Why You Should Avoid Cheap SEO Services. Save Your Brand!

In the digital marketing world, SEO is regarded as a gateway to success. But when you invest in SEO services, it is important to be cautious as there are a lot of “cheap” offers in this industry which typically involve a huge gamble on quality and effectiveness.

Short term fixes can result from cheap, compromised SEO services to problems that last long. This blog post will explain why cheap SEO services are harmful and how qualified SEO strategies have more long term value than cheap SEO.

What Are Cheap SEO Services?

The definition of cheap SEO service is different. Generally, it all depends on your company’s budget and revenue, which is usually proportionate to the size of the business. Sometimes, a service for 10,000 ₺ per month would be an opportunity for a larger business, but intimidating for a smaller business.

In any of the cases, low cost SEO services have somehow acquired the tags of being of low quality or even having no effect at all.

Nowadays, cheap SEO is not only the cost of the service, but also the quality of its implementation and the final results of the strategies used. As a result, such services are not beneficial for you and your company.

Work with a reputable SEO service provider that offers high quality reliable SEO services.

Searching for SEO services and adding terms like cheap or low cost is opening the door to spammy and unreliable agencies that can make things worse for your company – reputation, revenue, online presence.

Why Is Cheap SEO a Bad Thing?

Cheap SEO is not only about the low cost.

Many agencies and consultants are out there advertising cheap SEO so it is understandable that companies would ask: is cheap search engine optimization that bad?

This question is reasonable. For example, a quick search for “cheap SEO services” will bring up dozens of agencies claiming to offer cheap SEO.

There are different agencies to choose from if your business is looking for cheap SEO, but they typically deliver a similar experience and the same low prices. However, you should know the drawbacks of cheap SEO services if you are really serious about purchasing services from these agencies.

Why Cheap SEO ‘Services’ Don’t Work

Here are the reasons why cheap SEO and low-cost SEO agencies often fail to deliver results:

1. One Size Fits All Strategies = Cheap SEO Services

Low cost SEO is not a budget friendly approach. A cheap SEO company will use a copy paste strategy. This means they’ll end up sharing subpar reports with decision makers within their business, which is something that wasn’t expected, nor is it ever good.

Your business is just another one of many businesses for low cost SEO agencies. And your SEO strategy is going to be cookie-cutter because your company, products, services, industry, and competitors are all not unique.

These general approaches are not going to work if you are familiar with SEO. SEO is like any digital marketing strategy, there is a plan that has been made specifically for your business. The methods that work for a manufacturing company will not work for your e commerce store.

If you take services for cheap SEO, then you should be aware that the agency is not bothered about what works in search engine optimization and what doesn’t. They take the monthly payments, follow scripted service scenarios, and after that move onto the next client. SEO results take months to kick in, so they will not have your discontent with them for a while.

This is why agencies can keep pricing services under $100 per month.

The same strategy is applied to every client. They don’t have to research your business because the person managing your account can just go straight ahead to their one size fits all plan.

On the other hand, SEO agencies whose pricing is fair offer a completely new experience. Service templates are not in their hands. But they will actually build your campaign from scratch, putting effort into learning about your business, industry, products and even your competitors.

Partnering with one of these agencies means you get a customized strategy. These agencies know that what they see about your company, your brand, your team, your advantages is unique and everything.

2. Disconnected Customer Service = Cheap SEO Services

The cheap SEO company thinks of your business as simply a number and not a name. Additionally, with their staff in a different location and time zone, you will experience delayed responses, miscommunications and frustrating situations that pile on stress for the day.

Nobody likes poor customer service – and that’s something which is typical for cheap SEO services. Account managers at low cost SEO agency can be very difficult to reach for anything; whether you have a question, a performance report or you want to discuss strategy.

The worst thing is having to pay every month, just to be ignored. Your business sends in a payment each month to your agency, but your agency never delivers on the promise of giving your team and company first rate support.

Language barriers and time zone differences are another frustration for businesses investing in cheap SEO. For these reasons, and in order to reduce costs, many of these agencies outsource their work to places beyond Turkey, using either subcontract or white label arrangements. This actually makes communication more complex.

For example, if your account manager calls your team, you may have to wait until the end or the beginning of the day. Language barriers can also dish a challenge in the understanding and getting instances like misunderstanding across the channels like phone calls, emails etc.

Finally, let’s not forget that your account manager is probably not knowledgeable in your business and will probably need to start from scratch, just like any other hired gun. They might recognize your company’s name and know you’re the contact person, but that’s it. Don’t forget, they are just replicating your movement with a copy and paste strategy.

They don’t need to know anything about your company.

Low cost SEO services do not make life any easier. This creates problems, often leading to frustration and tension between your team and business decision makers. Cheap search engine optimization is simply not worth it for most businesses.

3. Inexperienced Account Managers = Cheap SEO Services

Cheap SEO agencies hire staff with no SEO experience to keep their pricing low. If your strategy is going to be led by an account manager with less SEO experience than your team (and in some cases still), it will hamper the way you operate and your business is less likely to see significant results with SEO.

Since low cost SEO agencies worked on copy paste approach, they don’t need experienced account managers. Within a few moments, they hire new employees, who are instructed to improve your company’s website with a basic script.

These agencies have no reason for hiring SEO specialists. What they are not doing is creating custom campaigns and targeting competitive keywords. Their SEO game for your business is average or worse.

Additionally, hiring an experienced professional in a cheap SEO company is expensive.

Furthermore, professional SEO experts would not wish to be part of such an agency. They have a background in SEO due to which they understand how these agencies actually run and the damage it can make to your business like you.

Lack of experience among account managers at low-cost SEO agencies can hinder your strategy’s performance. Let’s say your account manager uses black hat tactics to get your site to rank, and now you’re looking at severe penalties from engines such as Google.

You are paying for a specialized service and it is someone with minimal experience. As a result, companies that can afford only cheap SEO services have to be proactive in training their in-house teams. 

4. Black Hat SEO Tactics = Cheap SEO Services

Budget SEO agencies often fail to keep up with industry standards. They are unwilling to spend the time to update service templates or send unique strategies (that can immediately harm your business and profitability).

Copy and paste strategies do not work for cheap SEO companies to produce good results for their clients. As a result of this, many searchers resort to black hat tactics including deceptive techniques that utilize unethical strategies to fool search engines to improve your site’s position in search results.

Within the SEO community, these tactics are well known. The fact that they are so notorious that search engines like Google have gone out of their way to update their algorithms and penalize these techniques and not reward them. However, black hat SEO is still being used by many low cost SEO agencies.

The experience and skills of such cheap SEO companies is directly reflected in this decision. They do not follow industry standards like other SEO agencies. They also do not think much of the impact a Google penalty will have on your website.

A Google penalty can badly hurt your site in short and long term changes. If your site gets hit by a penalty, Google can completely remove it from search results, blocking off all search engine traffic from it, which can be devastating to your profitability.

For example, if you have an e-commerce store, you may notice a significant decrease in weekly sales. It is because your business does not appear in search results anymore, and this results in the decrease. While they look for a product, come across a competitor and finish their purchase somewhere else.

At the same time, you are still paying that SEO company monthly. Instead of this agency paying you to help grow your business and increase revenue, you are paying this agency to decrease your earnings and visibility in search results.

This is the exact opposite of what an SEO agency should do.

5. Cheap SEO Services = Zero SEO Assets

Aside from it being a low cost, SEO Company has zero assets that increase the long term value of your business. For example, a good backlink profile can boost ranking of both new and old content. Reputable firms normally have this in their strategies, while low cost SEO companies lack skills or resources to sell your business.

Since search engines evolve through time, their algorithms evolve also. This means SEO strategies are based upon long term value assets like original content and inbound links from other websites.

An acknowledged SEO agency attempts to generate good quality, elementary content on your website. Because their quality and user support naturally attract such links. If you have a good backlink profile, it could help propel your content up in search results.

But if you work with a cheap SEO agency, these types of agencies will not be able to help you with this most basic aspect of SEO.

It lacks personnel or experience to start such strategies. Furthermore, working on this type of content for your website needs its own approach. Low cost SEO services have no customization as they simply follow copy and paste methods.

And that’s why many businesses determine that they have no interest in cheap SEO. Why on earth would you pay for a cookie cutter strategy, some black hat tactics, and no results? In essence, this amount is a loss of the funds that you could invest into getting your in-house team trained on SEO.

Why Do Cheap SEO Providers Still Thrive?

Despite the numerous disadvantages of cheap SEO providers and the cheap SEO services they provide, it is easy to wonder why they keep on operating. The customer churn rate for these agencies can be very high, but they compensate by employing aggressive tactics to obtain new clients.

For example, they could use cold calling to attract new clients. In some cases, they intimidate people to steal customers from reputable agencies. Others also promote their affordable rates to SMEs.

To sum it all up, cheap SEO agencies put customer acquisition over customer retention. At this point, SEO is an ongoing strategy, and thus the fact that these agencies lack industry experience reflects this approach.

They are not concerned that they will keep you as a customer. They then search for their next customer until they find you and get your business (and bind you to a contract). Unlike that, a reputable SEO agency strives to build a long term relationship with you by understanding your business and your goals.

Digipeak = Trustworthy SEO Agency

Are you interested in finding out more about SEO agency work? For further reading on SEO, check out our SEO blog, where we have guides on hiring an SEO agency, setting a realistic SEO budget, and figuring out how SEO can help your business.

So if you are ready to partner with a reliable and reputable SEO agency then Digipeak is here to assist you. We have the skills and passion to grow your business with over 28 years of experience and generating more than $10 billion in revenue for our clients over the past five years.

For more information about our SEO services, feel free to contact us.