Rank and rent: build a local lead generation site and rent it to a business

What you are building

The asset is a website about one service in one place, with a phone number and an enquiry form. When it ranks, people who need the service find it, call or fill in the form, and their enquiry goes to a business that does the work. Before you have a tenant, enquiries come to you, and you either pass them to a firm on trial or tell the person honestly that you cannot help yet. Once you have a tenant, the number forwards straight to them and forms land in their inbox.

How money changes hands

There are three common arrangements. Each moves risk between you and the business in a different way, and the right one depends on how steady the lead flow is and how much the business trusts you.

Some people also take a share of each job the business wins from the site. I would avoid it for a first site, because you cannot see which leads turned into work or what the business charged, so every invoice depends on trusting their figures.

Why it takes months

A new site on a new domain has no links, no history and no reputation, and it is competing for searches where the map pack sits above it. Google does not publish how long a new site takes to rank, and nobody else can tell you either. In my judgement you should plan for six to twelve months before the lead flow is steady enough to sell, and accept that some sites never get there. If that timescale would make you cut corners in month three, this model is the wrong one for you.

The schedule below lays the stages over a year. It is one possible shape, built from the timings given for each stage, and the bars for ranking and the trial are the ones that slip. Most of the work you control happens in the first two months. After that the job is patient improvement, logging and selling.

The rules that shape everything after this

• No Business Profile. Lead generation agents or companies are among the businesses that are not eligible for a profile.¹ Stage six covers what that means in practice.
• Google's spam policies apply to how you build the pages. Doorway abuse, scaled content abuse, expired domain abuse and link spam are all described in them, and sites that break the policies may rank lower or not appear at all.²
• Consumer law applies to what the site tells people. Since 6 April 2025 the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 has let the CMA and the courts fine traders up to 10% of worldwide turnover for unfair commercial practices,³ which include misleading people about who a trader is.⁴
• Data protection law applies to every name, number and message the site collects.⁵ Stage three sets up the lead handling to comply from day one.

The legal way and the lines not to cross

Rank and rent has a poor reputation because so many sites are built on things that break Google's rules or consumer law: fake map listings, invented reviews, copied town pages. None of that is needed. A lead generation business that says who it is, collects enquiries honestly and passes them to a named firm is an ordinary business. The graphic sums up where the common practices stand. Each verdict is explained, with its source, in the stage where the practice comes up.

Set up the business behind the site

The site is a business from its first enquiry, so decide what kind of business it is before you register anything. Most people start as a sole trader or with a private limited company. This is the UK picture, and it is a starting point: an accountant can tell you which suits your tax position.

Whichever you choose, use one name for everything: the domain registration, the call tracking account, the privacy notice, the ICO fee, the bank account the rent is paid into and the rental agreement. When a tenant or a buyer asks who owns the site, the answer should be the same on every document.

Most of the outcome is decided here. A well-built site in a poor niche makes little, and a weak site in a good niche can still struggle against the map pack and the directories. Score each candidate on the same criteria, and do the checks on the real results page.

What makes a niche worth renting

• Job value. The rent comes out of the gross profit on the work the leads produce, so a trade where one job is worth hundreds or thousands of pounds can support a meaningful rent. A trade where jobs are small needs a lot of leads to be worth anything.
• Urgency. People with a leaking roof, a blocked drain or no hot water tend to ring the first credible number they find. People planning a kitchen spend weeks comparing firms. Urgent work turns more searches into calls and makes the leads easier to value.
• Operators to rent to. You need firms that could take the work, and ideally more than one, so that losing a tenant does not leave the site empty. Count the firms that cover the town before you build anything.
• Seasonality. Some trades are busy for a few months and quiet for the rest, such as gritting or grass cutting. A flat rent is hard to sell for the quiet months, so seasonal niches usually suit pay per lead.
• How jobs arrive. A rank and rent site works when customers phone or fill in a form to reach a local firm. If most of the trade's work is booked through apps, retailers or insurance panels, there are fewer enquiries for a local site to catch.

Brainstorm a long list first

Start wide. Write down every trade you or people you know work in, then the trades that come out after a storm, a freeze or a burst pipe, then the services people buy once every few years and know nothing about. A long list of twenty to thirty services is normal at this point. An AI assistant is useful here because it is good at generating options and splitting a trade into the specific jobs people search for. It is not reliable on local facts or on how much a job costs where you live, so treat everything it gives you as a list to check.

What makes a town workable

The town decides who you are competing against. Local results are based on relevance, distance and prominence, and prominence reflects how well known a business is, including how many websites link to it and how many reviews it has.¹¹ Your site cannot appear in the map pack, so the question for each town is how much room the organic results leave below the pack, and who is in them. I go through how the map pack is assembled separately.

• Strong local competition looks like several firms with established sites, a page for each service, plenty of reviews and links from local sources, sitting in the top organic positions.
• Directory and platform competition looks like national trade directories, review sites and lead platforms filling most of the first page, with ads above them. Those sites have years of links. If they take eight of ten results, there is little left.
• A workable town usually has a first page with a mix: one or two directories, a few local firms with thin or outdated sites, and the odd page that only partly matches the search.
• Town size cuts both ways. A large city has more searches and much stronger competition. A small town may have too few searches to produce steady leads. Mid-sized towns, and distinct areas of large cities that people search for by name, are often where the balance sits. That is my judgement and you should test it on the real results.
• Distance from you. You do not have to live in the town, but it helps: you can photograph local work, meet a tenant in person, and recognise the area names people use. In my view a town you can drive to is easier to sell in than one you have never visited.

Check demand with keyword tools

Before scoring, get a rough sense of whether people search for each service in each town at all. No tool gives you exact local numbers, so use two or three and look for agreement in the direction, not the precise figure.

• Google Keyword Planner, inside Google Ads, shows estimates of how many searches a keyword gets each month and suggests related keywords. To use the keyword ideas feature you need a Google Ads account with billing information set up.¹² The search volume statistics are rounded,¹³ so read them as rough bands. Set the location to the town or county to see local estimates.
• Google Trends shows relative interest, not volume. Its data is normalised and scaled from 0 to 100 against all searches in the chosen place and time.¹⁴ It is useful for seasonality: compare 'roof repair' in the UK over five years and you will see whether demand rises in winter. Small towns often return too little data to chart.
• Third-party tools such as Ahrefs and Semrush offer free keyword tools with search volume estimates and a keyword difficulty score,¹⁵¹⁶ with fuller data on paid plans. Their volumes are their own models, and different tools will disagree. Difficulty scores are mostly about links to the ranking pages, so check the actual results page as well.
• Search Console, once your site is live, is the only source of what your own pages are shown for. It replaces the estimates from month two onwards.

For the example, the builder enters 'roof repair', 'roofer', 'emergency roofer', 'flat roof repair' and 'chimney repair' into Keyword Planner with the location set to Derby, then repeats the list in Google Trends for the UK to see the seasonal pattern. They do not need a precise number. They need to know the searches exist in Derby in more than trivial amounts and that demand does not vanish for half the year.

Check the results page properly

Two prompts speed up the recording. The first turns a results page you have copied into a tidy row for your spreadsheet. The second drafts a list of firms to check. Neither replaces looking at the page yourself: an assistant only sees what you paste in, and it cannot see the map pack, the ads or how a page looks on a phone unless you describe them.

The worked example

Say the example builder shortlists roof repairs in Derby, tree surgery in Derby and drain unblocking in Leicester. Roof repair jobs are often worth several hundred pounds, many are urgent after a storm, and their spreadsheet shows plenty of small roofing firms covering the city, several with thin websites. Tree surgery jobs are also valuable but more seasonal and less urgent. Drain unblocking is urgent and steady, but in this invented check the organic results were mostly national drainage companies and directories. These findings are hypothetical and exist to show the method. Your own checks are the only figures that count.

A neutral brand that can be handed over

The name has to work for any tenant and must not pretend to be a company that does the work. A descriptive name built from the place and the service does both: in the example, something like 'Derby Roof Help'. Avoid anything that sounds like a firm with vans and staff, such as 'Derby Roofing Ltd', and anything close to the name of an existing local business. The CMA's guidance treats marketing that creates confusion with another trader's name or trade marks as a misleading action where it is likely to change what people decide.⁴ Check Companies House and a quick search for the name before you buy the domain.

• Register a fresh domain in your own name or your company's name, with an account only you control. The domain is the asset you are renting out.
• Do not buy an expired domain to borrow its old links. Buying an expired domain and repurposing it mainly to manipulate rankings, with content that gives users little value, is expired domain abuse under Google's spam policies.²
• Register the matching social handles only if you will use them. Empty profiles add nothing.

Choose the type of domain

There are three broad kinds of domain for a site like this. A descriptive domain is the service and the town, such as derbyroofrepairs.co.uk. A brandable domain is a made-up or neutral name, such as roofwise.co.uk. A partial domain mixes the two, such as derbyroofhelp.co.uk. Many rank and rent builders buy descriptive domains because they believe the keywords help the site rank. Google says the opposite: its SEO Starter Guide lists keywords in the domain name among the things not to focus on, and says that keywords in the domain or URL path alone have hardly any effect beyond appearing in breadcrumbs.¹⁷ Choose the domain for the people who will read it, say it on the phone and remember it.

• Pick the ending first. For a site serving one UK town, .co.uk or .uk is the natural choice. A country-code domain such as .uk is a strong signal to users and search engines that a site is intended for a certain country, and with a country-code domain the server's location does not matter for that.¹⁸ A .com works too, but tells a UK visitor less.
• Keep it short enough to say once on the phone without spelling it out. In my view fifteen to twenty characters before the ending is a comfortable limit, and fewer is better.
• Avoid numbers, double letters across word joins (roofrepairsstockport) and spellings people will get wrong.
• If you want both the .co.uk and the .uk, buy both and redirect one to the other, so nobody else can sit on the twin.
• Search the name before you buy: on Google, on Companies House and on the Intellectual Property Office's trade mark search. A name close to an existing local firm is a problem whatever the domain says.

Where to buy the domain

Domains ending in .uk and .co.uk are run by Nominet and sold through registrars. Nominet's consumer site, The UK Domain, has a search that shows which endings are free and then lists registrars to complete the purchase with, with each one's price and what else it offers.¹⁹ The registrars below are examples that sell .uk and .co.uk. Compare the renewal price as well as the first-year price, because first-year offers are common, and check the current price on each provider's own page.

Two .uk rules matter for a site you plan to rent out. First, the registrant details must be right. Nominet's terms require you to give and keep up to date your correct name, postal address, phone and email, and allow Nominet to cancel or suspend a domain where it believes the contact details, including names, are significantly inaccurate or false.²⁶ Register the domain in your own name or your company's, never in a made-up business name. Second, you do not need to pay for privacy: Nominet says the .uk WHOIS does not display the registrant's name or address unless they have given permission.²⁷

Say who runs the site

This is the part most rank and rent sites get wrong. Under the unfair commercial practices rules, giving false information about a trader's identity, status, affiliations or connections can be a misleading action, and failing to identify the commercial intent of a practice can be a misleading omission.⁴ The CMA's summary also makes clear that people acting on behalf of a trader, such as a marketplace presenting other sellers' products, carry responsibility for the information they present.³ Where a page counts as an invitation to purchase, for example because it sets out a service and its price, the guidance lists the trader's identity and address among the material information people need.⁴ I am not a lawyer, and how these rules apply to a particular site is a question for one, but the safe reading for a lead site is simple: never let people think they are dealing with a firm they are not.

• Put a short, visible statement on every page, in the footer or near the contact details: who runs the site, and that enquiries are passed to an independent local firm. Once there is a tenant, name them.
• Have an 'About this site' page with your trading name, how to contact you, and a plain explanation of how the site works and how it is paid for.
• If you trade as a limited company, the website must show the company's registered number, its registered office address, where it is registered and its full name including 'Limited' or 'Ltd'.¹⁰
• Do not invent anything: no fake reviews or testimonials, no years in business, no team photos, no 'fully insured' or trade body badges. The unfair commercial practices rules ban fake reviews outright,³ and claiming an approval or affiliation the site does not have is the kind of false information the guidance describes.⁴ Accreditations can appear once there is a tenant, and only the ones the tenant genuinely holds.

The phone number and the form

Buy a call tracking number in your own name, in the local geographic format the area uses, and point it at your own phone for now. When you have a tenant, you change where it forwards, and the number on the site never changes. The number must stay yours: if the tenant leaves, you redirect it to the next one. Keep a call log that records the date, time, duration and caller number for each call, because that log is your evidence in every pricing conversation.

Use a local geographic number. Ofcom explains that numbers starting 01 or 02 are geographic numbers tied to an area code,²⁸ so a Derby number on a Derby site matches what a local caller expects. An 03 number is the other reasonable choice: Ofcom says calls to 03 numbers cost no more than calls to 01 or 02 numbers and count towards inclusive minutes.²⁹ Avoid 084 and 087 numbers, which Ofcom notes might be charged extra.²⁸

• Local geographic numbers for your town, and whether you keep the number if you change plan.
• Forwarding you can change yourself, at any time, to any UK number. This is how you switch a tenant in or out.
• A call log you can export, with date, time, duration, caller number and whether the call was answered.
• A recorded message at the start of the call if you record calls, and the ability to turn recording off.
• Where recordings and logs are stored, how long they are kept, and whether the provider offers a data processing agreement.
• Missed call alerts by text or email, so no enquiry is lost while there is no tenant.

A single number shown on every page counts all calls from the site without any cookies. Dynamic number insertion, which shows a different number to each visitor to tie calls to individual visits, needs more care. The ICO's guidance says the exception for statistical cookies covers collecting statistics about how a service is used with a view to improving it, does not apply to purposes related to online advertising, and requires clear information and a simple, free way to object.³⁵ Tracking individual visitors to their phone calls goes beyond aggregate statistics, so in my view one static number per site is the better choice unless you have a consent setup you are confident in.

The form should ask only for what the firm needs to respond: name, phone number, postcode or area, and a short description of the job. Send each submission to an inbox you control and log it in the same spreadsheet as the calls.

Data protection for the leads

This section covers UK law. The ICO says an organisation that decides to collect personal data, decides what to collect and why, and decides whether to disclose it and to whom, is likely to be a controller.³⁶ Before you have a tenant, that is you. Organisations that use personal information, including sole traders, need to pay the ICO a data protection fee unless they are exempt.⁵

• Write a privacy notice and link it from the form and the footer. The ICO's list of what to include covers who you are and how to contact you, why you use the data, your lawful basis, who you share it with, how long you keep it, people's rights, and their right to complain to the ICO.³⁷
• Name the recipients honestly. Before you have a tenant, say enquiries may be passed to an independent local firm for a quote. Once there is a tenant, name them in the notice.
• Choose and record your lawful basis. Many sites passing an enquiry to a firm the person has asked to hear from will look at legitimate interests, which the ICO says needs a legitimate purpose, processing that is necessary for it, and a balance that does not override the person's interests.³⁸ Whatever you choose, write the reasoning down.
• If you record calls, tell callers that the call is recorded and why. The ICO says a recorded message is good practice, and that the rest of the privacy information can be provided by other means, such as a link on your website.³⁹ Check whether your call tracking provider can play a short message at the start of each call.
• Set a retention period for call recordings, logs and form submissions, such as long enough to settle billing disputes, and delete them when it ends.

When you have a tenant, the relationship changes and the agreement has to reflect it. If you collect enquiries only on their instructions and for their purposes, you may be acting as their processor, and the ICO says a written contract is needed whenever a controller uses a processor, with set terms on instructions, security and what happens at the end.⁴⁰ If you both decide your own purposes, you are likely each a controller. Which one applies depends on the facts, which is one more reason the agreement in stage eight goes to a solicitor.

A rank and rent site is small: eight to fifteen pages, a form and a phone number. It does not need a complex platform. It needs to be fast on a phone, to have its words in the HTML the server sends, to run over HTTPS, to cost little each month, and to sit in accounts that you own so you can switch the number and the form between tenants without asking anyone. Any of the three routes below can do that. They differ in what you pay, how much you control, and how much you have to maintain.

What matters in hosting

• Commercial use allowed. Some free plans exclude it. Vercel says its free Hobby plan is restricted to non-commercial personal use, and counts advertising the sale of a product or service as commercial,⁴¹ so a lead site on Vercel needs a paid plan. GitHub Pages says it is not intended for or allowed to be used as free hosting to run an online business,⁴² so leave it out for this.
• HTTPS that sets itself up. Netlify, for example, says it provisions a Let's Encrypt certificate automatically when you add a custom domain and renews it as needed.⁴³ Most hosts and builders now do the same, but check before you choose.
• Speed close to your visitors. Static hosts serve files from a global network. For WordPress, pick a host with UK servers and caching.
• Backups you can restore without help. Managed WordPress hosts such as Kinsta and SiteGround describe automatic daily backups on their own help pages.⁴⁴⁴⁵ On a static site, the Git repository is the backup.
• An account in your name. Never build on an account belonging to a tenant, a developer or a friend. When the tenant changes, you must still be able to sign in.

Pick the build route

In my view: if you already know WordPress, use it. If you want the least technical work and accept a monthly fee, use a hosted builder. If you are comfortable at a command line, or willing to learn with an AI coding tool beside you, a static site is the cheapest, fastest and most portable option, and it is easy to hand over or sell because it is just files.

Route A: WordPress

Route B: a hosted builder

Webflow, Squarespace, Wix and Framer host the site for you and handle HTTPS and the sitemap. You design in the browser and pay a monthly plan. What you give up is control over the markup and the ability to move the site elsewhere later. Check each of these on the plan you are considering, using the builder's own help pages.

Route C: a static site built with an AI coding tool

AI coding tools can now build a small, fast site from a clear brief. There are two kinds. Coding agents such as Claude Code and Cursor work on files on your own computer: Anthropic describes Claude Code as a tool that reads your codebase, edits files and runs commands, in the terminal, an IDE, a desktop app or the browser.⁶² Browser builders such as Lovable, Bolt and Replit build and host the app for you. Check how each one renders pages before you choose. Lovable says new apps created from 13 May 2026 use server-side rendering, and that only publicly published apps can be indexed.⁶³ Bolt hosts sites on its own domain and says custom domains are only available on Pro, though it can publish to Netlify instead.⁶⁴ Replit offers static deployments for plain HTML, CSS and JavaScript sites.⁶⁵

For this job I would use a coding agent to build a plain static site with Astro, then host it on Cloudflare Pages or Netlify. Astro renders pages to HTML on the server and ships no JavaScript by default,⁶⁶ which is what a small lead site needs. Whatever the tool, the rule that matters is the same: the words on each page must be in the HTML the server sends. Server-side rendering or pre-rendering makes a site faster for users and crawlers, and not all bots can run JavaScript.⁶⁷ AI crawlers are the clearest case: Vercel's 2024 analysis of crawler traffic across its network found that ChatGPT's and Claude's crawlers fetch JavaScript files but do not execute them.⁶⁸

If you build with Claude Code, Cursor or another agent that can load skills, the free SEO for AI Agents pack has skills for exactly these checks. Reach fetches real pages and checks that the content is in the served HTML before any JavaScript runs, and Understand adds JSON-LD that describes only what is really on the page. Programmatic builds pages from data behind a quality gate that refuses thin or doorway pages, which is a useful brake if you are tempted to generate area pages. The pack is open source under the MIT licence, at version 0.2, and marked experimental, so check what it reports yourself before you rely on it.

Connect the domain and verify it in Search Console

Whichever route you chose, the host or builder will give you DNS records to add at your registrar, usually an A record or a CNAME. Add them, wait for the domain to resolve, and confirm the site loads at https:// with no certificate warning, on both the bare domain and www, with one redirecting to the other. If your domain is at Cloudflare Registrar, the DNS is already at Cloudflare, so add the records there.

Then add the site to Google Search Console as a Domain property. A Domain property covers every subdomain and both http and https, and can only be verified through a DNS record.⁶⁹ Search Console gives you a TXT record that starts google-site-verification=, which you add at your DNS provider and then confirm.⁷⁰ Verifying before launch is fine: nothing is indexed until the site is crawlable and linked.

The site has to be the most useful page on the subject for someone in that town, because it has nothing else going for it: no profile, no reviews, no history. Google's guidance on helpful content asks whether a site decided to enter a niche without real expertise, mainly because it thought it would get search traffic.⁷¹ That describes a lot of rank and rent sites. The answer is to bring in real expertise, which usually means a tradesperson you can interview, and to write pages that answer the questions customers actually ask.

Plan the pages from the searches

Go back to the searches you collected in stage two. Each distinct service that people search for, and that a firm would quote for separately, deserves its own page. Pages that would say the same thing should be one page.

Area pages that are not doorways

Google's spam policies describe doorway abuse as sites or pages created to rank for specific, similar search queries, and give as an example multiple domains or pages targeted at specific regions or cities that funnel users to one page.² A set of pages for twenty villages, each the same text with the place name swapped, is that pattern. It is also the most common way rank and rent sites are built.

Start with one honest 'areas covered' page. Add a separate page for an area only when you have something specific to say about it: a different mix of housing that changes the common jobs, access or parking issues a roofer would mention, or planning restrictions in part of the area that affect what work can be done. Each of those facts has to be true, so check them with your tradesperson or the council's own pages before you write them. If you cannot find three things that are true of one area and not the others, it does not need a page. I cover this in more detail in location pages that are not doorway pages.

Content that is actually useful

• Interview a working tradesperson for an hour, record it with their permission, and build the service pages from what they say: the questions customers ask, the mistakes people make, what a job really involves. Offer them a free trial of the leads later in return.
• Use photos you took or have permission to use, of real work. Do not present a photo of one firm's job as the work of another.
• Write a cost page with price ranges supplied by a roofer, dated, and with the reasons a job costs more or less. Keep it updated, and do not make up figures.
• Answer the searcher's real questions near the top of each page: how quickly someone can come out, whether a repair or a replacement is likely, and what to do in the meantime.
• Do not generate pages in bulk. Using generative AI or similar tools to generate many pages without adding value is scaled content abuse under Google's spam policies.² Using tools to help you edit is a different matter. Say how automation or AI was used where readers would reasonably expect to know.⁷¹

Run the tradesperson interview

The interview is where the site's value comes from, so prepare for it. Find someone who does the work: a firm from your operator list that might want a free trial of the leads, a retired tradesperson, or someone you know. Tell them plainly what the site is and how it will be used. Ask for an hour, by phone or in person, and ask permission to record. Afterwards, write up the answers the same day while you still remember the detail, and send them the notes to check anything you quote as a price or a rule of thumb.

Most of these points apply to any local site, and the general case is in why most local businesses do not need more content. A rank and rent site needs fewer pages than people expect and better ones.

Structured data where it is honest

• Add WebSite markup on the home page with the site's name. It is the most important signal if you want to state a preference for the site name shown in Google's results.⁷²
• Mark up your own trading entity with Organization markup if you want to. It has no required properties and helps Google understand an organisation's administrative details.⁷³
• Do not add LocalBusiness markup while the site has no tenant. It requires a name and an address,⁷⁴ and the site is not a local business at an address. Google's general structured data guidelines say markup must be a true representation of the page and must not misrepresent ownership, affiliation or primary purpose.⁷⁵ Once a tenant's details are on the site, LocalBusiness markup describing them is appropriate.
• Do not mark up review stars about the site's own service. Pages using LocalBusiness or Organization markup are not eligible for review stars when the entity being reviewed controls the reviews about itself.⁷⁶
• Do not spend time on FAQ markup for rich results. The FAQ rich result is no longer shown in Google Search.⁷⁷ A clear questions section on the page is still useful to readers.

Speed and mobile

Someone searching for an urgent repair may well be standing outside on a phone. Core Web Vitals are used by Google's ranking systems, though good scores do not guarantee top rankings and relevance comes first.⁷⁸ Use a lightweight theme or a static site, compress images, avoid pop-ups, and put a tap-to-call button where a thumb can reach it on every page.

Check everything before launch

Launch is the moment the hidden site becomes crawlable. Most launch failures are small and silent: a noindex left on, a sitemap that lists the preview address, a form that sends to nobody. Run a full check against the real domain before you remove the block, and again just after. The prompt below turns an assistant into a second checker for the content and honesty side. For the technical side, the Launch QA skill in the free pack runs a pass over the things that most often stop a new site being indexed, such as staging noindex and robots blocks, preview hosts in canonicals and sitemaps, redirects and soft 404s, against the production address, and splits what it finds into launch blockers and fix-this-week.

Launch day

Do not create a Business Profile for the site

Google's eligibility rules say a business must make in-person contact with customers during its stated hours to qualify for a profile, and they list lead generation agents or companies as ineligible.¹ A rank and rent site is a lead generation business. It is not eligible, whatever address you could find for it.

Where the site can win

The site competes in the organic results below the map pack, and that changes which searches are worth chasing. In my view the best openings are the searches where the pack is missing or weak, the specific job searches where the top organic results are general pages that only partly match ('flat roof repair Derby' against a roofer's single home page), and the questions people search before they are ready to call, such as costs and what to do while waiting. Search Console's performance report will show you which of these are starting to move, by page and by query.

AI answers draw on similar signals, and I have written about how assistants decide which businesses to name. They matter more each year: in BrightLocal's 2026 survey of 1,002 US consumers, 45% had used ChatGPT or other generative AI tools for local recommendations, up from 6% the year before.⁸² A lead site with no named business behind it is at a disadvantage there too, until a tenant's name, reviews and accreditations are on the site.

Links and local mentions, done legitimately

Link spam means creating links to or from a site primarily to manipulate rankings. The examples in Google's spam policies include buying links, exchanging goods or services for links, excessive link exchanges, links from low-quality directories, and keyword-rich links in widgets or site footers. Paid links are allowed for advertising and sponsorship as long as they carry a rel="nofollow" or rel="sponsored" attribute.² For a small site in a small town, that leaves the slow, honest kind of link building, which is also the kind that tells Google the site is known locally.

• Something worth citing. The cost page, a guide to what to do after storm damage, or a plain explanation of how planning rules affect roof work in the area are the kinds of page local news sites, residents' associations and community groups link to when the subject comes up.
• Local organisations. Residents' associations, community newsletters and local business groups sometimes list useful local resources. Ask, explain truthfully what the site is, and accept a no.
• Sponsorship. Sponsoring a local sports club or event is fine. If the sponsor link is in return for payment, it should carry rel="sponsored" or rel="nofollow".² Its value is being known in the town, which comes back once there is a tenant.
• Directories. Only list the site where the directory accepts a site of this kind and you can describe it truthfully. Do not list it as a roofing firm.
• Not private blog networks, link swaps, paid guest posts or links bought from anyone who sells them. One manual action can end the site.

Measure from the first enquiry

Log every call and form in the lead log, with the page it came from where you can tell. Each month, note clicks and impressions from Search Console for the pages that matter. Those two records are what you will sell in stage seven. A business will pay on the strength of a dated log of real enquiries. A screenshot of rankings rarely persuades anyone.

When you have something to sell

Wait until the site produces enquiries every week. In my view you need at least two or three months of steady leads in the log before a pitch is worth making, because a business owner will want to see that the flow is real and repeatable. Until then, pass the odd enquiry to a firm that has agreed to take them, or tell the person you cannot help, and keep building.

Run a trial

The cleanest way to prove value is to send real leads to one firm for a fixed period, free or at a reduced price, and record what happens to each one. Pick a firm from your stage two list that is responsive, covers the whole area and has capacity. Agree the trial in writing, even if it is a short email: the length, the price, what counts as a lead, and that the firm will tell you which leads they quoted for and which they won. Point the tracking number at them, add their name to the footer statement and the privacy notice as the firm enquiries go to, and forward form submissions the same day.

• In my view thirty days is usually long enough to show a pattern for an urgent trade, and too short for a seasonal one. Set the length so it covers at least the number of leads you would expect in a normal month.
• Ask the firm to record, for every lead: whether they reached the person, whether they quoted, whether they won the job, and the job value. If they will not do that, they are not the right first tenant.
• Check your call log against their records weekly. Missed calls and slow call-backs are the most common reason a trial looks weaker than it is, and you need to know which it was.

Work out what the leads are worth

The rent should come from the business's side of the numbers: how many leads arrive, how many become jobs, what a job is worth, and what the business keeps after materials and labour. The rent is then a share of that gross profit. The tool below runs the calculation. Replace every default with your own figures from the trial.

With the example defaults, 10 leads at a 30% close rate is 3 jobs a month, worth £1,350 in revenue and £540 in gross profit to the business. A 25% share of that is a rent of £135 a month, which works out at £13.50 per lead. If the site doubled to 20 leads at the same rates, the same share would be £270 a month. The per-lead figure stays the same at any volume, because it is just the close rate times the job value times the margin times the share. That makes it a useful number to keep in your head during negotiation.

Two things follow from the sum. First, small changes in close rate and job value move the rent as much as lead volume does, which is why a trial that records outcomes is worth more than one that only counts calls. Second, if the honest figures produce a rent too small to be worth your time, the answer is a higher-value niche or more leads. A higher share is likely to be dropped by the business after a couple of months.

Choose how to charge

• Flat rent suits a site with a steady log and a tenant who wants a predictable cost. Set it from the average month in the trial.
• Pay per lead suits seasonal trades and wary tenants. Set the price from the per-lead figure the tool gives you, and define a qualifying lead in writing.
• A mix, such as a base that covers your costs and time plus a per-lead fee above an agreed number, suits a site whose volume is still growing.
• Whatever you choose, invoice monthly in advance for the flat part and monthly in arrears for the per-lead part, with your call log and form log attached.

Who to approach

The trial firm is the obvious first choice if the trial went well. If it did not, go back to the list of operators you built in stage two. In my judgement the firms most likely to say yes have capacity to take more work, already spend money on leads or ads so understand the idea, and have a weak website of their own. The firm that already dominates the map pack usually has enough work and less reason to pay you.

The pitch

• Lead with the log. Show the number of calls and forms by month, the trial outcomes, and the jobs won. Owners believe their own trial figures far more than any chart of rankings.
• Explain the arrangement in one minute: what they pay, what they get, how the number and the forms are routed to them, and how they can stop.
• Never promise rankings or a number of leads. You cannot control either, and a promise you cannot keep is a misleading claim to make to a business and a dispute waiting to happen.
• Say plainly that you own the site and the number, and what happens to both if they leave. Owners who understand that at the start are much easier to keep.

The agreement

Use a written agreement, and have a solicitor draft it or at least review it. The points below are what it needs to settle. Treat them as a checklist for the conversation with your solicitor.

Hand over properly

• Change the footer statement, the About this site page and the privacy notice to name the tenant as the firm enquiries go to.
• Add the tenant's genuine details where the agreement allows: trading name, address, accreditations and photos of their own work. Now that the site describes a real business with a real address, LocalBusiness markup for that business is accurate.
• Give the tenant access to what they need to see. In Search Console, a restricted user has view rights on most data without administrative actions, while owners have full control and can add and remove users.⁸³ Keep ownership yourself.
• Agree how quickly they will answer calls and reply to forms. A tenant who misses calls will blame the site.

The tenant's Business Profile is theirs

The site still has no profile. The tenant may have their own, at their own address, under their own name, which is theirs to manage. If they want to point their profile's website link at your site, Google's guidelines say the website should represent their individual business, and that URLs or phone numbers must not redirect users to anybody other than the actual business.⁸¹ In practice that means the site has to carry their name and details clearly enough to be their website, and the number on it has to reach them. Agree in writing what happens to that link when the agreement ends, because their profile will be pointing at a site they no longer use. Do not manage their profile for them unless they ask you to, and never change their name, address or categories to suit the site.

Reviews belong on the tenant's own profile, collected from their customers under Google's rules, which I cover in the local SEO guide. They are what the people calling will look at: in BrightLocal's 2026 survey, 74% of the US consumers surveyed said they seek reviews written in the last three months.⁸² Do not copy those reviews onto the site with review markup: reviews a business controls about itself are not eligible for review stars.⁷⁶

The monthly routine

When the tenant leaves

Follow the agreement: serve or accept notice, redirect the number and forms on the end date, remove the tenant's name, details and markup, and update the privacy notice. Then go back to your stage two list and stage seven evidence and offer the site to the next firm. The log you have kept since launch is what makes the second rental faster than the first.

Scaling to more sites

The temptation is to copy the site to twenty towns and swap the names. That pattern appears twice in the spam policies: doorway abuse includes multiple domains targeted at specific regions or cities that funnel users to one page, and scaled content abuse includes creating multiple sites to hide the scaled nature of the content.² A network of near-identical sites is the clearest example of both, and if one is caught the pattern is easy to find in the others.

• Build a second site only when the first has a paying tenant and runs in a few hours a month.
• Treat each new niche and town as a new project: score it, check the results page, find a tradesperson, and write its pages from scratch.
• Reuse the process and the paperwork: the privacy notice, agreement template and lead log can be adapted. Write the pages fresh each time.
• Keep a separate number, log and agreement for each site, so that each can be rented, sold or closed on its own.