Performance-based SEO payment or subscription?
Pay-for-performance SEO involves preparing a list of keywords that the client wants to do SEO for and setting a bid for reaching a given position in SERPs. So, for example, if a particular key phrase is displayed in the TOP3, then, the agency gets X USD, if it’s displayed in the TOP6, then, the agency gets X USD. In most cases, the bids are reckoned up on a daily basis. In not such a distant past, this settlement method was very popular, mainly due to the fact that very few companies were doing SEO, therefore, just a couple of proper links and suitable content optimization activities were enough to be ranked high. On the other hand, subscription involves setting a monthly bid for the conducted SEO activities. Usually, in such situations, every month clients get a thorough report describing performed actions and their results.What does your subscription cost depend on?
The cost of a monthly subscription depends on the number of working hours allocated to a given website. It also includes all the links made and obtained for the page. Sometimes, SEO agencies offer copywriting activities and if your budget is satisfactory, then, your subscription covers also the costs of creating blog posts and product or category descriptions.Performance-based Payment for SEO may be tempting, but…
Although this settlement method seems to be particularly alluring and advantageous (after all you pay only for the results you see), in reality any SEO specialist isn’t able to guarantee that you’ll get the promised results. Why?- First of all, there are many other ranking factors and it’s impossible to affect all of them. To find out more about Google ranking factors, go to one of our previous articles: https://delante.co/google-ranking-factors/
- In the past, it was enough to obtain links. Even not the most valuable sources of links guaranteed that the website was ranked high. Honestly speaking, obtaining links equaled getting good results.
- Google algorithms used to be much less complicated than they’re today.
- Doing SEO is becoming much more popular among companies so it’s impossible to predict what steps will be taken by your competition. Consequently, if a given company invests a lot of money in SEO, then you won’t be able to outdo it, even if you work like a dog,
- In SEO, there are no one-size-fits-all solutions. Something that works for one website doesn’t have to work for the other. Moreover, it may even turn out that the same activities can have a completely different impact on two websites.
- Google algorithm is being constantly changed. Every day it’s updated approximately 8 times. Only in 2018 the algorithm was updated more than 3 thousand times (https://moz.com/blog/how-often-does-google-update-its-algorithm). Although most of the updates are almost unnoticeable and don’t turn the SEO world upside down or give SEO professionals sleepless nights, every year there are a few updates that can create chaos. As a result, you can never be sure that an activity you performed a few days ago still has a positive impact on the website. Every SEO specialist needs to be prepared for spectacular successes and even more spectacular failures.
Everyone has their own perspective…
One of the biggest disadvantages of performance-based SEO is that it isn’t quite clear how to calculate the positions of given phrases. SERPs are dynamic and adapt to users and their locations. If you enter a hairdresser in the search engine, your results will depend on the place where you’re. So how can you demand from someone to pay you for being displayed high in Chicago if the same phrase and their website is displayed much lower in Detroit?When to expect the first SEO results?
Keep in mind that everything takes time. You should see first results of the conducted SEO activities approximately after 2-3 months. Therefore, if you decide on performance-based SEO, the agency will need to work for you for free but of course it’ll still have to pay for the necessary tools or employees who do the job. It’s natural that such agencies want to succeed quickly and as you may guess, quickly doesn’t necessarily mean well or in accordance with the rules. They often perform chaotic, reckless or nervous activities which later may result in a punishment imposed on the website. A performance-based SEO agency may use spamming and sooner or later Google will notice the unnatural amount of links and consequently it may ban or filter the site. All such activities are called black hat SEO - they ensure fast results and equally fast payments. Among typical black hat SEO activities, we can distinguish:- Unnatural number of keywords or content hidden by e.g. using white font on a white background,
- Hiding keywords in pictures’ alt texts,
- Creating unnatural links,
- Cloaking, i.e. publishing content that is different from the one in the meta tags. Then users enter the site and don't find the information that is of interest to them.
- Keyword stuffing which involves applying keywords in an unnatural way,
- Automatic generation of content through the use of programs that create content and apply keywords,
- LES,
- Thin content, meaning websites that are of no value to the user,
- SEO hacking.