Paying a Monthly Fee for SEO Services is Often a Waste of Time and Money

You spend loads on your sparkling new website… No visitors…  After being bombarded from all corners of the world by ‘the world’s best SEO Services company’. They promise you the world – ‘we’re a Google partner!’ they say (whatever that really means); ‘front page of Google’ they say. You choose one and start paying them a monthly retainer. They bombard you with lots of graphs purporting to show how much your website is progressing in SEO land. ‘Look at the wonderful progress’ they say!

The progress to your uneducated eyes seems kinda, sorta OK?… ‘Give it 6 more months’ they say – ‘we’re on the right track’ they say. Still no great progress with actual leads. Yet all the while they are receiving their nice (not so little) monthly retainer. They win- every month they get your money – irrespective of whether you get any leads.

They say ‘give it another six months’. Six months arises-‘give it 12 more months’… and on it goes…

Surely there has to be a better way to pay for SEO services than the monthly retainer model. Sure, the model is absolutely wonderful for the SEO services providers. I’m sure they’ve got all the most wonderful, watertight reasons why it’s the only way…

But with the monthly retainer model- they always win. What about the months when the leads are nowhere near the expectations set? What if the cost is simply not deriving a commensurate, measurable benefit? (i.e. leads that convert to paying clients).

It’s so hard to track exactly what they actually do for the monthly retainer – especially when we’re not qualified in the SEO space (nor want to be). Backlinks here, guest posts there- blah, blah, blah.