Why The Best SEO Agency Doesn’t Offer Guaranteed results?

In many fields, the best professionals can offer guaranteed results. For instance, when you hire a web development agency, you get a sense of security that anything that’s not done right the first time will be fixed. But in the SEO field, things work differently. None of the top SEO agencies or professionals offer services that guarantee a specific result on Google. Why? Here’s a quick rundown on why even the best SEO agency won’t offer a guarantee of where your pages will rank or how long it will take to get results.

Why The Best SEO Agency Doesn’t Offer Guaranteed Results?

Unlike other fields with predictable metrics and static challenges, SEO is a field where you compete with other SEO experts in order to get to the top. As if that wasn’t enough, the competition that your SEO agency has to win has rules that change unpredictably and nobody knows that the rules have changed until the score comes out. Furthermore, in the SEO world, the best long-term techniques take time to yield results, meaning that an SEO agency that offers a guarantee might have to resort to undesirable black-hat tactics that might boost your rank, but won’t keep your page at the top.

Finally, SEO is the means to an end. As a result, while page rank is a useful metric to track, the number you actually want to increase is usually either leads, conversions, or sales, which can be hindered or confused by an inflated page rank without a holistic SEO strategy.

Google Says You Can’t Guarantee SEO Results

In Google’s beginner SEO documentation, the search engine giant warns against guaranteed results. “If they guarantee you that their changes will give you first place in search results, find someone else,” Google says. In this instance, Google knows its stuff. Google is continually updating its algorithms behind the scenes, attempting to thwart dodgy  SEO practices while preserving quality content at the top of the rankings. This algorithm churn ensures that pages that “cheat” their way to the top don’t remain there forever, while pages that focus on things that readers actually want, tend to go up in rank over time.

SEO professionals understand this. In other words, a strategy that works this month might not work the same way next month. That’s fine. Rather than being a fire-and-forget task, SEO is an ongoing practice that requires constant maintenance and evolving techniques to keep your page above the competition.

You Can’t Predict The Competition

The rules of the contest are constantly changing, but that’s only half of the story. The other top websites in your niche likely have an SEO agency of their own, and they’ll be working hard to get their page up above yours in the search engine rankings. This means even the best SEO agency can’t maintain its place at the top forever.

Competitors are an unknown quality. Sometimes, your competition is futile in their SEO efforts. Other times, they utilize a flawless combination of tried-and-true tactics and a lucky viral push that gets thousands of social media users talking about their site. However, over time, a good SEO agency will outperform a mediocre one, but over a short period of weeks or months, it’s impossible to guarantee.

Google’s Algorithms Are Long Term

Google’s end goal is to deliver each user useful content that actually meets their search query. To accomplish this, they use a variety of metrics to attempt to track how useful content is, including things like how long users spend on each page, how reputable a page seems based on who links to it and where, and how responsive and accessible your site is to visitors.

However, these metrics take time to build. While there are metrics that can be built faster, these usually involve tricking Google’s algorithms into thinking your site is good in ways that actually reduce its quality for legitimate visitors.

The best SEO agencies understand this. So instead of focusing on short-term results, they build a web experience that’s accessible and welcoming to both real visitors and the Google algorithms. This means that, as Google patches its algorithms to remove exploitative strategies, sites that remain useful and helpful to visitors will slowly climb, while sites that cheat their way to the top will fall.

SEO is a Means, Not An End

Your search engine ranking is important, but only because of the traffic it generates. In fact, in a lot of cases, switching your SEO strategy to reduce your rank on the search engine and instead target higher-quality customers will make your business more money. You want good leads that turn into conversions, not a bunch of page loads that don’t result in sales or deals.

Accordingly, the best SEO agencies will work with you to track your lead generation, conversion rates, and other money-making metrics in addition to your page rank, helping to ensure that your search engine optimization strategies are working for you and not the other way around.

 

Why Guaranteed SEO Results Are A Red Flag?

SEO agencies will work with you to improve your page rank over time, but the best SEO agencies won’t offer a guarantee. Instead, they’ll give you a rough timeline on how long it’ll take to get results and a report about what they think the competition looks like when your SEO efforts start. Both of these estimates can change dramatically over time, as new websites might appear in your niche, or Google’s update cycles might happen sooner or later than expected.

This means that while your SEO agency won’t guarantee you a place on the front page of Google within a set timeframe, they’ll still work their hardest to give your business a measurable bump to traffic, lead generation, and conversions that will make their services more than worth it.

Be patient, however, these things take time. As long as you’re building a useful page for your customers, the algorithm will help your page’s search engine ranking creep up over time. You just can’t guarantee that it’ll happen quickly.

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