One of the things about clients I have never understood is their desire to enter into exclusive SEO contracts. While I understand the need to out perform the competition with regards to search engine rankings, what I don’t understand is how being exclusive is going to get a site to list in more than 2 positions in any given SERP (search engine ranking page).

Let me explain – If a search engine offers 10 results per page for any search query, the best any site can ever hope to achieve is 2 listings out of the10. If said site gets the two positions on a page in the search engine that still leaves 8 spots that you will not be able to rank for with the same site.

Now let’s say for arguments sake that you are working for a company that has multiple sites that offer the same products and or services, you could attain positions for that search phrase for each of those sites but then those sites would only be competing with the company’s own sites thus lowering the ROI for each of those sites. Sure you may be capturing the SERP for that search query (I have done this for a client in the past, 6 different sites capturing 6 out of 10 page one results) but is it really worth the extra cost for exclusivity to out perform your own sites?

In my opinion it is far better to spend the extra money you would have spent on exclusivity into making your site better for the people who use your site.