Guaranteed #1 Ranking in Search Engines
The Myth of “Guaranteed #1 Ranking” in Search Engine Marketing
You’ve seen the ads: Guaranteed #1 Ranking! There are no guarantees in search engine marketing and website promotion. If anyone tells you different, you
should check quickly to make sure they don’t have their hand in your wallet.
Suppose you sell widgets. You want to sell more widgets, and the way to do that is to make sure that more people know about widgets, and that you are the place to buy their widgets. You might decide to buy a half-page ad in a national magazine to tell your story. When you place that ad, you are “guaranteed” your position.
With a magazine advertisement, you know what the magazine’s circulation is, who reads it, and which page will feature your ad. The magazine can guarantee all
that, because they own the medium.
Search engine marketing is qualitatively different. When you work with a search engine marketing firm to promote your website, they cannot guarantee where your
listing will appear. Certainly there are types of online ads where there are guarantees in place: banner ads priced at “cost per thousand impressions”,
pop-up ads, and so forth. These are like traditional media buys, where you are working directly with the owner of the medium where the ads appear, but this is not search engine marketing.
Even so-called pay-per-click search engines cannot guarantee your position. In Google AdWords, for example, it is not just the price you pay for a given
keyword that determines where you will rank. They also bring in other factors, including how often your ad is clicked-on, to determine which ad will be listed first. Just throwing money at them will not necessarily get you into the #1 spot.
The bottom line is this: search engine marketing professionals do not own the search engines. They can tell you that you will achieve #1 ranking on a given
search engine, or they can tell you that the moon is made of green cheese, but there is no way they can make either of those happen. When you tell Time
magazine you want your ad to be on the back cover, and you pay them enough money, they will guarantee you the back cover. If you tell your search engine
marketing people you want to be #1 in AllTheWeb, they cannot guarantee you that result. They can recommend changes to your site that will increase the
likelihood of your ranking higher, but that is a long way from a guarantee. If you don’t control the medium, you can’t guarantee the result. Since your search engine consultant doesn’t control the search engine, there is no way they can guarantee your position.
The ranking algorithms of the search engines are a closely-guarded secret. The search engine wants to give top ranking to the site that is the best match to an individual visitor’s search query, not to the site that was able to “beat” the algorithm.
