The money-back SEO guarantee

Why this matters (Opening, story style)

A common conversation we've had on a first call

A Head of Ecommerce calls. He's been burned by two SEO agencies in the last four years. The first one promised "double your organic traffic in 6 months" in the sales call, then refused to put that promise in the contract. Eight months in, traffic was flat. The agency said it was "complicated" and "SEO takes time." He fired them and lost the budget.

The second agency was more careful. They promised nothing specific in the sales call, and nothing specific in the contract. Ten months in, traffic was flat again. He fired them and went without an agency for a year. His organic revenue kept dropping.

By the time he calls us, his question isn't "what's your strategy." It's "what happens if you don't deliver."

That question deserves a real answer.

The terms, in plain English (pre-emptive claim, Hopkins style)

What we commit to, in writing

Every Lobit retainer contract includes a Money-Back Guarantee clause with four elements:

1. A defined KPI

We pick one specific, measurable outcome that matters to your business. The default options are:

• Organic revenue (most common for distributors with clean GA4 attribution)
• Organic-attributed quote requests (common for distributors whose conversion happens off-site)
• AI-citation count across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google AI Overviews
• Page 1 commercial-intent keyword rankings (common for very new sites)

We set the specific target number during onboarding (after the audit, with both teams looking at the data). The number goes into the contract as a written clause, not as a footnote in a sales email.

2. A defined timeframe

The standard timeframe is 6 months from the contract start date. For very large sites or sites that need an extensive technical rebuild, we sometimes agree on a 9-month window. The exact months are in the contract.

3. A defined refund mechanism

If we miss the KPI on the agreed timeframe, you get a pro-rated retainer refund based on the percentage of the target we hit. For example:

• We commit to +150% organic revenue growth, we hit +90%: refund = (150 − 90) / 150 = 40% of the 6-month retainer
• We commit to 80 AI citations per month at month 6, we hit 60: refund = (80 − 60) / 80 = 25% of the 6-month retainer
• We commit and hit or exceed the target: no refund, the engagement continues normally

The refund cap is the total retainer fees paid during the guarantee window. We don't refund more than you paid us. We don't refund less than the formula says.

4. Defined client cooperation conditions

The guarantee is contingent on a small list of client cooperation requirements:

• Access to Search Console, GA4, the CMS admin and the dev environment within 14 days of contract start
• Technical fixes recommended by Lobit shipped to production within 30 days of being recommended (or, if longer, with mutual written agreement)
• No major platform migration, brand renaming or domain change during the guarantee window without a contract reset
• No paid media budget cuts of more than 50% during the guarantee window (a sudden paid pullback can distort organic attribution)

These conditions exist because SEO is a team sport. If your dev team blocks every technical fix for 5 months, we can't be accountable for the resulting traffic.

How often this gets invoked (Honest data, Hopkins)

The numbers behind 8 years of guaranteed retainers

• Engagements with a guarantee clause since 2018: 150+
• Engagements where the guarantee was invoked: fewer than 4% of them
• Engagements where we refunded in full: a small number, each one for a defined reason (usually a platform migration we didn't sign off on, or a paid-media collapse that distorted attribution)
• What we learned each time: how to qualify better at the front door. You benefit from those rejections.

The guarantee is not a marketing line. It is a contract clause with eight years of refund history behind it.

What the guarantee is not (Honest, sets expectations, Frey)

The guarantee covers outcomes. It does not cover surprises.

The Money-Back Guarantee covers performance against the agreed KPI on the agreed timeframe under the agreed cooperation conditions. It does not cover:

• A Google algorithm update so dramatic that the entire category resets (in those cases, we typically reset the guarantee window without restarting the contract)
• A platform migration or rebrand undertaken without our involvement
• A dramatic reduction in catalog size that mechanically reduces indexable surface
• A change in business model (going from B2B to DTC, for example) mid-engagement
• Acts of God: large-scale internet outages, supplier shutdowns, etc.

If any of these happen, we discuss in good faith and reach a written addendum. The point is to be accountable, not to invent escape hatches.

Why we can offer this when others don't (Pre-emptive claim)

The structural reasons most US agencies can't match this

The simple answer is margin and team structure.

A US Tier-1 agency with a 200-person headcount has fully loaded delivery costs around 60 to 70% of revenue. Their margin can't absorb refund risk on retainers without putting the agency itself at risk. So they don't offer guarantees, and they protect their margin by writing carefully vague contracts.

Lobit is a 4-person senior team with a Zagreb cost base. Our fully loaded delivery costs are roughly 35 to 45% of revenue. We can carry the refund risk and still make a healthy margin, because we are not subsidizing a junior account-manager middle layer.

The same structure is what lets us cap intake at 12 active clients. It's the same math, applied to two different parts of the business model. The result is an agency that can credibly commit to outcomes in writing.

CTA + P.S.

Two ways to start

1. Book a 30-minute call. We'll walk you through the guarantee clause line-by-line, on your screen. [Book the call →]

2. Order a one-time audit (€1,500 to €4,500). The audit gives both teams the data needed to set a realistic guarantee target before any retainer is signed. [Order the audit →]

P.S.

P.S. - If you've ever asked an agency for an outcome guarantee and watched the conversation get strange, you already know how rare a real, written, refundable guarantee is. The reason it's rare is not that other agencies are unethical. It is that their cost structures cannot absorb the risk. Ours can. [Book the call →]

INTERNAL LINKING SUGGESTIONS

• Link back to /services/seo-for-industrial-distributors, /services/geo-ai-search-optimization
• Link to /pricing from the cost-structure discussion
• Link to /case-studies from the "how often this gets invoked" section
• Link to /contact and /audit from every CTA

Ready to talk?

Book a 30-minute call. We'll look at your site live, your AI-search visibility, and your top three growth-blocking issues. No pitch deck. Just answers.

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