From: Lee

Hi Jill,

Love your tips and writing.

I have a service that offers "Home and Real Estate Buying without Credit Checks or Qualifying." (You select the property, and we do the rest. No "up-front" payments either.)

A "built-in" bonus is that buyers can rebuild their credit whilst living as owners in their own home and restart their lives!

The main target markets are:
1. All credit impaired, bad- and no-credit people, and therefore
2. Renters of homes or upscale apartments
3. Rent-To-Own

After reading your tips, I am clear on the context and tags, but confused about WHICH group to target, because the key phrases for each are quite different, although they do have common factors:

a) Repair Credit
b) Renters, House For Rent
c) Rent To Own
d) Home Buyers, Home Buying, Buying Homes
e) Real Estate (too big)
f) Home For Sale (many look here to get ideas of prices etc.)

Should I do one item for the home page with the main and related key phrases, or more?

Which one??? To me they are all good. How to know which is best? I was thinking "Home Buyers or Buying."

Should I put the rest on different pages with their own titles and corresponding phrases? Or, different sites for each? Or, different URLs leading to one site? Or what?

In newspaper classifieds, my prospects would look under Homes For Rent, because they cannot qualify to buy. So that's where I would place my main ad, followed by Homes For Sale. But, the web is quite different. Hence my dilemma.

Apologies for the length of this email, but you write great tips and this is your reward!!

Many thanks,

Lee

~~~Jill's Response~~~

Hi Lee,

Fascinating question! I can see why this could pose quite a problem for you. It's interesting that in newspaper classifieds you would target the Homes for Rent crowd. If that works for you, you might want to think about how you can target that same market on the Web.

The problem, of course, is that you don't want to deceive anyone regarding what your Web site is all about. You obviously can't put "homes for rent" phrases all over your site if that is not what you offer. So let's think about this for a moment. How can we target that particular audience without deceiving them? (This calls for an additional cup of coffee!)

Well, how about this...

Would it be possible for you to say something like, "Looking for a home to rent, because you don't think you can afford to buy one?" I'm not saying to use those exact words, as I'm sure a professional copywriter could do much better, but you get my drift. I can envision a whole page or article on that subject. Perhaps that is the key right there...articles! Since what you offer is so unique and different, and since most people don't even know your type of service exists, having loads of articles on the different aspects would be perfect. Doing this would enable you to target each specific audience, and to also use the various keyword phrases you want to target.

In other words, you could have an article all about repairing credit, another one about renting homes (and how it may not be the only option), and so on. I would keep these fairly non-commercial in nature, but don't hide the fact that you can provide more information through a quick email or phone call.

That said, "homes for rent" and most of the other phrases you'd like to target are all extremely broad phrases. No matter what you do, it's gonna be extremely difficult to get high rankings for them. Do you offer your service to the entire world? The entire U.S. or Europe? One particular state? A certain community within a state? If it's possible to narrow down your services by geographical area, then definitely do it! It would be a whole lot easier to target those people looking to buy or rent homes in upstate New York (or London, England, or whatever) than the entire world. By trying to rank highly for phrases like "homes to rent," that's exactly what you're doing...targeting the entire home-renting universe.

So the first step is to narrow down your target market. In fact, you should do this even if you do target the whole world. You could start small by creating pages or subsites that focus only on certain geographical areas. Once those were in place and doing well, you could branch out to new areas. There are lots of local Web directory sites that would probably allow you to add your regional site to their real estate section.

As you've already realized, your main page is going to be the trickiest. It may be that you can't really target any specific keyword phrases on that page. Instead, you may have to give an overview and just point people to the individual pages regarding those topics. I'm working on a client's site right now that's in a similar boat. They offer a variety of services, with no specific focus (other than, say, "marketing"). I'm slightly uncomfortable not having a keyword focus on the main page, as that's not how I generally do things. However, I'm hoping that the individual service pages will carry their own weight, with the main page funneling people (and the search engines) to them. In theory, it should work. Eventually, obtaining some outside links to specific inner pages will be important, and it would be the same for your site. By having informative articles on your site, you'll also be more apt to negotiate some outside links to them.

Hope this helps!

Jill