I cant understand how SEO firms that practice this are still getting away with it as a sales pitch.

Take Care,
Nick

Not sure why you provide a guarantee even though you claim that you’ve been doing SEO for 15 years. The fact of the matter is, there is no real “SEO expert” out there. You can find individuals and companies who may have tons of experience and know how to handle certain situations – however with the changing nature of the internet and search engines themselves, the expertise deteriorates and unless one keeps up to date with the trends, they will definitely fall behind.

Furthermore, it is a common now a days for clients to back off from companies who have a guarantee disclaimer, this is because many of them are educated enough to realize that it will most likely be a scam service. A review of the various internet marketing and SEO services that you should incorporate are briefed here and can be read through: http://www.9thsphere.com/services_marketing.html (reputation management for example, is something many companies overlook). Now a days it is critical to also incorporate many other things into your strategy besides just “On-page SEO”.

Sure, strictly speaking, no SEO guarantee should be made.

On the other hand, I think it’s perfectly fine and desirable to give a conditional SEO guarantee – “I guarantee these results with respect to these metrics by this date, OR your money back”.

It is actually common and accepted for malparactice lawyers to give such conditional guarantees – “I win your case or there is no charge” or “I only get paid 10% of damages you win”. Plumbers, car mechanics, they often do give such conditional guarantees – a refund is the task they are charged with is not actually addressed.

I think that an SEO provider who fails to give such a *conditional* guarantee, on the pretext that no guarantees whatsoever should be made, is far more likely to skimp on his work and exploit clients, than an SEO provider who does make such a conditional guarantee. Ergo, clients should be very wary of SEO providers who use such an excuse.

Secondly, truer words were never spoken about how clients sabotage themselves and your work. I have seen this happen several times and had to clean up the mess.

Thirdly, I disagree with teaching clients how to do this. After things have been screwed up royally they come back wanting you to fix it. However, I do agree with making sure they understand everything and what the process is all about. They must also understand that we may get them on the first page for their chosen keywords and primary markets, but we can’t make people click.

I also have to disagree that guaranteeing first page placement means using black hat. I get them on the first page and I don’t know how to do black hat. Never learned it. I get more satisfaction getting top rankings without smoke and mirrors. Underhanded tactics always get found out. Just ask that “locksmith” who was spamming the maps listings with a bazillion sites and fake addresses, who called me by the way. Wanted a bunch of maps listings done for locksmith and admitted that all the locations were fake. I turned him down. I had already read about him in the Google threads.

Question: Whats the going rate when a client asks for extra keywords? We give them three and get them first page for those. I then search using any combination of those and can find them on the first page as well. This is great, but when they specifically ask “Can I add another keyword?” What is the usual rate and what do you base it on?

Thanks. Really like this topic and have been waiting for it to come up.