I’ve been asked that question from time to time, i.e. whether I provide money back guarantee for my search engine optimization (SEO) services - I’ll answer that in a bit. Before that, let me just say that I had a great time in Singapore this week …well apart from the persistent showers that is. Yup, it rained twice a day while I was there and that made travelling a little inconvenient, especially when you had to see 4 clients a day. Besides that, I was shuttling back and forth between Funan and Sim Lim, looking at 3 Windows Mobile phones - the Dopod 838 Pro, O2 Zinc and Samsung Blackjack. I ended up with nothing because the sellers advised waiting for the upcoming phones since none of my choices ran the just-released Windows Mobile 6. Next, my trip to Singapore has never been complete without a stopover at a Japanese eatery in Raffles City called Sushi Tei. For those who like seafood, I’d recommend a S$15 dish called “Ebi Metaiyaki”. It’s essentially two halves of a jumbo prawn baked with cheese and sprinkled with fish roe (note: writer is drooling). Ok now back to the subject… out of all the potential clients I met, there was one who asked if I provided any money back guarantee if I couldn’t rank their website in the top 10. I don’t blame them for the misconception because there ARE consultants who provide such guarantees, for example: RM800 for top 10 rankings in 2 months and with a 60-day money back guarantee??? The only catch is the client’s desired keywords/phrases should not return more than 2,000,000 search results. But why does the client have to come up with the keywords/phrases? Isn’t that the job of the SEO consultant, i.e. to recommend keywords/phrases that people actually search for?! :) SEO is about optimizing a website and not about providing ranking guarantees. No consultant can realistically guarantee your rankings, even SEOmoz who charges a minimum US$10,000 per job, because: Search engines are also constantly tweaking their algorithm to battle spam. This includes giving more weightage to original content and age factors, and most recently, allowing webmasters to report paid links. Hence, SEO is a much bigger challenge these days, not to mention that it’s almost a 3-man job, i.e. consultant, copywriter and linkbuilder - any experienced SEO consultant can vouch for that. If you want guaranteed top rankings, you’ll just have to pay through any available pay-per-click program like Google Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing or MSN Adcenter. So do you still believe that RM800 can give you guaranteed top 10 rankings and in 2 months?
1) we don’t own Google, Yahoo or MSN (duh!).
2) your competitors could be optimizing their websites too.
3) frequent changes to the respective search engines’ ranking methods.
3) says Google - “No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google”.
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Hi Larry,
See ya ! some points I agreed with you but some are not.
I agreed with you that no SEO company can “realistically” guarantee ALL keywords ranks top 10, however, I think with only 2,000,000 listing, you and me can easily list it top 10 too like a peanut. :)
I don’t agree there is no guarantee although in real world we don’t own yahoo ,msn and google
Just like you buy unit trust which guarantee at least 8 % return per annum. As we all know how unit trust works, they invest in share market, bond etc… and yet they DON’T own or control the share market, but still they dare to give guarantee.
So in business world, there is always have “guarantee” services with the TERMS AND CONDITIONS impossed. So I think this “T” company also have other terms and conditions which we don’t know.
I also come accross an offshore “S” company which provide SEO top 3 guarantee with only USD 179.95 (lower than “T” company”) , and one of my friend sign up the service, and you guess what they did for listed top 3 in google ? The company name of my friend ! They put these as one of the keywords in the services terms and conditions..so you see, this is how business work. So to all end users, better watch out carefully what are the terms and conditions in the services agreement.
P/S : sorry for no reply in you last post when you said you come to KL. I was busy. Maybe one day we can meet at Singapore with Alvin as well. It is proud that the top 3 listing in google are all Malaysian. :)
Comment by james on May 1, 2007 at 1:03 am
LOL! All I ever tell my clients are that I’m “confident” of top rankings - I’ve never once “guaranteed” them, no matter how uncompetitive it is.
The purpose of this post is not to criticize anyone or their business model, but to inform the client to watch out for the following red flags:
- ranking or money back guarantee
- ability to rank top 10 in 2 months
- asked to provide own keywords/phrases
But if the client still insist, then I usually tell them to go ahead - you pay peanuts, you get monkeys.
Comment by Larry on May 1, 2007 at 8:05 am
james, still waiting for you to come to Singapore
Comment by Alvin on May 3, 2007 at 9:59 pm