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There are many ways to price your services. In the SEO world, you can charge a monthly fee, you can charge by hour, you can charge for results, you can take a piece of the action and so on. The Pay for Performance model is popular amongst some SEO firms, while others prefer the steady and secure income of other pricing models.
Search Engine Guide has a very nice write up on this model named Is the Pay-for-Performance SEO Model Still Viable? The article goes into the various forms of Pay for Performance, including (1) Pay Per Ranking (2) Pay for Traffic and (3) Pay Based on Revenue. Stoney deGeyter shares his personal experience with these models and concludes "while some SEOs have figured out how to make the pay-for-performance pricing model work for them, I remain skeptical."
There are over twenty comments on that article and it went hot on Sphinn. I thought we run a poll, asking you guys, do you still offer Pay for Performance payment models in this new economy? Take the poll:
Forum discussion at Sphinn.
Comments:
Rob Abdul
03/06/2009 12:29 pm
The issue with SEO services by performance is that a huge amount of work and effort has to go into getting initial results. So your first payment will be in the distant future and subsequent payments will be more regular. My only advice to my fellow SEO Brethren is that make a contractual agreement with your Client and do not start work until you have an agreement.
Paul R
03/12/2009 10:27 pm
The pay for performance takes too long to get paid, depending on the state of the current website. I've seen it take a year or more to get on Google's first page.