisation hours, insurance, pilot-owner planning, operating costs, LSA pros and cons (add MOSAIC).
Jaken Aviation, a broker of similar size, is cited by ChatGPT and Perplexity from a plain FAQ page. Your own down-payment answer is more specific than anything cited. It isn't surfaced because the page is 420 words with no inbound links.
Technical, performance, schema, content and E-E-A-T, on-page, AI search readiness, keywords, competitors, backlinks, UX and conversion, images, accessibility. Current stack: WordPress, Elementor, WP Rocket, Site Kit, six plugins, shared host behind an OpenResty anti-bot proxy, no CDN.
DataForSEO (Labs, SERP, Backlinks, On-Page, Lighthouse), Ahrefs API, Firecrawl, live Chrome captures at 1440 and 390px, direct fetches. All keyword and link numbers carry their source and date (24 Sep 2026).