I dont believe in putting website in rank then promising it. It still no one can say if you can go on top of all searches.
Agreed with Harsha and Vic Charges would completely depend upon the niche, work already done, and the competitors' analysis. It happens many times that you're not able to achieve top rankings for certain stubborn keywords. You can go with some monthly breaks in payments. You see his work, the progress and continue if everything goes well. Though many professional agencies won't disclose completely what they will be doing but they'll surely give you a fair idea to convince you. You must be knowing what they're doing. The charges however are reasonable but would take many factors into consideration for GUARANTEED rankings. Cheers!
They're not a professional agency if they wont disclose what they are doing. Anyone who lets someone work on their site without telling them exactly what they will be doing is a fool.
Imo nothing wrong with such charges ... but wrong metrics to measure keyword competitiveness ... and no such thing as a guaranteed ranking i.e. you don't know in advance what your competition... and moreover what the search engines are up to. Re keyword competitiveness, it's a little more complex than just the number of SE results ! e.g. type "a" , Google would return more than 16 billions results, not so competitive though i.e. no ppc activity, leading sites/pages, etc
Agreed with you Vic. But there are many competitors who try to get the complete plan and strategies in initial questionnaire pretending a client. A professional SEOer or agency would give the idea on their business sites itself first, and if not, they'll give an idea only. If the buyer is convinced, he will himself find the results with regular updates and reports given by the professional. A reputed or professional would not like to spoil the hard-earned reputation with false promises or keeping the clients' websites on risk with blackhat.
Agree with people that say the number of results isn't really how to determine the competition. You should look if there are any authority sites at the top results, PR of the best ranking websites, targeted keywords and so on. And the reason why I am already getting suspicious is that you're his first customer. I would recommend to check that guy out. All the best, The Moneyac
Agreed, and I am sure he can BS people for another 3 or 4 months. So a year of collecting fees then disappears and pops up a week later with a new user name and a new 'too good to believe offer'. Guaranteeing 1st page results is pretty tough so guaranteeing the first position or first two is basically impossible IMO
Which is exactly the point. At the very least we can leverage a more concise organic SEO campaign by learning about the trends for the keywords in the niche. This could allow one to ditch keywords yielding little to no searches, leads, etc. Once the proper keywords are arrived at, then organic SEO can begin. Till we rank organically, why not rank with PPC? That is, if the keywords are money-makers.
Using a network of your own sites to link to the website you want to rank is a technique used commonly, if you can do it without getting detected by Google, I think it can be an effective and extremely cost effective way to rank a site. Is it against search engine guidelines? Of course! Search engines want to put the best website at the top so that everyday people don't have to spend ages getting the website they want. By gaming the system and replacing the top results with your own, you're undermining the whole point of a search engine, unless of course your website really is the best. SEO is generally unethical, but hey, this is business.
Ask him to give any traffic estimation of that particular keyword . Usually SEO is not done on the basis of number search results in Google or Yahoo , but on the number of competitors .Search results may be millions but the actual active competitors would be some 100-200 . If you can provide the keyword , we would be able to give an approximate estimation of cost and time required for completion .
Do not pay anybody to do SEO for you! Do it yourself. webmasterstown.com/white-hat-seo-do-not-pay-companies-to-do-it-for-you-learn-to-do-it-yourself/
I would not TRUST any company or person that guarentees you a high Google PR for a specific keyword. See if they would agree to you paying them the total they are asking for times 2 after they get you there! They won't. Jose
Don't do it unless you're prepared to lose all the money. Otherwise, get it in writing, or use a credit card with fraud protection, etc. etc.