TL;DR:
- “Guaranteed SEO results” like a fixed monthly traffic increase (e.g., 6-10%) is unrealistic and outdated: SEO outcomes are influenced by numerous factors outside of an SEO specialist or an agency’s direct control, making guarantees of specific traffic increases impossible. This practice is widely seen as a red flag.
- Real SEO is affected by seasonality, algorithm updates, competitor actions, user behavior, and zero-click searches/AI overviews:
- Seasonality: Many businesses experience predictable fluctuations in search traffic based on the time of year.
- Algorithm updates: Search engines like Google constantly update their algorithms, which can impact rankings and traffic.
- Competitor actions: The SEO landscape is competitive; your rankings and traffic are relative to your competitors’ efforts.
- User behaviour: Search engines consider how users interact with search results and websites when determining rankings.
- Zero-click searches/AI overviews: Google’s features like featured snippets and AI overviews can answer queries directly in the search results, reducing the need for users to click through to websites.
- Instead of guarantees, I focus on a solid SEO strategy, fixing crawlability, relevant keywords, quality content, and ultimately, leads: This is best practice in modern SEO. A strategic approach that addresses the technical foundations of a website, targets relevant keywords, creates valuable content, and aims to drive business results (leads, sales) is far more effective and ethical than promising arbitrary traffic numbers.
- Reporting should be transparent, focusing on impressions, relevant clicks, keyword ranking improvements, and year-on-year growth, not just a misleading guaranteed monthly percentage. Meaningful SEO reporting focuses on actionable metrics that demonstrate progress and provide insights into what’s working. Impressions, clicks on relevant keywords, ranking improvements for target terms, and year-over-year comparisons offer a more holistic and realistic view of SEO performance than a simplistic and often unattainable monthly traffic growth guarantee.
Introduction
I had a great conversation recently about the fact that there are digital marketing agencies out there still offering “guaranteed SEO results”. The case in question was of a firm selling SEO packages that “guaranteed” 6-10% monthly organic traffic increases. I was surprised. I used to hear about this many years ago and remember saying that I thought this was quite an “old fashioned” notion.
This concept runs in the same vein as “guaranteed rankings”. Again these are questionably realistic, possible, and ethical. Nobody can promise search volumes, impressions, or rankings let alone clicks across the board. This may be achievable for a new website with a lot of SEO work needed on it but you have to honestly ask yourself are such continuous growth levels truly sustainable?
So with this minimum 6% in mind I ran some figures, and putting 1,000 organic visits as the primer for existing traffic currently, that 6% per month, repeatedly, equalled a more than doubling of organic traffic at the end of 12 months. By month 24 this had doubled again to over 4,000 monthly visits. I described that mapping the data would show a dead straight line going up and up forever and ever. Amen.
Now this very website you’re reading right now – a year-on-year three-month comparison of clicks shows that I’ve achieved a 433% increase in clicks, but that’s from a far lower baseline than 1,000 visits per month. I’ve even culled personal content to focus on SEO subjects, so that figure could have been much higher, But it’s also off the back of a 1,054% increase in impressions from an effort in increased content creation and reorganised information architecture. Is this sustainable? I don’t know. Would I guarantee myself increased clicks? I’m sure they will increase but I cannot put a specific figure on it. I’ll explain more below.
6-10% Is That Even Realistic?
Here’s a chart I plotted of 10% month-on-month organic traffic gains over a 4 year period starting from an existing 1,000 visits per month. Much like compound interest the increases are phenomenal – but ultimately sceptical. For a larger website and business this is challenging. For a small tradesperson’s website, it’s even more of a challenge when you take into account monthly KW volume and CTR. I have a growth mindset and don’t like limits, but sometimes there will only be 1,000 people looking for a service in a geographical area, and you will likely reach those limits. You can expand your service area to catch more potential clicks, but this could very well be subject to the law of diminishing returns rather than a more logarithmic unbounded increase.
Now, in some cases in the past I’ve achieved excellent rates of organic traffic growth through my hard work and SEO expertise. And yes, I have doubled traffic in a year and here I’ve quadrupled it. In fact I once achieved a massively flattering 800%+ organic traffic increase. However, that was because I saw that the new client still had a disallow directive in his robots.txt file that impeded his ranking and traffic and removed it – bingo! A massive traffic increase.
But, as an ethical and experienced SEO specialist, I would not put my name to any promises of guaranteed SEO increases per month as I wouldn’t do for guaranteed rankings. I will however, proudly put my name to more up-to-date methods of SEO and realistic results, as you can read later in this piece.
Why is “Guaranteed Traffic” Still Being Offered?
I don’t know why these guaranteed SEO results packages are being offered in this day and age, they’re a bit of an anomaly. I remember back in the day that people tended to be less informed about Search Engine Optimisation, just as people were often persuaded to submit their links to as many website directories as possible.
However, today. at the end of the first quarter of the twenty first century, clients are a lot more educated and informed, but there may always be those out there who don’t understand. I’m here to educate, inform and empower clients to know what is genuinely possible.
I would however AIM to earn a 6% traffic increase over a 12-month period and regularly re-assess that based upon impression, rank, and click data, and forecast if that can be realistically achieved again in the next 12-month period.
Why Shouldn’t Guarantees be Offered?
There are numerous reasons why specific traffic increases as well as rankings, just do not happen:
Seasonality
This is a big and obvious reason why month-on-month increases do not always occur.
For 25 years I’ve been poring over website traffic data and the majority of what I’ve cast my eyes on has been business-to-business (B2B) websites. What’s common amongst nearly all of them has been big dips in traffic during weekends, bank holidays, Easter, summer holidays, school terms, and the good old Christmas period.
This last example in particular is the biggest reason for traffic lulls, as many offices are closed over Christmas and workers are quite often expected to save some of their holiday entitlement to bridge the gaps over the Christmas and New Year break.
Any promises of traffic gains during these times should be questioned. Ask how any guaranteed increases could possibly happen against such a backdrop.
Search Engine Algorithms
Google is famed for its algorithm changes over the past 25 years. When they are introduced, they are designed to tackle an issue in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) and may affect your website depending on how you’ve built and optimised it.
In the past Google has cracked down on poor quality content, suspicious links, and more recently concepts such as expired domain abuse, site reputation, and scaled content abuse (In the March 2024 Core update). If you’ve been involved in any of these tactics then you may have been negatively affected. On the other hand, if you’ve been doing “white hat” SEO then you should have been OK. However, the point here is that nobody knows what’s in the next algorithm change, how it will affect you, or often what to do about it.
Google is usually pretty vague about what it has engineered into its algorithms, often simply citing quality as a goal. However, last March’s specifics were unusual yet very welcome. At least the SEO community is aware of what is not acceptable and that Google is cracking down on unsavoury practices where legitimate and ethical professionals work so hard to achieve.
Competitor Activity
Optimising your business website is not done in isolation. If you’ve made the decision that you need SEO then the chances are that your competitors have either already made that choice or will do so when you start to outrank them.
The very fact that you know that your website requires an SEO expert to work on it may also indicate that your competitors have already been doing SEO on their site.
There’s also the subject of just how much work has been done by the competition: Do they have an in-house team, an SEO agency, or a consultant working for them and what is their digital marketing budget?
User Behaviour
The concept of user behaviour is a fundamental part of SEO. User engagement metrics such as Click Through Rate (CTR), bounce rates, time spent on a web page, and session duration, are all key data in helping search engines to assess the quality of search.
With search intent as a metric, algorithms are designed to calculate whether a user’s needs have been matched by a search query, and if you provide a quality result through positive experience, then this reflects on the search engines ranking a website more favourably. The reverse is true too.
Zero Click Searches and Generative AI Overviews
For quite a few years now Google has scraped website content and presented it as its own. This has resulted in “zero click searches” and these are being repeated with AI Overviews.
A classic for me was that I used to regularly as “what is my IP” so that I could add it in Google Analytics to filter out my web developer traffic. For a long time the top result in Google SERPs was the website WhatIsMyIP.com but then the featured snippet took over and Google themselves provided e with my IP address, presumably robbing the website of its former traffic.
Today I conducted that very same search but I saw the website back at the top of the SERPs once again.
Featured snippets and AI Overviews can take away traffic, especially from informational search intent queries, so bear that in mind.
The Alternative to Guaranteed Results
As a reputable SEO specialist I don’t want to “put down” the agencies and individuals who still offer guaranteed organic traffic results, but it isn’t a viable option these days and hasn’t been for many years.
Instead, I focus on much more worthy and realistic organic ambitions:
Start With an SEO Audit, Develop an SEO Strategy
If you think about the SMART framework of making tasks specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and timely, then whilst promising a minimum 6% monthly traffic increase is a specific number, the specificity isn’t there in terms of which keywords will drive the volumes.
In my ready reckoning of 1,000 visits at 6% per month that’s 60 new visits I’d have to find straight away. Out of the traps, that’s an ambitious start, and completely misses the point that search involves increasing the crawlability of the website, then ranking and impressions, and then the clicks. So aiming for immediate increases in organic traffic skips all the important fundamentals.
So I’d start with a discovery session with the client, ascertain their business goals, and then conduct an SEO audit of their website. With the commercial strategy in mind, I’d create an SEO strategy to then focus on very specific, measurable, and achievable results.
Fix Crawlability
As I just mentioned, the first step in the search engine game is to make your website crawlable. With all the useful data in Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools, you can see where the issues are with a website so that you can focus and fix them. I’d even start with the webserver and make sure that was fully optimised first.
Fixing crawlability involves finding and mending broken links, adding canonical links where appropriate, making sure that the robots exclusion protocols are correct in your robots.txt, you have the right XML sitemaps etc.
This takes time, but you can make a website far more crawlable fairly quickly, and once it’s in that state, it’s easy for the SearchBots to visit, crawl, rank and index your site,
Focus on a Relevant Keyword Strategy
Happy that a website is relatively optimal to start with, my next port of call is to look at the keyword strategy for a client. This involves looking at the existing keywords, again in GSC and BWT, and comparing that with the business plan, marketing plan, and any digital marketing plan. It’s at this stage that I often realise that a website may not always have as rich a keyword map as I’d expected.
The keyword strategy is integrated into the SEO and wider digital strategy, so get this done early. Conduct a keyword gap analysis and a content gap too. You can do this manually, or with tools that are already out there (SEMrush has a KW gap tool).
I’d rather have better ranking for more of a client’s relevant keywords than simply try to drive an unrealistic guaranteed 6% every month.
Content Strategy
Now this may not always be appropriate to all clients at this stage, but having in mind a content strategy is also important at this point in the process.
If we’re trying to replace the guaranteed 6% month-on-month organic traffic increases, then we need to consider how this was supposedly being achieved and what the options are, With very small websites, optimisation is important but providing useful content may be the key to unlocking impressions and clicks.
I usually look for a blog or news section, cases studies and testimonials as a good place to start generating fresh new relevant content and expand upon a website’s footprint.
Leads
In my conversation about the “guaranteed” traffic, I said I’d replace simple 6% gains, which I don’t believe, and quite often come from boosting irrelevant keywords, with leads instead. If I can’t promise a constant 6% month-on-month organic traffic increase, then I’d be happy with a line that slowly trends upwards over 12 months, with the seasonal and algorithmic dips, but gets a steady drip feed of ever more relevant keyword clicks.
Ranking relevant keywords then getting relevant clicks, then relevant leads is totally do-able. Whilst it may seem in the realms of the PPC people and their landing pages with Conversion Rate Optimisation, it needs to be known that’s not exclusive to PPC people. I’ve conducted SEO that has made PPC more effective and so my PPC insights have made my SEO work more productive too – that’s the beauty of holistic digital marketing and my SEO+ advantage,
So aim for getting more leads too. 6% more traffic means nothing if you have no more leads, so aim for leads, regardless of what traffic gains you may make.
Results & Reporting
I’d love to see the reports on the results for a website that gets 6% monthly gains.
If this were me reporting on a website’s monthly traffic, I couldn’t guarantee that line will be 6% up every thirty days or so. But my transparency in using tools like GSC and GA4 would allow me to report gains in other areas.
I’d show how impressions are increasing, filtering out other countries to get an honest insight. Look at increasing clicks, and the increase in very specific, relevant keywords, driving them from positions 11-20 into the top 10. CTR would start to climb too.
My reports are also quarterly and can be H1, H2, and even six monthly or annual to show where you’ve come from. I also tend to run year-on-year comparisons rather than just month-on-month, you get a better idea of how you’re really doing and you iron out that seasonality too.
Conclusion
I’m sorry this is not a prescriptive outline of exactly what to do as every website, every client, every business is different.
However, stop chasing tactics from before 2005 and focus instead on the SEO strategies of 2025. The internet has evolved, as has the web, search, and user behaviours.
We’re now using generative AI to assist in searches mainly for informational search intent, but that’s changed how people search and therefore what is presented to use in the SERPs. In fact, we’re seeing more and more people use Google Search less and just dive into ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini, Claude, and Perplexity.
Organic traffic growth is achievable but it has to be in relation to your competitors, because if you’re seeing zero-click searches eating into
If you’d like a second opinion on your SEO, call me, an SEO expert with over 25 years experience of optimising websites for local SEO, deeper technical SEO and even writing quality copy. My number is 07730 499 539 and I look forward to hearing from you soon.
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