Guaranteed SEO services? Why not? Isn't it just hiding?

I'll somewhat disagree and agree with that. Search engine optimization is about optimizing your position in the search results. As long as those search results get a certain amount of searches a month then the job is done. Say like 10.000 searches per month.

However you can have placement sometimes and not get traffic because what you are offering just doesn't convert well and people don't click to it. So position provided the term gets searches is the best a SEO is going to be able to get you. A SEO cannot take responsibility for all your content.

Thats totally false . A SEO does have control over what terms he goes after. I don't have to try. I always do good research and can rank in any niche provided I choose the keywords.

Did I say for all time? You are adding conditions

Come on read don't do the knee jerk reaction thing. I said nothing about guaranteeing a keyword. I said point blank that you can't guarantee for a particular keyword. Its the job of the SEO to decide what keywords to go after IN A NICHE.

Thas just hiding. there is nothing quantitative or concrete about "satisfied" and what guarantee are you going to extend to a customer that can't be satisfied. theres nothing reasonable about proposing that. Thats status quo.

There you go. Thats exactly what I am talking about and my experience is the same

yeah I was thinking of saying that because if you do your homework you can get an idea of traffic and come in with a reasonable figure below that. However I left that out because on the lower end jobs thats not something I would really want to commit to

Thats the whole point of a guarantee. If you can't keep it you send back the money or you make it up to the client. Implying that I would make a guarantee and not stand by it is kind of slanderous Jack.

Thats why you wouldn't pin all your hopes on one keyword. You would have to approach getting the traffic and placement for a number of them to achieve your goal. If you can't pick any keywords where the competition is soft then you aren't a good SEO and should hand the money back anyway. You didn't earn it. Now if you didn't read the Op and are totally lost there is no guaranteeing of a specific result with a specific keyword. Read the Op again

Thats funny I would think it would help the customer to have the cash back if you didn't meet your goal. How would that not help anyone? Again you are erroneously building in to your assumptions that the guarantee would not be honored. The nature of this competitive market is that any and everyone claims to be a SEO and the customer is asked to eat the loss when the supposed SEO can't make the grade.

Ok at this point theres no kinda slanderous . You are outright being slanderous in claiming I am not "really" making the guarantee. Why not? its really simple. hand back the money or get the client the placement for some terms you can gt them ranked for. It really doesn't make any claim at being better. its based on being able to do really good research. Good research is AVOIDING the competition not beating them and the odds are slim that all of a sudden terms will all become competitive. If you can't find keywords for your clients where he can get some traffic then you would need to quit the business.

There are SEOs already participating in this thread that will tell you there are still tons of search terms that get thousands of searches where the front page is nowhere near as iffy to get on as you seem to believe.

Let me put it to you this way. You have a customer that pays you a thousand or two a month and he come back to you and says he's leaving because he is not satisfied. Your tactics really haven't worked and you know it. Do you let him walk and tell him too bad go ahead and move on or do you say = lets try something different and I'll make it up to you. let s freeze the billing for a month or two and let me make it up.

Its called standing behind your work and the more I think about it the more I realize how really crazy it is that there is absolutely no other business where you can totally let down the client and have zero responsibility. SEO now is like the wild west. Anyone can come in, take cash, deliver no results to speak of and then claim

"SEO is a dynamic game, you're not just playing the game yourself, but you are up against other SEO companies as well as the current whims of Google."

Its a cop out. That you can't guarantee everything does not mean you cannot guarantee anything. Google isn't the stock market on Black Friday. Things do not dramatically change every week. SEO is not that mysterious. Thats a myth.

First really no need for the blatant ad in the middle of a discussion.
Second if all you do is provide backlinks you are not a SEO. Sorry you are a backlink seller.

SEOs provide more than backlinks. They provide keyword and competitive research and on page SEO. they provide the whole blueprint not just hammer in some nails. Because they have done their work its really not that risky at all because they have the research to indicate where the softness in the competition is. That softness is exactly what makes the kind of links you put up have any impact. Its hit or miss without good SEO research which is why it doesn't work for lots of people just the few that luck into it or do their own research into a soft niche making your links better than they really are.

So its not really the same thing. I don't give any guarantees for backlink building either. You don't have enough control to give any and all you are really doing when you are offering thousands of those kinds of links is running bots so of course you can't stand behind results for that.

Many of us do it in one way or another.

A common emerging trend nowadays is the results oriented SEO, you only get paid once the ranking is achieved and from there on to sustain it.

The pitch is simple: "You absorb the risk, here's the fee. If you want me to absorb all of the risk you have to pay me 4x more once the result is achieved".