Guarantees in SEO Promotion: Myth or Reality + 7 Tips for Choosing an SEO Specialist

When we need to find something, we immediately open Google/Yandex/Yahoo (substitute as needed) and search for it.

As a rule, we visit the first 3-5 pages and stop searching (but only if we find answers).

And although search engines return hundreds of pages with all kinds of results, we only look through a few.

By what principle are pages arranged in the results?

This and many other questions are answered by SEO promotion.

These days, video content dominates in all options for promoting sites and social networks — even in search optimization, video is valued more than photos.

This is clearly demonstrated by a study from the company searchmetrics.

And although the company is located in America and works on the American market, it's safe to say that after some time this trend will be popular in our region as well.

What does a competitor have that you don't yet? Right — traffic. SEOquick to the rescue!

We'll attract a mass of traffic to your site through SEO.

We'll do it exclusively with white-hat methods, without filters and sanctions from Google.

We'll carry out deep optimization: strengthen the content, build up links and reputation. And it'll all work out!

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What SEO is and who it's useful for

I'm sure you've often heard the phrases "SEO promotion", "search results", "getting to the top in the search engine".

If you don't know what this is and how it can be useful to your site and sales, read below.

For those who are just starting their journey in SEO and want to get acquainted with this type of promotion in detail, I recommend watching our video.

From it you'll learn what SEO is, where to apply it, and whether you specifically need it.

And we move on. For everyone who prefers written content to audio, here's the rundown.

Wikipedia states:

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a set of measures for internal and external optimization to raise a site's positions in search engine results for certain user queries, with the aim of increasing network traffic (for informational resources) and potential clients (for commercial resources) and the subsequent monetization (generating income) of this traffic.

SEO can be oriented toward various types of search, including image search, video search, news search, and specific industry search engines.

To put it simply, thanks to SEO you can bring a site to the first page in Google by keywords.

To illustrate:

In this picture we see an example of contextual advertising (it's important not to confuse it with SEO) — such advertising is set up in the Google Ads account, and we talk about it in detail in the video.

Now about SEO:

Pages that reach the top thanks to search promotion are nothing remarkable: there are no "Advertisement" labels, as is the case with paid ads.

Such promotion is built on getting to the top by keywords.

If we take the example with tires, then let's try a few options (for the purity of the experiment I'm searching using a phone, since we make many purchases precisely from a phone):

• "buy winter tires toyota ukraine"

As you can see, the first three sites are lester.ua, rezina.ua, and ascania-shina.com.

Let's try the next search query:

• "winter tires toyota"

The same result — the sites lester.ua, rezina.ua, and ascania-shina.com are repeated.

We enter a third query:

• "buy tires toyota"

The result repeats. The fourth query:

• "winter tires ukraine"

Here the result is radically different. Let me explain why this happened.

We removed the word "toyota" from the search, and the leading stores of the previous three queries use car brand names in their key phrases (try entering "winter tires subaru", and you'll again see the sites from the previous pictures).

• "winter tires for toyota buy in ukraine"

The same results.

I hope my example with tires has proven to you the importance of SEO promotion.

After all, in our case almost any search for Toyota tires would have led me to the sites lester.ua, rezina.ua, and ascania-shina.com.

And if the prices and purchase conditions there are satisfactory, then I won't go wandering through the second, third, tenth page of Google.

But I'll make a decision and complete the purchase.

We won't go deep into the technical aspects of setting up search promotion.

Especially since not so long ago a separate profession appeared — SEO specialists.

These are people who will effortlessly bring your site to the top and thus attract potential clients and buyers.

Next we'll talk about guarantees: whether they exist in search promotion and how much you can trust companies that promise to bring your site to the top for a certain number of words.

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Guarantees in SEO — just a marketing ploy?

Many companies specializing in SEO promotion love to throw around beautiful words about a 100% result, bringing a site to the first page of the search engine within two weeks, and so on.

Why all these results are far from reality — read on.

Let's analyze the guarantees that various SEO companies give and confirm or refute them.

1. We'll bring your site to the top for a hundred-thousand-million keywords, otherwise we'll refund your money.

Such a guarantee does have a place, the only question is what those words are.

Usually companies that promise this back up their words with actions, but with certain reservations.

For example, you have an online bag store and you want to be in the top.

The company starts cooperating with you and supposedly fulfills its promise.

But if you dig deeper, it turns out that all the keywords boil down to something like "buy a blue bag under a full moon", "buy a bag for a girl in hopes of a weekend together", "buy a little red bag with blue ruffles".

The promise is fulfilled? It is — you can forget about your money.

And will buyers come thanks to the promotion that was done? Of course not. Well, unless you're selling a red bag with blue ruffles :)

2. Guarantees backed by nothing.

Due to the changeability of the online world and promotion strategies, no guarantee can be long-term.

If you're going to sign a contract on bringing your site to the top of search engines, I recommend carefully looking at the term of the agreement.

Google's algorithms have a persistent tendency to change.

No responsible company can promise that the work will be done in a week, and that the site will be in the top rows of the search results for the next year.

3. Long-term guarantees.

As I already described above, all guarantees in SEO optimization last a couple of weeks to a month. And here's why:

• A change in search engine algorithms.

Long ago Google loved and more often showed links with long texts (longreads).

Then concise texts came into fashion and the search results, where everything is clear, precise, and without extra information.

Now long sheets of text, where everything is described in detail, are again welcome.

People started reading on the Internet, not just looking at pictures.

And as for visual content, videos rank better, not photos.

• Problems with the site.

All sorts of things happen in life and in the operation of a site too: a failed layout, a server crash, and other troubles can occur suddenly.

Eliminating them will take several hours or even days.

And as luck would have it, it is precisely during this period that a search robot (a program that visits pages, collects information about them, and enters it into a database) may get to the site and, naturally, your resource's rating will drop significantly.

• The work of competitors.

As they say, "for every little fish there's a bigger fish".

It's the same here — even if you have cool texts, a huge number of keywords, a team of professionals working with you, there can always be someone whose work is done 1% better than yours.

And understandably, this affects the search results too.

As you've understood, giving any guarantees in SEO is pointless. And here are a few more reasons:

• A lot depends on the company being promoted

If your site is made poorly: has an old design, an inconvenient interface, uninteresting texts, then even geniuses in the SEO sphere won't save it.

Before starting any promotion, I recommend bringing the page to an ideal state: reread the texts once more, ask one of your acquaintances to give an objective assessment, think about what can be improved, and only then look for promotion masters.

• The quality of contractors' work

Unfortunately, many don't want to strain themselves and do their work carelessly.

Before starting cooperation with SEO specialists, you need to read reviews about them (and preferably on some independent site where real people write, not on the contractors' site, where only praising odes are published in the "Reviews" section), try to contact people who previously used the services, and only then make a decision.

• The result of the algorithms' work is impossible to predict

Unlike contextual advertising, promotion through the search results is impossible to predict.

In context advertising everything is simpler: you choose an advertising spot, make an ad, and pay for clicks to the site.

SEO works differently: you need to adapt to the search engine's requirements and hope for the best.

On the one hand, the absence of any kind of bribery is good — everyone plays on equal terms, but on the other hand, predicting the result of promotion is practically impossible.

• The behavior of your buyers affects bringing the site to the top

If, following a link, people linger there for a few seconds and don't even "wander" around the site (click on internal links), then sooner or later the search engine will realize that the resource is uninteresting and will start deliberately lowering it in the results.

That's why it's not worth promoting a lifeless site that doesn't catch the eye.

• The work of competitors directly affects your results

Some of your competitors allocate a larger budget than you and, accordingly, get better results.

With a more active and expensive promotion by a competitor, even a super specialist won't be able to help you.

Recommended reading:

1. SEO for a B2B Website: 9 Features of Search Promotion
2. SEO Promotion of a Blog, Media, News Site. A Guide to Promotion

How to choose specialists for successful SEO promotion?

Blowing budgets and falling for unscrupulous contractors in SEO is a piece of cake.

But how to avoid this, read in the chapter below.

Doing SEO on your own is a thankless and very difficult task.

It's all because of the specifics of the work, which few people manage to master quickly.

And as practice shows, while you're learning SEO, you'll lose far more money than if you choose a remote specialist and get on with your business.

If you still want to try on your own, then here's a little cheat sheet of step-by-step site promotion in the search results, specially for you:

Many face a number of difficulties with search promotion: "We paid the contractor company money, and the site was on the third page of Google and stayed there", "There are 10 times more visitors on the site, but there are still no orders", "I've completely lost faith in this SEO — they promise incredible sales, but for now it's nothing but a budget drain".

Of course, the causes of these situations can be various factors: a poorly made site, a failure in the search engine's operation, but most often — the poor-quality work of SEO promotion contractors.

How to correctly choose an SEO specialist for your site?

1. A good individual proposal.

After you reach out, the contractor company should prepare a proposal for you — an analysis of your site at this stage, an analysis of the audience (for example, the "World of Wallpaper" store in the city of Kamianske, Dnipropetrovsk region.

The main audience of the site is men and women aged 27-43, site visits — the city of Kamianske, Dnipropetrovsk region, the village of Oleksandrivka, Dnipropetrovsk region, and the city of Dnipro) and the exact search frequency in the promoted region (this will help in the future to avoid some magical figures that the contractor will draw up in order to embellish their merits).

The time to prepare such a proposal is 3-5 days, while the SEO specialists study your site, audience, and the needs in their work.

2. A contractor who doesn't grab everything at once.

If a person says they're handling 40 projects at the same time, then there are two options: either they're a robot, or they do their work poorly.

The ideal number of projects for one specialist is 5-8.

This way they have enough time to devote to each one and do their work well.

3. An optimal price.

SEO promotion can't be cheap. It's painstaking work.

If you're offered work on your project for $30 a month, know that you won't be able to demand big results.

Be ready to pay, and then you'll be able to expect and demand real results.

4. A good portfolio.

Before cooperation, ask to be shown work results — these can be "before-after" screenshots, statistics of clicks to the site, order analytics.

But the main thing — remember the names of the sites and look them up yourself.

What page in the search engine are they on now (clearly, we're not talking about projects from 10 years ago)?

5. The company has professionals with years of experience.

"Make way for the young" — that's good, of course, but not in SEO.

Only experienced people know all the specifics of working with search engines, understand the principles of how algorithms work, and can quickly adapt to changes in search engines.

6. The company's representatives are developing.

If the company's employees go to conferences, take part in public talks, learn something new — that's a huge plus.

Only this way can you be sure that these people are working not under duress and see in your project not just money, but also interest.

7. A step-by-step plan for promoting the site.

If you're told that all of the company's work consists of entering new keywords, feel free to turn around and leave.

The contractor should provide you with a plan of work on your project — starting with site analysis, writing texts, working with keywords, and so on, and ending with the analytics of the results.

Bonus. The SEOquick utility for quickly collecting keywords

If you've decided to burst into the world of search promotion and bring your site to the top, but don't know where to start, this chapter is for you.

The importance of keywords in SEO optimization of a site is hard to overestimate, because it is precisely they that describe your site and help the search engine show the resource to the right people.

The process of selecting keywords is very long and sometimes boring — you need to sit and figure out which queries people enter most often, and which queries are unpopular.

To make your life easier, we created a utility for quickly collecting keywords.

It looks like this:

You can watch a video about working with the utility here.

And now let's look at its operation with a specific example.

Let's say we have a store of branded original bags: leather bags by Prada, Chanel, Gucci, Michael Kors, Louis Vuitton, Dolce & Gabbana, Valentino, Calvin Klein.

And we want to attract an audience interested in such bags.

Let's break it down in detail:

• Main queries

Here we enter the main thing — that we sell bags, that we're a store, and that we have leather bags.

• Transactional queries and region

We answer the question "what can be done" — buy, order, etc., "where" — Kyiv.

• Properties, types, and nomenclature

"What bags are sold, made of what?"

• Brands, makes

Everything is clear here.

• Price queries

Everything related to prices — discounts, sales, how much it costs, etc.

• Other queries

We enter topics adjacent to ours — reviews, showrooms, boutiques.

• Negative keywords separated by commas

What doesn't relate to our topic. I entered the word "vacancies", because some people may look for vacancies in Chanel showrooms, and that has nothing to do with us.

• Get keywords

An infinite number of keywords falls out, which can be used in SEO promotion.

I won't add screenshots of all of them, because there isn't enough room for everything. Go in and check for yourself.

By following the link on each word, you can look at the statistics of that query in Wordstat and decide for sure whether it suits you or not.

Conclusions

Bringing a site to the top is no easy task, requiring persistent work.

To get good results, it's important to make a high-quality site, choose professional contractors, and allocate a good budget.

And our free utility will make your task a little easier and help with selecting keywords.

And although SEO specialists can't give their clients any specific guarantees, promotion by keywords in search engines was, is, and will be one of the most relevant and effective.