Performance related pay is not unusual, but there are complications...Over what time from do you base the judgment? SEO consultancy will improve a site's ranking for potentially a lot longer than the time you are working on it. Clients tend to disagree with payment terms lasting for 12 months after cessation of work. It isn't PPC that it neatly wrapped up; traffic doesn't stop when work stops.
Another complication is separation of traffic. You can never discretely measure uplift from one activity in a multi-variable system. Traffic rises and falls of its own accord, with seasonality, with natural growth, in response to TV advertising, special offers and more. It is impossible to completely isolate the traffic or sales generated by SEO activity.
This is one of the reasons SEO gets a bit of a bad reputation, because it is not possible to directly measure its value (not with any degree of transparency and honesty anyway). This is a strong part of your argument and one that we have with clients a lot.
PPC and Banners are tracked and each click can be accurately accounted for. SEO just doesn't work like that.
It is more like information architecture or design. You cannot attribute a traffic or sales value to the colour-scheme design of a site, or the icons used, or the content hierarchy. People just accept this though without question, claims of quack science or snakeoil selling.
You can give approximate upflit and indicative figures, but not attribute every click. People find PPC easy to buy into because a clear return on investment is easily demonstrable (if the campaign is run competently). SEO is much more complex because it is not easy to ring-fence traffic.
So yes, performance related pay is quite common, and is being requested more frequently by clients who are trying to protect their investments (or more commonly, need to build a business case to justify the spend). But the client needs to be very aware that there are some generalisations involved and predictions are very hard to make. Some clients have a massive mental block and cannot see why there is any difference between SEO and PPC traffic; we never work with them because the performance related pay is going to be either unfair to us or the client.
I put a performance model together once based on 80% of projected PPC cost per click (the client wanted to see a 20% cost reduction against PPC costs); they would have been much better off paying our ratecarded costs. Silly really, but they insisted in spite of us trying to persuade them otherwise.
(,
Wed 23 Jun 2010, 20:12,
archived)
Another complication is separation of traffic. You can never discretely measure uplift from one activity in a multi-variable system. Traffic rises and falls of its own accord, with seasonality, with natural growth, in response to TV advertising, special offers and more. It is impossible to completely isolate the traffic or sales generated by SEO activity.
This is one of the reasons SEO gets a bit of a bad reputation, because it is not possible to directly measure its value (not with any degree of transparency and honesty anyway). This is a strong part of your argument and one that we have with clients a lot.
PPC and Banners are tracked and each click can be accurately accounted for. SEO just doesn't work like that.
It is more like information architecture or design. You cannot attribute a traffic or sales value to the colour-scheme design of a site, or the icons used, or the content hierarchy. People just accept this though without question, claims of quack science or snakeoil selling.
You can give approximate upflit and indicative figures, but not attribute every click. People find PPC easy to buy into because a clear return on investment is easily demonstrable (if the campaign is run competently). SEO is much more complex because it is not easy to ring-fence traffic.
So yes, performance related pay is quite common, and is being requested more frequently by clients who are trying to protect their investments (or more commonly, need to build a business case to justify the spend). But the client needs to be very aware that there are some generalisations involved and predictions are very hard to make. Some clients have a massive mental block and cannot see why there is any difference between SEO and PPC traffic; we never work with them because the performance related pay is going to be either unfair to us or the client.
I put a performance model together once based on 80% of projected PPC cost per click (the client wanted to see a 20% cost reduction against PPC costs); they would have been much better off paying our ratecarded costs. Silly really, but they insisted in spite of us trying to persuade them otherwise.
."Clients tend to disagree with payment terms lasting for 12 months after cessation of work."
Would it ever actually take that long for link-building to have an effect? I thought that links were supposed to lose value over time, and so are likely to peak pretty soon.
With regards to the actual optimisation - why are there no standards towards the actual optimisation of the site a la accessibility standards? Surely there must be an agreed approach towards things like creating a decent link structure.
If there is not, then surely the whole thing is guesswork, and thus all you can offer is to make sure that the site validates and the relevent keywords are present and correct. Which should be a very cheap job.
I personally think that it's the optimisation of the code which is where actual skills lie, but the book I read on SEO was full of utter guesswork and nonsense (including such gems as saying that since Google own YouTube, then you might do better if you have a YouTube video on your site).
If this side of it has no standards or consistancy, what hope is there for someone to learn the appropriate skills.
How should someone learn the skills?
At what point would you say that you became professional? What type of knowledge do you have that a bog-standard SEO doesn't?
(Would it ever actually take that long for link-building to have an effect? I thought that links were supposed to lose value over time, and so are likely to peak pretty soon.
With regards to the actual optimisation - why are there no standards towards the actual optimisation of the site a la accessibility standards? Surely there must be an agreed approach towards things like creating a decent link structure.
If there is not, then surely the whole thing is guesswork, and thus all you can offer is to make sure that the site validates and the relevent keywords are present and correct. Which should be a very cheap job.
I personally think that it's the optimisation of the code which is where actual skills lie, but the book I read on SEO was full of utter guesswork and nonsense (including such gems as saying that since Google own YouTube, then you might do better if you have a YouTube video on your site).
If this side of it has no standards or consistancy, what hope is there for someone to learn the appropriate skills.
How should someone learn the skills?
At what point would you say that you became professional? What type of knowledge do you have that a bog-standard SEO doesn't?
monkeon schmonkeon,
Thu 24 Jun 2010, 1:33,
archived)
"Would it ever actually take that long for link-building to have an effect? I thought that links were supposed to lose value over time, and so are likely to peak pretty soon."
You can base performance related pay on achieving specific search engine positions and link building tends to target a small cluster of specific search phrases. However, this is a very shallow look at what SEO does for a site.
With personalised and universal search results, measuring positions is becoming not only difficult, but pointless. We can measure a search result at a specific position, but 30% of your users might see it in a lower place and 40% in a higher place. Search engine positioning is becoming a pointless metric.
Also, where consultancy is concerned, with technical improvements to the site, you will see improvements across all positions the site holds in the search results. I for one, am not going to put a performance model together based on the overall average improvement of 100,000 search phrases; it is a reporting nightmare and would take more time than the actual work being done.
We tend to focus on traffic. Specifically, non-branded organic search derived traffic. Non-branded search has an impact on branded search, so there should be indirect uplift there too, but we largely ignore that.
Our typical aim for an SEO campaign (tech & content consultancy and link building) would be to increase non-branded search traffic by X%; these are our usual KPIs and we sometimes tie performance models to these.
However, we can conduct six or twelve month programme of work on a site and then walk away. The traffic benefits of this work will exist long after contract end (until they tear the site down and replace it), so performance-related pay based on traffic can be a little unfair, especially if the client wants a cost-per-click model so that they can compare SEO ROI against that of PPC. This is a common request from clients, but there are fundamental differences between SEO and PPC activity; traffic gains from SEO work does not go away when the spend stops (like PPC does).
A lot of what is written is "SEO books" is out of date, or just shite. I have never read one that is worth the paper it was printed on, apart from as a basic beginner's guide (but I wouldn't even give one to a trainee as they can learn faster from our internal training programme).
A lot of our knowledge came from trial and error (not on client sites, but testbed sites we control). A lot of it was driven from hypothesis and testing, and we do use control pages; it is a little hard to do proper blind testing on this kind of thing though. We use testbed sites to confirm or refute other SEOs' assertions - we don't much like taking things as read, we need to see some impact before we take methods to clients.
We tend not to publish our results very often - this is the stuff that gives us a competitive edge over our competitors.
Link building is fairly bread-and-butter work, and to some degree, content optimisation and keyword research is as well; I tend not to get involved in that very often (the people that do this earn a lot less and have a lower rate-card cost). I tend to stick to the in-depth tech stuff and the overarching strategies and supporting new site builds.
Everyone in my business is self-taught or trained internally. You start out by reading everything you can find. With experience and testing, you learn what to discard as conjecture or nonsense. This is where a lot of the best people come from. Sometimes we cannot satisfy someone's ambitions and they leave to become a "head of" at an agency that is keen to build a search offering and start training their own team. It isn't an easy industry to break into on your own.
Of the people I would field to handle any question or problem a client could generate (this includes myself), I would say it took at least three years of on-the-job learning to get to that point. But like development, it is a constant requirement to stay on top of changes in the industry, and this isn't just they way search engines rank pages, it is changes in HTML, CSS, CMSs, server platforms and other elements of the technology stack (you don't want to know the problems an Endecca information access platform with guided navigation introduces).
(,
Fri 25 Jun 2010, 10:51,
archived)
You can base performance related pay on achieving specific search engine positions and link building tends to target a small cluster of specific search phrases. However, this is a very shallow look at what SEO does for a site.
With personalised and universal search results, measuring positions is becoming not only difficult, but pointless. We can measure a search result at a specific position, but 30% of your users might see it in a lower place and 40% in a higher place. Search engine positioning is becoming a pointless metric.
Also, where consultancy is concerned, with technical improvements to the site, you will see improvements across all positions the site holds in the search results. I for one, am not going to put a performance model together based on the overall average improvement of 100,000 search phrases; it is a reporting nightmare and would take more time than the actual work being done.
We tend to focus on traffic. Specifically, non-branded organic search derived traffic. Non-branded search has an impact on branded search, so there should be indirect uplift there too, but we largely ignore that.
Our typical aim for an SEO campaign (tech & content consultancy and link building) would be to increase non-branded search traffic by X%; these are our usual KPIs and we sometimes tie performance models to these.
However, we can conduct six or twelve month programme of work on a site and then walk away. The traffic benefits of this work will exist long after contract end (until they tear the site down and replace it), so performance-related pay based on traffic can be a little unfair, especially if the client wants a cost-per-click model so that they can compare SEO ROI against that of PPC. This is a common request from clients, but there are fundamental differences between SEO and PPC activity; traffic gains from SEO work does not go away when the spend stops (like PPC does).
A lot of what is written is "SEO books" is out of date, or just shite. I have never read one that is worth the paper it was printed on, apart from as a basic beginner's guide (but I wouldn't even give one to a trainee as they can learn faster from our internal training programme).
A lot of our knowledge came from trial and error (not on client sites, but testbed sites we control). A lot of it was driven from hypothesis and testing, and we do use control pages; it is a little hard to do proper blind testing on this kind of thing though. We use testbed sites to confirm or refute other SEOs' assertions - we don't much like taking things as read, we need to see some impact before we take methods to clients.
We tend not to publish our results very often - this is the stuff that gives us a competitive edge over our competitors.
Link building is fairly bread-and-butter work, and to some degree, content optimisation and keyword research is as well; I tend not to get involved in that very often (the people that do this earn a lot less and have a lower rate-card cost). I tend to stick to the in-depth tech stuff and the overarching strategies and supporting new site builds.
Everyone in my business is self-taught or trained internally. You start out by reading everything you can find. With experience and testing, you learn what to discard as conjecture or nonsense. This is where a lot of the best people come from. Sometimes we cannot satisfy someone's ambitions and they leave to become a "head of" at an agency that is keen to build a search offering and start training their own team. It isn't an easy industry to break into on your own.
Of the people I would field to handle any question or problem a client could generate (this includes myself), I would say it took at least three years of on-the-job learning to get to that point. But like development, it is a constant requirement to stay on top of changes in the industry, and this isn't just they way search engines rank pages, it is changes in HTML, CSS, CMSs, server platforms and other elements of the technology stack (you don't want to know the problems an Endecca information access platform with guided navigation introduces).