Rent the keyword your site can't rank for yet

Most makers fill a directory form the way they write their homepage. The tagline is clever, the description is about the vision, the categories are whatever came first in the dropdown. I did it that way myself across 435 submissions and never thought about it.

One of my customers did something else, and I only noticed because their pack read oddly. The tagline was not a slogan. It was the sentence a buyer would type into Google. I asked them about it, and this post is what they told me, with the mechanism filled in where they skipped over it. I am not naming them here. The numbers are theirs and I have not audited them, so read "eleven clients" as what they told me, not as something I measured.

The problem they had

They sell to businesses, and their domain is a few months old. The people who buy from them search for a handful of specific phrases, the kind with a few hundred searches a month, and the first page for every one of those phrases is held by sites that have been around for years. Their own page for the main phrase was nowhere near it.

That is normal, and there is no quick fix. A new site does not rank for a phrase people buy from in its first year, however good the page is. Google wants links and age before it trusts a domain with a result that people act on, and neither can be bought in a hurry. We measured this on our own domain. It went from DR 0 to 42 in 33 days on directory links, and still had zero brand impressions on Google at the end of it. Rating is an input. Standing takes longer.

What they did instead

Directories already have the standing. Search any "tool for X" phrase today and the first page has two or three directory pages on it, either a roundup or a single listing. Those pages rank because of the domain they sit on, not because of the product they describe. The listing page for an unknown product on a DR 70 directory can outrank that product's own homepage for the same words, because Google trusts the directory and does not yet trust the product.

So they wrote their listing to be that page. In order:

1. Pick the phrases. Three or four, and the problem phrase rather than the category name. If you built invoicing software, "invoicing software" is a category with giants in it, and "invoice reminders for freelancers" is a phrase a buyer types. That example is mine, not theirs, but it is the shape of what they picked.
2. Rewrite the pack around them. The pack is the one set of fields the agent fills into every form: name, tagline, one-liner, short description, long description, categories. The tagline carried the main phrase word for word, in a sentence a person would write. The one-liner carried it with the audience added. The short description used the second and third phrases in plain sentences, once each. Categories were the platform's own category closest to the phrase, never the broadest one on offer.
3. Choose directories by whether they rank, not by rating alone. They searched each phrase and its neighbours and noted which directories were already on the first two pages. Those went first. After that, the high domain rating list in order.
4. Let the agent submit. Every form got the brief for that platform and was filled from the same pack, so forty listings carried the same phrases in the same places. That consistency is doing more work than it looks like. Forty pages on forty trusted domains, all titled with your phrase, is a very different thing from forty pages with forty taglines.
5. Wait, and check. Directories get crawled often, so new listings were in the index within days, and inside three weeks the listing pages started showing for the phrases.

Eleven clients came in the first month. New ones have kept coming every week since, and their own site still does not rank for the phrase. It does not need to yet.

Why it works

Google ranks pages, and it judges a page mostly by the domain it sits on. A directory that has been linked to for ten years lends that trust to every listing page it publishes. Your phrase in the title of a page on that domain beats your phrase in the title of a page on yours, and it will keep beating it until your domain has earned something.

Listing pages are thin, which is usually a weakness. For a specific phrase with little competition, thin is enough. The title matches, the domain is trusted, and there is nothing better to show.

Several listings crowd the result. If five directories carry your listing under the same phrase, you can hold two or three spots on the first page for a phrase you hold none of yourself. Whichever the searcher clicks, they land on a page that is about you and has a link to you.

Followed or nofollow does not matter for this. The listing page is what ranks, not your site, so link juice is beside the point. That puts the directories everyone skips for being nofollow back in play, and there are a lot of them.

The same pages feed AI answers. Ask ChatGPT or Perplexity for "a tool for X" and a good share of what comes back is read off directories. A listing written in the buyer's words shows up there too.

Why I am calling it renting

You do not own the position. The directory does. If it removes the listing, redesigns its pages or gets demoted itself, the ranking goes with it, and nothing you did on your own site is affected either way. Some directories will also sell the spot above your listing to the next bidder, and we do that ourselves.

So treat it as a lease, and a useful one. Rent the phrase while your own domain earns the standing to hold it, and keep your product name and URL identical in every listing so the brand searches that follow accrue to you and not to a typo.

Where it goes wrong

Keyword strings get rejected. Most of the directories worth being on review by hand, and a tagline that reads as a list of search terms is the first thing a reviewer bins. The phrase has to live inside a sentence a human would write. One phrase per field, used once, is the whole technique.

Broad phrases do not move. "Project management software" has the directory's own category page above any single listing, and the rest of the page belongs to companies with sales teams. This works on the phrases those companies do not bother with.

Some high rated directories do not index listings at all. The pages sit behind a script, or carry a noindex, or are paged so deep nothing crawls them. Before you spend a brief on one, search for the directory's name plus a product you know is listed there. If the listing page is not in the results, yours will not be either.

And check back. Most directories let you edit a listing after it is live. If a phrase has not taken in a month, change it. The listing is yours to rewrite even if the ranking is not.

If you want to try it

The pack fields sit on the product's overview in the dashboard, and the agent fills every form from them, so changing the copy once changes what every future submission says. Every platform page on this site carries the directory's domain rating, and the directory sorts by it. The free plan is ten briefs, which is enough to test the idea on the directories that already rank for your phrase before paying anyone for the rest.