JMHS Alumni

TopSEOs rankings have come to be regarded as an authoritative source of objective information on SEO service providers. Through these rankings, you can tell who the best Internet marketing service providers in the various niches are. As a webmaster, such information would be indispensable when selecting a service provider to help you shine on the web. On the other hand, through the rankings, Internet marketing service providers see an opportunity to get exposure to clients. Indeed, being listed in TopSEOs has come to be viewed by many buyers of Internet marketing services as a mark of credibility. As such, many won’t even start considering you, if you are not listed in TopSEOs.

Now the TopSEOs rankings don’t just show the name of a SEO company, and how it ranks against other Internet marketing companies. Rather, the company behind the rankings has gone a step further, to provide the contextual background against which the rankings can be understood. This it does by providing other pertinent information regarding the ranked companies: how old they are, how strong their revenue streams are, how many employees they have, what their customer retention rates are and – of particular interest here, who their clients are.

As it turns out, while most of the companies ranked on TopSEOs provide every bit of data required – from their year of inception to their revenue ranges, their employee numbers and their client retention rate – a good number will tend to withhold information when it comes to revelation of actual client names. We are interested in finding out why some SEO companies don’t include their (sample) client lists in the column for ‘clients’ on their TopSEOs listings. This is typically in a situation where rather than mention client names, the said SEO companies only enter the word ‘confidential.’

Three possible reasons emerge, for these companies withholding their client portfolios.

For one, there are companies which don’t necessarily have remarkable clients, but which nonetheless make it to the top of TopSEOs rankings. These are companies mostly serving small (but numerous) clients.  Yet you notice that most of the companies which are very open about their clients, as per their TopSEOs listings, are those which have ‘notable’ clients (even if those few notable clients are all they have). It is perfectly understandable that a company with no big clients would want to keep its modest client list confidential, because revealing it may create the wrong impression that it is not a proper SEO company.

Then there are companies which have gotten into confidentiality agreements with their clients, and who, as such cannot afford to reveal them in their TopSEOs listings, notwithstanding the fact that the said clients may actually be very ‘notable’ ones.

Finally, we have some SEO companies that may be of the opinion that revealing their client lists on their TopSEOs listings may amount to exposing themselves to having those clients snatched. Naturally, such companies will tend to keep their client lists confidential; notwithstanding the fact they may have better client lists than all the other SEO companies listed in TopSEOs.