Business works like this. You have to pay some amount always to begin some project. If you can't believe a SEO ,how he can believe you that you will pay him/her after he will show the results....So behave like a business man ,not like some broker.
you can devide the payments because many SEO's use blackhat methods or make bad promises so if they are as good as they say then you should have no problems to just paying them after seeing results
I wouldn't want an SEO guy/woman who was so desperate that he would work for free and dumb enough to hope that he got paid on the whim of the guy who didn't trust him enough to pay as you go. Some/much of seo has an up front cost that the seo guy shouldn't have to front on a promise of payment. On the other hand I have had a couple of unscrupulous seo entrepreneurs make promises they couldn't keep and I wasn't smart enough to know that up front. Remember caveat emptor- buyer beware! C'mon there are only 10 spots on any given page 1 of Google's kingdom. Getting there, staying there is an ongoing battle, not a one time dealio! Unreasonable expectations fuel many black hat seo's who find they have to make promises that they know are unlikely to fulfill. Judging from all the responses here it is unlikely-read that impossible- to find that seo guy who works for free, yet performs like a master seo. There are lots of very good seo dudes and the good ones are fairly expensive, not free. If only I could find that surgeon to perform my back surgery and only after I have had the surgery I can decide if I want to pay for it. Sigh........... life is unfair.
Any SEO who promises positions for certain keywords are fraudsters, its impossible to predict which position for which keywords, there is the first page in google trick that some SEO consultants use, they promise first place in google and when the customer types his keywords and is in 67th position he complains and the SEO says, hey your in first place for {company name, location, phone number}
Hiring SEO'ers is a waste of money in general. No one can guarantee rankings and most people won't even consider working without getting paid upfront.
What a ridiculous statement! SEO'ers increase targeted traffic. You don't just focus on rankings for a particular keyword (at least you shouldn't).