I spoke to a potential client today about some desired rankings. The client was interested in ranking well for some moderate and a few heavily competitive phrases in a generally tough industry. Their end goal, however, was not to rank in order to convert visitors into sales or even leads, but rather, simply to impress and show off. Their products and services (and website) were not such that they could hope to capture leads and their specific focus meant that a high percentage of the visitors who might arrive at their site via such searches would be unlikely to seek service from them. And, naturally they needed a good price, as they had no ROI for these rankings.
It's a strange time in SEO, to be sure, and phone calls like these certainly make it seem all the stranger. There's a thread at SEW on a related topic where you can see this trend continuing. Mikkel has an example:
The most recent case was a company that was planning to be sold shortly. They, in fact, wanted to give me 2-3% of their company stocks to put them in a top 3 position in Google.com for a very competitive phrase ONLY because they had a very strong feeling they would mark up the 3% many times in the higher pirce they would get for the company if they could show that top 3 rank.
As does Ammon Johns:
One of my own clients was considering a purchase of a company that had ranked well in searches relating to their pretty competitive keyword areas for a few years. I said it was worth considering as a purely build or buy decision and asked what the asking price was. I actually laughed out loud when they told me they were being asked for £10 million (UK pounds).
Thing was that the site in question was reliant on one single SEO 'trick' that anyone could see was coming to the end of its lifespan. I said that if the deals and customer base was worth it, it could be worth £1 million, but that otherwise it would take the company only 6 months to build the same thing. Therefore the real value of the thing had to be based on six months earnings, the customer and partner lists, and that was about all.
Thankfully the client took my advice and withdrew from negotiations.
When so much of our analytics and measurement tactics go into ROI, it's hard to understand companies in positions like these, but it does exist.
Any of you have clients with strange reasons for wanting to be in the top SERPs?
I do consulting for a company in the energy sector, and it is very important for them to rank well for a number of key word combinations to improve the image of the company and to bring up friendly pages (instead of horrible boycot pages) to the attemtion of pupils and students when they are reserching a paper. There is a huge market for negative SEO; SEO with the goal of pushing negative blogs, personal pages and news stories to the bottom of the SERPS.
That is truly fascinating and makes sense. I imagine some campaign money for electoral candidates is spent on this cause? hmmm...
Why is this titled "Vanity Rankings"? These are all legitimate business reasons for higher rankings. To me, the term "Vanity" implies something that it done just to show off the fact that the owner has more of something than another. (ie, good looks, money, a Jaguar, etc)
A vanity ranking would be Bill Gates posting a personal page and optimizing for the phrase "I have lots of money."
I'm over-applying the term "vanity", but the intent is still there. It's basically rankings which don't correlate to direct ROI value through conversions, and my first example of the folks I spoke to on the phone was exactly that - vanity.
I have a client that is being sued by a company with a stronger web presence than theirs. So when the company suing them put up a malicious page lambasting my client it outranked their homepage. I was hired to help them outrank this page. We were somewhat successful, pushing it down from #1 to #5 in about 6 months.
I'd bet that Ford and GM have lots of high serps. GM is staring at possible downsizing. Ford is hurting. Doesn't mean they have extra value because of the serps.
Now many may evaluate a business because of high rankings. They are fleeting. If they can't produce long term value...the businesses will have problems.
But if people are willing to pay high multiples on value for a high ranking...that is another matter. Once again that could create crazy false business valuations.
Wow. Actions like that remind me of the financial run up during the first dot.com craze and during the telecom craze. Businesses were being sold on anything but real financial wherewithall.
Similarly (and this reveals my age) I leased and sold commercial real estate back in the 1980's. There were crazy price run ups on items that had nothing to do w/the real value of a business.
If perspectives like this grab hold...financial idiots start running the show. If it is like other run ups in the past...some people can take advantage of unsubstantial indications of value, create the "signs" of value, sell for inflated values and get out before real values ultimately settle in.
The real value of high rankings is that it enhances potential sales. Then you have to sell the products/services. Then you have to service the sales to ensure a profit.
Neat thing to watch though.
Dave
Having a succesful track record in the SERPs absolutely adds value to a business. It's one more competitive advantage. The key is to find out *how* it's done and what it takes to maintaine to justify the extra asking price.