Shared Risk SEO

Alliances and partnerships produce stability when they reflect realities and interests.
Stephen Kinzer

We know that you have a great deal of choice when it comes to SEO agencies, so let’s get straight to the point and talk about why we are different to the other options you are exploring.

Tl;dr… shared risk SEO. We work in genuine partnership with our clients

(Tavison Growth Partners… it’s not just a name you know.)

But on to the shared risk model…

Of the 5m options we can find on Google (5,010,000 to be exact) there are some absolutely outstanding competitors doing groundbreaking work… others will be terrible. Most will be somewhere in between. Sadly more will be bad than good.

Good or bad, the thing 99.9% of them have in common is they will charge you a monthly fee (as do we) and will make a profit regardless of the impact their work has on your bottom line (unlike us).

There are a handful of agencies – very much the minority – that offer “pay on results” SEO. Well under 1% of digital agencies offer this model, but for some business owners it can prove very appealing. Who doesn’t want to pay only once they have the desired result?

The big issue with this… and the reason we solely work on shared risk SEO projects… is that pay on results SEO is always focussed on the wrong result.

We did a deep dive market analysis, and saw that every single pay on results agency we could find was offering a pay per ranking model. “We rank the term, you pay us money.”

At Tavison Growth Partners we have two issues with this:

The result is not the ranking. The ranking is a small step in achieving the result, which is profitable growth in your business. Tying payment to rankings is like paying a marketing agency for people who walk past a shop. Not even walk-in… or much less buy something… walk past.
The entire model creates a dynamic where the agency is motivated to do things that are directly against your commercial interests. Rather than de-risking the relationship, a pay on results SEO offering is much riskier than traditional – pay us whether it works or not – agencies

Why is it riskier? The simple answer is that there is no true partnership.

SEO takes time. It takes a lot of man hours – which someone has to pay for if you aren’t.

and it takes time chronologically. Work today (absolutely excellent work) does not deliver traffic tomorrow. It delivers traffic in 3, 6, 9 months.

So the pay on results agency has two choices. They target terms that are really easy to win… so they can get paid. Or they use ‘black hat’ techniques that deliver fast results followed by Google penalties.

The easy terms don’t send you traffic (or the right traffic), so you pay your money and don’t grow your business, you just have a list of ‘vanity’ keywords in a report.

The black hat techniques…. well penalties, I don’t need to say much more than that.

Coming back to it… there is no partnership in this relationship. If you are willing to put all of the risk on your agency… to let them bear all the cost of growing your business, do you really deserve better than that?

And what about the traditional ‘pay me every month regardless of the result’ SEO agencies. Do they really deserve your marketing budget?

4,999,999 competitors and they aren’t willing to put even a little bit of skin in the game to make your choice easier?

We think it’s time for something different…

(p.s. If you want to know a bit more about vanity rankings search “shared risk seo” and see where we rank… looks brilliant doesn’t it? We must be awesome at SEO… the only problem is no one else is targeting it – we’re the only people that do it – and no one searches for it 🙂 )

We want to make sure our goals and your goals are in perfect alignment.

Your goal is to grow your business profitably.

You want to find a cost effective way of doing this, because if you spend more winning the customer than you make from them, you are just burning your money.

In the short term, you want to find an agency you can trust. Maybe you’ve been burned in the past? You have 5,000,000 options who all say they can grow your business, and you have no idea which one to trust.

Our goal is to grow our business profitability.

We believe the most cost effective way of doing this is to win clients that we can deliver great results for and to work with them for years. Winning new clients (competing with 5m other agencies) is hard, and it costs money. Making your choice easy, and then keeping you as a client by doing what we promised stops us from burning money on our own marketing.

In the short term, we would like to feed our children and pay our mortgages. If we give you our best work for nothing for the next 3-9 months, we can’t do that.

We think… if we’ve accurately described your goals… we have a very neat little way for everyone to win.

Yep.. it’s our shared risk SEO model.

It takes us time to deliver a result for you, and because we know the result is money in your bank (not rankings on Google) we want to focus entirely on that.

We also know that any corner we cut today to get that money in your bank tomorrow, risks the money in your bank next month, next quarter, next year… so we don’t cut corners. We do it right.

Every project we take on has a FINANCIAL target. We keep you up to date on rankings so you can see our progress, but the rankings are not the target. They are one of a number of KPIs we share.

We put our skin in the game by making our PROFIT contingent on your profit. You don’t get the result, we don’t make a profit.

But what about the children?

Well that is the beauty of our model. We can still feed our children.

Partnership is a two-way street, we only work with clients who acknowledge that doing SEO the right way, takes us a lot of time and costs us money.

Every project we take on has a cost.

A cost to us and a cost to you, our client.

That cost is entirely dependent on the strength of your competitors, and the size of your goal, so the exact costs vary from project to project.

When we take on a new client – we are entirely transparent about those two costs. All our clients know our profit margin, and they are fine with it because we make them more money, and because we don’t collect our margin (we call it a success fee) until they have made their money too.

So essentially we share the risk.

You buy SEO from us at cost.

We make a profit when you make a profit.

Obviously we are selective about who we work with. We have to be, since the only part of the process we can control is traffic generation. But when we work with great businesses, and do great SEO, everyone wins!

And of course… in the meantime… we can feed our children 🙂