Guaranteed SEO Results And Why They're Worthless
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I made a mistake recently. I promised to repay a customers investment in our SEO work if I didn't get his website into the top 5 Google results for a very competitive key phrase. I've been very successful in the SEO arena, and I've been good at predicting the results and timescales of our work in the past, but actually taking the leap and putting my money where my mouth is? That's not clever, and I'll tell you why.
For a particular key phrase you have no idea how much your competitors are investing in SEO. Sure you can see how many back links they've got, and you can check it on a regular basis to see if they are currently targeting that aspect, and you can check the on-page optimisation of their website and look at their social networking activity and so on, but you really have no idea of how much effort or investment they're putting in. Any kind of analysis like this takes time and you need to know what to look for, and that can only come from experience. I honestly do not believe that if you're running a business you can do SEO effectively yourself, simply because of the time involved in learning the ropes and then actually doing it.
And the simple fact is that if you have just 5 competitors with well structured, well optimised websites with plenty of good content who have been around a bit and are investing more than you are in SEO, you will be sixth.
If you want to get to the top of Google's results for the phrase "Facebook" you can forget it, unless you have around 10 billion dollars, because it would be easier and cheaper to buy the company. On the other hand if you want to get to number one for "leather shoe repair London" it will cost considerably less. Considerably less! My point here is that nobody can offer you guaranteed results without knowing what market you're in, what key phrases you're targeting, and what your competitors are doing. And even then, offering a guarantee is a very risky business indeed. An added complication is that search engines can change their crawling criteria at the drop of a hat, which may be to the detriment of your website, or it may favour your website, nobody has control over these events.
As far as my recent decision is concerned, I have full control over my customers website and he's recently gone for a full re-design with SEO in mind, which is great, but my guarantee was foolhardy because I didn't put enough time in checking out the competition. I wont be making that mistake again!
Which brings us to the "guaranteed results" merchants, and why they're worthless. They will send you an email promising to get you to the top of the results before they've even examined your website let alone the websites of your competitors. So please don't trust anyone who gives you a guarantee unless you're absolutely certain that they know what they're talking about and you're sure they've done the analysis.
This article was written by Paul Clarke and is copyright Web Equip Ltd. If you want to use it please contact us. Please don't run the risk of using it without contacting us.
This article was written by Paul Clarke and is copyright Web Equip Ltd. If you want to use it please contact us. Please don't run the risk of using it without contacting us.
