post by Stephanie Nelson
I get asked pretty often as I’m working on SEO proposals if SBN Marketing can guarantee organic rankings.
The short answer: No. (That’s really a short answer, huh?)
The piece of advice that comes with that short answer: If someone is offering you a guaranteed position in the organic rankings – especially if that position is #1 – RUN. Run like the wind. Folks that offer guarantees on SEO results are conning you and/or they’re intending to use “black hat” tactics that will get you ranked quickly, but will also ultimately get your site flagged by the search engines, possibly to the point of getting you blacklisted. (Blacklisting means the search engines refuse to show your site in the search results at all.)
The explanation that comes with that short answer: There are too many factors outside of our control to be able to offer a guarantee on any particular ranking position. We have no control over when or if the search engines will see the SEO efforts put into your site. We have no control over what your competitors’ SEO efforts are, if they’re doing more than you, if they’re optimizing more often than you, etc. We can’t control when or if the search engines will change their SEO algorithms. We can’t control when or if someone will search for the terms we choose to optimize around.
What we can guarantee: We can guarantee that all of our optimization efforts will follow current best practices for getting your site ranked. We can guarantee that when best practices for Google don’t exactly match those for Yahoo/Bing, we’ll set a strategy that should make everyone happy in an effort to get you ranked all around. We can guarantee that we work with our clients to find search terms in that sweet spot of good search volume + low enough competition to make setting a strategy around those terms viable. We can guarantee that we will submit optimized pages to the search engines’ webmaster tools in an effort to expedite indexing, though that’s not a guarantee the indexing will happen any sooner.
If you’re in need of some SEO help, give us a shout. We promise to do our best for you, too!
