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
-
Can we compete for both videos and text results?
Hi, We have a ecommerce website that performs very well for our brand pages on the text results including the reviews snippet. Our brand pages also include embedded videos. Until now we have always ranked poorly on video results. Our videos are hosted over youtube. In order to boost our video result we have recently submitted a video sitemap to help crawlers find out our videos. The result is the following : our brand pages are now only competing in the video results space. Instead of showing as a text result with our reviews snippet, it shows as a video in a carrousel widget. Within the video tab we are ranking top. We have experienced a drop in CTR since then. Moz have reported a drop on all our brand keywords for text search although the video widget shows our brand there. Is there a way to compete for both videos results and text results, making the choice to keey the review snippet widget? Is the video sitemap useful only to compete within the video space? Cheers
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mattam1 -
Why are these results being showed as blocked by robots.txt?
If you perform this search, you'll see all m. results are blocked by robots.txt: http://goo.gl/PRrlI, but when I reviewed the robots.txt file: http://goo.gl/Hly28, I didn't see anything specifying to block crawlers from these pages. Any ideas why these are showing as blocked?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
Empty search results labeled as Soft 404s?
I have a site with faceted search but sometimes when someone drills down too far it ends up with no results. The page and outlined and faceted navigation are still there. The site uses dynamic URLs for the faceted navigation but Google is reporting these no results pages as Soft 404s. How should we handle these? Should we redirect these? Can we return 404 in the status code but still show the no results page they are looking for? Thanks for your responses
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MarloSchneider0 -
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?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | IanTheScot0 -
Duplicate content resulting from js redirect?
I recently created a cname (e.g. m.client-site .com) and added some js (supplied by mobile site vendor to the head which is designed to detect if the user agent is a mobi device or not. This is part of the js: var CurrentUrl = location.href var noredirect = document.location.search; if (noredirect.indexOf("no_redirect=true") < 0){ if ((navigator.userAgent.match(/(iPhone|iPod|BlackBerry|Android.*Mobile|webOS|Window Now... Webmaster Tools is indicating 2 url versions for each page on the site - for example: 1.) /content-page.html 2.) /content-page.html?no_redirect=true and resulting in duplicate page titles and meta descriptions. I am not quite adept enough at either js or htaccess to really grasp what's going on here... so an explanation of why this is occurring and how to deal with it would be appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SCW0 -
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 -
Can I compete with these results? (Brand in Serp)
Hey, One quick question. Lets say im fighting for keyword "british airways" and i want to appear straight after first result in number 2 position. Is it possible to compete with stroked results. (See image attached) Thanks Stxct.png
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Marteen0 -
Alexa site title shows as "302 Found" on search result pages
If you search for the site "ixl.com" in Alexa, for some reason, it's showing the site as "302 Found" instead of showing the website name, IXL. If you drill into that, it shows the site as ixl.com, but underneath that, it says "302 Found" again. Every other site I search for seems to show the site's name properly. I have no idea where it's getting this "302 Found" from. Does anyone know how to fix this? Here's a link directly to the search results page: http://www.alexa.com/search?q=ixl.com
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | john4math0