Rank and Rent is a business model that consists of positioning local business websites at the top of search engines and then renting the websites, and therefore the traffic, to a company that would benefit from this traffic and potential customers. To find more information about this practice in Empresasyproductos.com. It is a reference in online marketing news and advice.
It is similar to real estate in that you find something of value, for example a store with many people passing by, or in this case, a website with many potential customers visiting it. Then you rent through rank and rent that property to a business that can benefit from it.
This works especially well for SEOs, as there are few ongoing costs once the website is ranked.
If you are able to position a website at number 1 on Google for “locksmith in [city name]” and this website receives 300 visitors a month, you are not paying per visitor like with PPC (Pay Per Click). It's free traffic, plus the initial setup costs.
That means that when you rent it to a company, for example, 900 euros per month. This is almost all the profit, plus the fixed costs.
When you do this through multiple websites, it becomes a business.
What types of companies rent websites?
Now you may be thinking, what type of company will rent a website?
Well, the answer is quite surprising.
The most important question is which businesses will benefit from search engine rankings? And what types of companies are the easiest to classify?
Let's take an example:
There is a local store in your city that sells custom designed bags. How many people do you think search Google for custom designed bags locally each month? Probably a small number, right?
So for businesses where there are few people searching, there is little profitability with rank and income.
This also applies when there are low profit margins per customer.
People may look for phone cases or local car wash companies, but the profit per customer is so low that these companies would need a significant number of new customers to justify the investment.
Therefore, we are looking for companies with the following requirements:
People search for your products/services locally
They sell a quite profitable service (purchase price greater than 500 euros)
And ideally, it should be easy for us to classify these websites (less work)
Now, within these requirements, we have an endless list of industries to work in, from real estate, to plumbers, roofers, various rental companies, and many more.
And all we are looking for are businesses that want to grow. That's all.
Renting a website is no different than buying advertising, we have a piece of valuable digital real estate, we are being paid to rent this and get in front of potential customers.
The benefits of this model
The benefits of the Rank and Rent model are clear when we see the final result.
Imagine having a portfolio of 10 websites rented for between 500 and 800 euros per month each. The maintenance of these websites is negligible, the profitability is extremely high, so you are making anywhere from 5,000-8,000 euros per month on almost all profits with little work.
Obviously this excludes the initial work to rank the websites and then the work to find someone to rent it, but even that is easier compared to the alternatives.
If your skill is SEO, the alternatives are probably client work or affiliate SEO.
For client SEO, the biggest difference is going to be the ease of signing clients and the ease of managing clients. With Rank and Rent, you don't need to convince a client that you can get them results, since you already have the results. And to manage them, you're not doing a job for them, it's just a rental, so again this is significantly easier.
As for SEO for affiliates, the advantage is that there is much less competition in ranking and rental because it is local SEO. While an affiliate website can take 8-12 months or more to start making money, a rank and rent website can be ranking in 4 months or less.
The possible disadvantages
A client will prefer to have their own website ranked, not rent yours, so they are unlikely to pay you as much as if you did it for them. The downside to this is that it is much easier to manage a rental client than a full client.
I would also say that it is easier to rank a client's website, but the counterargument is understandable. Rank and Rent allows you to have a lot of control over the niche and keywords, but with the added drawback of ranking a new website, as opposed to an established one that probably has a customer.
This can also make it difficult to rank within the GoogleMyBusiness package, as it is not as easy to get a verified local address when you do not have an actual business.
The last drawback depends on your approach. If you want to make more money, you can track and sell leads, moving to a lead generation model. This is more cost-effective, but with a lot more added work, since tracking and qualifying leads is a serious headache. Therefore, I would recommend sticking to renting websites and not selling leads.
