SEO: The myth of the number one ranking pitch

Probably a week doesn’t go by where I don’t get some sort of spammy email from a dubious online marketing or search engine optimization company promoting their virtues. As you’d expect from such companies, 90% of them offer – neigh” guarantee” – a top #1 ranking for any keywords you want. Considering these companies are resorting to spam, you can put about as much faith in their abilities as you can in collecting that million dollar bank check from that “esteemed” man from Nigeria.

What’s even more annoying is to see the “slightly” more reputable SEO companies advertising just about the same thing through Google Adwords. “Top #1 Ranking – Gauranteed!” and so on. Most of these incredulous claims come from your bottom tier SEO companies, because to be frank, no reputable SEO firm would ever make this sort of claim.

The hard facts of SEO

Any search engine optimization company or consultant with a shred of competence or integrity will never, ever, guarantee a number one ranking, let alone a position in the top 5. For starters, the claim itself has no valid business logic. Getting your site ranked for a number one position in the search engine rankings means very little by itself. There are a multitude of other factors. Where are your visitors arriving, are they converting? Generating leads? Good SEO by itself is just one of the many elements in a successful online marketing strategy. You need to convert those customers, retain them and keep your client base expanding.

Why no reputable SEO company will make the #1 pitch

As much as us SEO folk loathe to admit it, there is no bible of SEO. Sure, there are a whole slew of established baselines which are generally accepted by the industry as a whole. Most of them are not strictly in the realm of search engine optimization. Correct XHTML markup, lean pages, fast load times, relevant content themes and site usability are all elements of SEO, but their also critical to a web site’s success in so many other areas. For very obvious reasons, Google, Yahoo and MSN will never reveal their “secret sauce” to search engine rankings, and so SEO is as much as a game of catch up as it is a game of implementing best practice standards.

For that very reason, reputable SEO firms will never guarantee a number one spot. Sure, we’ll all tell you we can “guarantee” increased traffic from search engines. It’d be preposterous to claim we couldn’t, that would defeat the point of our specialization. Improving you sites natural/organic search engine traffic isn’t some wild claim, in fact it’s very achievable and there are many solid SEO companies (including us) that can do just that. SEO is a  process that works with your site’s evolutionary process. It is neither a bolt on service nor should it be the core foundation of your online strategy. Instead it is just one of the many online “tools” of marketing and traffic generation that can increase your exposure and potential business revenue.

Unfortunately, all it takes is a few bad apples, and many clients come to us expecting such wild claims. We will never guarantee a number one ranking, instead we will guarantee a slow, steady, improvement in organic visitors to your website. If you’re approached by an SEO company that makes such “no #1” claims, run away, as far as you can.