This is the question I love to hate. The reason is because I really want to say, ‘Yes, I’ll get you to the top of the search engines’ (and in most cases I do with enough time and hard effort) but the truth is, I don’t actually have the right to say that.

Why? Because I am not a Google engineer and don’t know the in’s and out’s of the algorithm’s or when the search engines are going to make changes to their sites that can affect a sites ranking.

It makes me smile (at first) when I see these companies say ‘come to us, we will guarantee you to get to number one in the search engines..yes.. GUARANTEED!’ Do they really know how to achieve that? Or are they just trying to get your business?

The truth is, I can get number one results in the search engines for competitive terms, and have many times for numerous key-phrases, (check out the term ‘debt questions’ or ‘debt forum’. This is a site I was primarily responsible for SEO for a number of years; where I achieved #1 out of over 12 million web-pages at the time of writing) but the truth also is, I don’t know what the search engines are going to do tomorrow. This is not a safeguard for me, this is me telling you that it is not for me to give you that guarantee.

Infact, you don’t need to be number one in the search engines to get the results you need. How many times do you yourself click on the first website listed and are 100% satisfied that you don’t need to look elsewhere? Number one isn’t all that its made to be. If your page can at least appear on the first page of the results, then you will achieve higher traffic and conversions.

My guarantee to you is that once I have implemented SEO onto your website you will see more targeted traffic coming to your website as your listings in the search engines will have improved. If I get you to number one, or at least on the first page (which I would expect to do) then I have achieved my goal with your site.

It is worth mentioning that SEO is continuous. Achieving a number one spot does not last forever if you do not keep on top of SEO for your website. One of my main achievements for SEO rankings was ranking for the term ‘debt management’ when that term was in it’s prime. It took me around 9 months to a year to get there, but I got there in the end. The term was highly competitive, I was competing with around 30 million other web-pages, so you can imaging how pleased I was the morning I woke up and checked the rankings to find the site was in the number one spot.

The real unfortunate thing is that as I no longer work for the company, SEO is not applied to the site to the depth it was when I had the freedom to achieve it. Now, you don’t loose your rankings overnight (Unless a dramatic change happens in the search engines that can affect your website) but if you do not continue with SEO, the rankings will drop, as they have done for that site. It is still ranked #5 spot in Google.com and still gets a fair bit of traffic, but unless people recognise the need to allow SEO to continue, the rankings will gradually continue to drop, and that really is a sad sight to see after so much hard work has been put into a site.