SEO - contracts, guarantees?

What kind of a guarantee should I offer?

[madmatt69]

Hi everyone,

I've had tremendous success doing seo work for my personal websites and for some businesses. But now as a result, I'm starting to get some recognition and reccomendations from those businesses. So now I've got a few other companies asking me if I can do the same for them...which I think I can.

But I'm still fairly new to seo, and now that it looks like I'll be getting clients requesting it more frequently, I'm wondering if I should have some sort of a contract, perhaps one outlining a garauntee?

Like if I can't get you into the top ten, then I refund part of your money, or stating that I can't garauntee placement because search engines do change algorithims, and are quite volatile.

How do you guys deal with this? Do you offer garauntees, or do you know of a sample contract online I could look at?

Thanks for any advice - And thanks to webmasterworld for teaching me all I know about seo ;)

Cheers,
Matt

[lorax]

>> perhaps one outlining a garauntee

The only guarantee I'll make is that I will improve their website for readability, structure, navigation, and it's ability to be read and indexed by the search engines. Beyond that - I tell them that I'm pretty confident that I can help them get into the ball game - maybe even number one - but I make no promises.

[buckworks]

If you want to offer a guarantee, consider using a benchmark like "XX% increase in your free search engine traffic" to measure success rather than promising such-and-such a rank for any term in particular.

Building page rank and improving a site's overall SEO will often result in new traffic coming in from words and phrases besides those you're targeting directly, and that should be counted as part of the value you're delivering.

[Filipe]

Google recommends to consumers to always get a guarantee from an SEO.

I recommend not offering a guarantee as an SEO.

The only time I would offer a guarantee is if I knew beforehand that the keywords I was ranking them for would be a piece of cake. Otherwise, there are too many variables. I've often, often, often had my clients hurt their own SEO campaign because of stuff they didn't want on their website.

How can you offer a guarantee when they do what they can to prevent you from meeting it?

[Panky]

That is sooo true what was said about clients who will actually hurt their SEO process by not implementing certain recommendations.

It's kewl that you have clients who have recommended you to other people. Word of mouth goes a long way.

What you can guarantee is that you won't break the rules and get their site(s) in trouble.