Pay-for-performance SEO: paying per ranking, per lead or per closed deal

No, pay-for-performance SEO cannot guarantee a #1 ranking on Google. Google Search Central states: "No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google." Google tells businesses to beware of SEOs that claim to guarantee rankings, and reminds them that they are responsible for the actions of any company they hire.

Paying per ranking in SEO ties the fee to an intermediate signal: a search ranking is not an SEO result, because revenue comes from enquiries and orders. The second risk is how the rankings are reached: Google treats buying or selling links for ranking purposes as link spam, and the business remains responsible for the actions of the company it hires.

Pay-for-performance SEO paid per lead counts a contact as the result: a phone call, an email or a form submission. A contact is not yet a deal, because the number of enquiries shows the volume of contacts, not confirmed deals. The contract therefore defines how a lead is recorded: in the seopaslaugos.io partnership, the number of calls redirected to the partner and the length of each call are recorded.

Rank and rent is a form of pay-for-performance SEO in which the SEO provider builds and ranks its own websites and passes the enquiries from them to a business. The seopaslaugos.io partnership works on the same principle: seopaslaugos.io builds and ranks websites in the business's niche at its own cost, every call and enquiry goes straight to the partner, and the partner pays an agreed share of closed deals instead of rent.

When a pay-for-performance SEO contract ends, the business keeps what it owned: its own website and the customers gained during the work. If the SEO provider ranked its own websites, those websites stay with the provider, and every enquiry and customer received stays with the business. Who registers the website and owns its content is therefore worth agreeing before signing.

Under the UK CAP Code, an SEO guarantee in marketing must not omit significant limitations, and the full terms must be supplied before the customer commits to the guarantee. The CAP Code also bans using the word "guarantee" in a way that could cause confusion about a consumer's rights. The rules are written for consumers, so how they apply to a business buying SEO is not settled by the rule text.

Before agreeing to pay-for-performance SEO, Google suggests asking the SEO provider three things:

• what results the provider expects, in what timeframe, and how it measures success;
• whether the provider will share every change made to the site, with its recommendations and the reasoning behind them;
• whether the provider can show examples of previous work and success stories.

Pay-for-performance SEO paid on closed deals means the business pays an agreed share only of the enquiries that became closed deals. Once a month the provider and the business review the enquiries received together, and a closed deal is an enquiry the business confirms as a deal at that review. The page on how our no-retainer partnership works describes the model in full.