Are you attracted by a cheap SEO offer? All-inclusive with guaranteed results?
Do you think you got a good deal because you found an SEO or an SEO agency that gave you a great discount, an unbeatable price? Be careful, a cheap offer is often up to the performance. It will not necessarily allow you to obtain a good natural referencing.
How Much Does An Seo Service Cost?
This is a question that we, SEO Managers and Project Managers, hear daily. Of course, we would like to be able to give you a price right away, but this is IMPOSSIBLE without an analysis of your site, your sector of activity and your digital competition.
The price of an SEO support will be defined according to several factors:
- The client’s visibility, traffic and/or transformation objectives;
- The age of the site and the reputation of its brand;
- The issues detected during the first site audit and the means to be implemented to respond to them;
- The extent of support (advice, web training, integration, web content writing, net linking) with Analytics, UX, data analysis, tools, graphic design… and so on following according to the skills proposed by the SEO agency;
- The location of SEO providers (a SEO in Paris , Lyon or Marseille will have a higher hourly cost than a SEO in Mumbai, Delhi or Antananarivo);
- The resources necessary for the smooth running of the service (business software, travel, frequency of interactions, meetings with other client service providers such as developers or integrators, editors, Ads or social campaign manager, etc.).
In France, the vast majority of SEO service providers charge between €50 and €250 per hour.
The price difference is big but it can imply that:
- The SEO service provider is subscribed (or not) to several business tool licenses to increase efficiency;
- The SEO service provider has “storefront” premises and is reactive;
- The SEO service provider can demonstrate several years of SEO experience;
- The SEO service provider can only take on a limited number of clients (non-automated service).
For annual support, you generally need a budget between €6,000 and €20,000 to carry out your growth project and gain visibility.
For some sites, the budget will have to be higher because they have particularities that will require additional work (multilingual sites, e-commerce sites with many product categories, penalized or hacked sites, ultra-competitive market, etc.). And, conversely, some may have results with lower budgets because their site is condensed on a few pages, they are especially on a single product or type of service or on markets with low competition.
With a limited budget, you could equip yourself with software, such as those offered by Optimiz.me, do SEO training at Open Linking for example and, by fully investing yourself, you can expect some results on your visibility and your traffic. However, SEO is a real job and collaborating with SEO professionals will certainly be more effective.
The Risks Of A Cheap Seo Service?
Opting for cheap SEO may seem like a great idea when you have a small budget or just want to test cheap SEO to see if it works.
When you put out a call for tenders or put out a competition between several SEO agencies, do not rely solely on the price to choose the right SEO agency.
Be aware that when a project is implemented correctly, SEO takes time and requires resources.
How can a cheap SEO company do all the work and still be profitable? The answer is simple: either they do not do everything that was requested, or they subcontract part of the service in a country where labor is cheap, which can represent risks for your site. .
Be that as it may, the probabilities of being 1st on Google in 50 days on an interesting request for €50/month (i.e., approximately 2 hours of gross work paid at the average French salary) are more than low.
Have No Results Or Lose Visibility
If the service provider does work that does not comply with Google’s rules, you run the risk of losing positions on search engines, getting fewer visits and simply losing money having to take over a service provider. to make up for the errors of the first.
Low Quality Content
Good SEO requires your website content to be relevant to Google, informative and interesting to the reader, and rooted locally, at the scale of a city or region, if that matters. Meaning in your strategy.
Most cheap SEO agencies outsource editorial production where the word is billed the least expensive to them (often in Madagascar, Tunisia, India, etc.).
These editors may have a very correct pen, but they will not necessarily understand your business challenges or will not be able to distinguish you from competitors in your region. If French is not their first language, you will need to set aside time to proofread and correct them.
An excellent copy costs money, because it requires both skills – the famous pen! – And time to learn about the subject, adapt to your tone and really answer the questions that Internet users are asking.
You find a 1500-word article paid 150$ is expensive?
Above all, keep in mind that poor quality content is the fastest way to drop in Google rankings. Their content guidelines are strict and will directly affect the number of visits to your site.
Harmful Backlinks
For SEO to work effectively, backlinks (= links that point to your site) must come from relevant, quality websites.
A service provider who offers you a large volume of links for a derisory price, it is very likely that this will be processed automatically on “trash” sites that bring neither visibility nor traffic. It is the equivalent on the web of the spams that we receive by email.
At best, Google will ignore it. At worst, your site will suffer a penalty and could disappear from the SERPs, thus becoming inaccessible to Internet users who search online.
Non-Existent Support
The worst thing for a client is to feel that you are not being listened to.
Make sure that the service includes a period of support that an SEO consultant will listen to you regularly, that he will give you visibility on the services carried out and that he adapts his strategy to your needs and desires.
Clients were able to tell us about their past experiences with inexpensive SEO services: “we were treated like numbers”, “everything was automated: deliverables and reports”; “inability to speak to anyone”; “if it came out of the initial package, they were lost”; “no flexibility”… and so on.
Unrealistic Guarantees Of Results
No agency, no referrer has direct control over Google’s algorithms and cannot decide to position its client’s site on the 1st page or in the first results. If the service provider sells you a guaranteed positioning, it is a lie…
Even Google warns against scams in its guidelines: “No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google. “.
The SEO agency can, however, issue growth forecasts based on the data of its customers who share the same field of activity, present to you the history of past results and the evolution of search trends on similar queries to help you to project you and explain the choice of its keyword strategy.
On What Criteria To Choose Your Seo Agency?
Since the cheap SEO side is not the determining criterion when choosing an SEO provider, how to make the right choice? What are the other things to know or actions to take to find a trusted agency?
- Study the organic visibility of the service provider. It is said that shoemakers are the worst shod, but an agency that fails to achieve its own objectives on strategic expressions like “SEO Paris agency ” will surely have a hard time helping you position yourself in your field.
- Study the agency’s references or client cases. Each SEO agency considered must be able to present several client cases indicating the initial problem, the strategy adopted and the results it has achieved. Why not take advantage of this exchange to request a connection with an active customer? This will allow you to learn more about the delivery and quality of the agency’s follow-up.
- Study the attitude of the agency. If you don’t feel listened to and no questions are asked to understand your web project, leave it at that. The mutual discovery phase involves active listening, questioning and a fairly detailed analysis of your issues and objectives. It is thanks to all these elements that the estimate which will be proposed to you will be adapted to your needs.
- Have the proposed strategy explained. You are not necessarily an SEO expert but it is important that you understand the offer presented to you, the future actions carried out by the SEO agency and the resources dedicated to your success.
- Make sure the proposal is in line with Google’s guidelines. If the techniques proposed by the agency seem unscrupulous to you (in web jargon, we speak of Black Hat), beware! This can penalize your site, or even make it disappear from Google’s results and index. In SEO, there is no revolutionary “hack” but a set of coherent actions to be carried out. An ethical referencing, White Hat, is necessary for the sustainability of your visibility and to make Internet users want to become your future customers.
- Make sure the agency has prepared a pre-audit of your site. If the salesperson talks to you about SEO for Personal Trainers in a general way, without relying on concrete examples of problems detected on your site, be careful. The avenues it offers you must be adapted to your activity and your market to ensure your success.
- Study the proposed offer. If your estimate is too light a block or on the contrary a tote with an overall price, have the estimate redone. A good quote is made up of priced action lines (audit, production of content, links, reporting, project management, etc.). It is clear, readable and allows you to understand how your budget is allocated to carry out your SEO action plan.
Other criteria can tip the balance on the choice of your SEO agency, but beware of abnormally low prices…. You don’t buy a Lexus for the price of a Twingo.