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The High Cost of Low Priced SEO Services

Published: January 14, 2015

As with many other things in life, you get what you pay for when you buy low cost SEO services. The difference is that SEO bought on the cheap usually means an inferior product based on outdated or discredited techniques that can cost you far more than if you had paid a fair price for quality work in the first place. In short, there are very few true bargains to be found when hiring outside talent to help improve your search engine rankings.

Nobody likes to pay more than they should, and you shouldn’t either. The important thing to remember is that SEO is not a product that can be engineered around a simplified design or manufactured with cheaper parts. It’s a personal service based on an acquired skillset which requires a strong work ethic, experience in multiple digital marketing disciplines, a dedication to continuing education, and a commitment to following standards of practice that will not harm your website’s standing in the search engine results.

How Low Cost SEO Can Harm Your Business
Unscrupulous SEO providers typically offer “cheap solutions” by using discredited techniques that are no longer accepted by the search engines such as:

  • Flooding your website with hundreds of backlinks from low quality sites with little authority and no relevance to your niche.
  • Failing to maintain a diverse link profile for your site by varying the type of inbound links and mixing up the anchor text.
  • Creating poorly written content that has little if any relevance to your website’s theme.

Once you fall into the cheap SEO service trap, you not only risk losing the money that you have invested, you may end up damaging your site’s search engine rankings for many months to come, as well as lose a considerable amount of potential revenue due to your poor showing in the search results. Search engine penalty recovery can be a tedious and expensive process, and some sites never fully recover. Depending on your niche and geographic location, you may also find it difficult if not impossible to regain profitable search engine real estate lost to your competitors.

Poor Link Building Practice is Common
A few hundred dollars a month is not going to buy much in the way of quality inbound links to your website. You’ll more than likely receive a number of low or no authority links, possibly from foreign-language sites, which have no relevance to your industry or niche. These links will undoubtedly be generated with automated tools, and the only guarantee you can depend on is that Google will have your site in its cross-hairs in record time.

Count on Receiving Thin, Low Quality Content
Relevant and high-quality content is the backbone of any good SEO campaign. Unfortunately, your bargain-priced articles will typically consist of poorly spun versions of scraped or “stolen” content, or will be almost unreadable due to the poor grammar and spelling so common to non-native English speakers. Poor quality content is hardly the best representative of your company, and is a sure way of incurring the wrath of Google.

There’s Simply No Time or Budget to Truly Understand Your Business
A bargain-priced provider cannot afford to invest the time in learning the nuances of your company’s products, or in conducting the market and competitive research necessary to successful organic search ranking. The best you can hope for is a cookie-cutter campaign based on templates and automated software that in today’s dynamic SEO world is simply not going to be good enough.

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