Is there are great SEO specialists willing to work “on performance”?
Jeremy Moser:
Very unlikely.
Anyone great at SEO, or paid/PPC for that matter, know that performance based deals never actually work.
If you overperform, the company is annoyed they have to pay you “so much” and you get fired.
If you don’t succeed, it is often not your fault.
You are just driving traffic.
Traffic to a crap product or crap sales team or crap retention department = not your fault, but it will be blamed on you.
People who are great at what they do know they are great, and thus have high demand, therefore zero need to waste their own time on performance deals when people are lining up to pay them for non-performance based deals.
Not to mention algorithm updates, macroeconomic markets, etc.
Eddy Martinez:
I don’t think so… Two reasons why.
- If I were to take on a deal like this, I would negotiate for half of the revenue, because I am taking the risk.
To me, it is wrong for a business owner to pass on the risk to someone else for their business.
- In marketing, is up to us to play at the best of our abilities, but no one ever knows for sure how things are going to turn out.
Someone could be working for ages on a site that is never going to rank.
That’s reality.
David Quaid:
You also can’t “roll SEO back” – so once it performs, the domain will keep performing, so no need to pay the SEO Performance guy.
Ammon Johns:
GREAT SEOs are not cheap.
That includes work by performance.
Many will want shares in the venture and hard contracts, and will then perform like a rockstar.
Years back, the SEO, one known well to me, took a share of an offline business.
A significant share, then did ALL of the online aspects of the business.
Profit share is the ultimate pay for performance.