What results do you contractually agree to with clients?

I don't contractually agree to guarantee anything at all. Never have, never will.

I do have discussions with prospects and clients about their goals and I do put an evaluation loop in place to check how close we are to meeting those goals, but I never, ever pledge that we will get there.

There is just too much that is out of my control to guarantee anything. A smart client will understand and respect that. If they don't, I don't want them as a client.

Different strokes for different folks.

Sometimes we end up on a yearly contract for SEO (or Social Media management), while other times we just do it once. There is always the option for them to use (rent) one of our top ranking sites, or buy advertising from us in those top sites.

But we never, EVER, promise anything as "we get you top5" to a customer.

In fact we just lost a customer cause he decided to "do a test" (<< his words) with a company that promised him top 5 for some keywords...

Good for him. He just ditched advertising in 2 sites ranking top 5 for his keywords, to "test" a miracle solution.

But as I was saying, don't offer/promise what you can't deliver. And organic rankings are just impossible to deliver.

The step approach is cool, but most clients ditch ya when their site gets Top 5... so I wouldn't advice you to use it.

Yes I agree, a client of mine the other day said if I pay you $xxx per week can you guarantee 15 phone leads.
Straight away I made him aware that I can't gaurantee any type of result. I told him my main focus was to get you ranking on the first page of the search engines but stressed that nothing is gauranteed.
If you are open and honest then that should win them over.

Although I understand the fear and legal liability of such a guarantee, I believe in putting your money where your mouth is. Simply put, if they use my company they WILL see results, so why not guarantee results right? Just make sure you are tracking everything.

It's hard to guarantee some things and you can burn yourself in the process. Never guarantee things that you cant deliver. There is a difference between saying that you will get them onto 1st page versus you saying that you will guarantee that they will have 100 new leads per month.

You can be on 1st page and get 10 visitors per month. You cant know all the niches out there and know what to expect. You can sometimes over and under deliver.

As stated above I don't promise anything either.

However, I am confident enough in the fact that I can get them to the first page within a decent time frame so what I do is this (for "local" keywords):

I take a set up fee, and tell them the monthly retainer does not start until you are on the first page for at least 1 keyword. Once that happens, I will send the bill for the first monthly retainer fee, and not a day earlier. There are no contracts, I re-iterate in an e-mail what we discussed.

I take a set up fee, depending on the scope of work, let's say the set up fee is $997 and quoted $497 retainer/maintenance fee monthly, starting on the day they are ranking on the first page.

usually within 2-3 weeks, I have at least 1 , or most all of the keywords ranked on the first page. I send the bill (with a screen shot of the rankings) for $497, they happily pay because they have been paying SEO company ABC $x-amount a month , for many months with no results(at least the clients I have , I target a certain way). So for the first few weeks, 1 client can usually equal $1500 (in this example, not pulled from thin air). If I takes 2 months to rank, well, I got a decent set up fee, it's all good.

I never guarantee anything in a world demanding guarantees, I just give them a reason to believe in me because I don't charge until first page results are delivered. It also keeps me "motivated" (not that I am not).

I am also kicking around an idea of performance payments, such as:

1st page for 5 keywords = $497
Top 3 = $797
#1 = $997

(something to that effect)

Not something I have implemented, but I an idea I am toying around with, because I know that there are no guarantees I could be taking money away from my self, at the same time, I could make 1.5 to 2 times the money per client.

Ryan

That's a great idea on the performance based work Ryan, definitely gonna think about that later on too Thanks for the replies guys.

So I must say I am a little surprised people will agree to this. I guess they are doing it with other forms of advertising for ages. The amount of people actually searching for services hasn't really been measurable before tools like Market Samurai came out I guess.

Thanks for the help guys, glad to see it's still possible to get paid without having to promise a certain amount of calls extra per week.