Pay Per Results SEO or performance based SEO through increased website traffic

There is a big difference between attracting any old traffic to a website and devising an SEO strategy that will drive quality traffic. It is the quality traffic that will buy the goods or services that you are selling and generate more revenue. You don't want unqualified visitors to your site, these are people that look at one page and quickly leave. Those visits may look good on Webmaster stat sheets, but it won't do anything for your sales figures. For example targeting poorly researched key phrases will bring more unqualified traffic.

There are of course other reasons for high bounce rates but a good SEO company will develop a consultative relationship with you to look at the whole picture and ensure that every aspect of your online presence is perfected to achieve your goals.

Choosing an SEO Company can be a minefield especially if you don't have an understanding of how optimisation works. There are so many companies out there all offering different pricing packages, different promises of success with different ways of measuring and reporting that success. There is so much SEO jargon out there too which is a confusion in itself!

One thing you can be sure of; there are no short cuts or magic solutions. The SEO strategies that work long term are all above board in google's eyes. Timescales for results will depend on many factors including domain age, competition, existing web design and current ranking. Any SEO company who promise you top positions over night are either offering false hope or if they are lucky enough to achieve rank for a short period of time it will not deliver the quality prospects. Don't be fooled by a clever SEO salesman who bombards you with jargon and dreams.

1. Look at the SEO Company's own website and its organic positions on the search engines.
2. Ask to see their portfolio of clients or case studies
3. Check that they follow the Google Webmaster Guidelines.
4. How long have they been in business?
5. What are their techniques and strategies?
6. How will the target keywords be determined?
7. Will they be thinking about your long term business goals?
8. Ask what results to expect and in what timeframe
9. How will they communicate with you?
10. How will they measure success?
11. How will they report on the results?
12. Will they be open and honest about strategies and let you know about changes they make to your website?
13. Who will be responsible for content development?

There are many people who have been burned in the past by SEO companies promising the earth and not performing. You know the sort -"you will get a guaranteed top 10 position or your money back". This is why only reputable SEO companies will offer pricing solutions that not only show their confidence in getting the results for their clients, but ensure no initial financial outlay for the client either. Pay Per Results SEO or performance based SEO is becoming a popular option.

Many SEO companies request payment upfront from the client and have a pricing structure based around optimising a set of key phrases and the positions they promise to achieve with those phrases. This is all very well but the client is taking all of the risk and in today's economic climate this is something businesses can ill afford.

A performance based or Pay Per Results SEO Company however, is prepared to share the risk with the client and is in fact so confident in their skills that they are prepared to put their reputation and fees on the line. If you don't perform you don't get paid - simple. For many businesses this is an opportunity to bridge a financial gap; it allows for revenue increase before being charged for services as opposed to paying up front for just the possibility of improvement.

Pay Per Results SEO concentrates on organic or natural listings which appear on the left hand side of the page and fill the majority of the screen. Because of the nature of organic listings you will get a longer term benefit from this strategy as the effects are longer lasting rather than short lived like PPC.

Organic optimisation also feeds the 'long tail of search', a term coined to describe the many one-off search phrases that can bring your site relevant traffic. It is reported that 80% of search terms typed into search engines every day are unique. So the success of Pay Per Results SEO is based purely on actual click through search traffic arriving at your site from organic search - this means more and more actual visitors looking at your pages.

A Pay Per Results SEO Company will measure the results of the increased traffic specifically from organic traffic sources. An agreed traffic baseline will have been established and will then be monitored regularly. You will then pay only for increased traffic.

A successful Pay Per Results SEO company will:

Create a Strategic Action Plan
Agree Objectives
Agree Key Performance Indicators (KPI's)
Research the competition
Perform deep, multilevel keyword research using many databases
Obtain quality relevant inbound links
Generate quality content and oversee content development
Review website usability
Perform on page optimisation
Provide technical advice and fix errors
Produce detailed reports.