Performance Based SEO

In my experience selling search engine optimisation in Australia, I have noticed the price for reliable SEO is often a barrier for many small businesses. For them to pay a monthly fee when it could take them three months or often more to see the returns can be a heavy financial strain. Even worse with one upfront fees that may be included (not by us). The biggest problem is that this investment has no definite tangible benefit, because no one can accurately predict the result.

One way to remedy this is with a performance based price schedule. Currently we offer this to some clients to help make SEO more affordable. They pay a once off fee to get things going, and then do not pay again until the rankings start to appear. We set easily definable milestones, which are usually linked to increased traffic generation.

Milestones usually involve keyphrases appearing on the first page of Google. This way they can also see that they are not paying for something every month when they are not even sure if it is working. Clients that have had a disappointing experience in the past also tend to favour an agreement like this because of their increased suspision of the SEO industry.

I know i would trust in the ability of an seo company more if they were willing to offer this sort of pricing and it definitely could be the factor that influenced my decision when choosing someone to work on my rankings.

We sometimes separate the keyphrases our clients want to rank for into different categories depending on how competitive they are. When the less competitive phrases come up they may pay a lower price than they do for their industries most competitive phrases. This is only fair because they will likely get less return for a less competitive phrase too.

I guess the larger seo companies might struggle to administer an option like this because they have too many clients to monitor. But for personal passionate companies like ours it works very well for both parties. SEO experts that are excited by what they do are kept even more motivated when getting paid depends on getting the rankings quickly.

Feel free to leave any comments about this post as we are always interested in feedback on pricing and SEO satisfaction. Have you had an experience with performance based SEO? Do you agree with our points on choosing a good SEO company to work with in this post.