Advice appreciated on a new mortgage affiliate site

[darkshines]

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Hi, this is my first post so please excuse me if my questions seem silly.

I'm planning on setting up a new site aimed at giving inside information on the specialist mortgage market (sub prime, self cert & buy to let) in the UK. I intend to have bags of useful content gained from being in the brokerage market for over 20 years. Not all the usual stuff about rates and deals, but real info about how lenders operate, their criteria, loopholes etc.

I would then have a simple datacapture form e.g. leadbays' to monetize the site and maybe a few other links. I have minimal experience of SEO, some web design skills and considerable experience of PPC.

I am aware that the whole mortgage area is anything but niche and to get any kind of natural ranking would be very difficult. My question is really to what extent unique, relevant and ongoing content can influence ranking?
Do you think that this is an area that is just too difficult to break into?

Thanks

[moredial]

If you can write content about what people are searching for, and include within that content the same words that people are going to use to search for the information, your site will rank OK.

With any market, there is little point competing on terms like 'mortgage refinance' as there will be sites out there that have been building links and rankings based on that terms for years and trying to rank above them before you run out of working capital is not the easiest.

By having content which covers the full range of the rich vocabulary used in your market, you will find you site being found under over 1000 search terms. Maybe only 1 or 2 visitors per term. The advantage you have is that those visitors have refined their search, expanding on the prime phrases so are likely to be highly targeted visitors (or finance students - who will soon be in the market for a loan and they may just remember where they found the info for their assignment).

If your content is sufficiently unique and relevant, your site will start to be quoted as an authority with other sites linking to you, which will boost your rankings.

SEO is not that difficult (search engine crawlers are only simple scripts that harvest data), as long as you avoid the gurus and use plain html tags to give extra weight to the search relevant content on each page.

The simple rule is to give understanding within 10 seconds of the page being opened:
1. relevant title
2. relevant summary
3. brief outline text
4. highlighted relevant content for speed reading
5. conclusion summary - this can be omitted on short content

Most of the lending sites I have looked at give a lot of information about rates and why you should move to a particular lender. Very few give information about choosing how much to borrow, what type of loan best meets their needs, how to budget for the loan, etc - you know the market so you know what I mean about not giving the information to answer the question.

Visitors don't want to know how good a lender is, they want to know how a loan is going to solve their problem and how the lender is going to keep solving any other future problems.

Good luck with your site. PM me if you want any help with a specific page.

[darkshines]

Thanks very much for the valuable tips moredial, I really appreciate it.

[moredial]

One point which I omitted:

Write your content for your audience.

For the masses: simple everyday language and sentences between 8 - 10 words.

For the educated: use general industry words and sentences below 20 words.

For your peers: free language choice and sentences up to 30 - 45 words are appreciated and treated as being authoritive.