Should SEOs Work For Commission?

By: Steven Bradley

Would you offer your seo services for commission only? As a small business owner would you request someone to market your site based only on how many sales you make? The question of commission based seo services arose in a thread on the Small Business Forum where the original poster was hoping to get just that.

He wanted to get in the top 10 in Google or Yahoo offering 10% of sales generated from search engine optimization in return. Would you take the deal?

Why Working For Commission Is A Bad Deal For SEOs

I wouldnt and said as much in the thread. My rationale is that too much of the sales process would be out of my control. An SEO could drive plenty of traffic to a site that wont convert or has a poor business model. The request is essentially asking the SEO to take on the risk of another business. In this specific case the thread starters business is easily duplicated. Why work for 10% of the sales when you could duplicate the site and work for 100%?

Even if you are willing to take on some of the risk would 10% be enough? It depends on how much the 100% is I suppose, but is seo only 10% of the success? Again it depends, but I would suggest that for a two month old business a successful seo campaign is worth a lot more.

In my last This Week In SEO post I linked to an article by Stoney deGeyter asking where does the responsibility of the seo end and that of the client begin? A successful seo campaign needs both SEO and client to do their part. While its not automatically the case my general sense is clients asking for commission based seo are looking to avoid their share of the responsibility. Read More...