Many clients call us and ask for a guarantee that their website will rank number one in search results. Such a client’s desire to insure themselves is, of course, understandable. If you’re paying for a sofa, naturally you expect to get a sofa.

Why, if you order SEO promotion services, you may not get your website to the top of search results for your targeted keywords? Is it even worth buying this elusive SEO? I’d like to get to the bottom of this.

First. Let’s start with the most important thing. When buying a sofa, two people are involved: the seller and the buyer. The seller simply hands over the item.

However, when promoting a website, three parties are involved: the web studio, the client, and the search engine. The search engine can change its ranking criteria at any time, without warning. We can’t directly access the search engine’s database to rearrange the websites. Therefore, if the search engine changes its ranking criteria, we can only adapt to the new situation.

SEO promotion is a technical setup of a website to meet the search engine’s requirements. Currently, it also involves marketing analysis and user experience analysis. To make a website not only easily findable, but also easy to navigate and easy to purchase from, we often need to not only optimize the technical aspects, but also significantly change the website’s structure and repackage the client’s business. This is a different scope of work and costs.

We’ve had cases where clients didn’t want to spend money on developing their website and only promoted it. Our efforts helped the website rank high, but it didn’t attract clients because the website was inconvenient or unclear. The search engines track this and the website’s ranking is lowered again. How can we give a guarantee with a limited budget?

Second. If you enter a search query on two different computers and compare the results, they will differ. This is called personalized search results. Search engines adjust their results to a person’s interests and show higher the website that they visit more often. The question arises, how to track the work of an SEO optimizer? Your website is on the 8th place, but the contractors send you a report saying it’s on the 5th place.

This issue is resolved by third-party services. For example, we use one that automatically collects official positions.

Third. The position of a website for a specific query can change several times within a month. Therefore, one report at the end of the month does not show the entire picture. This is not the most terrifying problem, as positions can be tracked daily. However, this also costs money.

So, the risks that a web studio bears are enormous. They need to redo your website, repackage your business, and set up all the optimization at their own expense — significant investments of money and time in your business. Knowing all this, I decided to clarify who gives guarantees and turned to several studios.

Some told me straight away that guarantees are not applicable to my website because it’s raw. And that’s true, I deliberately chose a website on its knees. They offered me additional work worth around 100,000 rubles to give guarantees even for website applications.

Others told me that they only give guarantees to large companies. They seemed to bring up «Svyaznoy» as an example and asked if our company was a large company too. Here, «guarantees» are simply a marketing hook to get you to call.

The third ones guarantee payment based on positions. That is, if your website is in the top, you pay, and if not, you don’t. With one small condition. You pay extra for positions, an additional 40,000 rubles, but this doesn’t obligate you to anything.

There are indeed proposals with guarantees, but studios take such projects threefold (or more) to ensure they don’t lose money. Either the word «guarantee» is just a marketing ploy because many are tired of wasting money.

What can I say, we also use the word «guarantee» in our proposal.

We give a guarantee for the completion of the entire technical task.

We give a guarantee that everything will be done within the specified timeframe.

We can even give a guarantee that website visibility will increase by a certain percentage. For example, currently 6% of requests are in the top 10, and after six months, it will be 20%. However, it’s impossible to predict exactly when a website will rank high for a specific query.

In some commercial proposals from web studios, you can see predictions for getting to the top. They write numbers opposite the search query, for example, 7-12 months. Because you can’t guess exactly.

In conclusion, I would recommend not searching for SEO with a guarantee of getting your site to the top positions or even with a guarantee of leads, because it’s very expensive and most likely won’t be profitable for you. It’s perfectly fine to find a responsible performer who already has a lot of experience and good results in their portfolio.