Finding Affordable (and Good) SEO Services for Your Small Business
Business owners looking for affordable SEO services to help them with their online marketing and search engine presence tend to misunderstand or at least underestimate what it takes to bring visitors to their site. Without an extensive knowledge of how search engines and the Internet at large work, choosing a competent SEO firm to work with can be a sticky process.
If you start looking for am SEO professional, it won’t take long before you begin to realize that “SEO Expert” is a very relative term. This label can be attached to a whole spectrum of people: from highly competent marketing experts, to those who wouldn’t know a meta tag from a clothing tag; from empirically informed, scientifically minded search obsessives to incompetent buffoons who will completely destroy your site’s reputation.
These days, it is essential that your company gets noticed online the right way. If you ignore this area, you will watch your competition eat up the market. Yet, even if you recognize the need for SEO help, the trouble is those services don’t often come cheap. Large corporations can hire their own dedicated SEO team to develop their SEO techniques. But that is probably out of your range if you are running a small company.
Finding affordable SEO services that will truly help your business get to the next level is a top priority. With that in mind, here is a list of 4 red flags to look out for before agreeing to work with any SEO firm:
1. Promising the Moon
Search engines are extremely complex pieces of software, and they are getting more complex as time goes by. Any SEO firm that guarantees a top spot in the SERPs for a reasonably competitive keyword in a timescale shorter than several months is probably selling snake oil.
There are reliable methods that all good SEO companies employ to increase search rankings, but most of them involve creating high-quality optimized content and honest link-building that will take a considerable amount of time.
2. Bamboozling Google
If your prospective SEO firm tells you he has discovered a previously unknown method for gaming Google’s search engine algorithms and rocketing your site to number one, trust him about as much as you’d trust someone telling you that they’ve discovered the secrets of perpetual motion (not at all).
In the unlikely event they have discovered a chink in Google’s armor, the benefits will last only until Google figures it out and changes their algorithms to account for it, which means at best you’ll have paid for nothing. At worst, you may see your site penalized and sent to the search engine backwaters.
This sort of “black hat” SEO is often the cause behind so many webmasters wailing about Google dropping their site’s position in the ranks. It’s very often because they were doing something other than providing great content for their users and building a natural link profile, so an algorithm change knocked them off the pedestal they didn’t deserve.
3. Too Cheap Part 1
Is it affordable or cheap? This is an important distinction. Affordable and cheap aren’t — or shouldn’t be — the same thing when it comes to business services. What is the difference? Cheap services are easy on the budget but don’t offer you much value. For example, you may find that some companies offer very budget-friendly prices. But when you look more closely at what you are actually getting in exchange for that price, the deal doesn’t look so sweet any more. So, don’t work with an SEO company that simply claims to offer a blanket package of SEO services without any details.
Instead, be on the look out for SEO companies that will offer you an affordable price for a variety of clearly outlined SEO services. It’s important to be clear about what services you are actually paying for, so you know that you really are getting a good deal, not just a cheap price.
The best affordable SEO is a time-consuming process engaged by smart people who can charge quite a lot for their services. So, calibrate your expectations somewhere in the region of what you’d expect to pay any highly-skilled professional or you won’t get a highly-skilled professional. As the saying goes, you get what you pay for.
4. Too Cheap Part 2
Say you’re browsing around some SEO forums and blogs and come across someone offering a package of scripts or a document that contains the One True SEO Secret for a Very Low Price. If you’re tempted to pay for this, I have a bridge I can sell you.
These packages are either a straightforward con, with no value at all, or an SEO tactic with marginal benefit, but which is coming to the end of its useful life (perhaps because of algorithm changes). If they did have the one true technique, they wouldn’t be selling it in a package for $9.99 or $999, they’d be using it with their own clients.
Don’t fall for this stuff, there is no easy long-term solution for ranking well. Google pays geniuses with Ivy League educations millions of dollars a year to make sure they can’t be gamed. Mr. (or Mrs) Blackhat will have a hard time beating that.
So if you’re beating your head against the wall trying to find affordable SEO services for your business, just remember the points above. If things seem too easy or too cheap, then it’s probably too good to be true.
