Local SEO Rank'n'Rent Study With 2 Sites
2
Leads
+400
Blog clicks
Case Study Premise
- Testing the Rank'n'Rent concept
- 1 Main site + 1 Control site (Same Niche)
- No GBP / No backlinks
Approach
- Publish location pages + blogs with AI
- Focus on semantic SEO, internal linking, website structure, design
SEO Test Results:
2
Leads
+400
Blog Clicks
Table of Contents
Table of Contents
Table of Contents
As part of my SEO testing and learning, I started a few projects involving new websites and AI workflows.
This is one of the projects to help me improve my overall skills both SEO, website development, as well as getting better with agentic AI and AI workflows.
This is still early on, as the website is less than 3 months old. Will update the case study I get more data.
I also have a 2nd control site for exact same niche, but different location.
Note: This site is also part of a case study I did to test if social media has any SEO impact – check that study here.
Quick Takeaway
- The 2 sites received mostly clicks only to blogs, but very few clicks to location pages.
- Received 2 leads (which did not look like real leads tbh).
- For a Rank and Rent to work you need more than ever to look like a real business with a Google Business Profile, reviews, and other similar external signals. Testing this minimal setup does not work anymore to rank local sites.
Case Study Quick Setup
- 2 websites same exact niche different locations, similar amount of pages and setup.
- Brandable domain names.
- Completely new domains name (not expired domains).
- 100% AI-generated content – text and images.
- No GBP (Google Business Profile), no reviews.
- Focus on internal linking.
- Home painting niche.
- Around 100 location pages & 21 blogs (so far).
- Almost all 100 location pages published at once, with blogs posted over time (2-4 per week).
- 3 Social Media accounts repurposing blogs content (Facebook, Instagram & Pinterest)
- My own custom local site template with SEO and conversion optimisation.
- Advanced schema.
- No backlinks or citations.
GSC SEO Stats Site 1 (Sep-23 to Oct-20)
- 307 GSC (Google Search Console) clicks last 28 days
- Of which 18 GSC clicks to non-blog pages (homepage and location pages)
- 6,460 Generative AI Impressions (Google Search Console)
GA4 SEO Stats Site 1 (Sep-23 to Oct-20)
- 196 GA4 Engaged Sessions (Google Organic)
- 56 Non-Google Engaged Sessions (Bing, Duckduckgo, Yahoo, Facebook)
- 2 Key Events / Leads (clicks on phone & email links, or Contact form submissions)
Expectation vs Reality
I was expecting it to rank higher for some location pages, as sometimes I find websites that rank with a near-empty page for competitive keywords. Just search in Google for ‘SEO in LA‘ and you will see what I mean.
Plus, I targeted a mix of low competition services keywords in small locations with not many competitors.
But as others in the industry are saying – ‘Rank’n’Rent website are practically dead‘.
Why? Because in my opinion, Google got better in identifying websites that try to rank without a real business behind them.
I often see pages with very thin content ranking above detailed and well structured content. The only difference is that the thin content website has a real business selling products,, while the other one is just a blog.
(Will soon have a case study with affiliate blogs, stay tuned.)
The 2nd Rank and Rent Site
I also build a control 2nd website using exact same setup: same niche, different target state. The first one is in Florida, the 2nd one is in Colorado.
From a Rank’n’Rent perspective the 2nd website it has 50% less clicks and Generative AI impressions.
- 152 clicks in Search Console.
- 3,300 generative AI impressions.
- 0 leads / Key events from any location page.
The 2nd website does not have social media, so I attributed the 50% decrease in performance to that, as you can read in the social media and SEO case study.
GSC SEO Stats Site 2 (Sep-23 to Oct-20)
- 152 clicks from Google
- Only 5 of those went to the location pages, the ones meant to make money
- 0 leads
What I would do differently
To increase the chances for this to work I need to do two things:
- Buy some decent backlinks and citations.
- Do an exact match domain instead of a brandable domain name.
- Spread out the publishing over a longer period.
- I would also consider to get an expired domain and build the new website on it.
Backlinks are a bit expensive for this type of project at this moment. EMD domains are another test I am planning to do. Stay tuned for that.
I published many pages at once so that I have the internal linking ready-made before the website went live. Therefore avoiding having too many broken internal links to soon-to-be-published pages.
What I've Learned
First, I learned that Rank and Rent is not as easy as it used to be. Indirectly this is what I personally learned:
- I practiced AI workflows in n8n and got comfortable creating complex workflows that generate and put together images, infographics, tables, internal links. All on auto-pilot.
- As well as integrating RAG databases in creating the location pages with real business and locale data.
- I got better at website design and at website development as a whole, including conversion optimisation and even code optimisation.
- I became more comfortable with tracking tools and custom events in GA4 as well with GTM (Google Tag manager) setup.
Therefore, although I did not become rich by selling Rank and Rent leads to business owners, I am happy to have gained other skills.
SEO Case Study Conclusion
I enjoy practicing and learning new things related to website, SEO and AI. But at the end of the day results is what matter.
In this case the results for this Rank and Rent test website are not impressive. I received a couple of leads that I sent to a random business in the area, but besides that there’s not much to put my hands on.
I will probably add more layers to it, such as citations and/or backlinks and see what happens, and if service pages get more clicks and leads.
As for the blog section, there’s not much to do here. I don’t see real value in blogs.
I usually recommend to clients to not spend resources on blogs, even go as far as telling them to delete most of the already published blogs.
In my YouTube SEO Audits, I oftentimes find local websites with many bad blogs that either have very little value or worse, they drag the website down.
Plus, on an old case study I did, I recovered a website’s traffic just by deleting underperforming content.
It’s nice to see the efforts resulting in blog clicks, but the most valuable, personally, was all the learning I did. At least so far.
Remains to decide see what I can test next on this very same website.
FAQs
Rank’n’Rent model means building a website in a specific niche and location with the goal of ranking that website for high ticket keywords and services. You then sell the leads coming in or you ‘rent’ the website to a business owner offering those services in that location. The price per lead or monthly renting proces can be established based on factors such as number and quality of leads and in some cases based on PPC / cost per click data from Google Ads.
In short, SEO is not dead. Fundamentally SEO is the same as people still search in the era of AI and LLMs. SEO is what you do to get your business and website you in front of the searcher – be it in Google, Chat-GPT or other AI LLM platforms.
Based on this minimal setup in this case study, Rank and Rent does not work. But that does not mean Rank and Rent is dead. It’s just harder to ‘convince Google your site has a real business behind it. As with any type of SEO, there are many nuances to it such as competition & location, website authority (backlinks), the technical aspects of SEO, etc.
My name is Andrei and in 2014 I made my first money online through websites and SEO. I currently offer SEO services for Romanian and English-language websites. Learn more about my SEO approach on my YouTube channel with SEO tutorials. For more SEO education, check my SEO blog or my SEO case studies.
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