SEO: Pay Per Performance or Pay Per Service

As we talk to customers we hear more and more about Search Engine Optimization that guarantee results and only make you pay when you rank organically for a set number of your desired keywords. This is very interesting, and on the surface, is a smart strategy for the search companies. They get paid when results are delivered – who doesn’t like that?  There actually are a couple of reasons that the consumer should be very wary of a company like this:

1.  You won’t get good results. As much as these companies promise, their strategy is generally to pick and choose the least competitive keywords that you are training to attain and focus on those.  The problem is that these keywords are not competitive for a reason – they aren’t receiving good search volume or they aren’t relevant to your site.  You don’t want to focus all your time on a keyword that won’t generate traffic or conversions. Also, focusing on any very small specific keyword list is a bad idea. You want to grow your site and audience in a broad manner. Just trying to rank for one or two keywords is not a successful long term strategy.

2. This model encourages black hat behavior. A company that only gets paid for results has much greater reason to try “black hat” or shady methods of getting your site ranked quickly.  These tricks may get your site ranked for some keywords pretty quickly, but the search engines are smart. They are constantly watching tactics and changing their algorithms to jump in front of it.  And if Google sees your site breaking their webmaster guidelines you will be penalized and lose rank or be removed from the search engines altogether.  It doesn’t matter that somebody else was responsible, it is your site and you will be penalized. Only work with companies that use strictly white hat, transparent SEO techniques.

3.  Its bad strategy that will not help your business in the long run: We would never guarantee results at Raise because of the hundreds of factors that go into ranking a page – for instance, it matters what your competition is doing, how long your domain has been active and what the search engines do.  Also, just getting ranked for a keyword is great but that is only half of a successful search engine campaign.  You must watch how that traffic reacts with your site and make adjustments based on the results using such programs as Google Analytics.

We understand why these companies would build a model like that, and we understand why businesses, especially small businesses would, jump at the offer.  Pay-per-performance has its place on the internet and is the future of sales, I don’t doubt that. But I cannot see when SEO will join those ranks. It is a service that takes time and expertise. Our focus is building for the long haul, not a short bang. In the end the mantra is true that if it looks too good to be true, it probably is.

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