Guaranteed Rankings Permitted?
I could guarantee your site will rank in the top ten for keywords.
I could tell you what keywords I will use to achieve those rankings.
What I can’t tell you is how long it will take to rank.
The firm I work for won’t guarantee rankings, and I agree with that, but let me put my take on the guaranteed rankings debate anyways.
Some companies still guarantee rankings, but even they can’t tell you how long it will take. (If they do, it should never be less than 2-3 months, as Google indexing and other crawlers may not come around any faster than that, regardless of what the firm says. Sitemaps, paid inclusion, and linking strategies can speed things up, but indexing is still different from ranking (which is another topic altogether)). Some of these companies say that you don’t pay until you rank, or maybe you pay but you will get your money back if they don’t achieve rankings. I can understand the attractiveness of free service until results are seen. As new sites popup every day and are optimized for keyword rankings, and your competitors are already ranking for keywords you want to rank for, why spend the money on someone who doesn’t guarantee?
A guarantee of rankings is a performance-based business model. If the SEO firm does not perform, they will not get paid. Based on that, they should only take the clients where they believe they will achieve top ten rankings quickly. This means that they should analyze sites prior to signing a contract or they risk losing money. As comparison, an attorney may take some forms of cases on a contingency fee, meaning they only get paid if they win. If they do not win, they lose the time and money invested in the case, and they might just permanently lose the client, all when they could’ve been working on a winning case. My understanding of social security/disability insurance (SSI/SSDI) cases, is that attorneys cannot be paid by the government unless they win. That is why these attorneys spend money on PPC ads and television ads; they must attract the cases that are most likely to win or they don’t get paid. An unscrupulous lawyer might want to do SSI cases like these in volume, hoping that 1 out of 100 cases wins, but for the most part, they won’t be able to focus on that winning case. They might actually lose some cases that can be won but didn’t come into the lawyer already a winner.
Some SEO firms likely work the same way, either (1) take the clients most likely to achieve rankings, or (2) take on volume (many clients) and hope that some of them will achieve rankings and pay the firm. But others (3) simply guarantee rankings and you can purchase their services on their sites without ever speaking with them. I’d be much more inclined to go with the first kind of firm who guarantees, than the second or third. But even more than that, I want to know about the strategy and process the firm goes through, and I want to know that they’re actually doing work to achieve rankings.
And most firms work in that way: they get paid for services rendered, not for results achieved, and that is why they don’t guarantee rankings. It’s not necessarily about the impossibility of guaranteeing rankings, it’s about using a different business model.
April 18th, 2008 at 4:30 am
interesting article. but the “business model” described is actually not a business model - is a tactic of jumping from deal to deal.
might be a step in the right direction to integrate all this optimization efforts with more conventional brand building and advertising in digital media to become more of a one stop service provider in online marketing.