Everyone wants to be number one. You want your site to rank number one in your main competitive keywords, don’t you? It’s quite a natural aspiration. If you are like thousands of other businesses approaching search engine optimisation, you may well ask yourself, if SEO is so great, why isn’t everyone hitting the top spots on Google?

Guarantees and other sweet nothings

Search engine optimisation professionals are unable to provide that guarantee of a number one spot. In fact, such a guarantee is usually the sign of a less-than-reputable company, and tops the list of things SEO experts caution newcomers to watch out for. It does bring up the question, what exactly can your SEO company guarantee for your business?

The answer is slightly unimpressive. Search engine optimisation is not an exact science. Each site is an individual case with individual challenges and individual advantages. You can discuss your individual case with us at SEO Consult. The upshot is that there are absolutely no guarantees. Unfortunately, this is not as compelling as a slick salesperson’s smile and a glowing promise.

SEO goes well beyond search engines

What ethical SEO companies do achieve for their clients is an across-the-board improvement of a site’s relationship with the search engines. Sites are rarely built with the invisible little robots of the search engines in mind. SEO implements many small changes to a site which helps the search robots crawl across a site more efficiently, placing what is hoped to be the right information in their path.

SEO experts don’t have the magic formula for search engine success, but nevertheless the implementation of search engine optimisation tactics can have a positive influence on the health of your site. The improvements made within your site’s architecture, the placement of keywords in your content, and the addition of fresh content, all add up to a site that is more appealing to human users as well as search engines.

SEO is a form of marketing

SEO companies are constantly asked whether they can guarantee results. This is partly the fault of regular marketing, where professionals are keen to show that they can achieve predictable targets, and partly the fault of a less-than-perfect understanding of SEO. SEO is a form of marketing, but it’s more like the regular mechanical tune-up that leads to a racing car winning a Grand Prix. The relationship between effort and success isn’t as clear, but without it no-one wins.

Take a few seconds to consider exactly what constant guarantees of number one spots would mean. In a perfect world, where your SEO company had all of the secrets to search engine success, you might well receive a guarantee of a number one ranking. That company’s other clients would also receive that guarantee, and so would all of their past clients, until the net was filled with guaranteed number ones, all kicking each other off the top position in milliseconds. You might be able to get to number one, but you’d have no time to benefit from your status.

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