Buy Cheap, Buy Twice
If you spend between £200 and £750, you’re falling into the trap of buying “bargain-basement SEO.” Remember, you get what you pay for, and when contracting a better company, they’ll have to spend time and money to resurrect and save the site from low-cost SEO.
The one mistake you might be making is thinking that working to appear on the first page of Google is an inconvenient cost to market your service or product, hence why you might be tempted to pay little for it.
SEO is too valuable in today’s online market to avoid paying a reputable company what their services are worth.
We’ve worked on hundreds of websites where business owners have fallen prey to cut-rate SEO practices, which only cost them more money in the long run. Any poor service is worthless. We understand that marketing any business is expensive and unaffordable to the smaller SME. However, some digital marketing packages simply waste your hard-earned money.
Our clients never grumble about the cost of our monthly SEO because they get hundreds of high-value leads month-to-month, which are three times the cost of our time, on average, per lead.
Value the importance of SEO and distinguish between good services and those that appear too good to be true
How valuable is SEO?
- The single most effective marketing technique that’s always on
- Reliable to scale online traffic and conversions
- Catches customers with hundreds of keywords and questions
- Secures a competitive advantage over competitors
Distinguishing between good and bad SEO
❌ Only works on technical errors.
❌ Buids spammy, low-quality links in bulk.
❌ Delivers vanity traffic or non-buying traffic.
❌ Only offers you blogs that do not sell your services or products.
❌ Uses software to spin content or AI to write copy.
❌ Uploads copy and content that is not unique.
❌ Promises you will be a millionaire and appear on the first page of Google within a month.
✅ Includes perfectly executed, high-quality content and copy – most labour-intensive.
✅ Strategise high-traffic blogs that answer your customer questions.
✅ Consistently optimises pages, text and links for improved ranking results.
✅ Includes UX optimisation per device (like mobile).
✅ Implements and records conversion tracking.
✅ Carefully builds authorised links from legitimate networks.
✅ Word optimisation to ensure content includes every word related to your industry.
✅ Positions your brand, business and employees as the expert.
Discover what good SEO looks like. Xcite writes an interesting article on the GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE UGLY IN SEO.
How much does low-priced SEO cost?
Cheapish SEO is contracting services that cost below £1,000.
For example, you should not expect great returns if billed £250-£500 monthly. Good, truly affordable SEO is priced between £2,000 and £3,000 a month because of the leads it delivers and the hours spent on your website. Costs like this include high-quality content production, strategies, competitor analyses, technical code, conversion optimisation, and so much more.
A one-size model should be avoided.
Whilst SEO services never change, they do adapt per industry and consumer. For example, our strategies to convert dental patients differ from how we attract homeowners. The services stay the same, but how they are applied differs.
Genuine red flags of bargain SEO include:
- No long-term or month-to-month strategy.
- ?The work is not tailored to your specific industry.
- The content and copy do not hook you or have a good tone of voice.
- They do not report on work completed or the results.
- In your analytics, fake traffic is used more than real users.
The main difference between the two is that inexpensive SEO agencies will focus on securing ah high volume of clients in the form of traffic in the hopes it drives profitability. However, a good SEO company is not about the number of users but about a targeted group of users who are more likely to purchase. Getting your site 50,000 users will be redundant if they’re not brought in with the right converting keywords.
How good SEO providers do it
✅ They begin by understanding the structure of your business.
✅ The strategy begins with your goals and income growth plan.
✅ They build plans focusing on your core objectives to measure their performance.
✅ They pay particular attention to how your business operates locally and nationally.
✅ They meet with you monthly to review results and improvement areas.
In our experience, cut-price SEO agencies don’t care
For these SEO agencies, prioritising a high traffic volume creates a simplistic business model that does not hold them accountable for the lack of long-term business relationships their work brings about.
Most have little interest in the businesses they help and do not study the industries they serve at length. And as they ultimately and invariable deliver sub-standard services, there’s very little to hold them accountable for as, yes, they’ve delivered the traffic, just not the right kind. How much is SEO worth anyway?
Because they offer affordable services, they’re not so worried about losing you as a client, as in the time it’s taken for you to become annoyed, they’ve already got five new clients in your place.
It’s about quantity, not quality. Bear that in mind.
Now, not only have you wasted money, but you will likely spend the next few months with a new SEO team salvaging what’s already been done or getting your site back to a healthy state so that Google can begin reading it again.
Remember, SEO is not instant. It’s a long-term game that takes time
Whenever onboarding a new client, we always get asked, “How long will it take?” Our reply never changes. SEO is hurry up and wait. The results of work we do in one month are not likely to take full effect until three months down the line. Making SEO, initially, an investment.
SEO can take a long time to achieve positive results, especially for particular competitive keywords and if you’ve been penalised by Google. This is scary to some business owners who do not want to invest without results.
But here at Vanilla Circus, we always go closest to the money, starting by dominating your local area and moving on to the higher-trafficked, more competitive keywords.
