Image credit: Scaredofbabies

There’s nothing I hate hearing or reading more about than “guaranteed page one results”, or worse, “guaranteed position 1 results” from web marketing and search engine optimisation companies.

They guarantee that they’ll get your business page 1 results and that if they DON’T get you page 1 results, they’ll work for free!

Wow!

I can’t lose! Right?

Wrong.

The first thing you should be asking your snake oil salesperson is, “do you have a conscience?”. Then walk away. Companies that guarantee you page 1 results are manipulating you. You don’t want to do business with a company who is willing to manipulate you into buying from them.

Thankfully, if you search for “guaranteed page 1 results” Google will return this as its page 1, position 1 result, specifically warning customers NOT to choose SEO’s that guarantee results (full Google article here).

So why are guaranteed page 1 results a scam?

Some industries, terms or phrases are simply higher competition than others in search engine marketing. Much like in real life, not everyone can be Paris Hilton or Bill Gates.

If a publicist approached you and promised to make you the new Brad Pitt you’d be skeptical, because only a lucky and super dedicated few reach such a level in their career, business or whatever pursuit they’re engaged in.

The same is true in Google, and its why guaranteeing results is manipulative.

Lets look at an example.

The phrase, “weight loss solutions” is pretty close to what I call a “Brad Pitt” term in Google.

Because the phrase has:

1. Boat loads of “commercial intent”,
2. Specificity (but it could have more)
3. Emotion (solution to a personally troubling problem)
4. Easily shipped products
5. Millions of customers
6. and more…

There is a LOT, a LOT of competition. Everyone wants to rank well for weight loss products. There are millions of web pages online trying to do so. Because of this, maybe your second question to that web marketing company should be “can you rank me on page 1 for weight loss products?”.

See their breathing quicken and cheeks turn red. They know they’ve been caught out.

Just like this company. They guaranteed top 10 to 20 results (page 1 and page 2), but they didn’t pull through for their clients, and then didn’t agree to refund their money when they didn’t receive exactly what was promised.

What Can Web Marketers Guarantee?

Photo credit: OUCHcharley

Web marketers cannot guarantee you any organic search results in Google or any major search engine. Why?

Because we don’t live in a vacuum for one. There’s other search engine marketers out there trying to rank for the very same term you are. They may have:

• Been around longer than you,
• Have a bigger budget than you,
• Have larger more authoritative websites than you,
• Have links from other websites you cannot get,
• Have better web marketers than you do,
• And any other number of variables.

Google’s ranking algorithm changes all the time. For all we know, tomorrow Google will announce that backlinks from domains with fewer than 100 indexed web pages will no longer count,  throwing existing ranking into chaos. Similar changes have happened before!

The above is an extreme example, but SEO is not a science where input “A” always guarantees output “B”.

SEO is marketers from one business changing or adding to a website to rank higher in another businesses (Google’s/Yahoo’s/Bing’s) search engine.

No laws of nature like gravity and fluid dynamics exist which remain constant.

The Lesson?

Whatever you do, if you’re approached by any kind of internet marketer, web marketing expert or SEO saying that they guarantee to rank you on page 1 Google, or any major search engine, run.

If you’re approached by an SEO telling you they’ll do their best, and that you might not see ANY results for months, you might just have a legitimate businessperson on your doorstep.