All good things come with a price and effective SEO should never be cheap. SEO is arguably more important in today’s competitive digital marketplace than it has been at any point in its history. An innate ability to distinguish good SEO services from those that are merely cheap or accessible should be lionised upon.
It’s clear that brands who invest in good quality SEO and are able to secure consistently high rankings will achieve a competitive advantage over their rivals. This leads us to the changing nature of customer behaviour, which has evolved considerably as the web has enjoyed exponential growth. More specifically, consumers are increasingly likely to source, reference, and purchase goods online, as they leverage the web and its tools to seek out key points of information such as comparative pricing and availability.
This is borne out by statistics, with more than 3.5 billion searches per day on Google alone. So, brands that rank well in Google’s organic search results in relation to pivotal keywords and phrases are in an ideal position to educate customers and compete for their business, while building the foundations of trust and creating the potential for a long-term relationship.
It is imperative to understand why cheap SEOs are not desirable, some reasons are as follows:
- Cheap SEOs go with a one-size-fits-all strategy
For low-cost SEO agencies, every business is the same and they fail to identify and acknowledge what is unique about your company’s products or services. Like a digital marketing strategy, SEO requires a plan tailored to your business.
An agency offering cheap SEO services doesn’t care about what works and what doesn’t with SEO. They get their monthly payment, follow their service script, and move onto the next client. As SEO can take several months to show any results, they don’t have to deal with your dissatisfaction for a while.
That’s why agencies can offer service prices that are typically less than what is usually offered. They’re following the same strategy with every single client. The person handling your account doesn’t have to bother researching your business, they can skip ahead to launching their one-size-fits-all plan.
- Low-cost SEO agencies won’t do even the basic SEO
High-quality content is a definite requirement to have an efficient website. Cheap SEO agencies will not be able to provide you with these basic SEO needs because they require a lot of labour and capital investment. Cutting down on these costs would mean that the agency will not be able to produce long-form, high-quality, and engaging content that you can place on your blog or website. Neither will cheap SEO services get you good opportunities for guest posts on high-authority websites.
Long-form content needs to be informative, well-crafted, and have a good structure and tone. This requires a good amount of skill as well as time. SEO agencies on a budget do not have the resources required to produce such good quality content and usually end up using online tools to ‘spin’ existing content into ‘fresh’ articles that end up being poor in grammar, structure, quality, and tone.
- Cheap SEO services account to inexperienced managers
Very often, low-cost SEO agencies follow a copy-and-paste approach to SEO and subsequently they don’t need experienced account managers. For these agencies, there is no reason to hire SEO specialists. They’re not building custom campaigns or targeting competitive keywords. Instead, they’re providing your business with the bare minimum when it comes to SEO. Plus, it’s cost-prohibitive for a cheap SEO company to hire someone experienced in SEO.
In addition, people with professional SEO experience have no desire to work at these kinds of agencies. Because of their SEO background, they know how these agencies operate and recognize why they’re harmful to businesses.
- No leverage to hold cheap SEO firms accountable
The desire of cheap SEO providers to prioritize a high volume of business is an interesting one, as this creates a simplistic business model that doesn’t allow the cultivation of long-term business relationships. So, not only do most cheap SEO companies have little interest in the businesses that they serve, but they also bear little accountability or fear should they deliver a sub-standard service (which they invariably will).
This can be extremely frustrating for business owners, who must face up to the prospect that have wasted financial capital and must bear the responsibility for this mistake alone. This is at odds with the typical business relationship, where there is a mutual desire among all parties to cultivate long-term interaction and resolve any issues that threaten this union. Remember, if you receive a generic email from an SEO provider, the chances are that this message has been sent to every single contact that the company has on its database.
- Cheap SEO providers can’t devise a long-term strategy
It can take a great deal of time to achieve positive results through SEO, particularly in competitive industries or in the case of firms that have been penalized by Google in the past. In fact, the formative stages of an SEO campaign usually demand a significant financial investment without delivering any kind of payoff, which can be frustrating to those who are new to the practice.
While you may see your organic search rankings increase in the near-term, it often takes far longer to earn a coveted place on Google’s first page in relation to your predetermined keywords. Brands that are placed prominently on Google’s first page see the biggest benefits in terms of the quantity and quality of traffic, so seeing actionable results can take much longer.
Hence, it is evident as to why when you want only the best for your business, there should be no room to compromise for Cheap SEO services and risk the quality of your business.
