Best SEO Blog|Launch your site.

There are some scary estimated costs-per-click associated with SEO expressions. Some of them are scary because people would be willing to pay so much for sponsored advertising on what appear to be trademarked names. Some of them are scary because of what people are searching for.

I’m going to pick on one scary SEO expression: “Guaranteed SEO”. Drop by any serious SEO forum and ask the regulars “what kind of guarantee can an SEO provide me?” and you’ll see feet shuffle, eyes cast down, and hear lots of hemming and hawing.

I hate discussions about SEO guarantees because the people who want guarantees don’t want guarantees on workmanship and product quality — they want guarantees on placement in search results.

A competent SEO technician with at least two years’ successful experience on five or more Web site should be able to help any site not receiving traffic to get at least SOME traffic. That same competent SEO technician should be able to help most sites improve their traffic, too.

You don’t have to be an analytical genius to find keywords that haven’t been optimized for. Nor do you have to reach for paid links or widget bait-and-switch schemes to figure out how to improve rankings for pages that are already getting some traffic from long-tail keywords.

But people in the industry want to act like Guaranteed SEO just doesn’t exist — can never exist. After several years of providing clients with projections and estimates and commitments, I’ve come to the conclusion that there really are certain things you can guarantee without painting yourself into a corner. You can provide some guarantees for work performance without having to meet unreasonable expectations about obtaining number 1 rankings in active queries.

Not that we cannot obtain number 1 rankings, but when you chase that top position long enough you eventually realize there is a whole lot more traffic to be brought in than any “hot” number 1 ranking will ever bring in for you. A well-optimized site with 400 pages of content should have thousands of number 1 listings in active queries.

So what kinds of SEO guarantees can guaranteed SEO offer without looking stupid and unprofessional? Here are a few suggestions:

• Basic SEO instruction — many clients don’t know enough to implement or understand what you recommend.
• Competitive SEO analyses — virtually worthless but they can help appease clients who think you aren’t paying attention.
• Intermediate SEO metrics — you can provide helpful feedback on bounce rates, time-on-page, benchmarks, etc.
• Link acquisition counts — easily verifiable if you provide a linking resource report.
• SEO Ranking Reports — everyone loves these.
• SEO plans — provided you didn’t make the mistake of including them in your proposals.
• SEO Site reviews — stock-in-trade for just about every serious SEO.
• SEO Traffic reviews — this is where you show the value of your work.

You don’t have to stop the list there but I will for brevity’s sake. Are these guarantees sufficient to justify the expense of hiring an SEO firm? Well, not, not unless you don’t mind paying for expensive lessons. You justify any expense through the return on investment, although ROI is measured in many different ways for nearly as many types of expenses.

Guaranteed search engine optimization cannot deliver everything, but very well-focused search engine optimization can guarantee quite a lot. You have to understand what you’re asking for or offering well enough to make sure you reach a common ground with the other side. In every negotiation one negotiator has an advantage of knowledge and it’s not always the expert who holds the advantage.

Guaranteed SEO works when both parties agree that the contract pertains to the work performed, not to specific changes in search results. You stay in this industry long enough, you’ll be asked more than once to deliver very specific search results. For most queries these kinds of guarantees are very feasible — that’s because most queries are not yet commercially harvested through SEO. It’s the competitive queries where people are actively vying for search conversions that one SEO’s ability to deliver the goods is compromised.

In fact, if a search engine insists on putting a specific site ahead of any others, there is nothing any SEO can do to change the search engine’s mind. That really isn’t what search engine optimization is all about. SEO is about achieving maximum possible results. In other words, the optimum performance may not be as good as the desired performance.

You cannot ever guarantee SEO success for an unreasonable request. That doesn’t mean you should turn down clients who want to rank first for “Britney Spears”. It does mean, however, that you had better reach an agreement with the client on what the point of ranking first for “Britney Spears” might be. I can guarantee you people will skip past an obviously irrelevant number 1 ranking in a search result if the site immediately below is obviously more relevant to the query.