Happy belated new year! It’s been really busy so this is my first post of the new year.

We’re going to get back to my series of posts on “7 Reasons Why Your Website Doesn’t Bring You Business” but I wanted to talk about a really important issue that I’ve been wanting to write about for a long time.

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m very fortunate to have a really good lead generation program that introduces me to business owners from every demographic every day.

My inspiration for this post comes from a really devoted business owner I spoke to early this morning, but this situation has come up many times before. The gentleman runs a small limousine service based out of Seattle, Washington.

What’s neat about this situation is that the gentleman has a desire to grow his business and he has reached out to me and two other SEO firms about quoting him on a monthly marketing plan that will help to get his website ranked on the first page.

Being the competitor that I am, I sent the owner my proposal yesterday and followed up with him today. To make a long story short, the owner really wasn’t excited about my prices. Not only was he not excited about my prices but he didn’t like the fact that the SEO process couldn’t be guaranteed in under 3 months.

Now don’t get me wrong, depending on the situation, it is possible to take certain keyword terms and get them on the first page in a relatively short period of time, but this is more the exception than the rule especially when you’re competing against similar businesses in a large city.

My firm doesn’t offer cookie cutter plans and generally speaking, there’s not much that we can do for any competitive industry with a budget below $450 a month.

Getting back to the limo guy; he had been quoted a price of around the $100 a month range and a guarantee that he’ll be on page one within 90 days! Wow! I should get that guy’s number!

The client is currently in position 42 or lower for most terms he’s trying to rank for, so any SEO firm that can get him to the front page in 3 months with a budget of a $100 is someone I want to get to know. Right? How about wrong.

If your keywords are competitive and or you live a city/region/county of over 3000 people (and this number can be much less depending on the industry ie: insurance agents) and are being promised first page rankings with a small budget, dollars to donuts you’re being offered a scam. What I told the gentleman this morning is what I’m going to tell you now; scammers are scammers because they tell you what you want to hear.

Local or national SEO (which can be much harder in many circumstances) is not like a light bulb, you simply can not turn it on and off at the flip of a switch. It doesn’t work that way. It is a process that requires a meticulous nature and a dedication to a planned approach. There’s no Houdini in this business and yelling out “hocus pocus” isn’t part of the process. Strong SEO campaigns are successful because they are consistent and executed properly.

Getting back to my prospect in Seattle, here is a list of his top 13 competitors:

If you look at the RDD (referring domains) column, you can see that most of his competitors have at least 100 referring domains and some have back-links (BLD) that number in the the thousands. There’s a heck of a lot more factors than these to get a website to rank well, but this gives you a small indication of the level of competitiveness this guy is going to be dealing with.

Looking at the prospect’s numbers below, it’s very unlikely that he’ll be on the first page in three months:

As an experienced SEO professional, the challenge of getting this client to rank well is easily attainable but it can’t be done with $100 a month plan in three months. No way.

Ultimately, good SEO practitioners have the ability to heavily influence the search engine rankings but we don’t control the rankings. The search engines do. So any SEO “professional” that meets you and guarantees you the number one ranking is someone that I would hang up on, kick out of my office, run away from or simply ignore because I guarantee you, you’re heading for trouble. Run away doubly fast if you’re being promised the number one spot for $100 to $150 a month when you’re in a competitive industry! That old adage, if it’s too good to be true, it usually is, pretty well applies to everything doesn’t it?