Search engine optimization services are found all over the internet. There are major differences between one service and another. Often, companies will look for the least expensive deal and sign for a year or longer. However, this can be a major mistake that ends up costing far more than the savings initially made on a cheap package.
Here are 7 reasons why cheap SEO companies can cost your business dearly.
1. Non-Tailored SEO Strategy
Companies that operate using inexpensive packages work on the basis that one type of service fits every client’s site. This is totally wrong. Every industry or niche is entirely different, and what works for one may not be appropriate for another.
For instance, Google signals through its search engine results pages (SERPs) what it feels are the right pages for a certain type of query. That could be a list post, an article, videos, or images. Examining the backlinks connected to sites ranking on the first page for a given search query provides strong indicators of what’s required or expected to rank in that SERPs too. A strategy where every site receives the same SEO treatment fails to consider this.
2. Cookie Cutter Approach Leads to Impersonal Communications
When SEO clients are on cheap packages that are similar to one another, there’s a tendency to see a factory-like approach to communications too. The same explanation is used with every client because the same steps are being taken. The agency will often try to avoid a detailed discussion of their services to avoid clients becoming overly knowledgeable and realizing their mistake with their agency hire.
3. Risk Levels Ignored
Different types of link building represent various levels of risk of the site being penalized. For instance, with a site that purchases PBN links, the risks are far greater than one that uses niche edits (inserting an approved link into an existing piece of published content) or having a new guest post published on a relevant website.
Clients will wish to discuss what links they’re willing to accept and those they are not. Some will require the SEO agency to educate them on the types of links available and the associated risk levels with each. Cheap SEO agencies don’t have the time for this educating process, nor will they be in a position to vary their services offered. There’s little chance of a bespoke package being created for clients.
4. Black Hat Link Building Strategies
One of the greatest risks with a cheap SEO agency is that they will use link building approaches that are either not good practices today or are soon to be so.
Low-cost Link Building at All Costs
Low-quality guest posting has been something that Google has warned against recently. This has encouraged agencies to pursue higher-quality guest posting placements to stand above the fray.
Black Hat Strategies May Continue Despite Warnings
Agencies that ignore the warning from Google because they already employ low-cost Black Hat tactics will be loathed to change tack. Indeed, some of these may include hacked websites where links are illegally injected into the site or traffic redirections as part of their approved strategy.
Long-term Consequences for the Client
The risk to long-term businesses is that a low-cost SEO agency can decimate a site’s online reputation from a few simple actions. It can lead to Google deindexing the site or simply refusing to rank content on the site any longer for relevant queries. Once in this position, it’s complicated, time-consuming, and extremely difficult to successfully dig out of it.
5. Outsourced Work to a Third Party
Inexpensive SEO services are often offered that way because almost all the services are being outsourced to another agency in developing countries.
With this action, there’s even less oversight on what the secondary agencies are doing. Whether the third party is using outlawed or otherwise bad SEO techniques that will get a site into trouble is completely unclear.
While using freelancers or remote workers within an agency is fine, the work and output must be strictly controlled and monitored to ensure the link building work meets the required standard.
6. Good Companies Refuse to Link to You Later
Website owners are aware that they shouldn’t be associated with other websites in a ‘bad neighborhood.’ In SEO terms, this means a site that has many issues and is linking to your site. When doing this excessively, anyone connected to that site may get hit. If at a later time, the site is hit for bad linking practices, Google may penalize all sites even tangentially related to it.
Because of this risk, once you have bad or low-quality SEO links as part of a low-cost link building campaign, it makes it less likely that a high-quality site will risk linking to you. If they’re thorough enough to check your backlink profile on Ahrefs or SEMrush and know what to look for, future agency linking requests will be refused outright. This makes it doubly difficult to repair the backlink profile later.
7. Spend More Later Fixing the SEO Mistakes
When one agency has made a ‘dog’s dinner’ out of your backlink profile, it won’t fix itself on its own. It’s necessary to locate, qualify, and hire another SEO agency (at a considerably higher sticker price) to fix the issues.
Because the new agency will need to painstakingly go through an SEO audit to figure out how bad the damage is and set about rectifying it, there’s the time and cost of that. Then there’s the cost once you are back to square one to produce a proper link building campaign and improve the chances of their client’s site ranking well in the future.
It’s more than double the work from a high-quality agency and the price will reflect that. The inexpensive option ends up costing money in lost business, plus extra to fix, and then to do the link building properly. What a headache!
In Conclusion
To hire a cheap SEO agency offering a low-cost package is a mistake. While it may appear to fit your budget in the short-term, it will cost far more over the coming years. Ultimately, they could do so much damage to the website and its online reputation that it becomes unrecoverable. The risks do not outweigh the potential rewards in this scenario, so avoid it completely.