Before you sign anything
The Ranking Guarantee Scam, and What It Doesn’t Say
How the guaranteed-first-page contract trap works, why it's always honored, and the one question that makes it fall apart.
How it works
The guarantee is real. That’s the problem with it.
The call is cold and it’s well practiced. Guaranteed first page on Google. Two or three hundred dollars a month. Twelve months, sign here. To somebody who has never bought marketing it sounds like the cheapest thing anybody has ever offered, and the guarantee sounds like the part that protects you. It’s the part that traps you.
Here is what happens. They do rank you, and they can prove it. They rank you for a phrase constructed so that no competitor is bidding on it, no competitor has written about it, and no human being has ever typed it. Something along the lines of:
“best plumbers who wear blue shirts in Phoenix, Arizona”
You’re first. Genuinely, verifiably first, and there will be a screenshot in the monthly report to prove it. The guarantee has been met in full, in writing, and nobody has done anything a court would find interesting. Your phone doesn’t ring, because nobody searches that, and nobody ever will.
Why the twelve months is the real product
The term isn’t there to give the work time to mature. It’s there because it takes most owners four or five months to work out that nothing is happening, and the contract has to outlast that realization. Four or five months is the figure people give us when they arrive here afterwards. By the time you’re certain, you’re more than halfway through and the sunk cost argues for finishing.
Then getting out is priced above staying. Cancel and you may be pursued for the balance. Some of these are handed to collections. An attorney costs more than the remaining months do, so the rational move is to pay it out, and almost everybody does. That’s the design. The money was never really in the service.
It’s legal, and that’s the point
Nothing described above breaks a law. The ranking is real, the screenshot is real, and the contract says what it says. Take it to an attorney and the answer comes back that the terms were met.
That’s why the word here is scam rather than fraud. Fraud is something a court decides. This is built so that a court never has to.
The deception sits in the gap between what you thought you were buying and what the words actually promised. You believed you were buying phone calls. You were buying a position, on a phrase of their choosing, and a position is exactly what arrived. Both of those are true at the same time, and only one of them was ever written down.
Legal and honest are two different tests. A guarantee written so that meeting it changes nothing about your month was written to be met, not to work.
Straight from Google
Google says the same thing, in its own documentation.
Google publishes a page for business owners thinking about hiring somebody to do their search work. It’s written in plain English and it says, without qualification, that no one can guarantee a number one ranking, and that you should be wary of anybody who claims to, who claims a special relationship with Google, or who offers priority submission to it.
That’s not our opinion about a competitor. It’s the company that owns the rankings telling you that the thing being guaranteed isn’t in anybody’s power to guarantee. Anybody selling it either knows that or hasn’t read the one document that matters in their own industry.
Read it before you speak to anybody, including us. It takes four minutes and it’ll save you a year.
What to do instead
One question, and you don’t need to understand anything to ask it.
Rank me for what, exactly, and how many people search it?
That’s the whole defense. You’re not asking about method, and you don’t need to follow the answer technically. You’re asking for two things: the actual phrases, written down, and roughly how many people type each of them in a month.
A business doing real work will have that list ready, because it’s the first thing they built. A business selling you a guarantee will move the conversation somewhere else: to how complicated it all is, to their proprietary process, to how many clients they have. Notice the move. The move is the answer.
And its other half: rank me where?
Map results depend on where the searcher is standing, so a business can be first in its own parking lot and absent three blocks away. That makes “we got you to number one” an incomplete sentence. First for somebody standing where, and across how much of the area you actually work in?
It also means the check you’d naturally run, searching your own business from your own office, is the one place you’re guaranteed to look your best. Anybody showing you a screenshot taken from your own address is showing you a mirror.
Three more that cost nothing to ask
What happens if I want to leave in month three? Not whether you can: what it costs. Ask for the number, and ask what happens if you simply stop paying.
Who owns the website, the ad account and the tracking number? What it takes to get them back is written out separately. Ask before you sign, because when you want to leave it stops being a question and becomes a bill. The most common way people end up trapped isn’t the contract. It’s discovering that walking away means starting from nothing.
What number will you report, and can I check it myself? If the answer is rankings or visitor numbers, ask how either of those puts money in the bank. The only figures you can personally verify are how many people called you and how many got in touch through your website.
If you’re already in one
Are you planning to change your agency?
There’s a short guide to making the move smooth, including the one thing worth doing before you give notice and what you can realistically get back.
Why we’re telling you this.
Partly because it’s the single most common reason a business owner won’t take a marketing call, and we’d rather deal with that in writing than fight it on the phone. If you’ve been through this, you’re not being unreasonable. You were sold something engineered to be technically honest and practically worthless, and the correct response to that’s suspicion.
But mostly because the questions above work on us too, and they should be asked. We’ve written down who we’re wrong for, we don’t use contracts, and we report how many people called you and how many got in touch through your website, with junk excluded from both. Those three things exist precisely so that the questions on this page have easy answers when you point them at us.
So here are our answers, since none of the above is much use without them. We aim to put you in the top three positions in the maps in Google and to keep you there. We won’t promise the number one spot, because a position moves with who’s searching and where they’re standing. Rank you for what: the things somebody types when they need what you do today, not a phrase nobody searches. Rank you where: the shape around your address where a local business can realistically show, which for most is somewhere between three and seven miles out, depending on how tightly Google draws the map in your area. That isn’t a ceiling either: widening it is most of the ongoing work, and once an area is saturated the next move is another area rather than a bigger radius.
And the part that makes it checkable is that you count the calls and the contact requests yourself. The work that does this takes somewhere between thirty and ninety days to show.
We’ve also been doing this since 2003, which answers a question this page hasn’t asked directly. Whoever sells you a twelve-month guarantee has to still be there in month thirteen, and a good deal of this business is people who weren’t.
If we ever start dodging them, do the same thing we’re suggesting you do to everybody else: give us our sixty days’ written notice on the search work and go somewhere else.
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