Pay for performance SEO: you pay after the leads arrive

Search marketing priced on the outcome instead of the hours. We carry the build, the profile work and the content before any results invoice goes out, so if a campaign never produces leads that work was ours to absorb. It is why pay per performance SEO is not offered to everyone who asks: it needs real search demand, a site that converts, and a business that answers the phone.

Pay per lead SEO suits a predictable job value: an agreed amount per qualified enquiry, invoiced after you have reviewed the count. Commission suits variable order values: an agreed percentage of tracked revenue, attributed from your own analytics. A hybrid covers heavy build work up front. The rate is fixed in writing before anything starts.

We take your average job value and close rate. A £900 job closing one in three earns roughly £300 per lead, so the per-lead rate has to sit well below that and still above our production cost. If that gap is not comfortable, performance based SEO pricing is the wrong model and we say so.

A genuine new enquiry from your service area, by phone, form, chat or booking. Spam, wrong numbers, under-30-second calls, suppliers, recruiters and existing customers are stripped out before you see the invoice. Every billed lead arrives with the recording or form entry behind it, in tracking registered to you. Disputed leads come off the invoice.

Google does not sell organic positions, and any agency implying otherwise is confused or lying. Ads are the only thing you buy from Google, and they are labelled. What you can do is pay for the work that earns a position, after it produces something. That is the honest version of pay for SEO rankings.

The same scope as our retainer campaigns: technical foundation, content programme, profile and listings management, review system, links and authority, tracking setup, and a monthly report with a work log. The pricing changes; the work does not get thinner.

Good fit: established local services, clinics, trades, legal, home improvement and ecommerce with margin. Poor fit: pre-launch brands, categories with no search demand, and businesses that cannot answer enquiries promptly. For those a conventional retainer is genuinely the better buy, and we will tell you that rather than take the work.

Four things, from us included: a real monthly lead report with the evidence attached, tracking in accounts registered to you, a plain exit where everything transfers, and an honest account of when this model is the wrong fit. An agency that will not produce them is telling you something.

Check whether the lead definition is written down. Check whether disputed leads can actually be removed. Check whether the rate rises after an introductory period, whether a minimum monthly charge hides under the performance language, and whether you own what gets built. The headline rate is usually the least interesting number in the contract.

A ranking is a means, not a result: position three on a phrase with intent beats position one on a phrase nobody types. Pay per result SEO is better framed around what the ranking produced, which is why we count leads and revenue. You still get full ranking and geo-grid reporting; it just is not the invoice.

Weeks one to four: qualification, tracking setup, technical audit, first fixes. Nothing is invoiced on performance because there is nothing to count. Months two and three: content, profile work, citations and reviews compound, map movement usually shows first, invoicing begins once the agreed threshold is reached. Month four onward: positions mature and the report and invoice arrive together.