SEO companies are not all the same. Some are better and some are worse. I have been working as an SEO professional since the early 2000’s. I’ve worked with countless other search engine optimization freelancers, outsource companies from India and other seo companies. They all have different pricing systems. Some of them work on an FP (fixed price) model and others work hourly. Some of them sell a process and others sell a result. Let’s talk about process versus results.
One SEO company I know (locally) has a business model that is results oriented. This means that they promise a certain result for your money as opposed to just performing some kind of process. You will get x number of keywords to rank on page one for x amount of money. The other seo business model is the process model.
SEO companies who use a process model say they will do a certain number of tasks, at a certain frequency for a price. This could be something like fifty article submissions, 100 social bookmarking submissions, 200 directory submissions and 100 blog comments. This kind of SEO process model appeals to some customers but not to others. Why? It depends on who the customer is. Typically, customers who purchase process related SEO tasks are actually SEO professionals themselves. They simply need someone to perform some tedious, entry-level tasks over and over again. This usually comprises only a small part of the overall SEO strategy, which the SEO professional or SEO company will supplement with in-house work. But what if the customer is not an SEO company or SEO professional?
If the customer is just your average small business owner, then they will be looking for a complete solution. They will not be interested in paying money for a number of SEO tasks to be performed. They just want to make more sales via their website. To this end the customer understands that ranking on page one in the search engines will lead to more sales. Therefore, as logic dictates, this kind of client should only be interested in securing good rankings for their keywords. A process may or may not have this effect so you don’t want to go with that service model. You should prefer a results based seo company.
So as a client you need to decide: do you want a process done or do you want SEO results. Some SEO companies offer a pay for performance model. That is, you don’t pay for your SEO services until your keywords rank on page one, two or three. This model addresses a very important issue – risk. However, as a customer, you will end up paying a much, much higher rate for your SEO services.