Cheap SEO Packages: The Meat on a Stick of the Marketing World
There’s nothing wrong with being cheap and saving money. Who isn’t looking for a deal when shopping for a new appliance or excited about a blowout sale at a high-quality clothing store. Being frugal is why Black Friday is so popular and why we love to tell a great story about how much we saved on a product. Saving money is the ultimate bragging material to our friends and family and makes us feel proud to know that we got something we need for much less.
But you do have to draw the line at being cheap with some things, food, for example, does come with its risks. You may be the guy who prefers buying 40 beers that taste like water over 12 high-quality beers, but would you really risk eating tainted meat to save a few bucks? What about expiry dates on dairy, or food that’s been sitting in the back of your fridge for months. It took us a long time to realize that the foods we put in our bodies have a massive impact on our health and well-being.
The same could be said about your business.
The trouble with Cheap SEO Packages is that the phrase is an oxymoron, like jumbo shrimp. A package refers to a bundle of things. So to imply that you can get a number of SEO tasks or links for cheap is just not realistic. I think the real problem is people assume that SEO is easy and is a quick fix.
This couldn’t be further from the truth.
Sometimes a new link to your website can take a week if not more for Google just to take notice of it. Building links to a site doesn’t have the immediate impact we all hope. In fact, Google Sandbox, an alleged filter placed on new websites was developed to slow to process from new sites from going from zero to superstar. The result is that a site does not receive good rankings for its most important keywords and keyword phrases. Even with good content, abundant incoming links and strong Google PageRank. The Sandbox acts as a de facto probation for sites, possibly to discourage spam sites from rising quickly, getting banned, and repeating the process.
There are lots of tips I can offer you when it comes to avoiding shady scam artists and getting the most for your budget, but for now, the following 7 will have to do.
7. SEO Audits Come is All Shapes and Sizes
A person with ten years of SEO experience could get hung up on the tiniest of details that an SEO with three year’s of experience may tell you not to worry about. It’s all about your goals. An SEO audit and quick fix won’t push the needle on the overall search results unless there’s a major problem. Either way, someone selling “cheap SEO packages” won’t be able to do anything more than scratch the surface.
SEO Tip: Before you do anything, why don’t you read the suggestive guidelines provided to you for a “Google-friendly site” from the mouth of the beast. That’s right; Google has a basic PDF explaining how to improve one’s SEO.
6. Buying Massive Link Blasts is a Waste of Money
“Three hundred links to your website for $49.95? – What a deal!”
Wrong.
As I mentioned above, quality over quantity will have a far bigger impact on your websites search results than an automated spammy link blast from random sites. In fact, getting shady links that are not related to your niche will hurt your site’s domain authority.
SEO Tip: Instead of hiring someone to go out and get you hundreds of bad links, find someone that can write a high-quality article about your business, service or website and get them to get it published on a respected internet site. The article would include a link back to your site and help build up your site’s backlinks and domain authority. For $49.95, you may have to settle for one article a month, but if the article is published on a respected website, it will be worth it.
5. Do Your Own “Search Engine Submission” in 5 Minutes
A lot of these cheap SEO services say they’ll submit your website to 1,000 search engines for you. But you only really need the basics. Google, Bing, Yahoo (still called Yahoo) and maybe Duck Duck Go are all you really need. Here are the submission links for you:
The URLs for the BIG 3 to submit your site:
- Google: http://www.google.com/addurl/?continue=/addurl
- MSN: http://search.msn.com/docs/submit.aspx
- Yahoo: http://submit.search.yahoo.com/free/request
4. Broken Links Need to be Fixed ASAP
Getting your meta tags just right or perfecting your favicon is not more important than fixing the broken links you have on your website. To correctly fix broken links, you will likely need to allow access to your WordPress site to redirect your broken links or your server depending on the situation. Most people who buy affordable SEO packages are looking for an easy win and aren’t about to hand over the keys to their website, and you shouldn’t to someone shady. Keep this in mind, for a someone to optimize your Onpage SEO, they will need access.
Instead, meet with the person you are thinking about hiring face to face or over Skype, hear out their plan on correcting your site’s SEO errors and use your best judgment.
3. Optimizing Local SEO
Local SEO is a highly effective form of online marketing in your local area. It allows businesses to promote their services to local customers at exactly the time they’re looking for your type of business. Local SEO uses Google and business directories like Yelp, Superpages, Qype & TouchLocal. Local SEO is focused on providing results that are relevant to a searcher based on their current location. If I search for ‘best steak restaurant’ on my desktop right now, Google will provide me with results that are nearest to me.
But here’s the thing. If you hire someone in India to take on your local search, can you trust them to get it right? Local search doesn’t have to be done by someone local, but it helps if they have a grasp on where the links and reviews are from.
They don’t even have Yelp in India.
2. Trust
Links are worth their weight in gold in the SEO world and allowing access to your website could be setting you up for trouble if you’re not careful. If someone has access to your site, they may be adding links to your site to promote other projects of their own. Year’s ago that was actually a popular black hat way to get links. People would create free WordPress Theme templates and add links to the footer that would be difficult for people to remove. I’ve even heard of stories where the links were set up in a way with javascript where the designer would have the ability to change the link to whatever he or she wanted. Making your website apart from of a link wheel to promote boner pills or diet loss products.
That’s not good.
1. Cheap SEO = Fiverr
Fiverr.com claims it’s for Freelance services for the lean entrepreneur. Sounds great, and to be honest I’ve bought some random things from Fiverr like Photoshop Fonts for $5 or an audio intro voice-over for a podcast, but when it comes to SEO, there isn’t anything worth buying. Some would say that spending $5 on an SEO audit is a good deal, but I offer them for FREE for those interested in buying an SEO package and will be able to offer far more insight than someone at Fiverr.
If you’re thinking about buying cheap SEO packages (for whatever reason), take the time to see if the packages they are selling you are the same packages that are being sold at Fiverr. I wouldn’t be surprised if they even copied the content or sales pitches and descriptions of the services.
What You Should Do Instead
I mentioned I offer FREE SEO Audits with my company Ethical Champ. Check out my SEO explainer video and submit your website if you’re serious about finding a more effective SEO solution to getting targeted traffic to your business or website.
