1. Answering all their questions.
2. Close personal attention.
3. Prompt return emails and phone calls.
4. Confidential service.

Etc. You just need to be creative as to what you guarantee.

“Make pages for users, not for search engines. Don’t deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users, which is commonly referred to as “cloaking.”

Sure the overall context is ‘don’t cloak’ but most landing pages from adwords probably shouldn’t be given to normal site visitors no?

and they MISUSE it - and this is EVIL …

I always tell my clients - “no guarantees - remember those guys spamming you to offfer a top10 google placement for $999 ” ???

Anyway - the goal here is of course to drive people away from organic to adwords - and even if Adwords has no money-back, you can easily count the clicks - and this measurability allows google to point back and say “Hey- your site quality is low, THAT’s the reason why you don’t convert”

I wish we would have a closed-loop short response system in SEO - but that’s just ONE reason for all those delays, dampening factors, link degrades, etc.etc… make SEOs and SEO clients mad

cheers

No, we don’t offer guarantees. If good SEO is about more than just improving your short-term rankings in Google, why would a guarantee be suggested?

Think about it.

Google says that the most effective search engine optimization takes the long-term interests of users into account. Not just content, but quality content. Not just links, but relevant links. Focus on good website architecture. Focus on usability.

However - if my company were to offer a guarantee, our clear financial incentive would be to ignore the long-term, and focus instead on getting very short-term SEO results. We would meet the obligation of the guarantee (to stay in business), but in the long-term, the client would suffer. Google would suffer (because more black-hats would exist), and the user would suffer as well.

Cutts has done a great job evangelizing what are, essentially, white-hat techniques. The guarantee game, however, is not well-suited for white-hats who focus on good, long-term, value creation. Those who focus not just on rankings, but on ranking for the right terms and creating business.

I always make sure my customers know up front that I am not billing them for rankings or any kind of guarantee of increased business. Instead… they understand they are paying for my years of experience and the time we spend making their site “Google Friendly”

As for Google, they say exactly what they need to say, IMO, to make regular people not trust any SEO - even those seo’s who have been out here for years, show a great track record, and are - hands down - completely legit.

Gotta love G, huh?

aren’t we lucky to have google managing our business models and contracts now? that’s really nice of them.