There’s no question: SEO is expensive. Most agencies will charge you anywhere from $5,000 upwards for good SEO quality work. Of course, there are also fly by night companies that only charge a few hundred dollars. This huge discrepancy comes down to the quality and effectiveness of the services being rendered. When you stop to think about this in light of the fact that SEO is content driven, you can see why paying more is better for your website.
Understanding the Different Types of SEO Providers
You’ll find that there are three different types of SEO quality providers. These include:
- Experienced agencies are genuinely interested in the brands they work with. They want to build a long-term business relationship that delivers a ROI for them. This is why they provide a lot of analytical data, conversion tracking, and measurable results.
- Some companies don’t know any better as they simply outsource everything they do. This puts them at the mercy of their providers who don’t always provide high SEO quality.
- There are SEO providers who just want the money so they’ll tell you what you want to hear.
This is why it’s so important to understand the current SEO landscape instead of focusing solely on price.
Why Amateur SEO Costs More Than Professional SEO
There are several reasons why this statement is true, including:
- Link audits are expensive but you’ll need to conduct a thorough one if you don’t employ a good SEO team from the beginning. Audits conducted by free software aren’t very thorough, which is why you need someone who knows what they’re looking for. Nevertheless, this will still be a very tedious, labor-intensive process – hence it’s extremely high cost.
- Completely cleaning up all your links and removing the toxic ones is important. Fortunately, this is still something Google will let you do with a simple disavow file, especially if you believe the links are either toxic or beyond your control. However, if you want to regain rankings you must do more than this: You must manually request that your links be removed and this can take a lot of time, which is why it can cost you $5,000 – $20,000 for a complete link clean up.
- When your website is penalized by the search engines, it could quite possibly lose all the traffic you’ve worked so hard for. This could happen overnight. This happens to big and small companies alike. In fact, Overstock was penalized by Google in February 2011 when they removed the site from the first page of their search results because Overstock offered schools discounts for placing anchor-specific links on their websites. It took them about two months and cost them about 5% of their revenue (a substantial amount of money) to get back to the position they once held.
- When your website is de-indexed (where it no longer shows up in Google at all) it can ruin your brand because you’ll be receiving absolutely no search engine traffic from this source. This can and will happen any time Google feels your website doesn’t meet its quality guidelines, which is why it’s so important for you to really stay on top of them despite all their changes. This isn’t something you can afford to leave in the hands of a low SEO quality service who uses spammy techniques. Doing so means you’re either knowingly or unknowingly placing your brand at risk of completely disappearing from Google search not something you want to experience. So, if you really need some help here, make sure you reach out to a high SEO quality service like the Local SEO Tampa Company. With their proven track record, you can’t go wrong.