If you are considering using an SEO consultant or agency to implement a campaign designed to improve the ranking of your local business website, your budget is obviously going to be an important factor in who you choose. That choice will not always be an easy one, and it is often deciding which SEO agency to use that has caused many business owners to feel their head start to spin.
This need not be the case for you, provided you take the time effort to research the SEO companies that help businesses in your local area, and you do your due diligence with regards to testimonials from their previous clients, for example.
There is, however, a very important point we have to bring up and is deciding whether to go for the cheapest SEO agency available or one that seems to offer value, but whose price is higher. Now, we must stress that simply because an agency gives you what seems low price, it doesn’t necessarily mean they’re cowboys or likely to do a bad job. However, there are some who deliberately offer a very low to get the work, but who then sadly let their clients down.
This can happen in lots of ways and it’s not always the case that the cheapest SEO agencies are in any way trying to rip their clients off, but more the case that because they have accepted a very low fee for the work, they are unwilling to employ or invest in the resources to do the best job possible.
Now that last paragraph may sound that we are giving every cheap SEO agency the benefit of the doubt, but we aren’t. Unfortunately, there are some out there who do take very low fees for SEO work and then do very little to help their clients, and in a lot of cases what they do actually harms the business in terms of their rankings.
The first issue is that a cheap agency might take a ‘one size fits all’ approach to carry out SEO for its clients. In other words, it has a standard package that includes the same work regardless of who the client or business is. You know as well as we do that no two businesses are the same, even if they operate within the same sector or industry.
For any SEO strategy to be successful, it must be tailored towards the specific needs of the individual business, including matching the business goals of its owner. That requires discussions and agreeing to a strategy that will allow the SEO work that is to be carried out to fulfil those objectives.
Another huge red flag that you might see appearing with cheap agencies or consultants is they start talking about getting hundreds of links to your website to help boost its rankings. Now, link building is an established and effective method of helping boost rankings, but it has to be done on a way that doesn’t have the opposite effect.
Sending lots of random links that are spammy is totally counterproductive, and a complete waste of time. Google’s systems are so advanced that they can spot when a website is trying to game the system very quickly. When it does, Google simply ignores the links, so they have no positive effect whatsoever. Worse than that, if Google senses that the links are being created in large numbers it could delist the website from the search results entirely. Quite a price to pay for going cheap isn’t it?
One final point on this is that, just as in any service area, the more you pay someone, the more accountability there normally is for them to produce results. It’s no surprise that those businesses that charge the highest fees, set the very highest standards for themselves and how they look after their customers because they want to retain them
Compare that with someone who charges the very lowest fees. They might not really care whether they keep that client because even if they do a lousy job, and the client demands a refund, it’s no great loss to them. They know that their low fees should attract other businesses with limited budgets and the sad irony of that is it’s those small businesses who’d benefit most from quality SEO.
