When researching SEO companies, it is tempting to choose any company willing to offer guaranteed SEO services. It is human nature – people love a guarantee. This holds especially true for purchases where the buyer is purchasing something outside of his or her area of comfort. When companies first consider pursuing search engine optimization (SEO) as a potential marketing channel, particularly when there is an ongoing cost involved, they get a sense of comfort from purchasing “guaranteed SEO.” Unfortunately, with many SEO companies, this confidence in the guarantee is ill-placed.
A lot of questionable SEO companies offer what I like to refer to as a “leprechaun repellent” guarantee. In other words, it’s a guarantee that is easily attainable – if you purchase such services and are not subsequently harassed by a pesky leprechaun, the guarantee has been met. How can you complain?
The truth is that SEO companies do not control the major search engines, and any firm that claims to have a “special relationship” that gives it sway over the natural search engine results is simply counting on your ignorance. Fortunately, this does not mean that guaranteed SEO is impossible, especially when the guarantee has to do with aggregate results and the methods used to achieve them.
What follows is a partial list of some of the more popular types of guaranteed SEO out there - some of them roughly as useful as leprechaun repellent, and some of them actually meaningful.
The "Leprechaun Repellent"
Keyphrases Guarantee
Many SEO companies boast that they will achieve a
certain number of top rankings in the organic results
of major search engines. This type of guaranteed SEO
can be tempting, especially to those who are investigating
SEO companies for the first time. After all, high
rankings are what it’s all about, right? Isn’t
that the goal?
The answer is an emphatic “No.” Quality SEO companies will point out that the real goal is to bring high quality traffic to your site. It’s quite simple to guarantee top positions if you choose non-competitive or obscure phrases – for example, “leprechaun repellent.” Want proof? Enter “leprechaun repellent” into your favorite search engine. You will almost certainly find this article dominating the results (caveat – if you are reading this article immediately after its release, the search engines may not have indexed it yet. Wait a week and try again.).
It is extremely easy for SEO companies to achieve high search engine positions for phrases that nobody uses. Such rankings might impress your friends and neighbors, but they won’t send you quality traffic. They likely won’t send you any traffic at all. It’s important to note that the phrase “leprechaun repellent” is used only for demonstrative purposes. Many unpopular phrases may not sound absurd. There are surely countless phrases out there that sound extremely relevant to your business that are never typed into search engines. Good SEO companies will avoid such phrases. “Leprechaun repellent” practitioners will embrace them – it allows them to attain their worthless guarantees.
There is also another aspect of this type of guaranteed SEO in which SEO companies will guarantee you first place positions on unspecified search engines for more competitive phrases. Unfortunately, this type of guaranteed SEO often involves obscure engines that have very little market share and are not sophisticated enough to quickly eliminate web pages that use spam tactics. In a few documented cases, the guarantees involved search engines that the SEO companies actually owned and operated!
There are really only three major search engines at present – Google, Yahoo, and MSN. There are a handful of minor engines that are also worth mentioning, including Ask Jeeves and AOL Search. Any guaranteed SEO should involve prominent engines, not obscure ones.
The "Company Name" Guarantee
There is also a common guarantee that shady SEO companies
will use that guarantees that a company will show
up for a search on its company name. This, much like
the “leprechaun repellent” flavor of guaranteed
SEO, offers no real value. Sure, if your company name
is “Acme,” it may actually be competitive
– but chances are that if your website does
not already show up near the top of the search engine
results for a search on your company name, there is
an easily fixed technical glitch that will resolve
the issue. Quality SEO companies will address this
area immediately. Moreover, ranking highly for your
company name, while obviously desirable, provides
only a tiny fraction of the potential value of search
engine marketing. The real benefit for most companies
is that search engine marketing attracts potential
buyers who are not already familiar with the company
name. Unless your company is a household name, it
is unlikely that having your company name figure prominently
in the results is going to have a huge impact on your
business.
The Pay-Per-Click Guarantee
Some SEO companies will offer guaranteed SEO services
that promise top positions for certain keyphrases
on popular engines, but they are counting on dealing
with prospects who do not understand the difference
between natural search engine results and Pay-Per-Click
(PPC) advertising. With PPC, it is very easy to guarantee
a number one result, but this result will appear in
the “paid” or “sponsored”
results of the engine. Say, for example, that your
company installs custom swimming pools. While a competitive
phrase like “custom pools” might be difficult
to achieve in organic results, the SEO company is
not concerned with organic results. All it has to
do is outbid the current highest bidder (using your
money, of course), and your site will show up as number
one in the “sponsored” results. Studies
have indicated that sponsored results are held in
a lower regard than natural results by savvy web searchers
who recognize them as advertising. Also, as soon as
you stop paying, your ranking disappears.
The "Submit Your Site to 50,000
Search Engines" Guarantee
There are many variations on this offer, primarily
involving the number of engines promised. Regardless
of the number, this is probably the most pervasive
and persistent type of “guaranteed SEO,”
and it is basically a scam that preys on ignorance.
Companies that believe that they have high quality websites are predisposed to believe that the only thing holding them back from search engine success is that the search engines do not yet know that their sites exist. However, search engines measure quality in a much different way than a website owner does. A properly optimized site does not need to be submitted to search engines at all (I refer to actual “spider-based” search engines such as Yahoo, Google, and MSN, not human-edited directories such as Business.com, the Yahoo Directory, and the Open Directory Project). Engines prefer to find sites on their own.
This “solution” offers no real value, except of course to the SEO companies offering the service. Also, as previously mentioned, there are not 50,000 search engines – or at least 50,000 search engines worth worrying about. Do SEO companies that offer this service meet this guarantee? Certainly – they use automated programs to do the submissions. Is this type of guaranteed SEO worthwhile? Not for search engine positions, but it may keep leprechauns at bay.
Given the preponderance of “guaranteed SEO” that is meaningless, the seemingly Wild West nature of the industry, and the reality that SEO companies do not control the results of any major engine, it may seem that guaranteed SEO can never be a worthwhile endeavor. However, this is not the case. If you note the examples above, they are primarily involved in specifics – top positions, a certain number of submissions, a certain number of engines. However, good SEO companies, understanding that they have no control over individual results, should be confident enough in the results of their work in aggregate and in the safety of the methodologies that they use to offer guaranteed SEO that lives up to its promise.
The Custom Guarantee
In very rare cases, certain skilled, experienced SEO
companies will be able to develop for you a custom
guarantee derived from the analysis of your current
traffic data, the competitiveness of your industry,
and the status of your site. You will ideally be offered
this type of specialized guarantee from the beginning
of your dealings with an SEO firm because it ensures
that you will be achieving targeted, meaningful results
based on your specific situation, rather than on generalities
that could apply to any business in any industry.
Some SEO companies may tell you that a custom guarantee
is not possible because they have no direct control
over search engine results. However, SEO companies
who have been in business for a while know how to
weather the algorithm shifts and understand that there
is more than one popular search engine. Such a firm
will be confident enough to create and back a custom
guarantee for you.
The Targeted Traffic Guarantee
SEO companies dedicated to showing value to their
clients will take a baseline reading of current search
engine traffic at the outset of a campaign. While,
as previously mentioned, SEO companies do not hold
sway over search engine results, they should at least
be confident enough in their overall skills to promise
that their clients will see an increase in targeted
search engine traffic based on popular phrases relevant
to the business. If the firm offering this type of
guaranteed SEO charges on a monthly basis, any month
of the engagement where traffic for targeted phrases
does not, at a minimum, exceed the baseline should
not be charged. After all, you are paying on a monthly
basis to protect and improve your positions. While
major algorithm shifts that make results on individual
results unstable can and do happen, they rarely happen
on all engines at once. You should feel confident
that the firm you are paying has a very vested interest
in making sure it adapts to the changing nature of
search engine algorithms, and few things inspire such
confidence as knowing that it will not get paid otherwise.
If your prospective firm is unwilling to at least
guarantee that it will send increased traffic to your
website from targeted phrases, every month, it may
be time to look elsewhere.
The "White Hat" Guarantee
SEO companies are commonly broken up into two camps
– “white hats” (practitioners who
remain solidly within the search engine’s stated
terms of service) and “black hats” (practitioners
who work to unravel the latest search engine algorithms
and base their optimization techniques largely on
technology, regardless of the engine’s terms
of service). Both approaches are legitimate –
after all, there is nothing illegal about exploiting
a technical loophole for results. However, black hat
SEO companies put their clients at risk of penalization
or even outright banishment from the major engines.
Getting back in can be a long process, and sometimes
it is not possible at all. If you are concerned about
potential penalization, get a guarantee from your
firm that they adhere to the stated terms of service
of all major search engines. If you can (and this
is rare), get a guarantee that your site will not
be penalized through any action of the SEO firm. This
is harder for a company to offer, since the major
engines frequently update their terms of service,
and techniques that are acceptable today can be deemed
unacceptable tomorrow. However, a confident firm that
always errs on the side of caution when optimizing
client websites will offer this type of guaranteed
SEO services, since it will not use techniques that
have a potential for penalization in the future.
Guarantees have been around for at least as long as leprechauns have been hoarding breakfast cereal and starring in bad horror films. So have guarantees that are essentially meaningless but sound respectable. A good guarantee should not only appeal to the base emotion of a potential purchaser, but it should also afford some real protection that the purchase he or she is making will provide meaningful results. Many of the most popular types of guaranteed SEO do not, and that’s a shame. The industry already has a questionable reputation due to “leprechaun repellent” practitioners – make sure you don’t go chasing their rainbow. After all, it’s your pot of gold they are after.
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