Debunking The Myth – Guaranteed Search Engine Optimisation Packages

Finding an honest, reliable and professional digital marketing agency is by no means an easy task. Some seem extremely cheap; too cheap. On the other hand, there are those that are just too expensive. Choosing a company that offers search engine optimisation packages is therefore, a bit of a minefield.

For businesses, it comes down to a case of being able to narrow down service providers. Price and guarantees are always going to help close a deal.

Any business owner that has been looking to outsource marketing has probably come across what some companies call “guaranteed search engine optimisation packages”; SEO with guaranteed results.

The fact is no such package really exists, and here is why.

First of all, what does exist…

Is SEO outsourcing companies that have professionals working on their team. They can offer a packaged service and can give indicators of results including time frames and positioning, based on their past performance; but no guarantees.

There are companies out there that do perform, produce results, work using white-hat/natural SEO techniques that are worth using; you just need to find them.

Consider reading out post on how to outsource.

The Cash-back Guarantee

There are some companies that will give a cash-back offer as part of their overall guarantee. Scrutinize this, as 9/10 times, you have no leg to stand on if the deal turns sour. What is worth pursuing is an Escrow/Authorize.net transaction. Under the rules of these transactions, under a dispute, neither does the seller get paid, nor do the buyers get a refund. Money is only released when there is a conclusion that seems fair. Of course, this still doesn’t guarantee that you will get any money back.

The takeaway is, if there is no Escrow or similar company to protect a transaction, the guarantee is worthless.

Competitor’s SEO Efforts

Next, is the question, what are your competitors doing? How can any firm offer guaranteed search engine optimisation packages, if they don’t know what your competitors are doing?

Here is a quick example. Let’s assume that you are in a niche where none of the top 10 results have improved their SEO rankings over the last 12 months and the competition for the keyword is fairly easy to rank for. Your SEO sees this. That is not to say that the day they start their optimisation, 10-20 firms suddenly see a breakthrough in the industry and start doing the same. Suddenly, the efforts of the marketing company, simply keep your results from dropping, due to the increased competition.

Most honest companies will give you guides. They “expect” to rank a website at a certain position, within a rough time frame. Although in most industries being vague is considered dishonest, in the world of site optimisation, this is actually a fairly honest answer.

Black-hat strategies

Next we come to black-hat strategies. Basically, anything that is considered to be dishonest, unethical or manipulating search results, is black-hat. You can see a more detailed description here.

Google sees this as you see your spam email; annoying and something that has no value. So, what do you think happens when they find out about it? They block it!

Your website might escape the eye of Google for a month, maybe even multiple months. During this time, the firm offering “guaranteed search engine optimisation packages” will collect their fee. After a few months, your results will not just drop, you’ll likely be blacklisted from Google and your site literally disappears. Any work prior to the SEO company, will also have been time wasted.

Don’t believe us? Google has been cracking down on this for a long time, originally with just larger blog networks and advertising ages, that were designed to manipulate search engine rankings.

Google Algorithms

Without understanding every single aspect of Google’s current and future algorithms, there is no way to determine exactly what is right and wrong. Here is the thing; most companies offering SEO with guaranteed results have never even worked at Google. Even if they have, they will not have created every aspect of every algorithm. To top it off, they certainly won’t know every aspect of the new ones that are about to be released. So, what is their guarantee really based upon?

Here is a list of historic updates that Google has released.

Conclusion

SERPs are not something that can be guaranteed. If you trust a service provider enough, then a cash-back guarantee may be worth something, but that still doesn’t guarantee your rankings!