SEO Company that bills on results?
-
After having bad experiences with a few seo and ppc companies, I would like to find a company that operates on the premise that they should get paid for producing results instead just for signing a contract.
I'm not thinking that any payment is contingent results but that a large portion of the billing is. I also know that it can take several months to get to an seo goal so I'm not taking a "you have one month to fix our site or we don't pay" approach.
Is there a company out there that has enough confidence in their white-hat processes that they actually back their services with some sort of guarantee?
-
Thank you all for your assistance on this. I was never looking for a guarantee of placement, more for a guarantee of a growth in organic traffic that could be traced to something they did.
I realize that placement these days varies by user so a promise of #1 ranking really is suspicious.
-
You will find that those companies that "produce results" will provide some form of shady metrics or guarantees. Let's be honest - choose any set of long tail words - the more obscure the better, and anyone on this forum can get you to no1 on Google. It's not difficult, but equally, it's not ethical or useful.
As has been recommended, either go for a company that is highly recommend or be prepared to offer a budget that will make the difference.
-
what they need to be doing to win the online battle.
This is really true and I have been very guilty.
Some of the biggest mistakes that I have made are..... Not betting on myself.
-
All of the responses here are good, but we also want to throw out the fact that as a company, do you know if your brand is a successful brand. We can all come up with ideas for companies but are they really money making worthy.
We have people who have worked on both sides of the coin, agency and in-house and I can say as an agency person, I see a lot of people who are afraid of really doing what they need to be doing to win the online battle. How are you marketing to your clients currently? Are you knocking on doors? Is your business even really marketing online?
-
Any marketing program is an investment with inherent risk. By requesting pay for performance, you are basically shifting the risk from the business owner to the service provider but not providing a strong enough return for that risk. If you are looking for a way to reduce your risk, you could ask friends and colleagues for a referral to a provider that has done great work in the past. I don't think any quality SEO companies would take the unnecessary risk because they will have more business then they can handle due to referrals from happy clients.
-
Asking an SEO company to accept "payment for results" is asking them to accept your business risk.
In most good money niches your competitors are not sitting on their ass. That makes SEO a "battle of resources". Your competitor throws more money at it and you must throw more money at it and the battle escalates just like Crocodile Dundee and the knife.
Lots of webmasters go into a fight without the proper knife because they limited their SEOs budget. He applies pressure, competitors respond and defeat is assured.
So, if you want the rankings be prepared to pay for the attack and then be willing to pay for an escalation... and then there is the most dangerous competitor of all - the one who has yet to arrive.
I think that most good SEOs have gotten their ass kicked at least one time and they know not to accept pay for results contracts.
-
I would especially avoid SEO companies that guarantee placement. No one can guarantee that and no reuputable SEO company will. Google's algorithm is always changing. If they do guarantee first page placement they are most likely talking about PPC or lying to you.
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
-
How do you report SEO audit findings?
Hello, Mozzers! I'm curious to know how you report SEO audit findings. Do you use a spreadsheet? A presentation? A formal report? Or maybe something else. If you have a favourite audit template, I'd love to see it. A second question: what things do you report in an audit? I currently report crawl findings, authority and trust, link profiles, and competitive analysis. I also investigate a site's security—that's not usually part of an audit, but site owners need to know about it. What do you report to your audit customers? Thanks for sharing your auditing wisdom!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AndyKubrin0 -
SEO rank down after Magento migration
Since November we migrated our shop from Magento 1 to 2 and our organic traffic has dropped by 50%. We still haven't figured out the cause (or a solution). Are there more Magento users who have the same issue? Charlotte (www.dochorse.nl)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DocHorse0 -
SEO page descriptions on mobile - how to hide while preserving the juice for SEO?
Hi everybody, On our pages we have crafted good text paragraphs for SEO purposes. On desktop everything is fine but on mobile the paragraph of text pushes the main content really low on the page. Is there a way of hiding the text while preserving the SEO juices and not getting penalised by Google for spamming techniques? I'd appreciate any recommendations on how to deal with this. Thanks very much!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Firebox0 -
SEO - is it site or page
Hi When we're talking about SEO does the search engine only look at the whole site in general or do they look at the individual page when we're talking about SERP? So if you have a keyword "my search term" Does the search engine look at the site first or the page with the term on then rank you or is it the page then the site.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Cocoonfxmedia0 -
International SEO Question
_The company I work for has a website www.example.com that ranks very well in English speaking countries - US, UK, CA. For legal reasons, we now need to create www.example.co.uk to be accessible and rank in google.co.uk. Obviously we want this change to be as smooth as possible with little effect on rankings in the UK. We have two options that we're talking through at the moment - Use the hreflang tag on both the .com and the .co.uk to tell Google which site to rank in each country. My worry with this is that we might lose our rankings in the UK as it will be a brand new site with little to no links pointing to it. 301 redirect to the .co.uk based on UK IP addresses. I'm skeptical about this. As a 301 passes most of the link juice, I'm not sure how Google would treat this type of thing - would the .com lose ranking? So my questions are - would we lose ranking in the UK if we use option 1? Would option 2 work? What would you do? Any help is appreciated._
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | awestwood0 -
Site structure from an SEO standpoint
I am fortunate enough to be working with a client who is still building their website. From a site structure standpoint, what can I look for with my SEO hat as they build their wire frames and storyboard their site? I want to make sure I don't miss any components that might be helpful short and long term
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | StreetwiseReports0 -
Does capitalization matter for SEO?
Two places capitalization comes into play: (1) on-page use (title, h1, body text, img alt text, etc) (2) external anchor text I didn't think it mattered from Google's point of view for on-page usage (is this correct?) but I notice that OpenSiteExplorer' s 'anchor text distribution' tab shows different counts for the same keyword if it's capitalized in different ways (eg seomoz.org is listed separate from SEOmoz.org). Is that just OSE or does Google treat the keyword/phrase different based on its capitalization, too? And if so, then should I be creating external links to my site with the 'regular' and 'Capitalized' versions of my key phrases?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | scanlin1