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.
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
-
Determining if video is a option for SERP Results?
Hi Guys, Looking to potentially create youtube videos and rank them on Google Australia for keywords around cosmetic brands. For example ASAP or Napoleon Perdis If you look at the top 10 SERP results example: https://d.pr/i/Tbkb5m for ASAP. There are no videos ranking which I think is strange or a very good opportunity. How would you determine if Google would rank a video on SERP results if there is none already? Cheers.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kayl870 -
Fetch as Google -- Does not result in pages getting indexed
I run a exotic pet website which currently has several types of species of reptiles. It has done well in SERP for the first couple of types of reptiles, but I am continuing to add new species and for each of these comes the task of getting ranked and I need to figure out the best process. We just released our 4th species, "reticulated pythons", about 2 weeks ago, and I made these pages public and in Webmaster tools did a "Fetch as Google" and index page and child pages for this page: http://www.morphmarket.com/c/reptiles/pythons/reticulated-pythons/index While Google immediately indexed the index page, it did not really index the couple of dozen pages linked from this page despite me checking the option to crawl child pages. I know this by two ways: first, in Google Webmaster Tools, if I look at Search Analytics and Pages filtered by "retic", there are only 2 listed. This at least tells me it's not showing these pages to users. More directly though, if I look at Google search for "site:morphmarket.com/c/reptiles/pythons/reticulated-pythons" there are only 7 pages indexed. More details -- I've tested at least one of these URLs with the robot checker and they are not blocked. The canonical values look right. I have not monkeyed really with Crawl URL Parameters. I do NOT have these pages listed in my sitemap, but in my experience Google didn't care a lot about that -- I previously had about 100 pages there and google didn't index some of them for more than 1 year. Google has indexed "105k" pages from my site so it is very happy to do so, apparently just not the ones I want (this large value is due to permutations of search parameters, something I think I've since improved with canonical, robots, etc). I may have some nofollow links to the same URLs but NOT on this page, so assuming nofollow has only local effects, this shouldn't matter. Any advice on what could be going wrong here. I really want Google to index the top couple of links on this page (home, index, stores, calculator) as well as the couple dozen gene/tag links below.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jplehmann0 -
Sitelinks in non-brand based organic search results
Hi all, I have a question for everyone. Sitelinks have been around for a while now & I've always seen them when the search is for a brand's name. However, today, when looking at the rankings for one of the campaigns we manage, we noticed there were sitelinks in the number #1 & #2 positions in Google (Australia) for the search term "Dance Costumes". Whilst both the companies have Dance Costumes in their title, so do all the other results & so I don't see why it warrants the sites to be relevant via their brand name.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KBB_Digital
Note: The results are organic results, not paid results (where you can add sitelinks). Firstly, has anyone seen this before (screenshot attached)?
And secondly, is there markup/schema that allows you to do this (none that I know of)? danceCostumes-sitelinks.png0 -
Problem with description on Google search results.
A few months ago I changed the description of one of the pages on my site.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Tiedemann_Anselm
And I noticed that Google does not display the entire description of his search results. Description page is: "Get yourself a personalized name necklace, we offer a huge range of silver, gold and gold plated name necklaces." And Google only shows this line: "Get yourself a personalized name necklace, we offer a huge ... " Did someone have an idea why is that? 2EPSLGX.png0 -
Do search results differ greatly when you search on mobile?
If you have a site with responsive design, is Google likely to look upon you more favourably and dramatically change rankings?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BlueLinkERP0 -
How long does google take to show the results in SERP once the pages are indexed ?
Hi...I am a newbie & trying to optimize the website www.peprismine.com. I have 3 questions - A little background about this : Initially, close to 150 pages were indexed by google. However, we decided to remove close to 100 URLs (as they were quite similar). After the changes, we submitted the NEW sitemap (with close to 50 pages) & google has indexed those URLs in sitemap. 1. My pages were indexed by google few days back. How long does google take to display the URL in SERP once the pages get indexed ? 2. Does google give more preference to websites with more number of pages than those with lesser number of pages to display results in SERP (I have just 50 pages). Does the NUMBER of pages really matter ? 3. Does removal / change of URLs have any negative effect on ranking ? (Many of these URLs were not shown on the 1st page) An answer from SEO experts will be highly appreciated. Thnx !
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PepMozBot0 -
Can Someone Provide an Example of a Site that Indexes Search Results Successfully?
So, I know indexing search results is a big no-no, but I recently started working with a site that sees 50% of its traffic from search result pages. The user engagement on these pages is very high, and these pages rank well too. Unfortunately, they've been hit by Panda. They already moved the section of the site with search results to a subdomain, and saw temporary success. There must be a way to preserve their traffic from these search result pages and get out from under Panda.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
How to optimise for search results which are affected by Query Deserves Freshness?
I am looking to rank a clients site for certain keywords which have a huge exact local search volume in the 200,000 region. Many of these keywords are celebrity names like Victoria Beckham, Pippa Middleton. etc. 9 times out of 10 these people are in the news and the first page is taken up by new article/news results. My client is a large media publishing company so their site is very relevant. Does anyone know how to optimise for getting on the first page with these types of queries? Thanks Barry
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HaymarketMediaGroupLtd0