Skeptical about SEO? Why?

[ZeroDouble]

There was some talk in this thread about SEOs offering guarantees. Personally, I don't see the issue with this. If you can't guarantee (top half) of page 1 results for your clients, then you probably shouldn't be doing SEO, or at the very least, you shouldn't be taking on clients who want you to rank for things that are above your skill level.

 

[Hireday.com]

For example, a search for plumbers Washington brings 4 reviews site in the top 4 spots. This trend, of course, is not new, but these days we can see it for more and more for local searches (and not only). So, what do you think, what is the Future of SEO?!

Google seems to be going in the direction that gets them the best revenue.
This means that search signals that were important a few years ago are now much less valuable.

I cant post links yet, but search for "moz 2016 link building" and watch the Whiteboard Friday video from Rand Fishkin

For me - SEO is one part of a complex arrangement of paid advertising, content marketing, influencer outreach, great website and PR. It is less and less valuable as a stand alone activity as the 'black hat' techniques of past (or even 'grey hat') are worth less and can even be a penalty.

Ask yourself - is £5,000 SEO going to give a better ROI than the same spend on PPC, leaflets, roadshows, branding etc.
If it is, go for it!

If not, then spend the money elsewhere.

 

[Ian J]

There was some talk in this thread about SEOs offering guarantees. Personally, I don't see the issue with this. If you can't guarantee (top half) of page 1 results for your clients, then you probably shouldn't be doing SEO, or at the very least, you shouldn't be taking on clients who want you to rank for things that are above your skill level.

I'm trying to think of the polite way to say that's a daft comment

Some ultra high rankings are impossible to achieve unless you have a massive budget.

In my own case the top places for the search term "factoring" are taken up by Wikipedia, HM Government, Royal Bank of Scotland and Lloyds Bank and I would like to see someone take them on without a six figure marketing budget.

My own SEO person will not get my site anywhere near the top five but that doesn't mean that she shouldn't be doing SEO or that it's above her skill level as it simply means that my budget isn't big enough

 

[justinaldridge]

Everything is possible with the right budget. The worst Formula 1 team still has exceptionally talented people but without the enormous budgets of the big teams they will always be racing at the back.

Money talks....

 

[ZeroDouble]

I'm trying to think of the polite way to say that's a daft comment

Some ultra high rankings are impossible to achieve unless you have a massive budget.

In my own case the top places for the search term "factoring" are taken up by Wikipedia, HM Government, Royal Bank of Scotland and Lloyds Bank and I would like to see someone take them on without a six figure marketing budget.

My own SEO person will not get my site anywhere near the top five but that doesn't mean that she shouldn't be doing SEO or that it's above her skill level as it simply means that my budget isn't big enough

Thanks for the SEO lesson - I can see that you've mastered the art of stating the obvious.

I would have thought that having the budget to achieve the rankings would go without saying. You wouldn't take on the client if they weren't going to pay for the work required to meet their goals.

Also FWIW, you wouldn't need anywhere near a six figure budget to rank top 5 for the term 'factoring'. But, then again, you probably wouldn't want to chase after that term anyway, as it's not going to convert very well. It's easier than you think to outrank some of the 'big boys'...

 

[ZeroDouble]

Everything is possible with the right budget. The worst Formula 1 team still has exceptionally talented people but without the enormous budgets of the big teams they will always be racing at the back.

Money talks....

I agree, but (as you know) having a bigger budget in SEO doesn't necessarily mean that you'll be on top. Especially, if you have to spread those resources across a large site, where as a smaller more focused site wouldn't.

 

[IanG]

If you can't guarantee (top half) of page 1 results for your clients, then you probably shouldn't be doing SEO, or at the very least, you shouldn't be taking on clients who want you to rank for things that are above your skill level.

Nothing to do with skill.

Your guarantee is complete bunkum.

What are you going to do when you get 10 clients in the same week all selling the same thing? You can't guarantee they'll all get there for their generic market sector.

The whole notion of guaranteeing good ranks is based on obscurity which I've already demonstrated is perfectly possible with very little work if your search strings are not common.

I can make you SEO guarantees, I'm a reputable professional. Oh, and please make sure your product is a Googlewhack.

 

[ZeroDouble]

Nothing to do with skill.

Your guarantee is complete bunkum.

What are you going to do when you get 10 clients in the same week all selling the same thing? You can't guarantee they'll all get there for their generic market sector.

The whole notion of guaranteeing good ranks is based on obscurity which I've already demonstrated is perfectly possible with very little work if your search strings are not common.

I can make you SEO guarantees, I'm a reputable professional. Oh, and please make sure your product is a Googlewhack.

Maybe I'm missing something, but I don't really get your point.

I don't do client work, but if I did, I obviously wouldn't guarantee 10 different companies that I could get them top 5 rankings for the same term - that would just be silly.

Also, ranking obscure terms has nothing to do with it. If you know SEO you know what you're capable of, so backing it up with a guarantee shouldn't be an issue?

 

[IanG]

If you can't guarantee (top half) of page 1 results for your clients

I obviously wouldn't guarantee 10 different companies

So your company is either going to stay very small, or you have the luxury of choosing your customers, or the guarantee was poppycock from the start.

 

[ZeroDouble]

Nice selective quoting skills you've got there....

I know some people probably do it, but taking on multiple clients who are all chasing the same keyword set(s) wouldn't be something I'd be comfortable doing anyway. I'd rather turn people down if I couldn't deliver their goals, and I doubt that it would have any bearing on the size that I could grow my (hypothetical) business to.

 

[webgeek]

"their goals" need to be scrutinised and the client educated, if their goals are based on Google ranking position in the SERPs for a single word or phrase, or a handful of them.

Clients want more customers (conversions), which they've associated with organic rankings (rightly so, given organic typically converts with a better ROI than most any other type of traffic). However, their goal is generally revenue. If a marketer can help them achieve increased revenue via organic traffic, then as long as it meets their threshold of target revenue increase, it's a winner.

It might be a dozen or more long tail phrases. It might be a single home-run search phrase. It might come off of the blog where Fresh is giving recent posts a bump in the SERPs. Local, news, maps, images, etc, etc. There's a lot of paths to financial success that do not include ranking top 5 for some single home-run phrase.

Helping clients keep their eye on the ball, their real goals, is often half the battle.

Yes, some content, optimisations, social syndication and an occasional backlink should make guaranteeing a revenue target a piece of cake... HOWEVER, clients do stupid sh*t that can undermine everything being done to help them along the path to success. We cannot account for that self-destruct mechanism - it's just too varied in nature, and frequent in application

 

[IanG]

Nice selective quoting skills you've got there....

I know some people probably do it, but taking on multiple clients who are all chasing the same keyword set(s) wouldn't be something I'd be comfortable doing anyway. I'd rather turn people down if I couldn't deliver their goals, and I doubt that it would have any bearing on the size that I could grow my (hypothetical) business to.

Course it does - because across the sector and across the prevalence of these guarantees, some / most / all of the people claiming to offer them are talking rubbish.

And re my quoting - it was quite easy. I just took the part in which you said anyone who can't guarantee shouldn't be in business, then I took the part where you said you can't make the guarantees. They were fairly conspicuous by their contradiction.

 

[justinaldridge]

I don't understand how anyone can offer a guarantee if it's ranking based as these can very from device to device, location to location, browsing history, etc.

It's very rare that one key phrase is all a client needs to rank for. There are normally many and all together generate the traffic that they need to generate more sales/leads.

The only thing we guarantee our clients is that we will work our socks off for them, we won't do anything dodgy and report every single thing that we do (including each backlink we get for them) in our monthly reports.

Our focus with clients is very much conversion based. If they are making more money they generally don't care where they are ranking and at the end of the day that's what it's about.

Returns not rankings.

 

[RambleRuth]

I think SEO definitely has its place but often people who don't have experience with this will find it a little hard to grasp and maybe just see it as a waste of time. Maybe if you were to explain to people in a basic and accessible way how Google indexing works etc and therefore the valuable role of SEO that would help! I guess it depends how much time a business can dedicate to this but there SEO steps that businesses can use themselves without the need of employing someone to do it for them.

 

[boring-friday]

What are you going to do when you get 10 clients in the same week all selling the same thing? You can't guarantee they'll all get there for their generic market sector.
.

10 clients in the same week with the same keywords? Probably celebrate that I'm now/will be the richest man in the world due to my marketing getting me millions of clients

 

[IanG]

If the celebration is more important than the guilt of reneging on your guarantee then yeah, bottoms up.

 

[sirearl]

Nothing to do with skill.

Does that apply to heart surgeons also?

Money can't buy you love but a good SEO can.

 

[boring-friday]

If the celebration is more important than the guilt of reneging on your guarantee then yeah, bottoms up.

lol was just saying your scenario of taking on 10 clients for the same keyword/s would never happen

 

[IanG]

Bet your log files are all below web root as well, no one will ever guess the folder name.

 

[beasty]

Thanks for the SEO lesson - I can see that you've mastered the art of stating the obvious.

I would have thought that having the budget to achieve the rankings would go without saying. You wouldn't take on the client if they weren't going to pay for the work required to meet their goals.

Also FWIW, you wouldn't need anywhere near a six figure budget to rank top 5 for the term 'factoring'. But, then again, you probably wouldn't want to chase after that term anyway, as it's not going to convert very well. It's easier than you think to outrank some of the 'big boys'...

I love the reply, it is quite easy to rank above the Big Boys, RBS, Lloyds, WIKI, .GOV

I scanned the last page of the thread and will not be coming back, I want to swear but you cannot tell people on a forum simply to **** off

 

[ZeroDouble]

I love the reply, it is quite easy to rank above the Big Boys, RBS, Lloyds, WIKI, .GOV

I scanned the last page of the thread and will not be coming back, I want to swear but you cannot tell people on a forum simply to **** off

Well, it appears that on this forum you can...

You've misquoted me, and in paraphrasing my comment you've suggested something I wasn't.

What I actually wrote was "it's easier than you think....", and the comment was in relation to the point in question - ranking for 'factoring'. A statement which I stand by wholeheartedly.

If I'd wanted to make a generalisation I would have written something like "more often than not, it's easier than you think to out rank the big boys for certain terms, but you'd need to take it on a case by case basis". Feel free to quote that if you like.

If you disagreed with my comment, perhaps a better approach would have been to state your reasons why, or even ask me to explain the rational behind it, instead of resorting to posting childish 'hit and run' type insults? Perhaps, that way we could have opened up the thread to further debate, and all potentially learned something?

If you HAD asked me to explain in more detail I would have gladly done so, but as it stands I'm just going to assume that 'you don't know what you don't know' and move on.

 

[neils3]

This thread has considerably transformed from the original question lol, particularly around Guarantees.

I don't provide any guarantees as ultimately is out of my hands and would not be comfortable with setting that expectation. If I did decide to provide a guarantee I think it would be backed up with a money back guarantee. But I'm not doing that anytime soon. As mentioned by others above, I prefer to keep the conversation focused around traffic/conversion/ROI.

The flip side to this conversation is that so many businesses ask for ranking guarantees, even if they are not originally offered. So what would this group say to these businesses?