Why SEO Work Is An Upfront Payment

SEO is a detailed process that takes a lot of time to complete. The work cannot be just ‘retracted’ since it involves dealing with a lot of accounts belonging to clients and a lot of moving parts. There might be 50 to 100 changes to a website made that might have to be manually undone.

SEO is not a product on a shelf that you can just ‘return’ if you are unhappy with it. It’s 30, 40 maybe even hundreds of hours of a company or person’s time spent.

• If you go to a watchmaker to get your watch fixed, they will easily take your payment ‘after’ the service is rendered… because they can keep your watch.
• An auto repair shop can hold your car for not paying your bill, so they can afford to have you pay afterward.
• A custom cabinet maker will ask for 100% or 50% down because they cannot afford to make you a custom cabinet, and you suddenly do not want it; or, it gets installed and you simply never pay your final bill
• A roofer will take the roof back
• Website design and graphics are usually a 50%

You can’t take SEO work back if there is no payment.

An SEO person can’t hold your website and accounts hostage.. you can just change the passwords to your accounts. You can steal the product, leaving someone who has done 30, 40 or 100’s of hours of work with nothing, and the time lost.

SEO Can’t Be 100% Guaranteed

SEO can’t guarantee the work either, because there are other people trying to rank for the same keywords in Google, sometimes it becomes harder than expected. If another company is out there pushing hard and paying a lot of money and putting in even more money.. to outrank your efforts and you charged the client a modest humble fee… suddenly what you thought was going to be 30 hours now is 60, or 100 to 200, and so on.

“EVERY time I have taken a promise of payment, the payment was either so late it was ridiculous or simply never paid. And I don’t want to hire a collection agency and I don’t like chasing people down. Being a small company, I can’t afford to spend 30 hours of my life on a promise of payment – Thomas Kane“

It’s hard to understand the complexity of the work too because it requires a lot of moving parts and a lot of psychology, so explaining the work is like giving a free SEO lesson.

You’d have to charge double just to tell people what you are doing because you’d have to teach them SEO just to explain it.

How To Protect Yourself By Checking Reviews

There are a lot of shady SEO companies out there though, and I have seen a lot of people pay for nothing at all, so if you are going to hire a company…

• Check references, call past clients up, and ask them about the results
• Ask for proof of results, ask for results they have gotten for other people (check to see if the company signature is at the bottom of their client’s web pages and if not, ask why)
• View their Google map reviews
• View their Yelp reviews
• A simple Google search on ‘[company name] reviews’ can’t hurt

I knew a law firm paying $2,000/mo for years and the company, after an audit, wasn’t and hadn’t done a damn thing in over a year, and what they did do, was barely worth his first two months of payments. I’ve seen a lot of this.

I knew a company in California (a start-up) gave a girl $100,000 upfront.. and she RAN with the money; disappeared. She was friends with one of the owners and they trusted her… no reference check. Nada.