Companies looking to hire an SEO agency to work with usually marvel at the high expense of having their websites optimized by experts. Different companies offer different pricing for their services, which usually ranges from a minimum fee of $3,000 to $5,000 to just a couple hundred dollars per month. But why the huge discrepancy in price? Would it matter if you hired a cheaper company instead of an agency selling their SEO services at ridiculously high prices?
The quality and effectiveness of what is being offered are usually the two factors that make the difference between expensive and inexpensive agencies. SEO is content-driven these days, and many cheaper companies offer their internet marketing services for less than the price of one good piece of content – so it’s no doubt that they charge only a couple hundred dollars per month.
What are some good reasons why quality SEO should cost considerable amount of money? Read on to find out.
What Are the Different Types of SEO Agencies?
Outlined below are the main types of SEO agencies.
1. Experienced SEO Agencies
Experienced companies genuinely care about the brands they work with, and they are usually looking to deliver a significant return on investment to their clients. When working with an experienced SEO agency, you can expect analytical data, conversion tracking and measurable results. They are generally looking to build long-term relationships with companies, and they have a genuine interest in getting their clients at the top of search engines.
2. Outsourcing SEO Agencies
Many SEO companies outsource the services they provide to clients. These companies have no control on the SEO campaign that they are paid for, and are at the mercy of the actual providers. While it’s true that their intention is providing quality services that their clients will be satisfied with, this doesn’t happen all the time since they aren’t the ones performing.
3. Money-Driven SEO Agencies
Unreliable agencies usually provide the lowest quality SEO campaigns that do not actually have any results. Phrases such as “Want to get at the top of search engines in as little as 48 hours?” or “Want to rank at the top of Google for your keyword?” are usually signs that you are about to hire an unreliable agency. Moreover, these companies may also ask to pay by Western Union which, unlike PayPal, doesn’t allow you to claim your money back, nor does it guarantee that you’re actually going to get any services at all.
Reasons Why Quality SEO Should Cost a Lot of Money
1. Link Audits Are Laborious and Time-Extensive
A link audit is the process of inspecting inbound links (or backlinks) coming to a website, identifying and ultimately deleting bad ones. Despite the increasing number of online tools and software aiming to do the job, thorough link audits need to be done manually by a person who knows the different types of links that may cause Google to penalize your website.
The process is usually very laborious, involving complicated logic, time, and resources, so it is not uncommon to be charged several thousands of dollars for a site-wide audit.
2. Complete Link Cleanups Come with Hefty Costs
Once bad links are identified, they clearly need to be removed to stand the chance at regaining your search engine rankings. Google allows you to disavow bad backlinks through the Disavow Tool that’s essentially part of the Google Webmasters Tools, but the process may turn out to be significantly more difficult than initially expected, especially for inexperienced SEOs.
Google expects webmasters to reach out to each website owner and request that they remove the links before you submit a disavow file (which, by the way, should be created following very strict guidelines in order to complete the disavow process). Doing this for every single bad backlink will obviously take a lot of time, so expect your SEO company to charge anything between $5,000 and $20,000 for a link cleanup.
3. Penalties Can Hurt Website Traffic
It’s a well-known fact that Google penalizes websites that employ unethical SEO strategies to manipulate their rankings. Back in 2011, Google has temporarily banned Overstock for a period of two months after having offered discounts to schools that placed anchor-specific links on their websites. The penalty resulted in a 5 percent drop in revenue (which is a substantial amount of money) due to the significantly reduced website traffic.
Many companies end up approaching experienced SEO companies after having already paid for low-quality agencies that only resulted in their traffic dropping overnight.
4. De-Indexation of Your Website Can Hurt Your Brand
If Google finds any websites that do not adhere to their guidelines, it will completely de-index them to ensure that users aren’t struggling to find the information that they’re looking for. What would you do if your website didn’t show up in Google, and you had no traffic driven by this search engine? You would end up with very little traffic, and little or no revenue. You wouldn’t be able to reach out to your audience, and nobody would know about you.
If you hire a budget SEO agency, or a company that outsources their services, you run a high risk of getting your website penalized, as they will likely employ spammy or manipulative SEO techniques. If you hire an experienced SEO company instead, you will indeed pay a lot more money, but you can be at peace knowing that your website will be professionally optimized and adhering to Google’s Webmaster guidelines.
Final Words
With literally hundreds of SEO companies appearing overnight, brands find it difficult to find a reliable one. You should carefully consider the agency you hire to ensure that you will be getting the desired return on investment. It’s worth checking out the different companies that other webmasters have worked with in the past. You may also want to compare their SEO packages and prices to see which one delivers the best value.