Imagine buying a car or a piece of property and the seller giving you a ridiculously low price. Wouldn’t you be skeptical about the legitimacy of the transaction? Or maybe you are thinking that SEO is a service, and products and services work differently. Then imagine you go to a hospital or an accounting expert and get rates below market value, wouldn’t you be just as suspicious?
Instances, where you get quotes that are way below market rates, are usually met with questions and skepticism, and SEO is no different.
SEO is a skill and a discipline that can take years to perfect. It is an ever-changing environment that needs the SEO expert to always be on their toes, exploring new ideas and implementing new strategies like this agency.
If you think about it, anyone can provide SEO services. All you need is a basic understanding of what to implement and how the search engines work. You can literally do a quick Google search, and you will get thousands of cheap SEO agencies ready to offer you “The Secret to Google ranking.”
But just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.
In reality, SEO is a complex web of strategies and digital marketing techniques, all finely tuned to fit a specific project.
What Makes SEO So Expensive?
Pricing a service is one of the most challenging things businesses must do. It often includes your time, resources, direct and indirect costs, and a desired profit margin. All these factors summed up could make SEO services quite expensive.
A rule of thumb used in the SEO space is:
If it is excellent and cheap, it won’t be fast
If it is quick and good, it will be expensive
If it is Cheap and fast, it won’t be good.
For further evidence, visit freelance sites that offer SEO services for as little as $5. You will find plenty of “SEO experts” you can use as a reference. These sites often provide reviews from past clients, and you will find many clients complaining about the services received, be it communication or execution. Those who appear more certified often understand what they are getting from these cheap SEO services from the onset. But if you want further evidence, here are reasons you should not consider cheap SEO services.
Cut Corners
As we have mentioned, while pricing, an SEO expert needs to consider a lot of things. But with cheap SEO services, the seller needs to account for their price somewhere. Often that way is cutting corners to save time, resources, and expenses.
The use of cheap tools and other resources: Every SEO expert has a set of tools they rely on for any SEO campaign. These tools and resources can be expensive and are often a recurring cost. A cheap SEO service may not have the money to purchase these tools consistently or at all. Meaning they’ll have to look for alternatives that may not be as effective.
Content: Content by itself can be pricey. It needs an expert in the field who understands SEO and how to create helpful, educative, and optimized content. A cheap SEO service may not be able to acquire such content. Instead, they may opt to spin content or use cheap content creators who may not create helpful and knowledgeable content. Ultimately, your site may be filled with spammy content that does more damage to your rankings.
Link Building: Just like content, link building is an expensive endeavor. To get good quality backlinks, they need to be relevant to your niche and from high-quality websites with strong domain authority. Link building takes time as you often need to reach out to other web admins. Such link-building outreach campaigns often have a low success rate and need time to get a sizable amount of backlinks. Alternatively, there are paid options that Google often frowns upon, but when done correctly by an SEO expert, they can offer excellent results.
Cheap SEO services may not have the budget to find the right backlinking opportunity or the time to reach out to other webmasters. In the end, you may get backlinks that have no contextual value to your niche from spammy websites that often lead to Google penalties.
Generic Strategies
A good SEO agency understands the need for tailor-made strategies. They know that each site is different. They will need to find keywords with low competition and high search volumes. They must find the right target audience; is it local, national, or international optimization? All these questions need to be answered by creating a tailor-made strategy.
With cheap SEO services, creating a custom strategy may not be possible. Sure, they may alter one or two things in their handbook; however, they often use a one-size-fits-all approach. This helps them save money, time, and resources. As you can imagine, with such an approach, the SEO strategy may not apply to your particular needs.
No Accountability
Perhaps the biggest problem with cheap SEO services is the lack of accountability. Due to their pricing, the cheap SEO team’s sole goal is to make money as quickly as possible from as many clients as possible. Meaning they will not care about the results and often do not bother communicating. To make matters worse, you do not hold much leverage and will often not get any revisions since the price was so low.
In many scenarios, cheap SEO services are a waste of time and energy. With cheap account managers or a one-person team running such agencies, you may always be disappointed at the communication, results, and delivery time. You may need to manually look at the work done or remove spammy links that should never have been set up.
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