Cheap SEO Services: You Get What You Pay For

As a small business owner, I know you don’t have much money to spend on marketing. I know this from my experience working with small businesses like yours and from being a small business owner myself.

Since our budget is small, taking advantage of cheap SEO services is tempting. We convince ourselves, thinking, “At only $10 an hour, what’s the worst that could happen?”

Let me tell you what might happen…

(This post was inspired by an article by Dani Owens. I don’t know her, but her article about the actual cost of SEO is spot-on. If you don’t believe what I say below, maybe you’ll believe her.)

Some cheap SEO services don’t do anything at all

As a small business owner, even as one who provides SEO services, I get these solicitations all the time, too. “We’ll submit your site to Google for only $6 a month!”, they tell me.

Before you do, please read what Google says about this “service”: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/ask-google-to-recrawl

Google no longer allows you to submit URLs directly to them. Instead, you must submit a website through their free Google Search Console tool.

Many companies are happy to take a small service fee from you each month in return for nothing. Sure, they might send you a report of your status. They might have pretty charts. Still, pretty charts don’t become new customers.

Other cheap SEO services produce a low-quality product

Some business owners get savvy to the “do nothing,” low-cost SEO services. When they interview their next cheap SEO company, they ask questions like, “what will you be doing?” or “how many THINGS will I get, each month?”

These are fair questions. You need to know what you’ll get in exchange for the money you are spending. THINGS might mean:

• hours
• pages
• tasks
• links
• or some combination of these

The problem is that if the focus is on the quantity of items delivered, they become a commodity. Any Economics class will tell you that as products become commodities, prices go down. So do their quality.

Some cheap SEO agencies cost so little because they outsource their work to other countries. Some publish the same article on all their clients’ sites. Sometimes, they skip the QA process. Some blindly write for you rather than uniquely for your audience. They’ve got to cut corners somewhere, after all.

The same thing is true for links. When someone is “on the hook” to deliver many links, their pressure is to complete the task as quickly as possible. That means they’re only concerned about quantity, not quality. This worsens when they have to build a finite amount of links for several clients simultaneously. This is where cheap SEO services cut corners and make bad links.

At best, these efforts won’t help you. Google is smart. As part of Google’s decision to serve your business to the search engine users, they judge its quality. Is it full of grammatical mistakes? Is it the same content as is on another website? Does it say anything at all? If not, you might as well not put it on your site. It won’t help, anyway. The same thing is true for links. Google recently made the Penguin penalty (dealing with links) a permanent part of their algorithm. That means many bad links no longer benefit you, at all. Your SEO program might be cheap to you, but it might not be accomplishing anything, either.

At worst, these efforts could hurt you. Google considers itself a champion for web quality. In some cases, Google will penalize or ban websites it believes are trying to cheat their algorithm. One of the ways people try to cheat is with low-quality content. Some websites cheat with low-quality and irrelevant links. If you take the cheap route, you might be banned from Google. Recovery from this is expensive. As a rule, I don’t take clients who Google has banned. Sorry.

Some other cheap SEO services control your assets

Another way some companies provide low-cost SEO is by controlling your company’s assets. They cut costs by buying things in bulk, which they give you as a discount. Sometimes, this means you don’t own your website- you’re only renting it. Other times, they hold the keys to your analytics, business listings, and other essential tools.

While this might seem appealing, remember that good marketing is long-term. SEO is an investment over time. One of the nice things about SEO is that the things you do today will help you over the next few years. SEO efforts build over time to bring you the results you’re looking for.

Let’s be optimistic and suggest that cheap SEO efforts help. Let’s hope this works so well that you outgrow that company’s ability to service you. In this case, they control all your company’s online assets. You can’t take them with you. If you start with another company, you must start from scratch. That means you wasted your precious money. Your “SEO investment account balance” begins again at zero.

You should never rent assets or services from any marketing company. Here are some things you need to make sure you have complete control over:

• Make sure you are the “Owner” of the following web assets. As the owner, you can give (or revoke) permission for others to view and change this information:
  • Google Analytics
  • Google Ads
  • Google Business Profile
  • Your company’s Facebook page (or any social media accounts, for that matter)
  • Never give anyone your password for any of these assets. Instead, grant them access to these tools from your account. All these tools can be delegated so others can use them, but you still control them.
• Your website
  • Pay to host your website separately from your developer and/or your marketing company.
  • Make sure you own your domain name. Don’t let another company buy one for you. If they do, make sure they transfer it into your name.
  • Sure, these are extra bills you’ll need to remember to pay. It’s better you control these than someone else. I’ve seen cheap SEO companies get angry with businesses and simply shut their websites down. You must control these assets yourself.

[As I write this, I realize I’ve purchased a few domain names for some friends. I need to transfer the ownership to them.]

But I can’t afford anything more

I get it. Marketing can be expensive—or, should I say, productive marketing can be expensive. That’s the key—how productive is your marketing?

Many small businesses waste money on marketing that doesn’t work. Maybe they’re spending $1,000 a month on a billboard or hundreds a year on the phone book. If they took time to measure their ROI on these, they’d find they were not making any money. They would have a budget if they put this money into productive marketing channels.

And I’m not mentioning the cost to your business if your cheap SEO services get your website banned from Google.

I might be able to help

Although small business owners who are looking for cheap SEO services in Charlotte are not my target market, I empathize with them. Few effective options are available for them to do online marketing.

This is why I’ve developed Curious Ants. This will guide you through your SEO campaign. You save money by doing it yourself. If you ever have to hire someone to do your SEO for you (perhaps because it’s working and you no longer have time to do it yourself), Curious Ants will have taught you all you need to know so you are sure to hire the best person for the job.

You might have more money to dedicate to an SEO campaign than you first thought. Learn if this is true by calculating the lifetime value of a customer. For some businesses, the lifetime value of a customer more than justifies an “expensive” SEO campaign.