Even just typing the words, guaranteed results, makes me cringe. I feel dirty, crooked and dishonest all at the same time.
Nothing is guaranteed in life. It’s that simple. So why, in the case of SEO, can some offer guaranteed results?
Guaranteed Results
If you ever see someone guaranteeing you results, please run. It’s a giant red flag. In the case of SEO, how can anyone guarantee you results before they know anything about you, your product, your website, etc.
If I could charge you a set amount, ask nothing in regards to your efforts and guarantee search results customers would sign up all day long.
But it’s not that simple. Not at all.
Why Not?
The biggest glaring reason is that the person creating and implementing an SEO strategy does not have the ultimate say.
Sure they can optimize pages, clean up duplicate titles, add missing meta descriptions and more. They can create structured data (please read Rich Snippets to learn more), index your site, you name it.
But at the end of the day it’s search engines, like Google who have the final say. For starters.
Lots Of Links
One guarantee that someone could, I guess, not only offer but produce results on is external links. Pay $500 and receive 10,000 links to your site for example. Sure, that can be done.
So I must be wrong right? They offered guaranteed results and delivered. In the short term sure. But those links are all spam links. Bogus, inferior, no street credit links.
And Google will ding you big time for it when they find out. Read more about Penguin to understand why. So in the end your search results will be worse than when you started.
Now What
Just because someone does not guarantee results or or in my case, says no such thing is possible does not mean all is lost.
When you hire someone to do SEO for you understand the restrictions and time involved. Even the best efforts may not perform as intended. And it’s not as simple as hire someone, sit back and monitor the results.
At a minimum it will take the site owner’s ability to let go of old ways. To accept change. And to understand that perhaps search performance is weak, less because of SEO and more because of an inadequate user experience.
That’s one thing I can almost guarantee you. Almost, that is.