SEO - different ways to get paid by the customer

on success or not that is the question

[Lello]

Hello I am a german SEO,
by now we have offered our customers a pure success-depending pricing-system.
That means that our customers - don't have to pay - as long as their keywords do not rank within the first 20 pages. if their keywords rank there is a certain fee per month they have to pay.
I know this system is very risky for us. So I am trying to figure out a new way which is less risky for us and still acceptable and fair to the customer.

Do you have any suggestions about different common systems to be used by seo-companies in the states or in europe?

Thanx in Advance
Lello

[eljefe3]

Lello,

Welcome to WebmasterWorld Forums. Many SEO's are now moving to a pay per click system. By doing this, your clients are only paying for results, and if you are getting good click throughs, you also get compensated well. A good starting point would be to look at the popular pay per click engines to see what they are getting per click.

Utilizing this method will require some sort of logging program so the client and yourself can view the stats at any time to verify the number of clicks.

[Lello]

Thanks for the prompt answer eljefe3!

:-)

>Many SEO's are now moving to a pay per >click system. By doing this, your clients >are only paying for results, and if you are >getting good click throughs, you also get >compensated well.

That means I am responsible for the ranking and the choice of the best keywords!

Do you now any company that is combining these kind of result oriented price modells with a startup-fee?

>A good starting point would be to look at >the popular pay per click engines to see >what they are getting per click.

I am not familiar with these SEs could you give me some URLs please?

I have a suggestion myself: Comparing SEO with banner-ad we could make the following calculation:

Banners in Germany: Euro 25-50 TCP (price for thousand contacts)
50 Euro is for highly target group focussed banners. The Link on a SE Result-page is still better because the person was looking for a specific product or solution...(so there is never a higher focus)

We have a CTR of about 1% that means one visitor on the customer's site would cost about 5 Euro. (10 Visitors cost 50 Euro)

Ergo: 5 Euro for any Click on Top-listed links to customer's site. Does this sound reasonable to you??

Cheers
Lello

[drbill]

Hi Lello.

You can try this forum for all the Pay Per Click engines.

[webmasterworld.com...]

[rencke]

This tool at SearchEngineWorld will give you an idea of what mainly US corporations are prepared to pay for top rankings for any given keyword. But it will not help you with German words, so you would have to translate the words first.
[searchengineworld.com...]

5 Euros per click sounds very high to me, but could be right if it is a very competitive keyword in a profitable business and if we are talking of a top 3 ranking.

Like drbill I suggest that you read the entire PPC discussion from beginning to end and also the discussion about the SEO business.

[Lello]

Thank U rencke
that helped a lot :)
Lello

btw: are you familiar with that swedish special food: it's kind of a fish they leave in wood-barrels and its fermentated? soere....fish or something. Someone told me about it and I couldn't believe..*g*

[Lello]

rencke: if my interpretation of goto's practice is correct their customers do not pay for the top ranking but for the click on the result link.

the auction is to decide whom of the customer they will toprank on a certain keyword but the pricing depends on the click.
so the auction decides who is willing to pay most for the later clicks...