I have never had to. I am very selective about the clients I take on

But in any case I don’t think your question has anything to do specifically with CPA/Performance based SEO. You can have clients that don’t pay no matter what payment model you use. And as a business owner you should off course always do whatever you find reasonable to protect yourself. Some degree of risk will always be left – that goes for any kind of business really.

There are a lot of things that search marketing does much better than the any old traditional form of advertising. But I don’t think that should stop us from becomming even better.

Besides, you CAN in fact some times negotiate CPA deals with some of the old medias but I agree its not very comon.

> The only way I do pay for performance

All I can say is that I have had very good experience working with performance based SEO directly on the clients sites – both from the point of view that its definately been my longest contracts and from a financial point of view (I made more money on them than any consulting SEO deals). But I have also been extremely selective in the projects I have sign on …

2. Can you name another form of advertising other than Paid SEM that allows clients to pay upon performance?

Television – No

Radio – No

Outdoors – No

Magazines – No

Newspapers – No

Guerilla Marketing – No

The only way I do pay for performance is where I own the site and the client earns all revenues. Once payment is missed after 30 days the site earnings revert to my bank account.

Great writeup,

Miguel

There is no difference between a CPA and any other deal when it comes to that

True but there is always an chance of not getting paid…would you remove links then?

If prospects knew I would end up destroying their SEO if they ever cancel the contract I don’t think anyone would sign it in the first place

Shouldn’t you ensure that the high quality links can be pulled if needs be?

“CPA” is not really a perfect term for the many variations of performance based SEO that are being used. Thats why I also use the term “performance based SEO”.

Sometimes performance based SEO is valued on: Rankings (allthough I don’t personally think thats a good model), trafic – or increaed trafic from search and sometimes on the return on the trafic: Leads, subscriptions, downloads, sales etc. Its the last group that you can really call CPA SEO.

The difficult part about performance based SEO is to find the right ways to calculate the performance based fees – that are good and fair for both parties.

Thanks!
Steve

I am actually living in Denmark. My friends in UK can make far more

Honestly, its absolutely not all sites that can pay this well and to reach that level you need to invest A LOT in the project.

Absolutely – at least to begin with. Later in the relationship I actually find that it can be easier than a regular consulting job.

Also, you – as an SEO, got to have both the money and the balls to make such deals. As you say – sometimes it can take 6-12 month before you start getting money. In all that time you have to have some other income – or good savings.

To most SEOs a combination of performance based jobs and regular hourly paid jobs are probably best – but only if you can accept to constantly invest part of you profits on consulting in CPA work.

In my experience it does pay out well if you are very selective about the jobs you take – and most importantly, say no to the “wrong” clients and jobs – the ones that don’t accept one or more of the consequences outlined in my post.

So I understand why some clients want to pay based on performance, but it sure does make things more complicated. Defining the acceptable performance benchmarks, for instance, can be difficult, and as you said, agreeing on the contract can be really tough.

Yes, that have worked out well for me – and my clients. I don’t like long notice periods in which noone is really motivated anyway.

Reaching agreement – and making life easier, I see that most areas where SEO PRPs fail is humans! Not being able to disambiguate multiple parties or existing work, and then dealing with credit rating, financial, market, seasonal issues, and also an over complicated model, time or contract term commitment issues, is not easy to get this nailed down!

Fundamentally its often a relationship sell – and if ‘the team’ can agree the true KPIs and you can approximately value them and trust in them then you can have a direction to go in. Motivationally for the larger ‘team’ performance based SEO is a far more stable and secure relationship. I encourage clients to also motivate their staff which help drive everything forward and makes you popular with them!

Like the idea of an exit fee, better than having a 6 month notice period where things go stale potentially. Cheers