So you’ve searched “Cheap SEO Services”, and you’re thinking you’ll just get a good deal on SEO and the results will be the same as any other seo package or plan, right? Wrong, unfortunately. Your website’s SEO quality will differ massively. Low cost and affordable seo has become synonymous with blackhat, low quality practices that could get your website a Google penalty.
I know this already sounds biased but hear me out, even if you do choose to go for cheap seo, I want you to look out for a few things.
Backlinks
SEO experts say, backlinks are one of the single most effective ranking signals that Google looks for.
Backlinks or link building services are a top focus for seo companies selling affordable marketing. If quality standards are lowered, link building can be an easy, and an even automated process, though the results may be easy for an SEO, your website rankings won’t be as good as if quality links were used.
Automated backlinks can be created by bot software that finds random places to place a link to your website on another website. This type of link building goes against Google’s guidelines, and could land your website de-indexed from Google altogether! So be careful with these kinds of services.
If the seo company in question fulfils a link building package, some provide a spreadsheet of the links they’ve created. Here you can see for yourself what kind of links have been created. If it looks spammy, it’s usually not good for the longevity of your website’s rankings.
DO look out for seo companies that offer link outreach to relevant websites and explicitly declare they offer whitehat SEO, also make sure to check the reviews of the company you’re thinking about buying from to back up their claims.
Guarantees
No SEO company should say they can guarantee results, yes more than likely most can achieve rankings, but if they claim to get you to Number 1 spot for any of your keywords, they’d be lying to you.
There’s so many factors that go into the ability to rank a certain web page for a given keyword. That includes the strength of competitor websites, relevance for that keyword, and user intent (among other factors). These factors vary across every SEO client’s site so a guarantee can’t be made for any ranking, or traffic.
The Package Economy
SEO packages are as good as their deliverables. Many only offer to complete a set of tasks that have an effect on SEO. But these won’t be comprehensive. So rankings (if any are gained) will usually be temporary, as no one is continually adding to the website and optimising.
Packages that set out a specific number of backlinks like “we’ll do 100 backlinks” are generally low quality, spammy links with no relevance to your website’s niche. And this is something Google’s algorithms look for when weighing up the quality of backlinks towards a website.
Competition
Competition is the main reason I think cheap pre-priced SEO is a bad idea.
Difficulty pays a big part in pricing up SEO and without doing a discovery stage before pricing SEO, the SEO company doesn’t know what opportunities there are for your website to rank and gain targeted keywords.
Often, cheap companies will ask YOU what keywords you want, and do no discovery, they’ll just implement a few changes, rather than trying to discover the best opportunities for your business, or find keywords that’ll bring in the highest quality web traffic.
We price SEO based on the opportunities available to a website, and how hard is the competition for the keywords we think will be best. We don’t just use your competition for benchmarking difficulty to rank, we also analyse their websites to find more opportunities for us to capitalise on.
Strategy
Usually a low budget won’t allow for a well thought out SEO strategy. However, this should underpin and guide every optimisation made on a website.
A cheap strategy is just to make changes that were agreed to be carried out. They won’t go beyond that.
To me, this is a real shame. There’s so many tools and softwares that could be used to evaluate a website and then decide what’s needed. But none of this will be used for cheap SEO.
A good seo company would look at your historical website data on Google Analytics to find out where traffic and clicks to the site are coming from.
They’ll look at other barriers to conversions like loading speeds of the site, and quality of content – what might your content be missing that your competitors have in their content.
Tools can also tell the SEO a lot about your niche in general, so they’ll be able to write quality content on subjects for your website, as well as monitor your competitors.
Of course, strategies are for long term success and continued seo work, so a low cost budget won’t touch this quality of SEO.
Other Channels
Rarely will social media, and other potential referral websites be optimised. A wholesome strategy would take into account the potential for quality web searchers to come from sites like Facebook, Yell, and other search engines outside of Google, and optimise listings for these platforms too.
It’s been known for a while that social media shares, likes, and comments can contribute to the success of SEO for a business website. These external sites aren’t deemed to be as effective as optimising your own website so are often left out of cheap services. But depending on the difficulty of the competition as mentioned previously, this could be the difference between ranking positions in Google search results, so well worth optimising.
User Experience
You won’t find a quality SEO who doesn’t look at user behaviour and make improvements based on website usage. What do I mean by this? I mean, as a marketing professional, every project should gather data to benchmark the success of it. Users are a huge part of a website and tools like Google Analytics should be used to discover how the websites are being used, and make a web visitor’s experience better.
Cheap SEO is not the right choice if you’re looking to consistently expand your website’s marketing online. Using spammy SEO can harm your website’s presence and leave a scorched history on your domain, making it harder to rank on Google in future. Not only will opportunities be missed, you’ll be limiting your website’s potential rather than expanding it.
Choose a professional SEO service instead! Is SEO a waste of money? Absolutely not, SEO can be a great use of a marketing budget, provided there’s a comprehensive SEO service in place including a digital strategy that doesn’t just take a website into consideration but the company’s online presence as a whole.
