Does your SEO company guarantee results?

Does your SEO company guarantee results?

Introduction

When we order something for our business, say we hire a decorating business to revamp the décor of our offices, well we would expect the workers to show up on time, and complete the decorating work as agreed.

So, when a business is hiring a local seo company, the business owner would normally expect to pay, and then instantly start seeing the benefits of investing in organic SEO.

That’s to say, often once the first invoice is paid, the business sometimes expects to see an increase in terms of sales than what they normally would make straightaway.

However, this is often unrealistic when a business invests in organic seo, and here’s why that is often so:

Your competitors have already set the benchmark

With PPC, a business can invest in this form of advertising, and then see the companies PPC ads being displayed straightaway. This means that the company can start to generate more sales instantly sometimes.

However, with organic seo things are totally different. In order to get onto first page of Google, you first beat your direct competitors. This can take a great deal of time.

Now, this isn’t as simple as just investing in a brand-new website, and thinking that will create more sales.

No, things are much more complicated, that’s because to beat your direct competitor’s SEO, your website must have what are called stronger “ranking signals”.  

This means that Google ranks websites according to how strong the businesses ranking signals are, and also how relevant that website is for the business sector it operates within.

So, let’s start with the ranking signals bit, there are thought to be in excess of 200 ranking signals. And Google doesn’t just monitor the strength of these say once a year, no they are read these signals very frequently indeed.

Ranking signals are things like backlinks that are connected to your company website, and also the strength of your onsite seo, such as having clear meta titles and meta descriptions for example.

In a nutshell, the benchmark has already been set, and sometimes is set very high by your competitors. This means that your competitors may have been investing in SEO for many years. This means that a start-up business, or a business that starts investing in seo right now, would often be unrealistic if they think they can catch up with their rivals in a very short amount of time.

White hat seo takes time

If you choose a digital marketing agency that are stating that they can get your business onto the first page of Google in practically no time at all, well the alarm bells should most definitely be ringing.

The reason is that white hat seo normally takes a great deal of time in order to obtain results. So, whether you run a law practice, or a dental practice, there are normally loads of competitors that you have to beat in order to get to the top.

This means beating your competitors in terms of having better and stronger ranking signals, and this can often take many months, if not years.

And as some of your direct competitors may have hundreds, if not thousands of backlinks, and may have spent many hundreds of hours on implementing seo, well there may well be much catching up to do.

Google’s sandbox

When a sales person arrives at your offices, to try and persuade your business into investing in SEO, well, sometimes some eager sales reps will gloss over the fact that new websites will often take much longer to optimise.

That’s right, if you are launching a start-up business, well often it takes a lot longer to optimise such a website, than say a website that has just stood idle for a very long time.

And here’s why, there’s something called the “Google Sandbox period”- now varying businesses state that the sandbox lasts different lengths of time, but most believe it depends on your business sector.

However, what’s important to know is this, and that is the Google Sandbox period can slow down how long it takes to get your website onto the first page of Google.

Longtail keywords

Okay, so its at this point you may now be thinking, so how do some agencies state that they can guarantee results?

Well, sometimes this can be because the seo company isn’t going to guarantee that they can get your business onto page one for the really important terms.

So, for example, say you run a dental practice, and you want to be on the first page for “dentists + name of the city where your practice is located”.

This would be a super competitive term, the one that most dentists want to be on the first page for.

So, instead your SEO agency may guarantee that you rank on the first page for a longtail keyword such as “dentists that also offer cosmetic dentistry in the city of London”.

This is unlikely to be searched all that often, if at all, therefore it should be easy for the seo agency to achieve it, and therefore that’s why some marketing agencies guarantee results.

Cutting corners will only trigger a penalty

Another reason that sometimes an agency will guarantee results is because they are using low quality seo.

This means that they may well be using low quality seo methods that will eventually trigger a Google penalty.

This means that the website will eventually drop, or be removed from Google because these seo methods are used.

Why it’s better if an agency sets realistic expectations from the outset

So, as you’ve probably gathered, its normally much better if the seo business just explains honestly what you are likely to achieve for your monthly budget.

Also, if the marketing agency states that your business sector is fiercely competitive, then this will not be to deter you, but may well be an honest appraisal of the mountain that needs to be climbed.

How our agency can help

If your business requires help with any aspect of its SEO, then why not give us a ring?