Hiring an SEO firm can be taxing. With myriad prices and a wide pool of such firms available, the idea of SEO guarantee has become a potent tool for SEO firms to lure the clients. Client’s proper understanding and discretion is required to go after such guarantees.
The act of guaranteeing is a trick of the trade. It convinces some and dissuade others. A SEO guarantee is one such trick and is no different from the others. Before making a discreet choice we must ask a pertinent question to ourselves that why the top companies providing SEO consulting and development services rarely ever provide guarantees. Following are the reasons:
Reason #1: SEO & Guarantees have a corrupted History
SEO scams have used catchphrases like "guaranteed rankings and traffic" to entice the ignorant buyers with false promises. Such initiations have ridiculed the entire industry and shrugged off businesses that might even consider using the "guarantee" tag.
Many of the SEO companies that still guarantee rankings, smartly guarantee certain number of keywords that they pick themselves. In this way, they can select primarily non-competitive terms and achieve a high rate of success. Whether those keywords provide any serious traffic is another matter altogether. An incongruous SEO company has its own deceitful marketing claims on which a legitimate provider never hankers.
Reason #2: The Search Engines extensively warns against SEO guarantee
First thing – Google’s official statement reads – “No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google”.
Beware of an SEO firm that offers guaranteed #1 ranking asserting a “special relationship” with Google or through “priority Submit” for two reasons:
(Quoted from Google’s official statement from title ‘do you need an SEO?’)
Reason #3: Rankings are a Poor Metric for Overall Performance
Good rankings not necessarily corresponds to an equally good traffic. A success of a SEO campaign should be gauged by the increase in search engine traffic and the rate at which the traffic is being materialized into optimum outputs. It should be kept in the mind that achieving rankings is always a means to an end and not the end itself.
The measurement should always be based on traffic - increasing search traffic means the SEO is doing their job. Prioritizing the rankings of few keywords above and the overall search traffic means that goals are out of sync.
Reason #4: Rankings have fluctuating nature
If one performs a search for "SEO Company" at one place, then drive away to a different place and execute the same query, he/she is likely to end up with unique ordering of results every time. Also, when one hits refresh on a query, the results get re-ordered.
Given the incongruous nature of the rankings and the fact that rankings plummet or ascend with the varying time, causes uncertainty about the future or even the present. It's no wonder that savvy SEO firms stay away from the guarantee.
Reason #5: Giving an absolute Guarantee to something one is unsure about is unethical.
Taking into the picture the false promises made by the politicians before the settling of a government one can easily contemplate the unethicality that is involved in SEO guarantee. To the contrary, SEO must guarantee of providing a prudent advice to help your site earn more traffic. They must quantify the guarantee they are providing, after reviewing your site.
So, before hiring an SEO firm for your website, the experience, market reputation, success rate and SEO techniques must be judiciously assessed.
