Looking to Gauge interest from Small Business about a service

People already do this, so its not a new idea. It especially works for trades who don't understand they are paying over the odds long term but need the leads and think this is better than adwords because they basically haven't got a clue. However you can end up with a limited lifecycle business.

To explain:

When they eventually figure out the domain name and the email address isn't theirs (because it can be sold on to another person if they decide not to continue paying for it as I assume you can only use a generic domain name not a branded one or their own current one if they have one) they will leave eventually.

Its fairly easier to get a website to page one for local keywords, so what they would pay you monthly over say 1-2 years, they could pay me the same money and have a mobile friendly professional custom design website of their very own, hosted, and the seo to get them to page one, for a lot less than I see people charging for this option (typically £50 a month), hence over 2 years it starts to work out expensive. I'm not self promoting either - but this is an example of what you are up against, and once they have made money from their leads, their natural next step is to have their own site generating their leads for a whole lot less. Hence they go to a web designer with their wodge of cash they may have made form a year's leads of you.

After a year when they realise the amount spent over a year and they still don't own it and could lose that to a competitor, that's when you lose them. I have had these people come to me. 

Ideally, you want a business model that retains your customers long term, so what I am saying is look at the cost long terms and view this as keeping them long term and building the customer base, and not charging a fee that after 1 year, makes them realise its not worth doing as all you are doing is ending up having to keep finding new customers. Obviously they wont all do this, but I am calculating by experience of knowing the nature of it all, many will, and that's not a wise business model if you are serious about it.

Don't really agree with the 2nd paragraph but apart from that understand your points. 

My thinking is this though: 

Someone comes to me wants to rank for "plumber Cardiff" say. I quote them £300 per month, say takes 4 months to get 1st. So that's £1,200 to them + the risk factor of I could be sh*t yeah? I mean testimonials / case studies / proposals whatever for closing clients, but still the risk element is there for them.

Alternative a site already ranks #1 for "plumber Cardiff" gets 10-15 lead a month. They take on that business for £100 per month. Still £1,200 a year but the risk factor is so much lower. They get leads "from day 1" as it was without the lag time. AND there is no closing/selling involved. They say they don't want it, it's not a problem, there is tons of competition. 

That's my thinking anyway. 

Anyone else have opinions/ideas?

You sell the idea fine, the concept is great, but you don't mention the fine print/restrictions that impact upon the client with regards the longevity of this idea.

So re second para, if they will own the domain name then how can you rent it to them?

No they don't own it. It's rented. 

So instead of PPL which is more hassle for both parties, it's pay to rent the site XX amount per month 

I look at it like this (no offense meant to anyone) it's my business and I want to be in total control of all aspects of it. And that includes who does what to my website, I'd never get into any kind of long term contract for seo work or consider renting websites, if I did I would no longer be in control and and it would be the seo/web designer who was running the show. That alone is high risk, if you were to go belly up overnight, I'd end up shortly following you. Whereas if I hold all the files to the website and personally hold the domains in my name, apart from a little bit of inconvenience I couldn't careless if you folded... I just transfer everything to someone else at little expense. Also for £300 per month you would probably be better of getting a build your own website and placing it on adwords.... just my thoughts.

Your idea maybe fine to those who are relatively new to running their own businesses and who want their first website up and running. But business owners soon end up learning about seo and websites whether they want to or not, simply because they have to and dare I say rather rapidly. Because sooner or later they get to realise that any results they were told they could achieve is based on a 'maybe' rather than a guarantee.......

I'm sure an old member (Tomsk) who hasn't posted for a while raised a similar topic but I can't find it!!  Anyway, it's good to have Barney's view and I would tend to agree - it makes sense in the long term to have ownership - certainly at £300 / month.

Having said that, there may be others who do like the idea of temporarily renting a site (if the pricing is right).  However, if customers remember the site name and go back to it at a later date to only discover that they're speaking to another company who's renting it they may be confused/reluctant to proceed.

Another point to consider, would you be willing to sell the domain if they want to stop renting and purchase?

At the end of the day, I'd suggest doing some more more market research and hopefully some other (non-webby! ) people on this forum will give their views too...

Finally - presuming you got to page 1 of Google, what would you tell those people who genuinely want a plumber before you've rented out the site to a plumber company....   ...or (thinking as I type ) I guess you put no contact details on! 

As has been said already this concept isn't new, it's been around for a long long time.

But from an SEO point of view we see this all the time. (well I don't, but I hear the moaning) 

As a directory we get absolutely plagued with this rubbish, SEO companies trying to swamp the market with what they see to be high prize terms. Most of these terms feed back to a minimally customised landing page, but you recognise the templates straight away.

For example take a 7 day period, we'll receive around 3-400 fake listings, left with a throw away email address, pointing to a fake address. The telephone number will point to a call centre where they will try and flog you leads etc. Some weeks it's more, other times it's less, but the problem is infuriating.

Popular ones are:

Plumbers Cardiff

Builders Cardiff

Removals Cardiff

Cleaners Cardiff etc etc. Then substitute Cardiff for any random town name.

The funny thing is these listings are all manually listed (they can't script it) and we used to delete thousands at the moderation stage.

But they do teach us great anti spam techniques, auto IP blocking etc. More recently we've started blocking whole ranges owned by proxies such as "Hide My Ass" from our sign up page, rather than the firewall. We figure if you are registering with a proxy, you have something to hide, and we don't want you 

But if a visitor from a proxy wants to click on an adsense unit then that's fine by us  

Best laugh we had recently was email abuse from a bunch of SEO spammers when they realised we had blocked their proxy IP range, demanding that we let them through? 

I've spoken to a few directory owners who have seen an increase in the same kind of rubbish. Unfortunately it's still (currently) an effective technique and plenty of larger directories (not naming) let them happily go through. I suspect Google and it's terminator approach will crack it in the end, but I'm a huge thumbs down for SEO rental sites, for all the reasons above and mine.

So long waffley answer to a simple question.

Short answer is no. I've seen your SEO work first hand which is first rate, so genuinely surprised why you would want go down this route, and not carry on doing what you are doing.

If it is just a research exercise/proof of concept, then hopefully us old farts have persuaded you otherwise