“We’ll make your company the top result on Google, guaranteed.”

 

This kind of statement would be great to hear at first glance. And why not? It only stands to reason that you’d want to go with someone giving you their word that they can get you specific results. If you hire a service, you’d want to be reassured of the exact results you’d get. So why doesn’t Mid America Web do this?

The simple answer, to put it bluntly, is that it would be a lie.

While there are certainly many ways to make sure your site is optimized for search engines,  directly controlling the rankings means manipulating results – and that means working against the best interests of any reputable search engine. Google itself has clearly stated their intent:

 

“No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google.”

 

Beware of SEOs that claim to guarantee rankings, allege a “special relationship” with Google, or advertise a “priority submit” to Google. There is no priority submit for Google. In fact, the only way to submit a site to Google directly is through our Add URL page or by submitting a Sitemap and you can do this yourself at no cost whatsoever.”

While this may initially seem disappointing, this is a very good thing! It helps ensure a level playing field in many ways. After all, if there were a secret code to become the first result for a specific search, then the engine has failed to provide you with the best service it can. Instead of the most relevant or helpful link, it’d only boil down to who managed to get there first, or manipulated these algorithms the most.

SEO is the practice of working alongside these engines ethically, becoming much easier to locate and provide helpful information. It’s difficult to imagine a scenario in which this wouldn’t have a drastically positive effect on your own ranking. Just because you can’t force Google to do anything, doesn’t mean you can’t influence it by being as helpful and relevant as possible. After all, there’s not much need to trick the system into finding you, when you’re what it’s looking for in the first place.

As the Internet becomes increasingly important to our businesses and daily lives, “SEO” has begun to pop up quite often – most notably your junk mail and spam folder. And it’s not uncommon to see these same messages make these guarantees. Luckily for Internet users, however, there’s no way to truly follow through on these claims.

SEO Is Not A Short-Term Strategy

It doesn’t matter what type of SEO methods are being used or how ethical a strategy is; it is impossible to get extremely high rankings in the search results within a brief period of time.  SEO companies that promise rankings are also claiming they can do it quickly. This is entirely unrealistic because it takes time to get results from SEO efforts.

The best SEO companies know SEO takes a good amount of time to see results. Sometimes SEO strategies need to undergo several tweaks before results start to trickle in. It can take months before any traffic begins to come in. 

No One Strategy Works For All Sites

An SEO firm can’t guarantee that a particular strategy will work for their clients’ plumbing websites.  This is because different websites have different goals, and the branding can be other. If one single strategy worked every single time, then making guaranteed search engine rankings may very well be possible. In reality, this is far from being the case.