Should SEO's offer money back guarantees?

[matted]

When you hire an SEO, isn't your goal to minimally be on the first page? So in other words, you are hiring someone because they are telling you they can achieve that goal. I wish more would put their money where their mouth is.

That said, SEO is crazy hard. but the SEO's know this.

I wish I could find an SEO that delivered what they swear they can.

[catchingsmoke]

exactly, matted that is why this is something that the industry should at least start moving towards, performance based results we all know are an issue because it means the SEO bankrolling the campaign, but if you actually believe you can do what you promise then why not a money back guarantee.

[pgaming]

SEO as you know catchingsmoke is vague and ever changing discipline. I would compare it to weather forecasting a month in advance. Can one actually guarantee 30 days from now it will be sunny and warm where I live. Will I be able to hold the weather forecaster accountable or better would any forecaster offer guarantee.

I would not offer a guarantee rather offer a better performing site. Surf the web and it becomes abundantly clear. Many website owners are totally oblivious to the two prong approach for producing a successful website; the website itself and the SEO aspect. The two IMO are absolutes if the client is keen on a performing website.

greek39

[catchingsmoke]

I believe its more a matter of principle, if you guarantee top ten rankings for a keyword and it drops to the second page for 2 days before you get it back up no client will worry however if you promise to get them there, take there money and never acheive that then you should give that person there money back dont you agree?

[pgaming]

I believe its more a matter of principle, if you guarantee top ten rankings for a keyword and it drops to the second page for 2 days before you get it back up no client will worry however if you promise to get them there, take there money and never acheive that then you should give that person there money back dont you agree?

No because what you are guaranteeing is unreasonable and unwise to begin with. Better to offer a better performing website and hope for the best. Have the client pay for it then maybe a guarantee is possible if they are not happy.

greek39

[Murton]

I think you are totally wrong and don't agree.

If it says on GOOGLE's page that it is "unethical" to guarantee results and that Google do not recommend going with that company at all then who do you believe?

[Simmo!]

Eiether way, if it was any sort of competitive keyword in this industry, I'd always have a niggling feeling that the SEO company might have used gray-hat, black-hat or spammy link-building methods to get me where they promised. Once you get a Google penalty it's a lottery as to whether you can ever recover. Unless the SEO company have a long and established track record within this industry, it's too risky IMO. Plus, the added pressure to perform (or lose the money) only adds to the risk that they might resort to those methods.

[catchingsmoke]

they may say that's it's unethical, but I personally cannot subscribe to that train of thought as far as I'm concerned saying that returning somebodies money for not completing a task is unethical is absolutely ludicrous, all it does is force companies to quote concervatively. I think if a company implies that they can do something and doesn't it is far more unethical to take somebodies money on a job that you don't believe you can complete.

And generally speaking at least in our case we charge to maintain rankings once they're in place so surely black hat methods would just be shooting ourselves in the foot.

Google actually states that a company that promises to get you to any posisition is unethical not just one that places a money back guarantee on the two, so which one is the real villain the man who returns your cash or the SEO who implies that you will get something knowing that they dont have to deliver but can still walk away with your money..... hmmmm...... I wonder, the real question is what do the people parting with their hard earned cash think. And as far as Murtons opinion goes it is more than a little biased with you yourself being an SEO provider who doesn't offer a guarantee....

[cmdenny]

Hi Catching Smoke, I'm not so sure as to your alluded claim about SEO's not running affiliate sites as they don't all have good comprehension of marketing.

I think by starting a thread specifically about your service and your USP offer you have demonstrated a pretty good understanding of PR!

Interesting thread. When we last used an SEO firm (iSpy Search) we didn't have any guarantees, but did have a few face to face consultations, and the benefit of dealing with an established firm based in registered offices, which gave us an expected reassurance of some service level.

[catchingsmoke]

lol, there is more to affiliate sites than PR and SEO though and generally I thought the GPWA may find this an appropriate thread for discussion and like you said it was interesting as a theory, most SEO firms are willing to give face to face consultations although sometimes that isn't applicable it obviously isn't always viable to fly to america for example depending on where you source your SEO. And the thread wasn't specifically about my service it's just something that happens to coincide with it.

But still glad you're finding it interesting I have a feeling this one might be a longer lasting debate than I expected and take much more maintainance time that I origionally planned.

[ck8795]

cathingsmoke - I think a good question to ask you is if you give a guarantee, how does that guarantee apply to more then 300+ google algo changes throughout the course of a year. What will you do then?

Murtons opinion goes it is more than a little biased with you yourself being an SEO provider who doesn't offer a guarantee....

I dont think hes the only one being biased here. I think this thread is geared towards self promotion.

[catchingsmoke]

well as you can gather on non competetive terms this is never really an issue so there there isn't a worry (obviously that doesn't apply to gambling, that's more for smaller localised clients) when it comes to gambling we try to cover all the bases so that when algorithms do change we don't suffer, How it works in this niche is that we value each keyword individually and offer a money back guarantee on each one so as not to have to give massive refunds if one term dips, which is reasonable. And when I say each term that doesn't mean that a long tail will have equal value to a hollywood term. In a lot of cases we will guaratee all the terms as a package, but understandably in some niches that is simply not viable in case one term bobbles.

Also if you're refering to long term plans how we work things is that we charge x fee to get you there in a certain time frame and the guarantee is on that, there after we drop the fee (usually to between half and two thirds of the origional monthly fee) to maintain the placements and the guarantee is then for a monthly basis to maintain the positioning, if you dropped out for say 3 days we would work that month for free untill you returned to your promised placement or we would refund all the money if that's what the client really wanted, but from experience most clients would rather we put there placement back and then carry on as normal.

In doing this we have yet to have a problem as whilst on occasion some terms have bobbled (never by much) most clients are happy with how we handle things.

Hope that explains how we can offer the guarantee without resorting to unsavoury methods Kaus.

And as regards this thread being geared towards self promotion it wasn't origionally intended that way it just seems to have developed that way through perhaps my defensive nature and many peoples sceptisms. I was generally interested in what people thought to see if i's a marketing method which is worth my continued persuits.

[ck8795]

well as you can gather on non competetive terms this is never really an issue so there there isn't a worry (obviously that doesn't apply to gambling, that's more for smaller localised clients) when it comes to gambling we try to cover all the bases so that when algorithms do change we don't suffer, How it works in this niche is that we value each keyword individually and offer a money back guarantee on each one so as not to have to give massive refunds if one term dips, which is reasonable. And when I say each term that doesn't mean that a long tail will have equal value to a hollywood term. In a lot of cases we will guaratee all the terms as a package, but understandably in some niches that is simply not viable in case one term bobbles.

Lets use a recent example then shall we - the big May day update - if that was a client who lost all their longtail rankings - which accounts for most people's traffic how would you have handled it. If your working with someone who gets it but doesnt get it and you offered a money back guarantee dont you think they'd be slamming your inbox going wtf is going on - and when nothing changes they are asking for their money back.

I don't think you can offer a guarantee for something that is out of your control. I do think you should have something in your contract stating your not using shady practices etc so your held accountable.

btw - this is just something to think about because you also need to protect you. Something out of your control could cause a client to panic and want their money back and you loose for services rendered.

Before someone else says well what about the client. People shouldn't hire someone because they seen an amazing post on a forum that seems like a great deal. That $199 seo package you see is likely nonsense. If someone had the magic formula do you honestly think they would be selling it for $199 or do you think they'd be banking on it as their personal cash cow.

Ask around before you hire someone, get referrals from people you know, look at examples, ask for references, etc etc.

[catchingsmoke]

Well then the answer is pretty simple, I'd refund the money, we do have money allocated and put aside for such occasions, personally I would ask them to wait for a small amount of time whilst we try to recover there rankings if we couldn't we'd refund the money it's as simple as that. The way having a guarantee has worked for me so far has been that I've drummed up a lot of new business, now if I have to refund say 10-20% of that I'm still a little bit better off than I was before because of the profit margins that we work on. So refunding a client for lack of success is not an issue that I'm particularly worries about. I never take on a job that I dont feel my firm can do and I quote conservatively with rankings so as not to have too many problems. And yes big updates can be scary, but equally any SEO firm could've lost clients in that scenario and having to pay back those ones who don't understand what's happened and it will take time to be fixed wont be that drastically worse than loosing them in the 1st place, not really, if you can't afford to pay a client back, odds are you can't afford to lose them anyway so your buggered regardless.

I agree about those sorts of thread that you see on Digital Point and such posting magical solutions which are garbage and we deal with the long term.

Although maybe adding a clause about having more time to recouperate from a major update might be worth looking into. And that is actually the sort of sugestions that I was hoping to get out of this thread when I started it, so thanks Kaus for the handy advice. Do you have any idea how you would word that into a money back guarantee? The issue I think with that would be defining a major update would it not?

[igamingforums]

I think SEO's can guarantee increase of backlinks but to guarantee ranking it's a bit un-realistic

[jctroy440]

First of all, if you have enough know how to build a web site you should be able to do your own SEO. It's not that tough

Secondly if you do hire a SEO then he/she should be familiar with portal gambling sites. (not likely) The catch22 is, if they are familiar, they probably have one of their own. If they do, don't use them. They are not going to give up the secrets they have learned.

Google and the other engines have enough tools and gadgets to confuse Einstein. Do your own work, get your own results.

I used to run top fuelers. Every now and then a new guy woud ask me to tune his digger for him. Do you really think I'm going to tell him the new dodad I learned to pick up a few extra hundreths? HEHEHE not on your life.

You know what my secret is??.............................................. ..........

[catchingsmoke]

First of all, if you have enough know how to build a web site you should be able to do your own SEO. It's not that tough.

You say that, but a lot of affiliates dont build there websites and SEO is a completely different skill set.