SEO Guarantee?

I work for a company that is just starting to branch into offering search engine optimization. I am curious to know if it is standard practice to offer a guarantee on the service. Considering the fact that no matter what you do, you may not improve a customers ranking, is it customary to make them aware that it is not always possible to acheive their desired rank? Or is it just a matter of going back to their site and just keep trying new things until something works? Any help would be greatly appreciated here.

Seth

You can't guarantee results. You do not work at the search engines and it's not under your sphere of influence. What you can guarantee is that you'll give some or all of their jack back if you do not hit specified ranking or traffic goals. There is nothing wrong or unique to this industry about that.

Some of my competitors have been doing this for quite sometime. :-P


There is a lot more to SEO than just "tweaking the code and changing the words." This only works when you are in trivial competition. When you are in anything greater then the off-page strategies become increasingly important.

I would never make a promise a client anything. I charge for each hour I work, nothing more and nothing less. I can not promise a spesific ranking, but give an evaluation on how and when I expect the rank to change.

Thanks for the responses. So would it be a good idea to have a disclaimer or something like that which states that results are not guaranteed? Does anyone know of any lawsuits or legal action stemming from lack of results? These questions may sound strange, but I just want to be completely sure of what we are jumping into. Once again, thanks in advance for the help.

Seth

I think such marketing isn't even legal in most European countries or it has very severe legal restrictions.



Don't promise anything that you can't do, and state it extremely clearly in all your marketing material, conversations with client, in contract etc.




Yes. It happens every now and then especially if the company does something unethical and a whole bunch of clients gets banned. Just do some searching on these forums or go to Google.

Exactly! I just answered someone about this.
Careful diagnoses of the website is absolutely necessary before giving any kind of promises.
For instance a dynamic site with multiple variables in the url string will be tougher and for some practically impossible, no matter how many keywords you throw in the page or meta area.

As for a guarantee... people are becoming wary of any site stating this... I wouldn't do it

If you cannot at least guarantee a better seach engine ranking then they already have then your services have no value.

I am sorry but this doesn't make sense.

If I go to a stockbroker and give him $1.000.000 to invest for me, he do a very good job but because of acts of terrorisms I lose $120.000. Now I lost money and it has nothing to do with the value of the service provided. It is the same with SEO.

Very good point. No matter what we do, sometimes there are just things out of our control. That is why I posted this question in the first place. In SEO, you just can't be assured of getting a better ranking. If ou know what you are doing, then yes, you should improve, but that is not always the case. Am I correct?

Yes.
SEO is about probabilities. SEO just enhances the probability of achieving high / better rankings in search engines.

Like with everything, there is always a risk that something goes the wrong way (google glitch, shared ip ban etc) despite you do everything right. A good SEO can achieve a better rankings, but he/she should acknowledge that there is no way to guarantee it and be honest to client about that.

IMO the guarantee stuff is pretty much the "american way". In EU, there is no specific need for such "marketing gimmick" due to tight legislation in b2b/b2c-trade. If the service provided doesn't match the marketing talk / contract, a refund (20-80%) is self-evident to all parties.