If you want me to take a sh*t in a box and mark it guaranteed, I will...I got spare time." - Tommy Boy

We should all know by now that rankings in and of themselves don't have any inherent value.  It's rather a well-worn topic - one Rand covered effectively in his post on why reputable SEO's don't guarantee search engine rankings. 

The thing is, SEO firms are still out there advertising "guaranteed rankings" or touting the exponential increase in "page one rankings" they've built for their clients.  There's a knowledge gap, and a big one at that, between the average small business owner and SEO firms.  What sounds better? 

A) "We don't guarantee rankings because we don't control the search engines and, furthermore, rankings aren't where the value is.  Building targeted traffic to your website is far more important."

-or-

B) "We guarantee 500 Google page one rankings within six months or your money back!!"

For those of us who know how ridiculous it is to guarantee X number of rankings, option A is the obvious better choice. 

What about the small business owner who simply doesn't know anything about SEO, but knows they need to show up in Google for keywords related to their products/services?  We might hope they'd smell the bull crap in option B, but in my experience they often do not.

I've heard dozens of sales calls in which the "guaranteed rankings" bit sold a contract. 

I'd like to outline the way the guaranteed ranking racket was run at an agency where I had the misfortune to be employed and just how little expertise and actual work this requires.  My hope is that perhaps at least one small business owner will come across this post and be better informed for it.

Using the following method, you can easily meet a guarantee of 500 page one rankings in Google within six months - even while traffic is flatlined or even sinking! 

What you need to pull this off:

• Rank checking software
• Access to website analytics
• About 1 hour per month
• Lack of a soul

• Pull together a list of keywords relevant to the client's website.  Forget about search usage data - we're not interested in that. (In fact, keep that kind of information out of your client communications at all costs.  We want their focus on the rankings, not the traffic.)
• Once you have a list of relevant keywords, simply drop it into your rank checking software.  Internet Business Promoter (IBP) is a good choice, because it automatically alphabetizes and filters out duplicate keywords.
• Start the rank checking software (this is a good time to take a long lunch).
• When the rank checker is done, review the results and compile your first ranking report.  The number of page one rankings will likely be low.  This is a good thing: the lower the starting point, the more drastic the growth moving forward.

• One month after completing Step 1, review the client's analytics.  Ignore traffic - again, it's not important.  Instead, pull up the data for referred keywords over the last year (never mind that the contract started a month ago).
• This is the tedious part: you'll have to copy/paste all of the referred keywords from the analytics suite into the keyword list in your rank checking software.  In fact, better get an intern to handle this.
• When you've added at least most of the keywords to your list, run the rank checking software (again, take a long lunch).
• When you return, the tally of page one rankings will have increased exponentially.  Why?  Because your client has already been ranking on page one for a lot of those long tail keywords you grabbed from the analytics data, probably long before you came along to help them with their SEO.

• Put together a nice bar graph showing the first month's page one rankings (see Step 1) compared with the second month's.  Looks great, doesn't it?  Nobody can argue with that kind of positive growth.  This should go on your cover page.
• Send the ranking report out to your client.

Step 4: Repeat Steps 2 and 3 Each Month FTW!

After six months you should have compiled a list of literally hundreds of page one rankings - all with no more than 1 hour of work per month!

You may be thinking, "Come on! That's ridiculous. Who would fall for that?"  And while I agree it is ridiculous, it saddens me to tell you: a lot of people fall for this.