I’ve run into this a lot lately: guaranteed search engine rankings. A lot of search engine optimization consultants and companies love to claim they offer guaranteed search engine results; especially things like this:
Guaranteed #1 rankings!
TOP #10 Guaranteed!
You Can’t Guarantee Search Engine Results
Anyone that guarantees you anything to do with the search engine results rankings is lying to you or is a fool. A fool or a liar, both are people you shouldn’t work with. So you should stop talking to them ASAP.
Too be fair, it’s not only the SEO consultants & companies to blame, a lot of the blame should go on the customers for asking the impossible.
You: We can try to rank you for New York Lawyer, but it’s very competitive and will take a lot of time.
Client: Okay, I need a guarantee that you can get me to position #1, in 2 months.
You: I can’t guarantee that, and 2 months is not enough time.
Client: Okay, that’s fine. My budget is $50 a month by the way. I don’t want to pay more until I see some results.
You: [Thinking in your head: Is it wrong to smack a client? Can I go to jail for this?]
^ You will go to jail, don’t do it. Especially if you hit a lawyer.
I’m sure a lot of local SEO’s have experienced something similar.
Search Engine Guaranteed Rankings Are Pointless
Don’t look for ranking guarantees, look for money back guarantees. If certain results are not achieved you get some of your money back. Money back guarantees are better than SEO guarantees, but still suck big time.
If someone guarantees you SEO rankings and they’re having trouble delivering their going to use the cheapest and worst ways to get you ranked.
They might get you to position #1, and you might even stay there an entire month. Then you’ll be penalized by Google, and it’ll cost you more money to fix everything they did wrong. It would have been better to hire someone competent in the first place.
In general most guarantees are worthless in the first place. If you need something guaranteed you should hire a reputable company not some guy in basement, and this is coming from a guy in a basement (although not right now).
Think of it this way:
Do Marketing Companies Guarantee Sales To Their Customers?
No, of course they don’t. They deliver a service and if their service continues to perform poorly people stop using the company and they die.
The big problem with SEO is that anyone can call themselves an SEO consultant.
They’ll tell you the sweet lies you want to hear (Guaranteed results!) to take your money, then they’ll do a horrible job.
How To Find a Good SEO Company
Here’s what a good SEO company does:
That’s it. Hope you enjoyed this rant.
This content was originally published here.