Customers often ask their search engine optimization professionals for guarantees before signing up. This is understandable since the customer is spending a considerable amount of money in order to improve their rankings and bring more targeted traffic to their website.
What customers who are new to SEO, don’t often understand, though is that SEO professionals don’t have any control over the search engine rankings as a person might have when they sign up for a Google Adwords or Yahoo PPC account. Customers, in fact, have more control with Google or Yahoo PPC, but they end up paying a lot of money for that control, compared to SEO in the long run.
This myth of SEO control is perpetuated by companies seemingly offering SEO in their ads that say, “Get your site to the top of the search engines in 48 hours.” What these companies fail to say upfront is that they are not talking about SEO but rather sponsored listings from pay-per-click (PPC) programs.
Some customers are also confused as to how the search engine results pages (SERPs) are divided one area for the organic listings and other areas for the PPC sponsored results. It is the duty of the SEO to educate the customer on the differences.
Now, what guarantees can an SEO give? Search engine optimizers run the gamut from giving no guarantees whatsoever to guaranteeing the number one result on all search engines. Neither of these extremes is realistic. Why would a customer pay money to an SEO when a guarantee of no results is offered?
On the other hand, some fly-by-night SEOs will try to lure customers in with guaranteed number one results that no SEO can deliver. The most logical guarantee that an SEO can give a customer is something along the lines of letting the customer know that their results will be better off than before the SEO was hired and that the SEO and customer can track the results and make adjustments if necessary somewhere down the line.
Though customers who start with a PPC program may find this SEO guarantee vague as this does not give the same control that paying Google or Yahoo for sponsored results does, this will satisfy most people. SEOs have to contend with proprietary algorithms, competition from other websites and other SEOs and even their own customers unknowing hurting the SEO of their own sites.
When working under these conditions, the organic listings are just as the name implies: a growing, changing and moving target that can fluctuate in unexpected ways. The most any SEO can guarantee is giving the customer better results than the customer can achieve by themselves and that SEO is indeed cheaper than paying for PPC over the long haul.
