The most vulnerable and painful topic for customers of SEO services has always been, is, and will be their money. By and large, businesses don’t care who they pay. But how much, when, and, most importantly, for what – this is the first thing that interests customers, and for good reason. The market for SEO services in Birmingham is so saturated with different offers that it is not enough just to choose the cheapest option or contact the most famous company. In order for the contractor’s services to meet the format and tasks of the business as much as possible, in addition to everything else, you will have to understand the specifics of pricing and the terms of payment for services.

SEO service payment formats

There are several payment options based on different KPIs. Each of them has logic, each has its own advantages, risks, and pitfalls. Let’s take a closer look at the four most commonly used payment models.

1. Payment for positions

This payment scheme is as old as SEO itself. The client contributes a subscription fee plus remuneration for requests that the SEO company brought to the top of the search results within the agreed period. The list of key phrases is discussed at the initial stage of cooperation. In the course of its work, the daily collects information about the positions of the site according to the agreed pool of requests and, at the end of the month, issues an invoice to the client for those keys that during this period occupied the top positions in the search.

It is important to keep in mind here that the price of promotion to the top of different key phrases is not the same. It will depend on the competitiveness of the topic, the region of promotion, and the frequency of the request. For example, SEO company Birmingham company will have to part with a tidy sum for website promotion by the high-frequency request “plastic windows to order in Moscow”, and it is not a fact that the desired result will be achieved, given the high competition in the subject matter. At the same time, the key “order a bouquet in Tula” will cost the customer several times cheaper and can jump to the top after the initial optimization of the site and a little work with text content.

It is a real art to agree on a pool of keywords that suit both the customer and the SEOs. If the client is eager to be at the top at once for all high-frequency queries in the topic, then the SEO agency wants to work with keywords that are easier to promote. Here it is important to find a compromise in which the business gets the right positions, and the contractor gets a commensurate salary for his labor.

It is very difficult to collect reliable statistics on query positions. The first reason is personalized search results. Even for users from the same demographic and region, search results can vary greatly. The second reason is different search algorithms for mobile and desktop devices.

The release of queries to the top can not always be confidently called the agency’s merit. Sometimes the reason may be external factors that do not depend on the efforts of optimizers: a change in the search engine algorithm, seasonal demand, and even the socio-political situation in the country.

When paying for positions, the risk of playing in gray SEO is too high, when the contractor tries to achieve the result by cheating on behavioral factors, bulk buying of links, creating satellites, etc. All this is quite easily recognized by search engines, and sooner or later the site will come under sanctions.

2. Pay for organic traffic

A younger, but also common form of payment for SEO services. Here the basis for the calculation is the volume of traffic that came to the site from a search engine in a month. To this price is added a fixed subscription fee, which the customer is obliged to make regardless of the results of the promotion. At the start of work, SEO Birmingham specialists measure the current traffic on the site. This figure is taken as a starting point. It is believed that all organic non-branded traffic that came to the site in excess of this amount is the result of search engine promotion, while unscrupulous contractors consider the growth of all traffic to be the result of the work.

Then, taking into account the theme, seasonality, and other factors, the price of each unique visitor to the site is calculated. At the end of the reporting period, the resulting value is multiplied by the amount of traffic attracted. It is believed that the more unique visitors came to the site, the better the agency has performed and the more reward it will receive.

The most vulnerable and painful topic for customers of SEO services has always been, is, and will be their money. By and large, businesses don’t care who they pay. But how much, when, and, most importantly, for what – this is the first thing that interests customers, and for good reason. The market for SEO services is so saturated with different offers that it is not enough just to choose the cheapest option or contact the most famous company. In order for the contractor’s services to meet the format and tasks of the business as much as possible, in addition to everything else, you will have to understand the specifics of pricing and the terms of payment for services.