Search engine optimization is a key part of your digital marketing strategy. It helps get your content ranking on Google’s first page, where it can be seen by your target audience in organic search results.
To be successful online, it’s important to optimize your website for search engines like Google. This will help ensure that your content is seen by potential customers, who can then find you through organic search results.
Without SEO, your website and digital content will be unable to compete in your niche. You also will receive little to no organic traffic. Yet, you may be worried about how much money you’ll save by going with “affordable SEO services.”
While a small business’ budget is very different from a large corporation’s and everyone has a different definition of what’s affordable, “affordable” all too often actually means cheap. And cheap SEO services are a problem.
What Are Cheap SEO Services?
Naturally, your marketing budget will determine how much your company can afford to spend on search engine optimization services. However, even within a limited budget there is a big difference between professional and cheap SEO services.
In today’s world of digital marketing, “cheap” has come to mean poor quality. This is true when it comes to search engine optimization as well. Cheap SEO does not just refer to the price point—it also refers to the quality of your customer service, work quality and results you will receive.
When you choose a high-quality, trusted SEO agency, your business will benefit from strategies that work. The agency will genuinely have your best interests at heart and produce work that demonstrates your company’s professionalism. Alternatively, choosing a shady agency could be extremely detrimental to your business—especially if the company uses spammy tricks or tactics that infringe on Google’s Terms of Services. Not only can this harm your company’s reputation, but you’re also throwing money down the drain on short-term tactics that won’t get you the growth your business needs.
Reasons Why You Shouldn’t Hire a Cheap SEO Company
- One Size Fits all
Low-cost agencies have a different goal in mind than reputable companies. They are far more concerned with client acquisition than with building a long-term relationship with your company. This mentality has a variety of negative impacts. One of the biggest problems to arise from hiring a company that doesn’t really care for your business’ unique needs is that you’ll wind up with a cookie-cutter digital marketing strategy that isn’t designed to give your company a competitive edge. To a cheap SEO company, your business’ products/services, industry and competitors are just like everybody else—even though this is definitely not the case!
To be successful with SEO, your content needs to be unique. Google is incredibly smart, and it can tell when copy-paste approaches are being used. Likely, a low-cost agency simply doesn’t have the time, resources or inclination to spend the right amount of time honing your content to make it stand out from the competition. Instead, it will wind-up sounding generic. The company will likely use templates and scripts they’ve used before to save time—because they aren’t charging you enough to actually be invested in your content. Comparatively, professional SEO agencies that offer a fair price for their work quality will have a completely different approach: they’ll build your SEO campaign from scratch and complete research that guides their direction—earning your business rather than taking it for granted.
- Inadequate Service
Along with using generic scripts to save time while developing your SEO strategy, it’s likely that a cheap SEO agency won’t have adequate resources to invest in one of the most important parts of your campaign: backlinking. Backlinking is essentially rewriting or posting articles on other sites that link back to your own and help boost your search engine ranking.
A campaign to gain backlinks should be a long-term strategy. Guest post links are critical to long-term success; they tell Google that other reputable sites think your content is valuable. While backlinks can happen organically, there is so much competition that it’s not likely your content will get enough traction without a campaign. These campaigns take a significant amount of time and manpower—qualities that cheap services simply don’t have.
- No Accountability
It’s unlikely that you’ve hired a service before that didn’t feel accountable to you, whether it was in the realm of SEO or digital marketing. Usually, this lack of accountability is common when the service you’ve hired is inexpensive. Why? Because when you partner with a cheap company, they don’t really care about their image or ensuring they have satisfied customers. Rather, they want to acquire as many on-off clients and short-term contracts as possible to earn money quickly, move on to the next unsuspecting business owner and forget about them entirely. They don’t want to build a long-term relationship with your business which means they don’t listen to your needs and address questions or concerns provided by you or provide long-term value to your business
- Black Hat SEO tactics
When you partner with a cheap SEO company, you run the risk of being exploited by black hat SEO tactics. These are essentially attempts to manipulate the search engine into ranking one’s content higher—even though the content is of poor quality or even in direct violation of Google’s terms and services. Black hat tactics may look like they’re working in the short-term, but it’s only a matter of time before Google finds out what’s happening. Then, it will severely punish not just your page where the black hat tactic was used but also your entire online presence. Black hat tactics are very serious and could irreparably damage your company’s reputation if they aren’t stopped soon.
Some Examples:
- Hidden text or links
- Keyword stuffing
- Link schemes
- Link manipulation (including buying links)
- Inexperienced Account Managers
When you choose a cheap service provider, you can expect the people hired by that company to be inexperienced. Moreover, it’s common for inexpensive agencies to use scripts. This is at odds with reputable companies that build custom campaigns centered on targeting competitive keywords. Not to mention, you’re essentially paying for someone else’s learning curve. Once a company’s account manager becomes more experienced and moves on to a better paying job at another professional agency, he or she is replaced by an inexperienced new recruit who will face the same learning curve as his predecessor did.
Choose a SEO agency you can trust
SEO can make or break your brand. Getting the right SEO agency for your brand will go a long way in determining your success.
Don’t waste money or time with cheap SEO services. Instead, look for a company that hires expert SEO specialists and content writers, aims to provide long-term value and has a history of happy clients.
We at AI Advertisement are determined to provide you the SEO strategy that works perfectly for you.