How does performance-based SEO pricing work?

Put simply, “if you don’t rank, you don’t pay.”

Of course, in practice, understanding our pricing model can be a little confusing. Here’s a quick guide to understanding how it works.

After you’ve entered your website’s domain and a few keywords, you’ll be ready to view our pricing matrix. It looks like this…

You can see that in this example, the user’s website is not currently ranking in the top 30 for their chosen keyword.

Each ranking tier shown, has a corresponding service fee for each index. If we improve this website’s ranking for this keyword into one of those tiers, we would consider it billable on the 1st of the month.

Our pricing is calculated by comparing a number of SEO related factors for both our client’s website, and those of their competitors.

Our rank-tracking system will analyze all “active” keywords, and as mentioned above, campaigns only become billable if we’ve improved rankings into one of the “ranking tiers” shown in the matrix above.

Example A

Let’s pretend this client signed up on September 10th, and activated this keyword via their account dashboard.

Let’s say in the first month, we get their website ranking at #20 in Google for this keyword. For simplicity sake, we’ll assume that their Yahoo/Bing ranking did not improve.

That means on October 1st, we would bill this client $207. If during the subsequent weeks we further improved their ranking to #9, we would bill them $311 on November 1st.

Now, if their ranking stayed at #9 for the month of November, we would again bill this client $311 on December 1st. If instead, their ranking decreased to #15, we would only bill them $207 on December 1st.

Example B

Let’s pretend this client also signed up on September 10th, and activated this keyword via their account dashboard.

We can see that they’re already ranking #10 in Google, and #14 in Yahoo/Bing. The green number $189, means that if we improve their ranking within the same tier (10-7), we would bill $189 on the 1st of the month. If the ranking remained at #10, we would not charge anything.

Let’s say, that due to competitive factors, we’re unable to improve rankings for this keyword in Google during the month of September. In Yahoo/Bing however, they improve to rank #9. We would then process a charge of $57 on October 1st.

If in November, we improve their ranking to #5 for Google, and Yahoo/Bing remained at #9, we would bill $309 on December 1st. That would be $252 for Google, and $57 for Yahoo/Bing.