Guaranteed organic search engine rankings offered by SEO companies have been a point of contention for years. There are two camps: those who insist that all guarantees are bogus, and those who insist that if an SEO company cannot provide a guarantee that it does not know what it is doing. As with most (if not every) extreme points of view, there are details being ignored in order to advance the argument.

Let’s start with the idea that anyone offering a guarantee is running a scam (basically). This may not necessarily be true, but certainly can be; but it depends on the guarantee being offered. The Devil is in the details. For example, if the guarantee being offered promises 15 top 20s across 12 search engines from a list of 30 keywords being optimized for within four months of project commencement, the client could end up wasting a lot of money and more importantly time waiting for these results. Let us assume that the keyword list is evenly distributed across a spectrum of competitive to easy keywords. This would give the service provider 10 easy keywords to work with. We end up with the following formula:

20 (number of positions in top 20) x 10 (number of easy keywords) x 12 (number of search engines) = 2400 (number of potential top 20s)

So there are 2400 possibilities 15 of which the SEO company has to deliver on in order to meet the guarantee. That is 0.625% of the potential rankings. This is obviously a bad guarantee for the client and a great one for the SEO company—it is almost impossible to not meet this guarantee.

So it is very important to study the guarantee to understand what it actually is promising.

Now let’s study the claim that anyone not able to offer a guarantee is running a scam. Let’s assume that a potential client has requested a quote for a new jewelry site which was launched no more than two months ago, and has no incoming links. Furthermore, the client is looking to rank for keywords such as ‘jewelry’, ‘luxury gifts’, and ‘wedding rings’ (these are extremely competitive keywords). There is not an honest SEO salesman that will provide a guarantee in a scenario such as this. It is virtually impossible to get good rankings for such a competitive project because unless the jewelry site offers something incredibly different from thousands of other jewelry sites then it will be exceedingly difficult to develop natural links no matter how many link development schemes (e.g. link-bait, directory submission, link-buys) are implemented.

Extremes are usually not the answer. A potential SEO client has the responsibility of due diligence before signing on the dotted line. Relying on the honesty of others is a risk few businesses can afford to take. Do not be afraid to ask for second or third opinions when you are presented a proposal; and most certainly don’t be guilted or forced into signing a contract if there are any details that are vague and unclear.