Pay for performance SEO services, also known as performance-based SEO, is nothing new under the sun. Some call it pay for results or pay for rankings.

Nevertheless, the goal of pay for performance SEO services is lessening the risk of standard SEO services by requiring customers to not pay until they have been ranked.

This sounds good at first glance, as pay for performance SEO services sounds like a no brainer that is sure to keep money in your pocket until SEOs perform their work.

I mean after all, companies have pay for performance pay structures that pay regular or bonus pay based on meeting certain company objectives.

So surely if it works for companies paying employees, then surely pay for performance can work for SEO services.

To some extent, we’ve all had an experience with some sort of pay for performance type of an agreement.

Some of us have had good experiences while others have had either bad or downright nightmares of being had by pay for performance agreements.

In this post, I share my top six (6) reasons why pay for performance SEO services fail for both SEOs and customers, and how both parties should go about structuring sound pay for performance SEO services and agreements to ensure a real “win-win” scenario and working relationship.