Why You Should Avoid the Top 10 Guarantee in
SEO
By Karri Flatla - April 10, 2006
If you are a small
business owner shopping for an SEO expert to
optimize your website, no doubt you've been tempted by the
ominous "Top 10 Guarantee." While top ten rankings are a
worthy goal, shelling out money to an SEO that makes such
pie-in-sky claims will leave you frustrated and probably
wishing you had spent your cash on something more useful, like
snake oil.
Experienced SEO experts know
that top ten rankings (or even top twenty for that matter) do
not happen over night. There can be a period of tweaking
required depending on the requirements of your site, the
complexity of its content, and you and your SEO's willingness
to partner over the long run.
Moreover, it takes about
three to six months for applied SEO to begin impacting your
rankings in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). And even
this three to six month window is itself a gray area. No SEO
should guarantee when a web page will begin to start seeing
improved rankings for specific key phrases. As if this is not
enough to try the patience of a monk, new domains (and the
pages that inhabit them) must endure Google's much dreaded
"aging delay" which can last up to a year. During that time,
Google does not care one iota what you or your SEO do to your
site or its code. The Google algorithms simply won't permit
your pages to compete in organic search until they are deemed
to have aged like a fine wine, arguably demonstrating an
intention or purpose that goes beyond spam, your
brother-in-law's homework assignment, or just a whim on a dull
Friday night.
When your pages do get
released from Google's holding pattern and SEO efforts being
to pay off, it's tempting to get complacent about the
maintenance of other important online marketing efforts. (Why
does fame do this to people?) Anyone who has lived through the
last couple of rounds of algo updates over at Google can
attest to the monolith's rather ticklish disposition. "Here
one day, gone the next" has happened to the most savvy
marketers on the Internet. That's life in SEO. (That's also
why you should have a well-stocked marketing toolkit working
for your site at all times.)
While many of the best things
for sale do in fact come with a guarantee, the only thing your
SEO should "guarantee" is to work with your firm to uncover
key business goals and implement a strategy to help your site
move closer to achieving them. Esoteric? Perhaps. But SEO is
not an exact science—neither is business in general, despite
what the academics and Wallstreet cronies would have you
believe. Attempting to quantify and guarantee results is a
dangerous gamble for both parties.
A top notch SEO consultant
will be the behind the scenes partner that works to drive more
qualified traffic to your site than what it is currently
seeing. And therein lies the catch: qualified traffic. It's
relatively easy to achieve top ten rankings for key phrases
that no one is searching on and that none of your competitors
are optimizing for either. But that won't help your bottom
line, will it?
SEO is about alerting the
search engines to content, content your target market is
likely to be searching for when seeking information regarding
the products or services you have to offer. There are numerous
ways to do this, but a good SEO will work in an ethical
fashion with no intent to "trick" the search engines into
thinking your pages are something other than what they really
are.
Search engines may just be
mega computers in a warehouse, but they are programmed to act
like humans do on the web. Humans want to see SERPs that
relate as closely as possible to the search terms they just
typed in. Search engines thus strive to provide relevant
results to their audience. In doing so, they can also offer a
better ROI for paid advertising, ultimately protecting their
revenue streams. An SEO who doesn't understand these basic
economic principles is an SEO that probably doesn't have your
best interests in mind.
Search engine optimization
does not have to be an exercise in frustration or budget
busting. However, a savvy entrepreneur will ignore whatever
sounds too good to be true. Instead, he will seek out an SEO
practitioner who will focus on the wins that could bring long
term success rather than short term goal scoring.
Karri Flatla is a business
graduate of the University of Lethbridge and principal of
snap! virtual assistance inc., a small business consulting
firm providing business communications and online marketing
services to solo professionals. Karri also produces Outsmart,
the email newsletter for small business with big purpose.
Visit
http://www.snap-va.com for more information.
