Over at Search Engine Land, Jordan Kasteler writes about “The Hidden Cost of Cheap SEO & Social Media Labor”. It’s a great article, so you should definitely check it out here.
Here’s my take on his article:
First, I want to take a minute to talk to business owners
Look, I get that every business wants to save money where it can. It’s perfectly understandable. Just don’t expect great results from your online marketing strategy if you aren’t willing to pay for quality.
There are no shortcuts. Google is getting smarter (and more aggressive) in the way they combat webspam (did you hear about their recent patent?). Hiring the wrong SEO provider can get you in a lot of trouble with Google. Hiring the wrong web designer can get you a product that is poorly designed, difficult for search engines to crawl, and worthless as a source of new business to your company.
In short, don’t expect A results for C dollars. If you want your business to be associated with quality, then associate yourself with quality providers.
SEO and SMM providers, now I want to talk to you for a minute (myself included)
You want to make your clients happy (and people in general). That’s understandable. You tell yourself that by offering low-cost solutions, you are helping your clients. But you are only kidding yourself and them. There are no shortcuts. Start providing only the best quality services, and start charging what those services are worth. By trying to play nice and keeping your services cheap, you are hurting both yourself and your customers. You are hurting yourself because you aren’t giving your best. You are hurting your customers because you are playing into the myth that there are shortcuts when that is clearly not the case.
Thanks for reading.
I couldn’t agree more. Cheap services equate to low quality spam tactics which have become obsolete and downright harmful to a rankings. Google has really cracked down over the last year and they are putting the hurt on SEO’s who try to game the system. The sad part is that the client is the one that suffers. High quality content and obtaining quality backlinks is the only way to go nowadays.
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Hi Rusty
Yes I am agree with you, Google has its own tools and algorithms to catch the bad links. The only thing which it likes are quality back links. This can generate traffic to website products in order to add business.
I think most SEO providers know that the old days are behind, tricks and tactics are being penalized, and customers start to realise that good SEO does not come cheap anymore. In a way, google is successfully encouraging to resort to quality when it comes to SEO.
Thanks for the comment. I think it’s a given that SEO providers know the volatile nature of their industry. But I think you hit on a good point when you say that customers are starting to realize that good SEO isn’t cheap. That has been our experience at 417 Marketing. Thanks for the comment, and best of luck to you.