Can you go cheap with SEO?
Last fall we received a request from a Medicare insurance broker in the Midwest to look at a search engine optimization campaign for which he had been paying for about a year.
It was a lesson in SEO disappointments.
He had been approached by a company that advertises throughout the country for its cheap SEO service. For $175 per month they promised to give him high rankings. But my client’s website was not receiving many visits. He was expecting a fair number of calls from prospects for his hard-earned cash. But the results were almost nada.
“Did they write any articles for your website?” I asked the insurance agent.
“No, I didn’t want them to do that,” he said. “They said, ‘OK, fine. We can do the job anyway.'”
“Hmm…” I told him. It doesn’t work that way.
Content is king
There is a phrase about SEO from way back: Content is king.
You cannot do SEO without adding content to your website on a regular basis. You have to add articles, interlink the pages, expand current articles, improve the looks and so on. Google asks why people should come to your website. This whole game is more than links. There has to be some meat and potatoes there.
We did a link study with special software and found that the SEO company had put in a lot of backlinks to the insurance agent’s website from a lot of … well, let’s say insignificant websites. This could have been what’s called a private blog network, in which the SEO company owns a lot of websites and puts links from them to their clients’ sites. In any case, these websites were all of a low quality. They had what’s called low domain authority scores. Domain authority has to do with the quality and relevance of a website.
When we looked at the backlinks we found that the one with the highest domain authority was a parish-related website where my client had purchased an ad in the church bulletin. So that link was the strongest – not what he paid the SEO company for.
No SEO support
Another drawback was efforts on his part to contact the SEO company. He wanted to talk to them and send them emails about what was going on and what could be done to improve things. After a while, his efforts were futile. Emails and phone calls were going into cyberspace. My client wanted to talk to a real person on a regular basis. He was disappointed.
“You won’t get that for $200 a month” I said.
Since then we at Savvy Senior Marketing have been helping with a simple SEO program. We add articles to his website taken from his emailed newsletters. We expanded the articles a bit and put them on as blog posts on his website. His site is a simple one offered by the website hosting company Ionos. We also post the same articles to Google My Business, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Patch, a free local-based news service.
We have seen the rankings for his most important keywords on his site going up on Google search a bit over the first three months. But while going from page three to page two is a hopeful sign, you won’t get any fruit for all your planting until your website listings reach page one. That’s where 75% of the clicks land. Most searchers never bother to venture beyond page one. And it takes a while to reach page one. It could be six or even twelve months, depending on the competition.
How a SEO program can backfire
What’s worse in dealing with an unscrupulous company is that if they are trying to game the system, Google will eventually catch up with you and drop your rankings. Or Google may come up with a new algorithm, such as the ones called Panda or Penguin, and drop you to the search basement. Then you’ll get no ranking and no calls.
And then if you cancel your account with such a company, they might pull all your links from the websites, so you will no longer gain any benefit from what you paid for. They drop you like a hot potato with no love lost. Sounds unfair? Then read the fine print that you may have glossed over when you made the first payment.
SEO is tricky, and you must deal with someone who is good, and whom you trust.
Image by mohamed hassan form PxHere
