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Why The Best Performance Based SEO Companies Don’t Always Charge the Big Bucks

Search engine optimization is a hard thing to measure. You don’t ever really know how much of it happened naturally because you’re awesome or how much was the SEO company doing their thing. But an SEO company that has lots of clients and consistently manages to get them all ranked on the SERPs has what they call ‘performance-based value’. In other words, you can’t assume that they got lucky and every one of their clients was a winner — at some point, after so many dozens of clients, you have to admit that they’re either freakishly lucky or that they know their stuff.

That’s precisely why so many people are looking for the best performance-based SEO companies — because without performance-based value, you don’t actually know if a given SEO company is skilled or just going by rote and occasionally getting lucky enough to earn a testimonial from a client who did half of the heavy lifting themselves.

The surprising part to many people is that by the performance-based value metric, some SEO companies that charge huge amounts of money get piss-poor ratings, while other companies that charge very meager amounts end up providing HUGE value per dollar. Why does this happen? There are many reasons, but a big part of it is the opacity of the SEO market.

When you don’t actually have good ways to measure the value of a service, you don’t really have a good way to know how much money they make you. Which means that what really determines the prices that an SEO company can charge is what kind of clients they can attract. When you’re writing SEO content for Travelocity.com, you’re going to end up making more money than if you’re writing SEO content for Ken Leatherman of the Warrior Forum, plain and simple. It may be that you’re actually providing better SEO value per dollar to Mr. Leatherman — but value per dollar isn’t as important in the SEO world as how well you do your SEO marketing.

This isn’t to say that paying more for SEO is necessarily a bad idea — only that doing your research and hiring a performance-valued SEO company is.