Need Advice on Hiring an SEO Consultant for Chinese content

[myrrh]

I have been communicating with a Chinese SEO consultant in preparation for him to optimize part of my English-language site that has been translated to Chinese. He has taken a lot of time to research my particular situation and answer my questions. He seems to know what he is doing.

The deal is I pay 30% down to start work, 30% when the page reaches the top 30 in Baidu, and 40% when the page reaches
the top 10, which is to occur within 120 days. When I saw the contract, it appears the charge is per year.

Two questions:

Is it customary that an SEO consultant charge every following year the same amount as the initial year?

If I decide to pay for only one year, what is the likelihood that the SEO consultant could do something to take my site out of its top 10 position?

[bwnbwn]

Keeping a site in the results is a constant battle and needs to be done year after year after year.
If you get were you want in the engine and make the sales this is all part of being in the business.

I assume he will remove the links and other SEO stuff he did to get the site ranking.

[myrrh]

Keeping a site in the results is a constant battle and needs to be done year after year after year.
If you get were you want in the engine and make the sales this is all part of being in the business.

I can understand that this may be true in certain situations, but I think of my own content sites that have achieved good positions by natural backlinks and have maintained those positions with little or no intervention on my part.

I assume he will remove the links and other SEO stuff he did to get the site ranking.

Regarding the links - how likely is it that enough natural linking would take place over the period of a year to maintain a good position should the SEO-placed links be removed?

Regarding the other SEO stuff - what is there other than backlinks that are off-site factors that the SEO person would be able to control?

[anallawalla]

It isn't usual to charge the same amount every year but certain sites that change drastically each month might need such pricing. Trying to think of an example in haste and not doing well, a theatre will have different plays each month and each one will have fairly different content and context, e.g. Pygmalion and The Sound of Music would have different footprints.

You site sounds more static, at least for older articles, so you need more of maintenance pricing for links (off-page) and the occasional "check up" (on-page) pricing. But not the full price that you paid in the first year.

Depending on the competitiveness in your niche, your SEO may need to work harder in the second year because 100 new competitors arrived and did SEO to get past you. In this case the price may go higher than it was for the first year.

[bwnbwn]

I haven't studied Baidu enough to really help you on the answers.

A guess here is that he may control a network of sites in the Baidu index that can help very much in the rankings and by removing the links well you know the rest of the story.

I am just guessing here, why don't you just do what you did in Google

my own content sites that have achieved good positions by natural backlinks and have maintained those positions with little or no intervention on my part.

then there isn't any need for an SEO from China