I was thinking about doing something like this but I'm wondering how a website owner or the SEO specialist would go about tracking something like this? What are your thoughts? Thanks!!!
Easy, figure out the average sales per day / week / month / year the website owner makes and anything over that you'll take a %. If your doing PPC along with that, just work on the websites budget your services are free / you gain sales on anything that comes in through that which is easy to track. 2 major problems with these scenarios are 1. If the niche is crowed and your budget doesn't allow you to expand in this market your working for free. 2. If the PPC budget is low ( Low is anything under 5k a month) it's almost not even worth it to do this type of service based contract with PPC you won't make enough. These type of deals are great usually for people starting out because you don't have 10 years of SEO experience. There is less risk for the web owner and more chance to get the gig since you have less experience.
If the seo is any good, this way of paying him would be far more expensive. You would need to establish some type of tiered payment structure so that you don't end up paying him large amounts of money. It definitely would give him more motivation than the average seo who is paid hourly.
Most professional SEOs will not even consider this as an option for a few different reasons...and, if they do, they either trust you a lot or probably provide subpar services. For one, it involves way too much trust on the behalf of the SEO provider; after all, how do they know you're not falsifying your earnings in attempt to pay the SEO guru less. Secondly, if your site has a poor design it will not convert even if you are #1 for every keyword term on the search engines. In this case, the SEO guru would get paid next to nothing for their hard work and effort. Lastly, even the best SEO providers can experience setbacks as a result of unexpected algorithm changes or "Google filter tweaks" as I like to refer to them. Why should they (SEO providers) tie their work compensation so closely to performance if they have no control over what Google does?!?
There is a company here in Dallas that I had the ability to change their sales by 50%. It would have required implementing On-Page SEO to a screwed up Content Management System / Shopping Cart. I proposed about 7 months of work with linking program. Simple right? 50% of gross sales? 50% net sales? Oh, the visitor needed a question answered, Is it still an Internet Sale or a Salesman Sell. On and on were the variables. After 18 months of talk, I gave up. Getting paid would be impossible. Going from 12 million is sales to 18 million was easy. But dude, you will never get paid. It's either up front or you will work for free. This industry is full of nice people. But they don't pay you. And thats the only thing that counts. People like you are cheap. You want results, you want sales, you want to get paid by you customers. But when paid, you will not pay your SEO vendors. I have seven of the best SEOer working here, and if I did what you recommended, they would be unemployed within a month. People don't pay! No matter what you do. Even if they are #1 on Google for all their keywords, you can not control the client's company, their pricing or the rude staff. SEO is a business. Not a game.
I work this way for a client which I have a really good relationship with. They pay me a % of total revenue. Keep in mind the SEO is responsible for more then just traffic referred from search engines. Bookmark and link traffic are also related to SEO work which has been done.
I doubt Catanich was trying to insult you (although I can't speak on his behalf), but instead merely providing his strong opinions and beliefs. I must agree with him, and I doubt there is any good way of going about letting the SEO track the revenue...unless of course you give him full access to everything. Even then, you could still falsify information...for instance by deleting customer orders after they are processed.
I beg to differ Catnanich was trying to insult me. Anyways, I'm perfectly fine with hiring a SEO. Actually, earlier in the day before I wrote this post I posted looking for a SEO to do work on my site and was strongly considering going this way anyways. And considering the conversion of traffic to sales I get on the limited traffic I have already, I would have to give it a lot of thought to whether or not it would even be worth it to me if it COULD be properly tracked. Clearly, if this did happen the SEO person would have already been able to go over the logistics and history of my site to see for themselves if they think it would be worth it and would have to be 100% comfortable with the payment set-up. Oh, and I use authorize.net for my CC orders. I wasn't thinking of even paying the SEO person after the fact, but rather, split into the two accounts immediately. Plus, there would always be at least 2 ways of tracking every payment - through my site AND the cc site. The only reason I posted this to begin with is because somebody suggested it on a forum. I merely asked a simple question to get some feedback and ideas. Not really a huge deal though.