Posted by Vikram Rathod
October 21, 2016
Search Engine Optimization is true, the trickiest part of any online business. The majority of business owners know that SEO contributes greatly to online success, but many do not fully understand the difference between Good SEO and Affordable SEO.
Falling for the Affordable SEO services trap can completely wreck your online business. And, nobody will want that to happen to them.
This article will explain why you should avoid hiring these cheap services and what to look for.
Further, I’ll guide you on what you can do if you have a limited SEO budget.
Let’s dig deeper.
Everyone has a different perception of what “Affordable” means. Today, most of the clients say: they can outsource the SEO and link building and most of them think they’re getting a great deal; but the fact is, there is no such thing as an affordable SEO plan. There are certain SEO providers who offer the services at a low rate, but if you’ve been in the industry for a good long time, you’ll hopefully get to know, you’ll only get what you have paid for.
If you are hiring cheap SEO services, which doesn’t get you the results you were promised, then you will have to turn right back around and hire another, more realistic SEO company. For those who have not thought about it, let me just tell you; It is going to cost you a lot more in the long run if you begin with such simple mistakes.
So, there’s one element that is true:
Good SEO isn’t cheap
Now, let me show you the top reasons why hiring an affordable SEO company isn’t a good idea.
There are not many optimization techniques you can perform on a small budget. You can only go for the time-dependent actions like keyword research and page-level optimization, not the capital-dependant actions like content and backlinks.
With that being said, you’ll not go much far than just keyword research, optimizing pages, and performing some technical optimization.
This isn’t enough, the two biggest factors of growth are content and backlinks – both the activities are the most money-intensive.
This is where the affordable SEO services won’t work because they can not spend:
– enough capital to create the quality content
– the required time to do link outreach
– for the link placement on the high-quality sites.
This will result in two things:
– They’ll opt for cheaper content creation, which may end up compromising on your brand.
– Due to low-budget, they’ll use blackhat SEO activities which may get your site penalized.
Here’s the truth…
I get it. Every business owner wants to squeeze as much profit as they can from their business. But there are some things in life which you’ll never want to go cheap on. For example, buying cheaper food items will result in great loss in the long run – harming your health or buying a cheaper engagement ring can create consequences in your life. Your future wife won’t be happy.
In the same way, Working with an affordable SEO agency isn’t as black and white as getting your fiancée a cheap engagement ring.
The cost of working with a cheap SEO company isn’t immediate. It will take months of working with a relatively bad SEO company to realize the cost – the ‘cost’ can be seen in many different forms.
Firstly, cheap SEO may probably land you a Google penalty. So, even if the low-quality SEO tactics work well in the short term, you may end up getting unearthed later on. If your site gets penalized, you will have to find another SEO agency to get that penalty revoked.
You must be knowing, your site can easily get penalized but it takes more than double effort and time to recover from the penalty. Moreover, you may not get the previous traffic levels for your site.
These are just the visible costs, besides you should take into account time spent and the opportunity. If your site gets penalized, you’ll have your capital and the precious time simply wasted.
Being a business owner, you know the importance of money, time, and your business assets.
Now, here’s another point that sucks, if you decide to go to the cheap SEO route
The two most important assets for your business are content and backlinks. These assets continually bring value to your business in the long run.
But the main obstacle achieves these tangible assets is, it requires good capital to create top-quality content or acquire good-quality link placements. Unfortunately, the affordable SEO companies won’t give you these assets and even if they manage to perform these SEO activities, the quality could not be assured to take you to next level.
Moreover, the affordable SEO company would be hiring cheap labor. Cheap labor will often be the inexperienced employees. To get good SEO results, you require experience, SEO skills, and tested strategies, not large staff and entry-level workers.
It is very easy to figure out low-quality SEO services if you know the basics of SEO. You should look for:
Cheap SEO companies take the advantage by injecting the technical jargon into their convoluted proposals which seem they are doing a lot of work, but actually most of the tasks listed; either take very little time to complete or will not have much impact on your campaign.
If you don’t see these two main aspects in an SEO proposal, then just stop reading. Content and Backlinks are the most impactful SEO boosting elements of a successful campaign. If the agency is not focused on these, they hardly know how to get great results.
Are you looking to hire a good SEO agency, but have a lower budget? That’s okay….
Here’s what you need to consider to get the ball rolling on a limited budget:
Doing some basic SEO activities is far better than hiring a cheap SEO company. This will give you control over your site and you will be responsible for your site’s success. Moreover, you’ll be forced to learn more about SEO. But your business is your baby, and you will not want it to get ruined. You want to do the best for it. That’s the reason, you’ll want to use the best in class SEO strategies that are safe and the most effective.
Here are the basic SEO tactics which you can do yourself by using various tools and resources available on the web:
1. Start with some On-page Optimization
2. Ensure content quality
3. Make a strong social media presence
4. Make sure your page has an awesome design
Once you know the structure of an effective SEO strategy, start investing in the right things. For example, you can hire someone to write content for you instead of writing yourself or you can use a blogger outreach service instead of you outreaching for links.
Making a rash decision will lead to hiring a not-so-good SEO company. So, just wait, build up some funds to hire a good, right SEO agency down the road.
Though hiring a good SEO agency is an important decision for your business, it’s required you take it seriously and avoid getting into the trap of Affordable SEO services.
Do you have any questions? Please leave your thoughts and ideas in the comments section!