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?