Seo And Money Back Guarantee Options

[JJL]

When I am selling SEO, clients always ask for position guarantee. If there is no guarantee, they will be hesistated. We all know that rankings are very dynamic, and you can see you rank no.1 today, and tomorrow go to 21, and 2 days later, you are in No.2!

So, what should I do?

If I am saying my SEO's purpose is for increasing your website traffic, high ranking but no traffic is not useful to you. clients will ask how many % increase in traffic I can expect? What if the % increase is under the expectation? Any Money back guarantee?

It is a big problem. How do you sell your SEO? measured by traffic or no. of top 10 positions?

If you are selling traffic, how do you measure result and how do you establish a baseline?

[Martin C]

I would invest 5-10 minutes to explain to a potential client why guarantees are not what they seem. It is easy to rank well for an uncompetitive term, you could almost guarantee it (IMG:style_emoticons/default/giggle.gif) , but even then it is a little dishonest as it is giving a guarantee to something that is worthless as it implies it is worth having.

Although it is not really about rankings but traffic, and more specifically the quality of that traffic, it can be a case of flogging a dead horse trying to get that point across to potential clients, some get it, others seem to get it but don't and others just never get it. Hopefully time sorts things out, i.e. they may not get it but once everything is done and dusted they are happy with the results.

It is my view that you can quite quickly, with a little bit of analysis, estimate where you would expect a website to roughly rank in a given period of time. You can take a look at the current competition and see if they are optimised, often they are not, and therefore you can be fairly confident that you can say, and providing nothing in the SE world changes significantly, if we do x, y & z and given y time we should be able to appear around about the n position for various quality search phrases. However, you do have to put a number of caveats in place.

The point to remember is that getting there takes time and effort, so if you are going to be judged/paid on performance you will have to take all the risk and you will also have to make sure that you are going to get paid for your efforts if you do achieve the goals and make sure that they are going to follow all your advice.

I always take the view that it is better to be upfront and temper peoples unrealistic expectations. I find that most of the time I can explain it in a way that gives them the confidence that I know what I'm talking about and for those that don't I don't really want to work with them. It is useful to relate the Internet to a city, people don't expect to open a shop and within a few days appear on the most prestigious retail street rubbing shoulders with well established brands and outlets, in that respect it is a myth that the Internet is a level playing field.

[adybee]

Put it this way if a client has 1k traffic per year for a particular keyword and this has a conversion rate of 3% ( 30 leads / sales per year) and an average order value of £50 he will have sales of £1500 per year from that particluar KW.

If you can increase the quality traffic to his site to 1.5K per year per KW (and conversion remins at 3%) he will have sales of £2250. A growth in sales of £750. Multiply this by a 10 KW campaign and you've got extra sales to the value of £7500 per year.

What's more important to your client - being number 1 in G or making £7500 more? (IMG:style_emoticons/default/clapping.gif)

[JJL]

thanks. but the problem is:

1. How can you persuade them to trust you that you can improve their website traffic before they sign up?

2. Even though they trust you, but what % of improvement means successful project? You may think that a 1% improvement is improvement, and project is successful. Client may say without 100% increase in traffic, it is a failure.

3. and also clients may doubt if you can really improve their website traffic by a certain %. E.g. If you tell them you can improve their traffic by 20%, they will ask "If you can't at the end, what happens? will you refund? " ot "do you provide any website traffic increment guarantee?"

Do you experience these kind of questions? What's your solution? Pls. advise.

[torka]

First off, IMHO effective optimization is not about increasing traffic, any more than it's about increasing rankings. It's actually pretty easy to increase traffic, as long as nobody cares whether that traffic ever converts into sales. However, most clients are smart enough to eventually figure out that all they're getting are "visitors" but no sales. When that happens, they're bound to be unhappy. They may feel that they've been "ripped off" or that you haven't provided a service of value, and that can lead to requests for refunds.

On the other hand, when you can tie your efforts directly to more money in their pocket — particularly when the additional revenue more than offsets your fee — there's a much better chance they're going to be happy with the work you've done.

1. By showing them the results from other websites you've worked on where you've achieved gains in useful traffic. If you don't have any such results to show, go to work on your own website(s) and see what you can do to increase targeted traffic there. You'll gain valuable experience in building targeted traffic (if one has no results to show already, it's possible one could use some practice in this area)... and you'll actually get more targeted traffic, which can eventually lead to more revenue for you. Something of a win-win proposition. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

2. Don't project any specific percent, IMO. The exact amount of increase is dependent on factors that are largely outside of your control. Short of going to people's homes and places of business and forcing them to enter your client's URL in their browser, you can't force people to visit their site. You can only persuade. Never promise a result unless you're sure you can attain that result.

As you gain more experience, you may find that you can give customers a range of "typical" improvements or a minimum figure to expect. Something along the lines of "While we cannot guarantee specific results, our customers typically see increases in their web site traffic of between 20% and 50% (or 'increases of at least 15%' or whatever) as a direct result of our site optimization and link building services." That sort of thing. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

3. Depends on what your guarantee is. If you guarantee you'll refund their money if you don't achieve a result, and you don't achieve that result, then you owe them a refund. You can designate some amounts as non-refundable (either a hard-dollar amount or on a percentage-of-completion basis) to ensure you don't end up doing the whole job for free... or worse yet, going into the hole paying someone else out of pocket for subcontract services.

Whatever your guarantee is and whatever refund policy you have needs to be spelled out as part of the agreement you and your client sign before you start work. It's primarily up to you to decide what terms you want to offer when it comes to guarantee / refunds.

If the client balks at your terms, you can choose to alter them for that client, or you can tell the client those are your terms and they can take it or leave it. That's part of the negotiation process and its entirely up to you.

But if it were me, and I had a potential client who was pressuring me to give him a money-back guarantee on something where I know I have limited to no control over the outcome, I'd tell that prospect to take a hike. YMMV, of course.

My (IMG:style_emoticons/default/penny.gif)

--Torka (IMG:style_emoticons/default/mf_prop.gif)

[Martin C]

1. By showing them the results from other websites you've worked on where you've achieved gains in useful traffic.

I personally think you should be careful in disclosing what other website have been optimised for as in my view that information should remain confidential. Most potential clients should after all respect that as they probably don't want other people to know what they have themselves been optimised for.

What I am happy to do is provide references to show that people I have worked with have been satisfied with the results/service.

I agree with Torka that it is not about rankings or traffic per se but volume of quality traffic. Although it should all be about conversions, that is a tricky one as an SEO consultant can do everything right and attract the required volume and right quality of traffic to a website, but once there, the product/service being offered might fail to convert because of other non-SEO reasons. Therefore be careful if are going to base your fee on performance that you pick the correct metrics to be judged on.

This post has been edited by Martin C: Jun 14 2007, 11:51 AM

[torka]

I personally think you should be careful in disclosing what other website have been optimised for as in my view that information should remain confidential.

Absolutely! You should never disclose any identifiable information without permission of the client. Sorry I didn't make that clear in my reply. Good catch, Martin!

--Torka (IMG:style_emoticons/default/mf_prop.gif)

[Darryl Payne]

First of all, clients should run from any SEO firm that will guarantee position or traffic. Unless they have a working crystal ball, or a time machine, they simply can not guarantee any results. What most firms do offer is a money back guarantee if they don't get you ranked for a seldom searched term. A firm that guarantees a certain position is like a bad used car salesman...you really can't trust them.

Secondly, you should instill trust in your clients from the start. Be professional, courteous, and honest and it will go much further than a guarantee. Gain their trust and then grow their business. They will tell their friends. My entire business started with two good friends with two separate businesses. I let my reputation from word of mouth and my online presence bring in the work.

[SearchRank]

It is very rare anymore that we get potential clients demanding money-back guarantees regarding traffic or positioning. You might want to revisit your sales copy. Does your sales copy promise higher rankings and increased traffic or rather does it talk about improved search visibility, improvement in not only quantity but quality of traffic? Does it talk about improving ROI? How about the web site user experience itself?

In other words if the majority of your sales leads are requesting the old "money back guarantee" option, you might want to revisit your web site to see if you can makes some changes that will attract a different crowd.

Besides your sales copy, do you have set programs? Do you display pricing? Are your prices "cheap?" If yes to any of these elements, you will most likely attract the tire kickers and cheapies that don't want to pay for quality SEO work.

[bigcat]

First of all, clients should run from any SEO firm that will guarantee position or traffic. Unless they have a working crystal ball, or a time machine, they simply can not guarantee any results. What most firms do offer is a money back guarantee if they don't get you ranked for a seldom searched term. A firm that guarantees a certain position is like a bad used car salesman...you really can't trust them.

And unfortunately there's ALOT of them out there (IMG:style_emoticons/default/unsure.gif)

[Jill]

What if the % increase is under the expectation?

If you don't have this info from your previous clients sites you've worked on, you've got no business telling prospective clients what they might expect.

What WE might get for our clients has nothing to do with what YOU might get.

And for you to want our info to tell your clients is simply wrong, imo. And scary.