Guaranteed SEO (Part 2) – Why You Need To Be Careful

A few weeks back I posted an article about SEO guarantees and why we don’t offer one. Click here to read. 

Types of SEO Guarantees & Guaranteed SEO Services

Following on from that article, in today’s posting I thought I would go into a little detail about the types of SEO guarantees that we are often asked to match. This isn’t an attempt to tar the entire SEO industry with a bad name, or to suggest that we are the only high quality SEO provider in Australia. Rather, I want to shed a light on a few ‘SEO Guarantees’ that appear attractive on the surface but don’t actually guarantee much:

If you aren’t ranking by month xx we will keep working for free: A common guarantee is to offer to keep working for free on an SEO campaign if certain rankings haven’t been achieved in a period of time. An example would be, if you aren’t ranking on the first page of Google for half your keywords in 6 months we will keep working free of charge until you are. We have received negative anecdotal feedback from clients about this offer when they have tried to enforce the guarantee.  Commonly a client will enforce the guarantee if rankings haven’t been achieved by a set date. At this time the SEO firm stops billing and continues sending automated monthly rankings reports to the client. The problem is that once billing stops, the SEO company ‘downs tools’ but continues sending automated reports. Because work has stopped rankings do not improve. It generally isn’t for many months that the client realises their rankings will never improve because adequate work is no longer being undertaken on the campaign (the SEO company simply can’t afford to work on a campaign they aren’t being paid for). In essence this guarantee doesn’t offer money-back, but just a future promise of work. The problem with SEO is that it is near impossible to substantiate if work is being done. Typically after many wasted months the client will realise rankings will never improve with the provider, that they have no entitlement to a refund and will look elsewhere for an SEO provider. 

A 100% Money-back Guarantee:
Some very new SEO firms offer a 100% money-back guarantee if certain metrics aren’t met on a campaign. We don’t know of any established / respected SEO company in Australia that offer this. Typically these companies open for short bursts of time, and then close before any refunds are / can be made. If you are signing up with such a guarantee be careful to assess whether the company / business will be in a position to return your money at the end of the contract period. 

If you aren’t ranking by month x we will refund xx%:
SEO firms sometimes offer a part-guarantee if certain metrics aren’t met. But this typically means an inflated quote. Eg if half your terms aren’t ranking first after 6 months we will refund 30% of your contract. If the contract was initially marked-up by 50% this guarantee isn’t a guarantee at all. 

Irrelevant Metrics/Search Engines:
If you feel that a company that offers a guarantee complies with the 3 types above, you still need to be careful on what metrics they are basing their guarantee. As a policy we only ever target keywords that fulfil strict criteria; 1) relevant to your business, 2) Contain strong search volume (eg people are actually searching for that keyword) 3) Where we believe a first page ranking is realistic within an agreed time. We have heard of guarantees where the SEO company promises first page rankings but then forces the client into selecting obscure long-tail keywords. Obscure long-tail keywords are easy to get ranking well, but bring no financial benefit to the business owner because potential customers simply don’t use those search terms. For example, there is  no point ranking first for the search term ‘best plumber and plumbing service in Forrest Lodge’ if 0 people search for it each month. Equally be careful of guarantees that are not based on rankings in Google. Often a guarantee will be based on search engine rankings, but not specify Google. It is often easy to get great rankings in search engines that control very minor market-share, but much harder in Google and to some extent Bing. 

Conclusion

At the end of the day if something sounds too good to be true it typically is. We get dozens of calls each week from clients who have been burnt by a “guarantee”. Often for them, more frustrating than the money lost, is the opportunity cost of the time lost. It often takes 12 months before a client realises that their ‘SEO guarantee’ isn’t what they thought it was. At this point they are actually 18 months behind their competitors in terms of first page rankings, eg the lost 12 months with the first SEO company, and then the time for a campaign to kick in with a new SEO company.