5 Reasons Why SEO is Expensive, But Worth it in the End

You’re right; SEO is not cheap. Well, I’ll rephrase that – quality SEO is not cheap. I’m sure you could do a bit of research and, within no time at all, find a company that claims they can build 1,000 links to your website within a week and propel your business straight to that number one spot in search results.

But surely even part of you has to admit, all that sounds rather fishy doesn’t it?

Company executives and directors that don’t necessarily have an up-to-date knowledge of the current online marketing industry may be more tempted to go with the cheaper option. But more often than not, these instances result in a nasty burn and subsequently, the company wards off SEO for good. But this is such a shame and it shouldn’t be the case.

As an industry, SEO doesn’t have the best reputation for various reasons, including the companies that promise the earth for a small amount but then don’t deliver. However, if carried out by a company that’s as dedicated towards your cause as you are, SEO really can pay off.

So yes, whilst good quality SEO is expensive, we’re here with five reasons as why, ultimately, it’s worth it in the end.

1. Not all “SEOs” know what they’re doing

You’d be amazed at how many “SEO companies” out there actually just outsource all their work to another company. All they’re doing is taking your money, acting the middle man and fobbing the work off elsewhere (making sure they take a generous cut of your cash in the meantime). You’re with a company like this for a few months until you start to realise, you’re seeing no improvements whatsoever and, if you decide to leave, they’re not really that bothered as, at the end of the day, they’ve been taking your money every month and done very little to earn it. They’ll just happily continue to do the same thing with other businesses.

On the other hand, a company that really knows their stuff will stand out. You can ask them a question and get a comprehensive response pretty sharpish; other companies can take days to come back to you and, even then, their answer doesn’t really address what you asked in the first place.

Good quality companies dedicate time to educating themselves on the ever-changing world of the online marketing industry, ensuring they keep up to date to provide you with the best services.

2. Clean-ups take time

If you’re looking to sign on with an SEO company, it could be because your website isn’t currently performing as well as it should be. And the chances are there’s a reason for this. A new company getting involved with your online marketing will need to assess the situation and undertake clean-up tasks to fix the issue. But it’s not as simple as it sounds.

Let’s look at it a different way. You wouldn’t expect a plumber to come into your house and immediately be able to identify the cause and location of a leak without first doing a bit of digging around your pipes. Once the digging’s done, he or she then has to spend extra time fixing the problem.

SEO works the same way. If your online presence is performing badly, the first thing to do is assess what the problem is, which can take a lot of time and research. Have you been given a manual penalty? Have you been hit by a recent algorithm? Or is it something historical that’s yet to be fixed? Once the route of the problem has been established, further time then has to be dedicated towards fixing it. Just to give you an insight into what this entails, if for instance, you have back link problems, the following steps need to take place:

1. Collect a list of back links
2. Manual assessment of each individual link/domain/link’s anchor text
3. Identification of which links must be removed
4. Attempt to remove those links by manually contacting the external website owner

These are just four steps that must be taken during a link audit/removal process; there are many more and, with websites that have tens of thousands of back links, this one process alone can take weeks. As I’m sure you can imagine, this is a rather monotonous and labour-intensive task hence why some companies can charge a rather large sum to carry out a full site-wide audit.

3. Content remains King

With so many things affecting the ranking of search results nowadays, one of the few things that you can remain in control of is the content on your website.

Whilst you could produce this in-house, you may not always have the time available to commit yourself. A professional SEO company will have dedicated copywriters whose time is spent solely on creating promotional content for businesses.

Often bringing with them qualifications in Journalism or English, these copywriters can produce great quality content for your website. But it does take time. Firstly, they won’t always know your industry as well as you do, so extra research needs to go in to ensure all details are correct. Also, it’s important that the content produced is of use to its audience. So, as you can imagine, it takes time to create a piece of content that’s correct, informative and engaging, and even more so when you bear in mind it’s written by someone that’s not directly involved in your industry.

But another plus is that good quality content attracts natural links. If you’re publishing things that people want to know about, they will share it by linking to it. At the end of the day, this natural link is what you should be trying to achieve and is something search engines love to see.

4. Quality vs Quantity

The Quantity being how much you invest and the Quality being what you get out of it. Yes, a company could provide you with 100 back links in a day, but where would these links come from? Will they be giving any quality to your website? Yes, a company could provide you with content for your site, but how well written will it be? Will it pass the search engines’ content quality guidelines?

Hmmm, I’m not so sure…

Good quality back links take time to achieve, but one great back link is worth much more than 1,000 spammy ones. Similarly, an amazing piece of content that’s well written, informative and unique will provide much more value to your website than something that’s badly written, full of spelling mistakes and possibly copied from somewhere else.

5. Cheap, bad SEO could ruin your business

With the search engines rolling out algorithms left, right and centre, all of which focusing on different areas of search, many businesses find that previous work carried out on their websites has caused them to drop in the rankings, some even disappear entirely. And more often than not, this work involved spammy, low quality tactics. If your website doesn’t fall within the search engines’ quality guidelines, you could be completely removed from their index, meaning you wouldn’t appear anywhere within the search results. Pretty scary thought, isn’t it?

So if you find the right company to carry out your SEO, hold onto them tightly and don’t let go. Don’t be tempted away by businesses who promise you the earth for next to nothing, as the chances are you may get a nasty burn and your online presence will be in a worse state than it was before. At the end of the day, if you’re investing in something as important as online marketing, don’t you want to make sure your money is going towards something worthwhile that’s going to provide you with a great payback in the end?