Most professionals in the search engine optimization business are hesitant to give any sort of guarantee of results. Why? It’s simple - search engines are out of our control. We can tweak sites based on what we know about the search engine algorithms — that is, what we think we know. However, when it all comes down to it, very few people on this earth know exactly how Google works, and what changes they’re planning on implementing next week.
I recently ran across a great example of what to be cautious of. A ’search engine optimization’ firm was guaranteeing page 1 rankings within 7 business days. That’s hardly enough time for Google to crawl your pages after changes, much less for Google to get them indexed and for results to start showing. So, instantly, something is wrong. And then, they offer this for $100/month. That’s awfully cheap for that type of guarantee.
I did some digging on this companies site and found some interesting information. Here are a few of the items that jumped out at me:
“Since we are already submitting all the “text” on your website we do not need to ask you for keywords. Your keywords are already on your site.”
So what is odd about that, you ask? Well, one of the biggest components to search engine optimization is to ensure you are focusing on keywords that users actually search for. Many sites are not optimized with keywords based on user search activity. For example, say my web site has the term “red and black armchair coffee mug” on one page 20 times. Well, that’s a pretty obscure term, and therefore would be really easy to optimize. I could be #1 in Google and Yahoo for that term, but it doesn’t mean that anyone will search for it.
The second thing that really caught my eye was this:
“You can show up in sponsored, non sponsored areas or both.”
OK, so they guarantee that for some specific term, that they pick without any input from you, you will show up on page one of the paid or non-paid listings. With $100/month, I will guarantee that you’ll show up in the sponsored or non sponsored areas, too! They state that they will email you your Page 1 listings. So, if within 6 days you’re not showing up organically, all they have to do is create an Adwords campaign and purchase a keyword with a high cost per click to ensure you show up on the first page. Not rocket science, and again, not search engine optimization.
I want to be clear - Pay-per-click (PPC) ads through Google Adwords and Yahoo work great. We’ve had tremendous results with them, both for ourselves and for clients. Ultimately, organic optimization seems to produce the best results and ROI, but PPC is great, too. My issue is not that this firm is doing PPC, but how they’re selling it — very deceptively.
I wanted to see how I could do, so I found one of their clients, via a testimonial on their site. I looked at his supposed ‘keywords’ and determined it was a pretty obscure term. I decided to write a quick blog on it and to create a quick 1 page web site to see if I could get myself onto page 1 in Google for the same term.
Guess what? A few months later, I’m still #5 in Google (organically) for that search term. It took a few weeks, but my site popped in there and has held strong since — without any further tweaking. That tells me that that specific term is pretty obscure and not very competitive. What’s the term you ask? Contact me at Creative Anvil and I’d be glad to share the term with you.
Joe Koenig
Principal
Creative Anvil
