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Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is essentially the foundation of a successful digital marketing strategy. Authentic SEO brings free, organic and search-driven traffic to your website, ensuring your business is presented professionally to those searching for your services, whether they are aware of your business or will be coming across it for the first time.
The digital marketing agency you choose should have a dedicated team of experts providing SEO Agency solutions. Experts with years of collective experience and up-to-date knowledge of the latest Google Webmaster Guidelines.
As important as good quality SEO is for your business, cheap SEO services can be just as detrimental - lowering your rankings and ruining your business’s reputation.
Repairing the damage done by bad SEO can even work out as more costly than if you had just started with a reputable SEO company, to begin with.
Below, we will look at ways of identifying inadequate SEO services and some of the consequences of contracting a cheap SEO company.
What Does A Cheap SEO Service Look Like?
There are a few red flags that our experts can identify when it comes to knowing which SEO Solutions should be avoided.
Service does not include a business listing.
Any SEO company that does not include initial set-up and optimisation of your Google business listing is cause for concern.
Service offers a standardised approach to link building.
Inbound link building is one of the most complex aspects of an SEO strategy; there should never be a one-size-fits-all approach. Avoid SEO packages that offer a standard amount of links built per month; usually, these will be of poor quality with no value to your business.
Link building requires hours of planning, negotiation, and expertise - it’s a service that should be tailored specifically to your business’s niche and location, and look at how your competitors are implementing their SEO strategies.
What Are The Consequences of Cheap SEO and Digital Marketing Services?
Cheaper SEO solutions have the tendency to build the cheapest and quickest links possible; blog and forum comments, free directory links, or even basic paid links might help your SEO for a little while, but eventually, it will result in penalties. In addition, some cheaper SEO companies will sell links on your website, which will, in time, lower your ranking.
The consequences of bad link building practices will trigger algorithmic penalties, lowering your ranking and resulting in less traffic to your website.
In the worst-case scenario, you might wake up one day to find your website has disappeared. This is because the unethical link building practices implemented on your website have triggered a manual penalty, meaning your page has been flagged and removed from Google’s listing.
It is a long and painful process retrieving your website that includes removing and documenting all of your bad links and submitting them to google for review.
These penalties can be avoided entirely by implementing your SEO strategies with a reputable and quality SEO Agency to begin with.
What Are The Consequences Of Poor Content?
Hiring a cheap digital marketing company will inevitably result in bad content creation. Ad copy that is overly pushy, content that is clearly stolen from competitors, and content that is full of grammatical errors or difficult to read will deter potential customers.
The general public can recognise bad website content, and so can Google. Google has specific coding called Google Panda - written to identify bad content and stop traffic flow to the content source.
What About AI-Driven Content and SEO As A Cheaper Solution?
A new trend emerging in digital marketing is AI-generated content - automated content that promises to save you time and money, so you can do it all yourself.
Although it is a quick way of generating content with little human input, it lacks creativity and common sense; often, professionally written content stands out by a long shot and is more impactful. AI-driven content lacks creativity and common sense regarding grammatical context, emotive quality, and expressing opinions. It relies on the data that has been fed into it and can sometimes begin misinterpreting data from different sources.
The same can be said of AI-driven SEO strategies which lack the capacity to understand the emotion behind an individual’s online behaviour and search patterns. As a result, you’ll often find that your AI-driven strategy generates a lot of traffic, but with a very low conversion rate.
Whereas a reputable SEO Agency will have a specialised team that understands how to interpret data to optimise ad campaigns, getting you hundreds of conversions.
SEO should be seen as an investment; if you have never implemented an SEO strategy before, remember that trying to implement the cheapest solutions will end up costing you more in the long run.
There is no such thing as a cheap SEO strategy, only a bad one; if a package price seems too good to be true, it probably is.
TheContentTribe is an SEO Agency that can offer in-depth SEO solutions; whether you are implementing your first SEO Strategy or feel you want more out of your current SEO strategy - let’s get started!
Get your free SEO Audit today for in-depth analysis and report back on what is preventing your website from ranking well.