SEO Guarantees

The Truth About SEO Guarantees

Guaranteed SEO offers are typically aimed at those naive and unfamiliar with how SEO works.  You likely have seen ads for “Guaranteed First Page of Google for $29.99/mo” or something similar that sounds too good to be true.  While many of the guarantees out there are technically true, they are almost always MISLEADING, meaning that what they are guaranteeing is of much less value than what they are charging.

Our SEO Guarantee

If you feel convinced you have found an “unbeatable” guarantee from a competitor, feel free to give us a call and we guarantee we will help “educate” you on where the “gotcha” may be.  We can likely match their price for the same service, and their guarantee, but we will let you make that determination AFTER you fully understand the potential shortcomings.

Guranteed SEO:  Common Misleadings

Local Listings
The most popular “Guaranteed SEO” program of late relates to local business listings.  These listings do have value, but you can get most of them on your own for FREE!  While there is some value in having a third party handle your listing submissions for you, particularly as it relates to keyword optimization, the prices being charged are well out of line with where they should be.  For local listings a fee is resonable, but it should only be one time and not recurring.

Paid Listings
Several companies with guaranteed ranking offers will guarantee a front page listing in Google for local, organic, or PAID.  The key point is that they are only guaranteeing ONE of these three items will occur.  This is often burried in the fine print and the customer is led to believe they will be receving an organic listing when in fact this is not the “actual” guarantee.

Long Tailed Keywords
It is well know that longer-tailed keyword phrases (i.e. keyword phrases with more words in them) are easier to rank for than short ones.  For example, it is much easier to rank for “Personal Injury Attorneys in Tampa, FL” than it is to rank for the keyword term “Attorney”.  This is not to say that ranking for long-tailed keyword phrases does not have value, but it is important to make sure the phrase you are targeting has sufficient traffic to justify the cost of the ranking.

Partial or Performance Based Guarantee
Some SEO companies offer performance based guarantees where they get paid an initial fee, typically 40%-60%, and then they make the remainder only when specific ranking results are achieved.  While this concept sounds attractive at first glance, many of these companies have this guarantee baked into their cost, meaning that they make money charging you the 40%-60% upfront and if by chance they achieve the rankings all the better.  When companies take more risk such as this, the cost is typically passed on to the customer.

Spam Marketing
Some SEO companies will use dangerous “Black-Hat” SEO techniques with the potential to actually get your website permanently banned from the major search engines like Google.  The techniques these companies use often catapault your website to the top of the results, but only for a brief period of time.  These companies are to be avoided at ALL cost as they will render your website 100% useless by the time they are done.  These companies are typically identified by the “too good to be true” offers they provide.

SEO Guarantee Red-Flags

There are No Secrets

The most commont SEO guarantee red-flag is SEO companies that will not reveal to you the techniques they use to market your website.  They will tell you they cannot reveal the techniques they are using because they are so secret and valuable.

The fact of the matter is that there are no secrets in SEO.  Search Engine Optimization is about making your website more relevant to your visitors, particularly in the eyes of the search engines.  This involves making changes to your website itself (on-site optimization) and external link building programs (off-site optimization).

There are No Shortcuts

Proper SEO is a lot of work.  There are no shortcuts.  Again, you can do the work yourself, contract it out to a professional SEO firm, or do a combination of both.  Just make sure you do it the “right” way!