Conversion Matters

Issues Surrounding Search Engine Optimization Guarantees: Off to the Races!

How is the practice of SEO in any way, shape, or form related to horse racing?

The analogy that follows is provided to help you understand search engine optimization from a different perspective - one that can hopefully help you understand just how difficult it is to obtain high search engine rankings, let alone guarantee them. After receiving excellent feedback on this portion of my "Budget & Overlooked SEM" presentation at the 2003 Boston Search Engine Strategies Conference, I decided to reproduce it for you here.

If an SEO firm guarantees you any kind of ranking, question what they are selling you. If the company/consultant is not selling you CPC advertising on Overture (which is tactic commonly used to obtain top rankings posing as index-based results) then you should probably take your business elsewhere. Why? Because… trying to rank a web site in the search engines is almost exactly like trying to get a horse to win a race. I know because I grew up on a horse farm, my family owned many racehorses, and I actually exercised them for a number of years when I was younger. At one point I wanted to be a trainer… but that's another story!

The reason a good SEO consultant or search engine optimization company not only should not, but truly cannot offer a search engine ranking guarantee is the same reason a good racehorse trainer cannot offer a guarantee that your horse will finish in a specific place at the end of a race - there are just too many variables. For example, a horse must be entered into a specific race before being allowed to run - often times the race fills up and the horse does not actually get into the desired race after all. When your trainer cannot guarantee that your horse will actually get into the 8th race at Belmont on Friday, how on Earth can that trainer guarantee that your horse will definitely run second?!? The same holds true for search engine optimization. When Google, for example, does not guarantee that your site will be included in their index (something obviously required for you to achieve any Google rankings), then how can an SEO firm guarantee you top Google rankings? They can't. Sure, they can purchase Premium TopSpots on a CPM basis for you, or they can purchase the CPC Adwords, but no firm can guarantee Google positioning. There's more.

"In" the race doesn't mean "win" the race . Let's say your trainer does get your horse into the 8th race at Belmont on Friday - and your site does get into Google's index (let's go with Google for this entire analogy, shall we?). Still think your trainer can guarantee that your horse will run in the top five, the top three, or that he will specifically run second? Ha! Ever been to the races? Often times, no matter how good your trainer is, no matter how well your horse has been prepared for the race, there are factors outside of your trainer's control that can, and nearly always do, affect the outcome. For example, what if it rains that day and you find out that your horse just doesn't like to run in the mud? Likewise what if Google makes an algorithm shift and what worked last month doesn't seem to have the same impact this time around? How about the shadows across the track in the home stretch… what if your horse decides to start jumping them because the last trainer never took the time to teach the horse to run across them? So for every race on a sunny day at that track, you're out of luck! This can be compared to having a site on a blocklisted IP address - the IP owner (before your site was hosted on the IP) participated in some spam tactics and got the IP penalized - so until you fix that, you'll always have to deal with jumping shadows - an obstacle to achieving good rankings.

Then there is the issue of your competitors. No matter how well your trainer has prepared your horse - he simply cannot control what the other trainers are doing with their horses! Maybe half of them are coming off of a long layoff and have fresh legs, the other half have only been running at this same distance at this same track for their entire careers and are as finely tuned for the race as can be, and there is a first time starter in there that wasn't even on your radar screen. There are sites out there working every day to target your keywords, while there are others that haven't even show up yet but are prepping to. You cannot control what your competitors are doing to their web sites on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis - the competitive landscape is always changing, someone is always training, or optimizing, to beat you.

You also have to acknowledge that there is only so much control your trainer has over your horse (site). For example, your horse's bloodlines cannot be changed. Often times there are certain web sites that cannot be changed to the extent that an SEO consultant would like them to be (the seemingly eternal conflict between the design and marketing teams). Sometimes the horse just isn't up to snuff, and no matter how much training the trainer puts into him, the horse cannot compete with his competition. And, sometimes, your horse just runs poorly one day, for no particular reason - so it's back to the drawing board, and maybe time to consider some alternate training techniques. These and countless other elements of the racing and SEO games are why guarantees in either industry simply cannot exist with any credibility.

Does that mean you're not going to hire a good trainer? Certainly not!

Does that mean that a trainer who has had five Kentucky Derby contenders is not worth paying for if you are setting your sights (sites) on the Triple Crown Races (Google Top-10 Rankings)? Certainly not!

And do these highly paid trainers offer a guarantee of any kind? By now you know the answer.

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