Billing for results not by the day. Thought?
-
Hi,
We are searching for a new SEO provider for www.compoundsecurity.co.uk and I notice that some SEO providers are now billing against results rather than days spent doing the work.
Considering the high prices and lack of work done for those fees by current provider, this is of interest to me.
Does anyone have experience of working this way and or have any advice please?
Thank you
-
Keri:
You are such an instigator! Sounds like you are angling for a joint blog post from me and EGOL.
In your evll and nefarious way.
NYAH-HAH-HAH.
<<evil grin="">></evil>
-
This subject often comes up in Q&A, both by people wanting to hire using this method, or sell their services with this method. All of your arguments here would make for a good YouMoz post if someone was interested in giving it a comprehensive treatment.
-
** just because previous providers haven't delivered,...**
I know a few people would say the problem is a lack of vetting.
-
I agree with EGOL. I would decline a "pay for performance" model because too much is out of my control: client cooperation, algo updates, new competitors.
Performance and accountability are important. Who could argue with that?
But just because previous providers haven't delivered, it doesn't necessarily follow that shifting to a pay for performance model is the way to go. This often degenerates into the futile pursuit of phoney metrics, eg. ranking for non-competitive terms, social media shares, etc...
You need to find a provider you trust with a track record of delivering results. Limiting yourself to those who will accept pay for performance compensation may limit your search -- and your bottom line results.
-
Are you willing to turn over your entire site to the "SEO provider"?
That is a good idea. If I am going to do SEO on the basis of performance I will start my own website and sell the leads or dump the shopping cart to the highest bidder. Then I get paid for everything that I kill and can move the business to Company B if Company A does not perform. I would also then have complete view of the activity on the site and the transactions that occur there.
Just like being an affiliate or having a drop shipper - which I currently do.
-
Some seo's have been offering this type of billing, on results only, for quite a long time now.
I can see the attraction, although i would never offer it myself, especially since the consequence of a good contemporary seo program extend far beyond ranking results. For example an SEO's efforts sorting out all the social media profiles for the SEO benefit and advice or work on the ongoing social profile management would likely result in more reach, engagement and hence traffic and hopefully sales and increased brand awareness and reputation etc etc. Hence client would likely be receiving high value results from social immediately but not paying anything for it. So i wouldnt be happy working like that.
I would ask what defines a result that justifies billing ?
Is it simply a ranking result for keywords they choose (in which case be very wary since they may not convert) OR keywords you choose based on research OR is it conversions from organic search result to your website OR is it an actual sale tracked back to organic search (& arguably social too if they are doing a holistic 'Inbound' package).
If its the latter and the CPA (Cost Per Acquisition) they propose/you negotiate leaves you with a profit then worth considering.
Interested to hear what other think ??
-
I do have some experience in this area. If you operate a highly measurable marketing program, some web marketing agencies will agree to a "pay per performance" model of compensation, but you will have to work with them for it to be clearly defined, and they will still want a flat rate compensation for their hours spent. At the end of the day, agencies want to get paid period. And they should be. You may end up paying more for their services going this route, so if saving money is your concern I wouldn't recommend it. If ensuring that your agency can deliver and that they have some "skin in the game" to keep them honest, then this could be a great direction.
A typical setup I've seen is the agency will give you their hours at "cost" or a very low rate as a baseline to cover their expenses and time, then if you have very good past historical performance reporting setup, and they are comfortable that they can do what they say they can, you can define a payout based on "results" such as website conversions from organic search sources. So comparing year-over-year, say you got 100 conversions in October 2012 from organic search, you could say for every conversion we get in October 2013 above 100 you get 25% of the revenue, or something like that.
Also keep in mind, the industry is somewhat in free fall right now in my opinion due to the increase of "not provided" keyword data. In the past, you would do a contract like I outlined above specifying that you would not count branded keywords. The last thing you want is to run a magazine ad which increases searches for your brand 2000% and have to pay the agency for the influx of organic search conversions that you would have gotten anyway! With all the organic search data lumped into one bucket now, I don't see how that will work anymore personally.
-
If someone asked me to work on the basis of results I would decline. Why? Because I don't have any control over new companies entering your business niche. That is market risk that belongs to the business owner, not a service provider.
Even if you offered me a percentage of sales I would not take the deal because sales are determined by factors that you control such as retail price level, shipping charged, quality of staff serving the customer and more.
SEOs have a base line value on their time that is determined by how much they can earn by doing other things. If you want the time you gotta pay the price.
Perhaps SEOs who are new to the market or those who will do "anything required" to get your site ranked and collect the fee will be interested. But they might not be able to hold those results once Google figures out that they have spammed.
-
What are "results"?
Are you willing to turn over your entire site to the "SEO provider"? If not, it's truly difficult to pay for results.
It's a two-way street; your SEO firm can only be effective if you're doing your part. The days of paying a company to "go out and do some SEO" are long gone.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Thoughts on my change of address delima?
Currently our corporate website and store website are under two domains. internationalcompany.com (DA: 51; Corporate Website) companystore.com (DA: 34; US Store Website) We were hoping to piggyback on the corporate website domain authority by moving our store to internationalcompany.com/store and when we learned that couldn't happen we opted for us.internationalcompany.com/store. The reason we are leaning towards the route of us.internationalcompany.com is because it is likely that we will be taking over the US branch of the corporate website so we thought it better that the store be a sub address of that. My main concerns... From what I have gathered it seems that I can't do a change of address to a subdomain within Webmaster Tools - I'd have to have access to internationalcompany.com which won't happen soon. So, is a 301 just as good in this case? As a subdomain, we won't actually reap the benefits of the domain authority of the parent domain will we? Are we just as well off considering a new domain and asking that regional tags be established on the current internationalcompany.com so that the content does not interfere with our SEO efforts? This is a broad explanation for a complicated issue. Please ask any question that may help clarify.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bearpaw0 -
Does Google still don't index Hashtag Links ? No chance to get a Search Result that leads directly to a section of a page? or to one of numeras Hashtag Pages in a single HTML page?
Does Google still don't index Hashtag Links ? No chance to get a Search Result that leads directly to a section of a page? or to one of numeras Hashtag Pages in a single HTML page? If I have 4 or 5 different hashtag link section pages , consolidated into one HTML Page, no chance to get one of the Hashtag Pages to appear as a search result? like, if under one Single Page Travel Guide I have two essential sections: #Attractions #Visa no chance to direct search queries for Visa directly to the Hashtag Link Section of #Visa? Thanks for any help
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Muhammad_Jabali0 -
What can I do to put these pages back in the top results?
Hello here, here is an interesting question for you. The following 2 webpages from our website have been ranking well on Google (usually on the 1st or 2nd page) for the past 12 years. They are among our oldest, highly relevant product pages on our site: http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/score/Moonlight.html http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/score/Eliza.html And we could always find them with the keyword "moonlight sonata sheet music" or "fur elise sheet music". Now, since the last November these pages don't show up anymore despite they are still present in the index. It is pretty hard to understand why those pages don't show up in the search results for those keywords as they used to, above all if you consider that those are among our best, most popular and unique product pages! But instead to struggle to understand why we lost presence (Panda? Some unknown sort of penalization?), has anyone any suggestions to help us to have those pages back in the top results? What do you suggest to do in such kind of cases? Any ideas and thoughts are very welcome! Thank you in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fablau0 -
Why does my home page show up in search results instead of my target page for a specific keyword?
I am using Wordpress and am targeting a specific keyword..and am using Yoast SEO if that question comes up.. and I am at 100% as far as what they recommend for on page optimization. The target html page is a "POST" and not a "Page" using Wordpress definitions. Also, I am using this Pinterest style theme here http://pinclone.net/demo/ - which makes the post a sort of "pop-up" - but I started with a different theme and the results below were always the case..so I don't know if that is a factor or not. (I promise .. this is not a clever spammy attempt to promote their theme - in fact parts of it don't even work for me yet so I would not recommend it just yet...) I DO show up on the first page for my keyword.. however.. instead of Google showing the page www.mywebsite.com/this-is-my-targeted-keyword-page.htm Google shows www.mywebsite.com in the results instead. The problem being - if the traffic goes only to my home page.. they will be less likely to stay if they dont find what they want immediately and have to search for it.. Any suggestions would be appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | chunkyvittles0 -
How to show country name in google search result
I have a site with tld .com but my target country is United kingdom so i want to show United Kingdom in SERPs.How can i show it ? I have already set target country United Kingdom in Webmaster tools but still it is not showing.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Alick3000 -
What should I get my assistant to do? (SEO wise, no real results!)
We own a video search site like casttv.com, now there is not much 'content' we can develop. I want to rank high for certain video names for Google. In terms of seo, i have told our assistant (seo guy now) to basically find all sites on the net related to videos and collect their about us and contact them, and see if we can build any sort of partnership and also to post a new interesting article a day for our blog... He has contacted 500 sites of which we were able to get good links from 5 of them (1 way). He has exhausted his search of quality 'video' sites, now what? what can I have him do so we can actually start ranking, we have 100k pages indexed of which we have around 1million. Only the top pages are allowed to be indexed, in terms of off page seo, what can I have our seo guy do all day now? should I fire him ($3k a month) and get a PR firm to try to get us into newspapers instead?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ketlad0 -
3 results for a site on page one?!?
Hi, I've never seen a website rank on page 1 in position 2, 3 and 4 for one query, completely separate results as well. I thought they limited the amount of results from a website on each page?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | activitysuper0 -
Block all search results (dynamic) in robots.txt?
I know that google does not want to index "search result" pages for a lot of reasons (dup content, dynamic urls, blah blah). I recently optimized the entire IA of my sites to have search friendly urls, whcih includes search result pages. So, my search result pages changed from: /search?12345&productblue=true&id789 to /product/search/blue_widgets/womens/large As a result, google started indexing these pages thinking they were static (no opposition from me :)), but i started getting WMT messages saying they are finding a "high number of urls being indexed" on these sites. Should I just block them altogether, or let it work itself out?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rhutchings0