Guaranteed SEO Services: Avoid At All Costs (your campaign depends on it)

Promises, promises, promises. We've all heard of those SEO agencies that offer the world and really give nothing close. Many agencies even go as far as to offer guarantees on SEO results. Are these companies truly capable of offering these type of promises, or are they simply trying to close the sale? In this video, we dive into SEO guarantees and what you can expect when you speak to a company offering you a promise of results. Hey everyone, this is Jason Berkowitz, founder and SEO director of Break the Web, coming to you with a new video about SEO guarantees. Now, many times throughout my career, I've heard of many different variables of the SEO guarantee in a variety of forms. Someone might come to us and ask, do you offer guarantees? Another person might even come to us and ask, this other person guaranteed me SEO results, what can you do? So, let's dive into the reasoning behind guaranteed results, whether it's a good option for you, and maybe some more pro tips on agency red flags. Now, one important thing to remember when searching for an SEO company is that business is business, and many companies employ very skilled salesmen that are quite keen on making sure that they can get you to sign on the dotted line. Because of this, many salesmen are really more focused on their commission checks versus the true well-being of the newly onboarded client. They may even go as far as saying, we promise SEO results, or we won't even charge you until we get those results. So let's dissect this a little bit. The guaranteed SEO results. It's virtually impossible for someone to guarantee you SEO results. As we've mentioned before, it's a very, very popular sales tactic, but since we're relying on metrics that are used for the search engines to verify the trust and relevancy of a website, it's impossible that any SEO agency can guarantee these type of results. Even Google has stated multiple times that if an SEO agency is offering you guaranteed results or even states that they have an in with someone who's currently employed by Google, you should question the general motives of the SEO specialist you're chatting with. And this also directly ties into the introductory call, or what's truthfully called the qualification call. This call is done to ensure that the SEO company has the potential to be the right fit for you, as well as ensuring that you might be the right fit for the SEO company. And many times during this qualification call, you might ask questions that simply cannot be answered by a salesperson because it might seem a bit too technical. This makes it super easy for the salesperson to make up an answer that they believe you would like to hear. In one way or another, as the SEO director in our agency, I'm heavily involved with the entire sales process from start to finish to ensure that we're able to give the best answers that'll properly manage the expectations of the campaign. To take it one step further, some agencies even go as far as to offer guaranteed SEO services straight on their website, which is a typical no-no for SEO services in general. These type of promises have the very potential that the SEO agency you're in contact with is likely using outdated or questionable tactics that might even lead to a search engine penalty. Simply put, many SEO agencies fail to evolve as the algorithms get more advanced, and that leads to improper execution and poorly managed expectations. So to summarize, if an SEO agency is offering you guaranteed SEO results, that should be taken as a red flag. It cannot be done, And no agency can offer you a guarantee. Before we wrap up, there is another type of promise that tends to be mentioned by some SEO companies, and that is, we'll work for free until we get you the results. This second type of guarantee that many SEO agencies will give is that they will work for free until you get the results that was initially agreed upon. And this is a scam in and of itself. This way they can get X amount of money over the course of X amount of months for however long that contract is signed. What they will do is simply take your money for a few months, not do any work, and after a few months say that they will work for free until they get you the results. But nothing will change. They won't do anything different because they weren't really trying to begin with. They were able to squeeze a few dollars out of you for the first few months and will be moving you from person to person within their agency until you just stop emailing or stop calling them. The lesson here is simple: many SEO agencies will do what they need to do, they will say what they need to say to close the sale. It's no secret that the SEO industry is very, very competitive and businesses need to create that market differentiation as much as possible. And sadly, this means stooping into low levels like this to close the sale and bring on a new client. What can you do about it? When speaking to a new SEO company, one of the things that you can do is to properly qualify the company. You can even ask the company if they can guarantee results so you can get a feel for their style of operation. Most respectable companies like ourselves will answer that we cannot simply guarantee results, but what will take place is the time-tested framework that has been used countless times to transition websites in the search results. Unfortunately, it's companies like this that give SEO as a broader marketing strategy a bad name. SEO works very, very well when executed properly, and proper optimization has the potential to bring in a lot of traffic from search. Just making sure you hire the right company is the most important thing in the SEO marketing strategy.