It’s that time of year again. The thrill of the new year has worn off, and some of the more diligent companies have realised that almost 15% of the year has gone by, with many of their 2011 goals untouched.
At least that’s my theory for why we always start getting a surge of enquiries for our services around the middle of February.
It’s also the time of year when I get asked what guarantees we offer for our SEO work.
Please allow me to set the record straight.
I can not guarantee anything regarding your search engine rankings. Anyone that claims to do so is deceiving you.
I could offer you something like this:
“We guarantee to get your website in the top three slots for at least five of your keywords. In the unlikely event that we don’t achieve this, we won’t charge you for the following month.“
This provides the less-than-scrupulous SEO company with a number of opportunities.
The first is the choice of keywords. If your name is Steven Kraigwarna and you’ve written a book on Time Scheduling For The Perplexed, I probably could get you top position for the keyword “Kraigwarna Time Scheduling Book”, but how many people are going to be searching for this?
The second is the free month approach. Essentially they’re saying “If the work that we do for you this month doesn’t work, we won’t charge you for when it doesn’t work next month“. How’s that for an enticing deal?
As a company with a great track record of providing Genuine SEO Services, I could choose to make wishy washy guarantees.
I could guarantee that your website will be SEO ready, that I will monitor the results of what we do, that I won’t use any dodgy tricks or techniques.
But if you’re looking for tangible SEO guarantees that won’t be enough.
A reliable SEO company will tell you outright that there are no guarantees. They don’t control Google’s updates, they can’t affect your competition, and there are no special tricks that will boost your rankings.
SEO doesn’t always work, but it usually does.
We don’t offer any guarantees, other than we’ll do all the right things in the right way, and that we know what we’re doing.
If an SEO company is telling you otherwise, walk away.
