Recently I was doing some localised keyword research targeting my hometown of Brisbane Australia.  Whilst going through some of the search results, I came across a guy who was attempting to rank for the term 'best looking man in Brisbane'.

I thought that this was pretty entertaining and thought that I'd go one better and attempt to rank for 'sexiest man in Brisbane'.  There was no real purpose for doing this other than for fun, and given that the term certainly wasn't competitive, nor would it drive any traffic, I didn't expect anything from this (other than a slight boost to my own ego).

So within a few days, my personal blog was ranking for the term.  I was happy.

A couple of days later I was talking to a prospective client, and after providing him with some case studies and testimonials I could tell that he still wasn't sold on the idea of optimisation. So I thought I would lighten the mood a little and make a joke about recently convincing Google that I was the sexiest man in Brisbane, and if we can make someone as ugly as me look good in Google's virtual eyes, we could pretty much do anything.

This sparked a level of interest I certainly didn't expect, and he started asking all sorts of questions about the various terms we could target for his site.  He explained that he had heard the SEO spiel from a few other companies before contacting us and everyone said the same types of things.  We were the first to show him a less practical, but far more interesting use of SEO which emphasized that we enjoy what we do and have fun with it, whilst still offering a professional level of service.

So we gained a new client, and in the last couple of days I've also noticed some link love from other local bloggers for an incredibly non-competitive term that previously generated very little traffic and required no effort at all to rank well for.

I'm not sure if the moral of this story is to have fun with SEO and you may be surprised by the results, or to look for humorous ways to differentiate yourself from the rest of the market, or it could even be that local buzz can be created from something very non-competitive.

Either way, I'm happy because Google thinks I'm sexy... now I just need to figure out how I can convince humans to share the same point of view :)