Help With A Ymyl Site.

Hey everyone,
I’m hitting a wall with a hard money lender website and could use a fresh pair of eyes or suggestions from anyone who has worked in high-scrutiny YMYL niches recently.

The Situation

Niche: Hard money / asset-based real estate lending (B2B/investor focus).

Search Console Data: GSC shows solid impressions and an average position hovering between 15 and 20 for relevant commercial intent keywords over the last 60–90 days.

Manual Search Reality: When performing manual SERP checks (incognito, cache cleared, localized search via geo-spoofing / GS Location Changer / VPN to the exact service area), the site doesn't appear anywhere in the top 50–100 results.

What We’ve Already Done (YMYL & E-E-A-T Focus)

Because hard money falls squarely under Your Money or Your Life (YMYL), we went heavy on trust and transparency from day one:

Entity & Transparency: Full business registration, physical office addresses, phone numbers, state licensing/disclosures clearly displayed in footer and dedicated legal pages.

Author & Team Bios: Complete profiles for loan officers/principals with verifiable LinkedIn profiles, industry experience, and direct contact details.

Schema Markup: Implemented robust ⁠FinancialService⁠, ⁠PostalAddress⁠, ⁠Person⁠, and ⁠FAQPage⁠ structured data with clean entity validation.

Content: No AI fluff. Comprehensive loan program pages (rates, LTVs, terms, application steps, requirements, fees) and practical investor guides written from an industry practitioner perspective.

Technical Health: Core Web Vitals are sorted, clean indexation (no canonical/noindex conflicts), HTTPS, and mobile-friendly.

What I’m Trying to Rule Out:

1. GSC Skew: Could GSC be logging impressions for non-standard features (image packs, universal snippets, or ultra-long-tail localized variations) that inflate the average position?

2. Geo-Targeting Mismatch: Are impressions coming from outside our service area, skewing the reported position while local results suppress the domain?

3. Algorithmic YMYL Filter / "Sandbox": Is Google testing the site in lower SERPs intermittently without committing to stable organic placement?

4. Intent Misalignment: Is the algorithm heavily favoring local map packs or major financial aggregators over independent lender domains?

Questions for the Community:

1. Have you seen this specific disconnect (GSC Page 2 average vs. complete absence in manual checks) in competitive YMYL spaces recently?
   
2. What specific filters or diagnostic steps would you run in GSC / third-party tools to isolate where these reported impressions are actually rendering?
   
3. Any specific off-page or brand entity signals that helped push your private lending/finance sites over the hump into visible SERPs?
   
4. ⁠It’s an .Io domain. Do you think that could be an issue?
   Appreciate any constructive thoughts or teardown ideas!