ethical SEO Archives - Page 4 of 4 by Mark Murnahan

Internet Marketing Truth: An Internet Marketer Fights Lies With Truth

In today’s marketplace with all the desperate static on the Internet, it seems that honesty is hard to find. I can give you instances like the guy I found claiming to be an Internet marketer for over 25 years; the liars telling you that more followers on Twitter will make you money; or the many search engine submission jokers with pink ponies for sale. I can list instances of lies, deception, and fraud in Internet marketers all day long. I have heard Internet marketing described as “the last refuge of sleazy,? get-rich-quick scumbags too slimy to sell used cars.” and I agree with that statement.

The fact is that I am not here to sell you anything. Only a small fraction … and I mean a tiny number of the people who will read this can afford my services or care enough about their company to build a business the way I do it. I want their money, and not yours. Just relax, my hand is not reaching for your pocket.

This article will possibly bore you to tears, but at least you cannot say I never gave you something. I am going to give you some harsh truth about Internet marketing. For those who choose to brave the truth, my work here is worth my effort.

If you smell one whiff of typical Internet marketing “bullshit perfume” in what I will tell you, just turn the page and don’t bother coming back. I want to tell you how to truly achieve success in a market, and I am not going to lead you wrong. If you don’t come back, at least I know that you are not serious about doing the right things for the right reasons. That shame is on you.

You can chock this up as just another blog post from an Internet marketing guy trying to seem revolutionary, or you can drop what you are doing and listen to the truth. The truth of how I truly, factually, and without lies, have earned millions of dollars for myself and my clients using the Internet … and how much I hate the directions my industry has taken. You may not want to read all of this, because it will not spell out a glorious pink pony ride to success or the convincing unicorn hunting expedition that other Internet marketing and SEO people hit you with every day, like this Johnny Come Lately Internet Marketing Parody video.

I made a late night coffee run with a friend who reminded me how much truly spectacular marketing takes benevolence, persistence, honesty, integrity, intelligence, and marketing talent. It really requires a whole lot of other “magical” secrets that the huge wave of Internet marketing “experts” will try to sell you, but the piece I want to focus on here is truth about Internet marketing. Not the kind of truth you may expect, and not the kind of truth you may want to stick around and endure. I am offering the real deal. I want to give you the honesty about Internet marketing that you may be missing, and help to set you in a better direction.

So, you want the truth about Internet marketing. This will require you to read, and against all forces of outside persuasion, to pay attention to what I tell you. Only a desperate need to rush and read the next ineffective ideas of how to improve website traffic and reach more people to sell your stuff to should tear you away from this. I understand, there is a lot of that bad Internet marketing out there, and it all seems very tempting. If you are under time constraints to get rich today, go ahead, you probably have something more important to do. If you must go, just get lost … this is a story of truth in Internet marketing that I am telling, and not a ploy to help you get rich fast or to get you to buy my stuff.

Oooh, look … there is something shiny over there … *blinking advertisement* … you should click and check that out. Really, go ahead, you are not going to hurt my feelings. That is the way of the Internet. Click away, because you may get massively rich with that very next click. That seems to be the popular message these days.

OK, since you are still with me, and if you can shut out the temptation to go see the next message on Twitter or the next thing your friends on Facebook just did, sit there until you finish this.

I am going to give you a tip. I am going to tell you why and how it takes more than all those Internet marketing lies people will lead you to believe, and why I drink more coffee and smoke more cigarettes than the average person. It is so that I can be consistently alert and useful in my SEO and Internet marketing career. I know work … I know real work, and what it really takes to earn millions of dollars in Internet marketing, for myself and for my clients. No, not the crap you see in most marketer’s arsenal of fakeness … the real deal. I have walked a high and narrow path with hell on each side and I have battled business alligators until I found the swamp plug. I have endured insane work schedules and taken the risks that wives hate their husbands to take. I even released a book titled “Living in the Storm” to share what it takes to become successful. I wrote it as a man who dropped out of school at fifteen years of age and owned successful companies before many of my classmates finished their schooling. I have also been there to wave goodbye to a half a million dollars in fine cars when I decided that I could not justify my six digit per year second job as a race car driver. The truth is that I have walked along the highest steps in the top percentile money earners worldwide, and I have also looked in the cupboard and found nothing but peas and pancake mix and found a way to make a fantastic meal of it to get there. If you want lies and you want to find a shortcut, at least be ready to live as hard as that successful dropout kid I have grown up to be. That is a bit of truth about what it actually takes to be a success. You have to be ready and willing to make sacrifices, and be ready to work hard … or pay somebody who has been willing to make those sacrifices for you, and learned the truth about Internet marketing.

For your own sake, if you think it is easy to have Picasso hang on your wall, walk across a rug worth more than the $50,000+ desk you write blogs at, or ride a motorcycle that cost more than your first two homes combined … go ahead and read from those Internet marketers who know an easier way than I did, because it took me to my knees more than once to have those things. Go ahead and suck it all up and believe them, but don’t come to me to fix what they mess up for your business. Also, don’t blame my industry for your being too naive and getting conned into something stupid. Now, if you are ready to work hard and stop chasing unicorns long enough to learn something useful about Internet marketing, keep reading.

I am going to give you a piece of truth about Internet marketing, social media, and SEO that you can confirm. Here you go:

Internet Marketing Success Requires Hard Work

If there is no sacrifice, it probably will not work. Otherwise, everybody else would be doing it, and then the market would no longer be so great … kind of like the market for good SEO and Internet marketing. Instead of selling real services with real marketing strategies that work, the majority of Internet marketers are all trying to sell you some crap about how you can get it all and have it all just by sitting there at your keyboard adding up your money. They are lying to you. Go back and read my blog to see if I am telling you the truth. Just go and read the last few days, few weeks, or few months of my work of telling the truth about Internet marketing.

Maybe you think that due diligence will take too much of your time and you may just miss that next click from a Twitter friend or you may not catch that link that will make you filthy stinking rich. What it may save you is a whole lot of wasted time and money spent on Internet marketing with the wrong agenda. Let me remind you that I am not here to sell you anything. What I want from you is enough of your time to stop believing in all the unicorn chasers and static makers, enough to put them out of business. Then, perhaps without all the suspicion and static making the Internet deaf with something worthless to sell, we can all benefit. We can start looking forward to a world where people can see through the clouds and build their businesses the right way again, instead of getting scammed out of more money and then looking at the whole Internet as a failure.

Let’s face it, good marketing that brings loyal customers is trickier than ever. It gets harder and takes more creative marketing to be heard above the rumble of bottom-feeding Internet marketers who want you to believe that you will get what you want and will not have to make big sacrifices. You have probably heard somewhere that if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Yeah, well it seems that a lot of people overlook that sensible statement as soon as they switch on their computer.

As I visited with my friend late last night, I gave him a fantastic rendition of many things he could do to effectively build his business and reach all the right people. He and I both know that I would never sell him anything for money. The things we brainstorm together are the best kind of honesty, and without any awkward agenda. He is a long-time technology guy, like me, and he strongly agreed to everything I said. If he disagrees, he is a close enough friend to be extremely stubborn. As it was, it was one of those light bulb moments for him, and he quite frankly flattered me with his attentiveness to my ideas. I shed light on his marketing thinking, and I feel really great about that.

We had one of those conversations where we came up with some brilliant business ideas for his company, but he kept trying to switch it around and focus me on how to improve my company. He complained about how I constantly have great ways to help monetize other people’s ideas, but yet, I will overlook the best direction in my own business. He called me a “cobbler with barefoot children”, and I had to agree. He really nagged me about how hard I work for others, and the sacrifices I make to build their success. It is not the easiest thing for me to hear, because I actually know he is right. He is one of the closest friends in my life, and when he kept trying to focus me on how little I try to maximize my own company, I had to internalize it. It kind of stings to feel my shortcomings, just as it does for most people. It is not because I don’t have the talent or the drive. I guess it is just because I am really focused on what I do. I make people more successful in their business. That is my job, and it is something I am passionate about.

So, my plan for following up on Mike’s urge to focus on my own business is not just for my own benefit, but to benefit others as well. My intent is to inform people that as long as there is static in my industry, it hurts us all. As long as people keep believing that it will be easy and not take serious efforts and make sacrifices to build their business, I have done us both a disservice.

Internet marketers who will tell you the truth and the ones who are just out of your reach are the ones you listen to. You know that you probably cannot afford their services anyway, so they really are not a threat to you. You nod your head as you read their blogs, and it all makes very good sense. Then you walk away from it and try to trust an industry of thieves to implement it cheaper, or try to do it yourself. If this rings any bells for you, please take a step back and look at your motivations. Take a moment to decide if you have the persistence to do things better than before. Take the time to use the sincere honesty that you will find here at my blog and those of a few other industry leaders. Use it … don’t just try and hold onto that hope in the back of your mind that there really is a simple way to win.

The truth about Internet marketing as I know it is that I have to keep turning away companies who want and need my help, but they have wildly misguided ideas of what it really takes to be successful. I am tired of watching so many people suffer from the belief that it should all be so easy and that anybody can do the job. These are the same companies who come back to me after they get the shirt ripped off their back and can no longer afford to implement the best solution to their needs. I think it is a damn shame.

Maybe if I tell you the truth that you didn’t want to hear, we can all be more successful tomorrow than today. The truth is that I am seeking one new client … just one, and it probably is not you. I have turned away a lot of people in the process of seeking that one new client. Maybe in exchange for some truthful and useful articles about Internet marketing, you can help me find that one new client. Maybe you can help to clean up my industry and remind people that there is no pink pony ride to success.

Perhaps you know a business person who wants to do it right and is not afraid to start seeing the truth. If you know somebody who needs to impress their board members or investors with more profit, please pass them my name. If you know somebody who can make serious sacrifices to make their business more profitable, please pass them my name. I only want one, so it would be hard to call me a big threat.

If you know somebody being conned with the vision of easy and cheap success, please help them to know the truth about Internet marketing, too. It is going to take a lot more work than most people are ready to withstand.

Good SEO vs. Bad SEO: How to Tell the Difference

There are good SEO (search engine optimizers) and there are bad SEO, and if you cannot tell the difference, your money and time will be wasted. I am going to give you some third party objective tools to tell the difference between good and bad SEO. These can help you to determine whether yours is working, whether you have hired it out, you are seeking to hire it out, or you are venturing into the ever-popular DIY SEO. The information I will provide in this article also includes some great SEO tools just to satisfy your curiosity. This can help, in case you wondered why there are not more people coming to your website, or to estimate how well your competition is doing. First, I want to be sure that you understand what SEO is and why good SEO is important, so I will start with that.

Why Good SEO is Important

We should first establish that it is important to be listed when somebody searches the Internet looking for what you offer. Searching the Internet is the most common way for people to find a business. If people do not find you, they will find somebody else. Obviously, they will find your competition. Count on it!

I will be really basic for a moment, in case you are totally unfamiliar with SEO. In this article, I will use the term SEO as both the field of search engine optimization (the art and science) as well as search engine optimizer (the person). In basic terms, SEO involves placing your website at the top of a list when somebody performs a search on the Internet. SEO also has a lot to do with making sure that when your link is found in a search, people will click on it, read what you have to say, and take an action such as buy what you have to sell, tell their friends, fill out a form, call you on the phone, and etcetera. These are the things that will produce more business for your company. It really involves a lot of different areas of art and science, so I want to give you some ways to measure both of these things.

Now, let us assume for a moment that good SEO actually exists. It is not a unicorn chase, and it is not some VooDoo witchcraft. Somebody actually is at the top of those searches, they are making sales, and there are reasons for it. So, let’s look at this from a standpoint that there actually is such a thing as good SEO for a moment, please? After all, we can be pretty sure that there is a reason the company at the top of a search for, let’s say, “travel” is not just a brand new company with a $400 budget and 13 incoming links to their site. No, it does not happen that way … ever.

Tools of the SEO Trade

Good SEO is not just made up of a couple of big factors. Yes, there are some big things we look at, but there really are a lot of little things that make up the big picture. Some of the factors are specifics about the website itself, such as the programming code, the servers, XML sitemaps, robots.txt, text content, link structure, keyword usage, and much more. There are a whole lot of pieces to the puzzle of the website itself that add up to make a difference. You have to get those things just right, and have every piece in place to achieve high search engine ranking for competitive search terms. That is to say, the things people actually search for when they need you. Then, there are the things that exist in the world outside of your website. These are things that a lot of website owners often feel are a bit out of their control, or really hard to improve. It is not so hard, but it does take some work. When there is work to be done, there are tools for that work. My father was a craftsman, and he always expressed the importance of using the right tool for the job. If you use the right tools, the job will always go much smoother. My father was really on to something.

Understanding SEO is Not Like Understanding “Rocket Surgery”

SEO does not require a degree in “rocket surgery” (rocket science and brain surgery). A lot of people will try to do some, if not all, of their SEO on their own, and it really can help. I respect anybody who wants to try to build their search engine optimization. Having people understand that SEO is important and that it actually works when done properly is one of the biggest hurdles in my job. In fact, I do everything in my power to be sure my clients and prospective clients understand SEO enough to help themselves. I tell them to read the “Google SEO Starter Guide“. I teach them the good reasons to blog, and I want them to have a better understanding of SEO. Most good SEO will generally try their best to be helpful, because they equate their success with the client’s success. They realize that it is a joint effort. Good SEO know that when they make clients massively successful, they have a lot easier career path. It is why people who Google the term SEO lessons find me at or very near the top. I want people to understand how and why it works. That makes my job much easier.

One of the biggest factors of SEO is backlinks, or links that point to your site from other websites. As you surely understand by now, this is not a silver bullet, but it is a huge factor. So let’s look at link building for a moment, and how to see if you or your SEO are doing a good job.

How to Check for Backlinks (incoming links)

Since a primary factor of good SEO is backlinks, we need to know how to check for them and monitor them. When I say backlinks, I mean links coming to your website from other websites. This is the biggest factor of Google’s PageRank algorithm, and it is what will make the difference between two otherwise equal websites. One with a lot of high-quality incoming links will be ranked, while the other may be totally invisible to search engines, or somewhere between. This is so important that if you could just see me right now, I am jumping up and down and screaming.

Most SEO fail at link building. They get it totally wrong, and their link strategy fails miserably. If you want to know why, I strongly suggest reading this article: “SEO Backlinks: Why Most SEO Fail at Link Building“.

I will give you some tools to check for backlinks. Each of these are useful, but for the most comprehensive look at incoming links, any SEO knows to use Yahoo Site Explorer. By default, it will show you the links for the particular page, so if you enter your website, be sure that you click the “inlinks” button and then select links to the entire site rather than just looking at the home page. After all, people link to the pages they like, and not just link to the homepage and tell people to look for it. Only television stations do that, and perhaps you have heard what kind of trouble they are in these days.

Your search for backlinks should look something like this search that shows tens of thousands of “inlinks” to my blog or like this search excluding internal links.

Another useful tool for determining incoming links and whether they are doing any good is to look at SEOmoz Linkscape. Linkscape will also show your mozRank, which is similar to Google’s PageRank but, in many people’s opinion, more useful.

It seems that most people are confused about backlinks. High-quality backlinks do not just mean any link from any website, and they do not mean just any type of link. The quality of the linking website makes a big difference in the quality of the link. Also, a link coming from a picture is not all that great, but a link from text is fantastic. Wait, but not just any text. A link that points to you with the words “pink ponies for sale” is not so great if you do not have any pink ponies to sell. You want links that are relevant to what you offer, and links that benefit your site. This is where Open Site Explorer can be handy. Open Site Explorer (another SEOmoz tool) will show you which links are valuable to you. It will tell you the actual text within the links pointing to your site (e.g. pink ponies for sale), whether they are “nofollow” links or “dofollow” links (which is another blog post), it will tell you the domains that link to you (e.g. facebook.com), and even how many domains link to them (which is also important). There is a lot more functionality to Open Site Explorer than I will go into here, so be sure to check it out. If it starts to feel like you are just tinkering with useless information, then you are getting the picture about why there are people who actually do this for a living.

Now that you know a little about checking for links, you may also like to know how to discover new ones as they arrive. For this, you can keep checking back, which I suggest anyway, but you can also set up a Google Alert to email you or monitor the RSS feed for new links coming in. That is another blog post, but what we want here are ways to decipher good SEO from bad SEO. So, let’s look at some tools that examine good or bad on-site SEO. This is to say, the things about the website itself that are working correctly, or need some tuning.

SEO Website Readiness Tools

Is the website ready for the incoming links? Let’s find out. I know that I probably spent too much of your time with that drawn out portion about incoming links. Backlinks really are very important … extremely important … but there is more. If you are still with me, I want to share some good SEO tools that will help you to uncover on-site issues that may be stumping your search engine optimization efforts. Running your website through these free SEO tools will help you find things that you can often fix quickly and relatively easily. If you test your website with these tools, and fix it as directed, your SEO will get better. If you are trying to determine a good SEO from a bad SEO, their website should be standing tall in these tests.

Note, that a good SEO also knows which “rules” to break. Nobody will have this all just perfect, because sometimes you just have to break the rules to get the results you want. For example, my site will not validate as XHTML Strict, because I use Disqus commenting system, TweetMeme for people to easily share my articles on Twitter, Apture for cool content display, and I use an anchor target in some of my links so that pages open in a new window. This is OK, because I know which trade-offs are worthwhile. However, the SEO’s own website should provide a good indication of their SEO knowledge. I understand the whole excuse of “the plumber with leaky pipes” (I have been guilty, too), but this is not a good excuse! Any good SEO should be able to show some pretty impressive results with their own website. I find a lot of people trying to sell SEO services who have very few incoming links, and really rotten rankings for their targeted keywords. Try these tests to compare SEO:

HubSpot Website Grader
SEOmoz Toolbox (an assortment of good SEO tools)
W3C Markup Validation Service

Website Traffic Estimates and SEO Website Age

If you are comparing SEO, you should know a couple of key things about them. Does anybody know they exist? You can find a really quick answer to this question by checking their Alexa.com rankings and see their estimated website traffic. This only gives a reasonable estimate based on sample data, but it can definitely tell you a lot about the SEO. If they are unknown there is a reason, and there are no good excuses for it. There is also the often more definitive Quantcast, but a lot of SEO do not wish to share that much data.

I see a lot of SEO with new domain names. This is not always a red flag, but it can be a sign that they are either new, or their previous domain was banned by search engines for abuse. It happens more than you may imagine. This is not the kind of SEO you want to do business with. If they have been banned, you can bet some of their clients have been penalized as well. I said that a new domain is not always a red flag, because there are a few newer SEO who have talent, or may just be beginning their freelance career. However, if their company website is new or unranked, they better have a really good sales pitch. You can look up domain ownership with a WHOIS tool such as YourNew.com WHOIS Lookup or DomainTools.com

Content Creation is Important to Good SEO

Content creation is where many of these SEO factors come into play. A great looking website that is easily indexed by search engines is a good start. Now let us consider content production. If the website does not have good content that includes topics and keywords people search for, it will not matter. You must have something fantastic to offer once the website visitors get there. This is where a lot of the art of SEO comes into play. This is where marketing talent and creative content really make a huge difference between success or failure. How important is creativity in marketing? The easy answer is that it is absolutely critical. Great website content is what creates a desire to buy what you sell, and is also the biggest factor in that important SEO goal I wrote about above. It builds links! If people like what you have to share, and if they find your website content to be useful to them or somebody they know, they will share it. They may tweet it, digg it, stumble it, facebook it, or blog about it, and that creates links.

I explained that incoming links are the most important off-site factor in good SEO. This is an undisputed fact in my industry. Now I want to explain that you do not get those backlinks by taking a pink pony ride with one of the SEO offering to add your website to a squillion search engines and directories. No, that is not how this works. That is how the bad SEO will often try to get your money. You will get the best links with great content, and being useful to others. Even then, good SEO results only happen if you make all the other pieces fit just right.

By the way, good SEO also means they read it all the way to the bottom of the page.

Brandon’s Baseball Cards and Google SEO Starter Guide

Did you know that Google will help you to have better results in their search engine? Google provides useful advice on how to improve a website’s search engine ranking, and they did it with Brandon’s Baseball Cards. If you have never heard about Brandon or the example Google made with his baseball cards, I would not be surprised. There is a lot of information on the Internet, and it can be hard to take it all in. The information Google provides to explain search engine optimization is worth the time it will take to read and take notes. This is especially true if you are going to try do-it-yourself search engine optimization (DIY SEO) for the first time.

Google Wants to Index Your Site

Google wants to include your website in their index, and for good reason. When you can find anything and everything you ever want to know at Google.com, it is good for their company. This is how Google maintains its ranking as the number one search engine. Being the perfect go-to source for information is what drives Google’s AdWords advertising sales up, and keeps their market share strong. The biggest challenges website owners face mirror the challenges Google faces, and are as follows:

Billions of Competing Web Pages
Providing High-Quality Information

Google works very hard to provide the best results when users search the Internet. If your website is not among the top results, it is not because Google is out to kill your business, but mostly that somebody else had more relevant and easier to index information.

Google Will Help You With SEO

The efforts Google has made to help people better understand their search engine is not a secret. Any decent search engine optimizer (SEO) is aware of Google Webmaster Tools and Google’s Search Engine Optimizer Starter Guide. Most SEO will be happy to share the information with you just as I am here. A good SEO will be glad to know their clients have read the information so they understand the job we do. An informed client will understand the value of SEO work, and is less likely to fall asleep when we talk.

If you put this information to good use, and you do not try to cheat Google’s well-formed system, your Google ranking will improve and your website will receive more traffic. Better yet, it will receive more relevant traffic because people will be finding your site based on exactly what they search for. It will cost you nothing but your time and attention, but what it can return is extremely beneficial to your business. Now that I put it this way, wouldn’t it really seem crazy to neglect it? Really, this is free exposure to your business using the number one way that people find businesses to buy from. Doesn’t it seem like that is worthwhile? I believe your answer is yes, but you may be wondering what this has to do with Brandon’s Baseball Cards, so I will get to that.

Brandon’s Baseball Cards and Search Engine Optimization

If you do not already know what Brandon’s Baseball Cards has to do with SEO, it is only because you did not read “Google’s Search Engine Optimizer Starter Guide” yet. It is only 22 pages in length and I really hope you will take some time to read it. Even if you are a professional SEO, the information contained in the document may just be what your next client needs to help them understand how you can help them.

Since I know some of you will never take my advice and read the SEO starter guide, I will let the cat out of the bag. Brandon’s Baseball Cards is the product Google used in its examples. Go ahead and see what is at brandonsbaseballcards.com. If you did not guess, it goes to Google.com.

What Google Didn’t Mention

The information Google provides about SEO is very important, but it is not everything. There is not a single element that will place your link at the top of every search results page. If there was an easy fix, everybody would be doing it. Effective SEO requires marketing talent, and it is a mix of both art and science. If I could condense all that you need to know into a list of SEO lessons and make it simple, I would do that. As it is, there are still a lot of important tasks that a professional SEO performs. Two search engine optimizers will never achieve the exact same results, and implementation of SEO skills will vary. There is only one position at the top, and I hope to see you there. If you need help with that, ring me any time at *REDACTED DUE TO AGING WEBSITE* (*REDACTED DUE TO AGING WEBSITE*).

Just one more thing: Can you name the baseball player pictured above? Add your guess in the comments!

Contingency SEO Contracts

I recently wrote about SEO Hourly Rates, and I received a lot of attention to the topic of SEO pricing methods. Now I would like to address one of the other popular SEO pricing methods, contingency SEO.

Contingency contracts have long been used by attorneys when a client either wishes to mitigate their investment risk in legal fees or cannot afford to pay for all of the legal cost upfront. Contingency contracts can also be leveraged properly for your search engine optimization (SEO). When the risk and the reward is equitably shared between the SEO professional and the client, a contingency SEO contract often makes sense. After all, it is easy to see why a professional will often do their best work when their income is dependent on winning.

Contingency SEO: The Client Perspective

Most companies understand paying a reasonable percentage of their profit to a sales representative, and contingency SEO is not so different in some ways. When the sales representative provides you with business, you provide them with remuneration.

Viewing your SEO provider as another sales representative is a simplified look at contingency SEO, but it is also important to give consideration to legal matters and preserving your company reputation. Ideally, you and the SEO company will have a unified long-term goal of success. Like sales reps, there are good and bad search engine optimizers, so it is important to have a similar approach to that of hiring a new sales representative, or more appropriately, taking on a new business partner.

Since proper SEO work requires a sizeable investment of time, you should be prepared to provide the SEO an upfront payment so that you are, indeed, sharing the cost equitably. Securing a contract with a quality SEO company would be too simple if not for an upfront cost. Clearly, all of your competitors would have done it by now if it was that easy.

Contingency SEO: The SEO Perspective

If I only had a nickel for every opportunity to provide my work upfront and receive a percentage of the profits, I would not offer hourly pricing for SEO services. Like the example of an attorney working for contingency, the SEO provider must be comfortable with the arrangement, and see good potential for gain. The SEO must consider the marketability of the product or service, how to measure the SEO results (gross profit, net profit, market share gain, etcetera), and accountability. There are a lot more ways for the SEO company to come out cheated in the end, so clear contracts and trust become important factors.

Because of the risks for the SEO professional, some ways that contingency SEO can be accounted for include full access to the client’s records, Website scripting to account for the traffic and report it to the SEO, or a separate Website owned by the SEO to measure the traffic and send it to the client. There are many other methods of accountability, but this is simply to say that accountability is often one of the greatest concerns for the SEO professional.

The Contingency SEO Contract

When approached with the opportunity for a proper and equitable SEO contingency contract, I take it very seriously, and I expect my client to do the same. After all, we should be in it together for mutual benefit. Just to be sure both parties understand the relationship, it is very important to spell it out in a contract. A well defined contract for contingency SEO will require much consideration of both parties’ interests, and will take some work for the contracting SEO provider. The client should expect to pay for this time, and for a careful review of the existing Website assets or liabilities. Without a thorough review and assessment of the client’s needs, expectations, and current market position, the SEO professional and client will not have all of the necessary facts to work with. The client should be reminded that if they are engaging the SEO, it is like calling the attorney of choice. It is best to call a great attorney rather than just the first one willing to take on your project. Similarly, the upfront retainer cost to review the case, as well as the depth of the assessment will vary.

Contingency SEO Bloodsuckers

Attorneys have often been referred to as bloodsuckers, and it may be the contingency contract that has caused their reputation. Attorneys are persecuted for receiving huge amounts of money for what looks like an easy job. To their credit, we must remember that there is always a reason the client asks for them to take the case on contingency. The risk is shared, and so must be the reward. Like the attorney, if the contingency SEO does not meet the expectations, neither party benefits. That means the professional has spent their time on the client’s behalf, with the only reward being lost time. The responsibility of maintaining a marketable product or service offering lies outside of the SEO professional’s control. This exposure to potential loss on the part of the SEO must be carefully considered.