Guaranteed Search Engine Rankings
Network Solutions is running an email marketing campaign in which they offer Search Online Marketing services to their clients. There is nothing new in their communication, except that they offer a "guarantee of top 10 rankings in major search engines."If you've done any research or reading about search engine marketing (SEM) and search engine online marketing (SOM), you have probably run across articles such as "how to choose the right SEO" or "how to pick the right SEO firm" or "dos and don'ts in SEO" etc. Most of these articles recommend using a variety of companies which offer guaranteed SEO rankings. Yet Google itself, on its help and educational pages, warns users against such companies by saying "beware of SEOs that claim to guarantee rankings."
Reasons for these warnings are simple – search marketing agencies do not control the search engines. Most of them don't even fully understand them. Search engines rank whichever sites they wish to rank and in the highly competitive keyword market for certain industries, it is very hard for smaller companies to outrank the larger ones.
What Network Solutions should guarantee is that they will use the best practices and methods that they've found effective in the past to help improve overall rankings.
Strategically speaking, focusing on one or two keywords may actually be ineffective, depending on your particular industry. Instead of spending the majority of your online marketing efforts on rankings for a couple of prestige words or phrases, spending that effort across your site writing original content on as many pages as you can and using as many combinations as possible, will result in small, incremental ranking improvements that cover many less-popular keyword search phrase combinations. Assuming your site is properly programmed for SEO, this will result in far greater traffic than is found through hot keywords that everyone is bidding and fighting for.
Don't get us wrong. At Attention Interactive we still maintain that keyword ranking is important, but the Law of Diminishing Returns tells us to be careful and supports our points above. For example, for some industries, the amount of effort required to get rankings on a hot industry keyword may be so high that it costs them resources that would be better spent on many other potential keywords. In the end, the hot keyword ranking could be entirely unattainable anyway.
It is still unclear to us how Network Solutions is surviving, charging so much for domain names when compared to GoDaddy and now coming up with "guarantees" of top 10 search engine rankings. The latest domain names they came up with (www.domainaname.us.com for example) are clever, but too expensive for the average person who's also aware of GoDaddy.com to buy. Now, through its marketing messages, Network Solutions, even if it never takes so much as one small business to the top 10 rankings itself, is setting expectations too high for small businesses and making other SEO firms do extra work explaining why this is not as easy as it seems. They are setting the bar way too high and setting up their own customers for disappointment.
From receiving-end experience on some of our web properties, we know that a large number of the search engine agencies that offer guaranteed search engine positions are spammers. They continually spam our web properties with comments, links, doorway pages, and other methods to achieve their goal. If one such doorway page gets a top position, even if only for a few days, the SEO firm fulfilled its end of the contract.
It will be interesting to see what will happen when Network Solutions gets more than 10 clients in a particular industry. How will they guarantee the results then? Now it becomes even scarier to think of the situation they are creating for themselves. They used to be a brand name and trend-setter for many things on the Internet, but now their online marketing efforts are only showing the potential to degrade their own brand.
Attention Interactive uses mutual fund disclaimers when we talk to our clients about guaranteed results on search engines. While we can demonstrate results from past performance, we do not and cannot guarantee future results. We can only guarantee top placements on search engines during pay-for-placement campaigns. Also, if you read the fine print carefully, you will notice that all major search engines have some sort of disclaimer stating that they ultimately decide which Web pages will be included in their indexes.
Your web design company should develop your web site based on search engine principles. The purpose of your site should be to generate not only exposure, but leads and sales for your business. And remember that any web design, web development, or search engine marketing firm which, during their sales pitch, is guaranteeing top SEO rankings should be looked at with more scrutiny than the others for the reasons mentioned in this article.
