No one can ‘guarantee’ rankings on Google or other search engines.
No. One.
Google could, but they won’t. They won’t even guarantee placement with AdWords.
Here’s the thing, if your client lead is not internet savvy they aren’t going to easily understand some of the finer points of your online marketing strategy. Salespeople probably don’t generally know, or care to know, and generally, don’t need to know that to get a contract signed.
Rankings = traffic, and ‘Rank #1 In Google Guaranteed!’ is good enough to get a new client signed on the dotted line.
But it’s not good enough for the bottom line. And the bottom line is customer leads and that is the expectation that is being set.
Your client DOES NOT CARE about rankings.
Unless it’s advertising for the sake of vanity, they want new customers. Even if it’s not stated explicitly, the idea is that traffic turns into sales and that’s what they want.
So, it doesn’t matter if you rank #1`for a keyword if the traffic is non-converting, or if it is an information gathering search, and not a decision making search.
And don’t forget to mention the client. You bring them in the door, but they still need to close the deal. Call-to-action, value proposition, usability, and price need to be compelling before traffic converts.
The uglier side of guaranteed rankings are the tactics employed to achieve those goals. Basically, it’s buying links. That’s the only real way to ‘guarantee’ rankings on a shortened time frame.
Part of the blame lays at the feet of Google. search ranking are the underlying why there is so much link spam. SEO firms buy links because it is effective to do so, especially in the short-term. If you get stung by an algorithm update later, deal with it later. Keep the client paying until that happens and then up-sell to fix the problem that they made without the client ever being the wiser.
It’s poor business practice and it’s unethical. As a business owner, don’t let visions of zeroes and dollar signs get your cart in front of the horse. Your goal is customer development, and without a couple of fundamentals, getting web traffic is like pouring water without a cup.
If you didn’t get that video was a joke. Please, go back to the beginning and start over.
