The SEO industry has undergone a lot of evolution from 1996 through to this day. To find out what an SEO does, check this article. “Guaranteed rankings and traffic” was a popular catchphrase to lure in gullible clients, for many an SEO company in the past. However, in today’s world, these promises and guarantees just don’t hold good. If at all an SEO promises this, they are still looking for ‘gullible’ clients.

However, things have changed for the better, and today most of the SEO providers don’t give any sort of ‘guarantee’ to it’s clients. This is because page rankings are inherently unstable. Here is a simple example for you. Try performing a Google search on any keyword from your home PC. Now drive, say about 3 hours, and then try the same keyword search from an internet kiosk. You would never find the same ordering of results. Also, if you would log into your google account and then do the search, you would get a personalised result. Thus, obtaining a high ranking at any point of time does not give any guarantee about the future, or even the present.

Also, rankings do not equal traffic. In fact, to a knowledgable client, page ranking simply doesn’t matter. The metric should always be traffic. If search traffic is on the rise, it means the SEO is doing their job. However, there is another school of thinking which believes that ‘conversions’ should be the metric; whether or not the campaign involves on-site conversion optimization. They claim that it simply doesn’t matter whether the client gets a 1000 visitors a day or 100. All that matters is that they get 100 sales instead of 10. The traffic-quality thus becomes an important factor. Obviously, if the quality rises, the quantity also follows.

Search Engine Rankings are ultimately a competition; a competition where:

• We do not know all of the rules.
• We do not know all of the competitors.
• Our competitors may not follow rules, even those that are stated.

Thus, providing a guarantee to something which has such an unsure nature, would be an unethical means of doing business. What SEO’s can do is provide guarantees that the web-site would have increase in traffic. They may even promise to improve the traffic by say, 10, 20 or 30 percent based on their studies, but never to get the website into the first page of search results. The only means by which an SEO could do this is by picking keywords which are non-competitive. Thus, the bottom line is that ‘NO ONE CAN GUARANTEE #1 RANKING ON GOOGLE’. That’s what makes trying all the more fun!

Your’s truly,
An honest trier!

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