SEO Guarantees

As consumers we like to see guarantees, unfortunately for SEOs and their clients, search engines rarely co-operate in this matter.

Search engines are dynamic, regularly changing their ranking parameters; this, together with the constant arrival of new sites or the upgrade of existing ones, makes search engine optimization guarantees somewhat problematic.

Many companies offer SEO guarantees, most are just marketing ploys, while the genuine ones will probably require deep pockets by the client, and tight control over the site by the SEO company.

For example, I could guarantee you a No.1 position for your main keyphrase on Google, and could fulfill that simply by bidding for the top AdWord, of course that result will disappear as soon as I stop paying, but you'll notice I didn't guarantee how long you'd be no.1!

When considering SEO guarantees, determine whether the results will be for your major keywords/phrases on the major search engines, come from actual site optimisation rather than through PPC, and what methods they'll be using to attain them.

Our own Website Promotion Report doesn't offer any guarantees on ranking, only on best efforts based on industry recognised "best practice" at the time of compilation.

The main reason for this is that we have no control over:

The past SEO history of the website.
The implementation of the WPR recommendations.
Other factors outside our control that may negatively affect the site.

Here's a couple of leading SEO forum threads on search engine optimisation services guarantees, a read of them should help make up your own mind.