Not all search engine optimization companies are created equal: some offer premium services for a premium price, while others may only provide a minimum level of service. You often get what you pay for, but a large price tag does not always translate to a successful outcome. While many legitimate SEO companies can deliver results, they often use a variety of tricks or scams in order to get you to commit to their services. These claims can be enticing but are often too good to be true. How can someone who knows nothing about SEO be on the lookout for potential financial pitfalls? While you cannot always anticipate a problem before it occurs, it does help to know about the most common tricks and scams used to get your business. Below, we will discuss three of these and what you can really expect in the situation.

A Guaranteed Ranking on the First Place

Boy, this sounds like a great deal, right? An affordable SEO company makes the promise that they will be pinging search engines with your content in no time at all and you will rise to the top of search results. If only it were that easy. The truth is that no reputable SEO company can promise this, and even the best ones out there cannot adequately anticipate how a given niche will change over months and years. While a sparsely populated niche may be easily overtaken for a short period of time, it will not take long for others to find this niche and begin targeting it as well. As competition increases, so do your chances of being knocked off of the first page. No company can promise a first page ranking and no honest company will say that they can.

“We Understand Google”

While Google has a lot of different metrics and algorithms that can be analysed and understood in various degrees, no SEO company can adequately claim that they understand all of the algorithms or the search engine itself with unflinching certainty. The fact of the matter is that Google and many other search engines constantly change algorithms and tweak various settings – all of this will impact how your site ranks in select search results. With updates being released almost on a monthly basis these days, there is not a content optimizer on the planet who knows all of the ins and outs of Google.

Our Secret Methods Work

What a hoot! Some SEO company tells you that they have a secret method that allows them to beat the rest of the competition in terms of augmenting your site’s presence and pinging search engines. The truth is that SEO is very much a science: there are right ways to do things and wrong ways to do things. While these precise methods change with each update, an individual SEO company is not going to possess a set of talents or skills that have somehow remained unknown to an entire industry of professionals that work for other firms. If someone tells you this, then they either seek to simply gain your attention or use questionable/negative tactics that will ultimately result in your site being penalized or blacklisted from Google.