When is a guarantee not a guarantee?

For many business owners, search engine optimization may seem like some sort of arcane magic. Some changes are made to the pages within your website and over time it begins to appear at the top of the results when someone searches for specific keyword phrases. To add to the apparent confusion, many of these changes may not even be visible to visitors since they occur only in the HTML code. When these factors are combined with the steep bell-curve associated with achieving organic SEO results and the abundance of misinformation out there, it can seem like the type of service that you should outsource to a firm that specializes in it, and in many instances, this is a good choice because it allows you to focus on your area of expertise. The challenge then is to choose the right company to handle your search engine optimization.

It’s tempting to favor one company over another based on some sort of guarantee; however it’s important to note that it is pretty much meaningless because no company has the ability to directly influence any of the major search engines. Anyone that says otherwise is simply lying and you should stay far away from them. Most often, a search engine optimization firm’s guarantee will cover non-sense keyword phrases. These phrases may be relevant to your industry, but will deliver little to no traffic to your website, and therefore are of no value to you. The guarantee will be worded stating that they will enable your website to rank for these keyword phrases, and they will because since the phrases drive little to no traffic, no one else is competing for them. The same goes for your company name. It is relatively easy to rank for your own company name in most cases, but it will usually do little to drive significant traffic to your website. You should also be wary of any guarantee that promises to drive a specific amount of traffic to your website as this can easily be manipulated to artificially boost the volume, and in the event that actual live visitors are driven to your website, they will usually be extremely untargeted, resulting in a poor return on investment.

So what is a business owner to do? Simply choose a search engine optimization firm based of the results that they’ve delivered for their previous and existing clients.