Many years ago, when I had a small SEO agency (OK, it was just me!), a client told me they had been approached by an big SEO consultant who guaranteed to get them into one of the first three positions on Google.
It sounded impressive, until I looked at the search phrases they were proposing.
They were incredibly obscure. After a little research, I couldn’t find any evidence that people were actually searching for them. The consultant might well have delivered the rankings they promised, but those rankings would have brought the client little or no useful traffic.
To demonstrate how meaningless this could be, I invented a word:
fuzzyalarmzip
There was no competition for it because the word didn’t exist. Once I published it on this page, I became the number-one result on Google for fuzzyalarmzip.
Many years later, I still am.
Technically, that makes this page an astonishing SEO success. I’m number one on Google, with no serious competition anywhere in sight.
There is, of course, one fairly important problem. Nobody searches for fuzzyalarmzip unless they have already read this page.
That was the trick behind some of those guaranteed-ranking offers. An agency could choose a long, obscure phrase with no competition and little or no search traffic, get your website ranking for it, and then present the result as proof that they had done their job.
The promise had been fulfilled, but the business hadn’t gained anything.
A useful search ranking isn’t just about appearing first. It needs to be for something your potential customers genuinely search for. It also needs to bring the right people to a page that answers their question, solves their problem or helps them buy something.
So when someone promises you a top-three Google ranking, the obvious question isn’t simply, “Can you do it?”
Ask them what they plan to rank you for, whether anyone searches for it, what kind of visitor it will attract and what value that traffic could bring to your business.
Ranking first for a phrase nobody uses is easy.
Just ask fuzzyalarmzip.