To the people talking about a profit share with the client: absolute madness!! While you can optimise a site for search engines, to a point; the site might not be optimised for sales; you are essentially deferring the opportunity of the conversion to the quality of the site, and the salesmanship of the client.
For those who would consider selling leads (
@Marcus Allen): it's a very profitable way of 'doing SEO'. I did this with a partner and a small team in the legal industry for a while, but it did require a lot of hard work to get and maintain rankings. Once we had established our positions, and found stability (which took months for a single keyword), we were easily able to calculate the equivalent costs for that keyword using PPC, and build a package that we were able to sell which would save our client a ton of money and be nearly as predictable.
Once you had factored in PPC click costs, and a VERY high conversion rate of 10% of capturing a lead on your site (in reality, it's actually only going to be 5-6% or less, so our offering was even better value but we liked to underestimate + over deliver) , we were able to save our clients a MINIMUM of 50% on PPC costs - and that wasn't even factoring in the time it would take for someone to manage a PPC campaign.
The other benefits really rounded off the value proposition, which meant for the first keyword we were collecting leads for, 5 out of the 6 legal firms that we called to offer this service to said yes; and this was from totally cold calls (plus fighting through gatekeepers!!). We almost had a bidding war on our hands when we told one client another was interested.
We offered a performance based pricing scheme to make the deal a complete no brainer (as
@Andreas75 said - it's about sharing the risks). They would pay between £x,000 and £xx,000 depending on the position of the primary keyword.
There was a setup fee of £x,000, but to sweeten the deal further there were no long term contracts. I'm a firm believer that you win more retainer business by lowering the barrier for exiting an agreement, and so far it's worked for SEO, PPC and website maintenance.
If we maintained positions 1-2, they would pay 100%; 2-4: 75%, etc etc. There were always long tailed keywords for the lead capture pages, which is why we could justify a minimum payment.
The other kicker was that by having pages that we ranked and had lead capture forms on, we didn't have to compete with ad blockers in the SERPs
My partner and I got out of the legal industry earlier this year - more due to regulation in the industry which made it slightly tougher (although far from impossible), but are certainly looking at doing the same thing for other high margin, service based businesses.
If anyone is interested in how we did this - it was a private network of sites. While Google had supposedly cracked down on PBNs, and bearing in mind the 'P' in PBN stands for 'private', it was the more *public* PBNs that had been given the boot - ie people selling links on their networks. If you had/have a truly *private* PBN, and treat each site within it as you would any tier 1 site, then you honestly don't have a problem. It does take a lot of effort though.
We had social media posts drip fed using Hootsuite, followers (by following others) on social media, regular new content added from UK writers, separate/unique Google accounts (Gmail, analytics, WMT etc - tip: buy PAYG SIM cards), banner advertising on the site, people who commented on the blog articles, as well as the bog standard 'no footprint' style of builds, and a unique host per site. Some had phone numbers on the contact pages that we had set up using VOIP providers. We spent about 24 - 32 man hours (plus content writing) setting up each site at a cost of £500 - 1000. Like I said earlier, it was HARD work, but worth it - we had never seen any PBN of this quality, and we didn't ever have a single site de-indexed.
We even mixed up new/fresh domains with old, high DA domains and built the sites in the same way - which although wouldn't give us any ranking lift, just evened out the link profile.
From what I can see (having just checked rankings for these keywords), it's still going strong and hasn't moved an inch (we sold the whole thing, and they continue to use it, and by the looks of it, expand) - which means this site/PBN has retained it's strength for 18 months or so in one of the toughest niches (I hate that word, but too early to think of an alternative), despite all of these crackdowns.
Also, for context - the keywords had a CPC of £40+ (some where also as high as £100... per click!), so this level of effort might not be worth it for lower cost services.
Call it what you will, black hat or otherwise; it was effective... and in business, that's sometimes the most important thing... and that's coming from a former do-everything-by-the-book SEO purist. There's always a risk with this type of stuff, but then again, there's a risk of doing everything by the book and then seeing nothing in return.
We used to 'do' SEO for retainer clients, and had some nice sized contracts, but as other people have said in this thread, with any product or service that you part money for, you really want to know what you will get back. I found myself having too many conversations where customers would ask me "So we'll be at the top of Google, right?" or "How long will it take to get to #1 in Google" - or something to that effect, and I simply had no guarantee for them, other than we would guarantee to work hard and to the best of our ability within the budget they had set - which isn't exactly an easy sell...
Would I point PBN links at a client's site? No. But perhaps I would set up a new domain for them, and capture leads on that with PBN links pointed to it if they were willing to pay for this service.
Otherwise, it seems that the overlap between SEO (and I'm talking about the monthly stuff - link-building, not the more technical on-page stuff) and PR is huge. To get links of any worth nowadays requires more than 'just' an SEO. If you had a PR campaign, then you're likely to get natural links as a consequence.
