Offline Client requesting guarantee

Hey guys,

I've just started an offline SEO company, and have quite a few customers ready to drop.

One has requested a Guarantee/KPI of sorts,

How would we go about this? Essentially he's wanting one for traffic, but should I just be saying that we can only guarantee rankings (and only to a certain extent) as the actual traffic that hits his site is out of our control (i.e. his brand position, people may not like his brand and not click on it).

Any advice would be much appreciated,

Cheers,
JC

Drive him junk traffic with blank referrer if he keeps insisting, lol.

"The only thing I can guarantee is that you will get a large increase in calls and inquiries at your business. I cant guarantee results because I cant guarantee that your employees will close the sale properly. If you've had an issue with closing clients in the past, Ill be sure and call in an expert to get them trained and add that into your current package"

#1 You need to build more trust before you go into closing
#2 You need to manage his expectations

how can you even guarantee him rank? In this business nothing is guaranteed.

I tell every client that if anyone guarantees them anything, walk away because they are lying. Nobody can guarantee anything about SEO. It's random, unknown, and changing by the second. I just explain that based on previous experience we have been able to significantly increase client rankings for relative keywords, which resulted in boosted sales for them, but it does vary greatly depending on the industry, the employees, and many other factors. I also tell them it does take time, and I don't guarantee anything.

i guarantee page 1 for certain keywords with no problem. but never guarantee traffic.

Hi Guys,

Looks like I may have to turn away this business then,

I'm thinking something along the lines of "If we don't get 25% of your keywords onto page 1 within 3 months, and 50% within 6 months, we'll work for free until we do". These kinds of guarantees are getting increasingly common, and I believe I can deliver on this,

The reason they care specifically about traffic is they are a major brand, but do not actually sell - they have retailers for that (thousands of them). I'm in with them because I used to manage their account at the web design firm I used to work at.

They're already getting 2k/month uniques without ANY SEO, just by people searching for their brand, so I need to bring another 2k traffic to the site per month to have a hope in winning the business.

Let me know if you have any more thoughts, but thanks so far guys, its looking like it'll come down to managing expectations. As a start-up I feel horrible turning away business, but it may be the only way to go.

Thanks,
JC

Will likely be facing this problem soon with some potential clients.

My approach was going to be similiar to pyrogods answer. Tell the client nothing in this business is guaranteed as things are always changing. Give him testimonials from other happy customers and try to sell him on those rather than any guarantees.

Dr_Scythe said:

Will likely be facing this problem soon with some potential clients.

My approach was going to be similiar to pyrogods answer. Tell the client nothing in this business is guaranteed as things are always changing. Give him testimonials from other happy customers and try to sell him on those rather than any guarantees.

Click to expand...

That's definitely going to be the plan down the track, but so far I've only done SEO for a couple of clients, and the majority has been purely for myself (my own personal websites promoting products) - in comparison this clients job is a walk in the park, but a testimonial from myself carries little weight.

Until I get some clients under my belt I may need to risk it all and make some guarantees.

I have not been doing SEO for long but one of my earliest mistakes was with a lease site. We cannot guarantee rankings because we do not control Google. We cannot guarantee clicks because we do not control searchers. We cannot guarantee sales since we are not the sales staff.

But what if you could elevate rankings for some keywords that they are missing out on. I would bet that any company out there is missing some opportunity on at least five keywords.