Marketing Profs

When researching search engine optimization (SEO) companies, it is tempting to choose any company willing to offer guaranteed SEO services. It is human nature—people love a guarantee.

This holds especially true for purchases where the buyer is purchasing something outside of his or her area of comfort. When companies first consider pursuing SEO as a potential marketing channel, particularly when there is an ongoing cost involved, they get a sense of comfort from purchasing "guaranteed SEO." Unfortunately, with many SEO companies, this confidence in the guarantee is ill placed.

A lot of questionable SEO companies offer what I like to refer to as a "leprechaun repellent" guarantee. In other words, it's a guarantee that is easily attainable—if you purchase such services and are not subsequently harassed by a pesky leprechaun, the guarantee has been met. How can you complain?

The truth is that SEO companies do not control the major search engines, and any firm that claims to have a "special relationship" that gives it sway over the natural search engine results is simply counting on your ignorance. Fortunately, this does not mean that guaranteed SEO is impossible, especially when the guarantee has to do with aggregate results and the methods used to achieve them.

What follows is a partial list of some of the more popular types of guaranteed SEO out there—some of them roughly as useful as leprechaun repellent, and some of them actually meaningful.

Questionable Guarantees

The 'Leprechaun Repellent' Key Phrases Guarantee

Many SEO companies boast that they will achieve a certain number of top rankings in the organic results of major search engines. This type of guaranteed SEO can be tempting, especially to those who are investigating SEO companies for the first time. After all, high rankings are what it's all about, right? Isn't that the goal?

The answer is an emphatic "No." Quality SEO companies will point out that the real goal is to bring high quality traffic to your site. It's quite simple to guarantee top positions if you choose noncompetitive or obscure phrases—for example, "leprechaun repellent."

Want proof? Enter "leprechaun repellent" into your favorite search engine. You will almost certainly find this article dominating the results (caveat—if you are reading this article immediately after its release, the search engines may not have indexed it yet. Wait a week and try again.).