Guaranteed SEO, guaranteed!
No reputable SEO professional will offer you first place. I stress ‘reputable’. None of us have any direct control over Google or any other engine despite bogus claims by some. We merely do our best to influence the engines to believe that your site is most relevant for a term.
I happen to be very good at influencing the engines to believe the sites I optimize are related to the words I want them to rank highly for and, most of the time, I get my way. I would never lie and make guarantees about position though. SEO’s have no direct control over the engines and, therefore, cannot guarantee position.
To expand the thought on this, there are millions of site that want to be on top of ‘Website Optimization’ SERPs only 10 are going to get it. Does your budget come close to that of the top sites? Are you pursuing your efforts efficiently?
If you are willing to spend $50 one time to get on the top… save your money (or change your strategy and SEO expectations). The time and effort it takes to be on top (especially in competetive arenas) will simply not allow small one-time efforts to succeed. The amount of effort top ranking sites in competetive categories use requires that you do it yourself or that you spend like any other marketing avenue… setup a budget and stick with it.
I’m not saying that you can’t get great results from low budgets, I’m just saying use some common sense when setting up a budget and don’t expect the world for peanuts… especially if you are in a niche where you are competing against Behemoths who have the resources to employ a full-time staff of professionals to rise to the top. The real point behind SEO advertising is not to prank, it’s the traffic that comes from it. By widening your target markets to include many low-level (but active) keywords and keyphrases, you can triple your traffic or more from the engines.
Large budgets are honestly no guarantee of success either. Bad SEO efforts or optimization that is targeting weak keywords will dash your efforts. It would be similar to advertising under trash-can lids in the real world and may not be the best placement of your product or service. Your best bet is to have realistic expectations of what SEO CAN and CANNOT do for you and your site.
I have some ‘pre-compiled’ packages I offer for SEO with setup beginning around $250. This consists of several scripts to help monitor spiders and build sitemaps while ensuring that the overall health of the site is acceptable (robots.txt, htaccess, HTML, OPML, Google, and Yahoo sitemaps). This gets me started on keyword research to make sure that the SEO efforts will target appropriate phrases and gets your site submitted “PROPERLY” to the top engines and DMOZ. Proper keyword targeting will ensure that your budget is not being wasted on words that do not bring traffic in. This is a solid foundation and is designed to get you going. This part is pretty standard across all sites, but chances are that you will need more to take off and top out in your markets niches.
Since, at this point, most sites begin to take different paths to SEO greatness, this is where individual customizations and strategies come into play. This is the point where, according to your budget, I can suggest different approaches and methods to help your site get better ranking. Not every site will require every SEO method to be fully tweaked. Many times, quiet little niches can have many top keywords without a whole lot of effort into the optimization. Many sites can improve ranking by some minor code adjustments that help to inform the search engines what your site is about.
Bottom line is, good SEO takes time and effort and that requires a dedication on the part of your SEO provider and your budget. While you may be able to improve your site over time by small increments, someone else is throwing all they have into beating your site on the SERPs. Stay competetive, do what you can, but have realistic expectations about your goals. The ability to expand on SEO strategies and implement many various optimization tactics will help your provider to succeed but the SEO expectations must be realistic.
By the way, great SEO not only dominates at competetive keywords, but can also find many little niches to funnel traffic your way. I get more traffic from all of my ‘little words’ than I do from a top position on ‘website optimization’ and it was easier to get top ranking for those words.
Traffic from a small budget is not impossible, if you look at it realistically. I’d love a Lexus for $50, but if I am lucky enough to get it… it may not work like I expected. Maybe I should save my $50 until I can get a better Lexus… or get a Pinto to get me around for now until I can get a better car.