Affordable SEO

By Adam Stetzer - 12/01/08 6

When looking for affordable SEO, you need to be careful not to compromise quality too much and render your search optimization campaign useless. On the flip side, paying for top notch professional SEO can be expensive. We have a number of very large Fortune 100 clients who have budgets that medium or small businesses could never match. This is true for direct buyers of SEO or people who want to become an SEO reseller.

But this doesn't mean that SEO can't be affordable. Not at all. We've also run a number of campaigns for small and medium sized business that smaller budgets can accommodate. However, we also see many people falling into the usual traps as they try to save money. Here are things to watch for:

1) Many 'affordable SEO' services are really low-quality link building in India. This does not work. The submission sites that they are using have so many outbound links (like tens of thousands) and so little authority, that they don't help your site.

2) Many affordable SEO packages that guarantee results for you are a scam. Don't believe me? Try asking them what types of phrases they are going to guarantee. We've done this when we've been pitched search optimization services. It always turns out to be a 3 word phrase for which there are under 5,000 pages indexed in Google. This means it's a phase with no search volume, no traffic, and therefore no interest for anybody.

3) Some affordable SEO packages go even further and actually use private label content. This is an extremely bad idea because one key aspect of SEO is unique content. Google loves unique content and is good at spotting it. They can tell you if any sentence has been used anywhere else on the Internet. It's amazing really.

So what should you look for when shopping for an affordable SEO program? I would look for a professional SEO firm that has large Fortune 100 clients but also has a stripped-down offering for smaller clients. This is positive because you know that the firm operates with a high level of integrity and transparency, or they wouldn't be able to attract and retain large customers. This type of environment is likely to permeate down to the lower-level plans, which is positive for you.

I would also look for top notch reporting tools. This is critical so that you know what the professional SEO firm is doing for you. While you need to be ready to accept lower levels of customer service from an affordable SEO plan, you should not have to accept sub-standard reporting and transparency.

Comments:

05/11/09 - seo marketing ventures said:

Affordable search engine optimization services should always be there and an option for those who want to do better online.

09/23/09 - Marquis Gittens said:

Do you assist persons who are advertising affiliate programs?

09/23/09 - Adam said:

Hi Marquis. Generally, no. Sorry about that. The reason for this is that at Hubshout we strive to use our SEO skills to help promote high quality websites. I am going to make a huge generalization here, but most affiliate websites are just not high quality. They are usually just middlemen, marking up the price of a product that can easily be found elsewhere. So, to date, we have not taken on any affiliate clients.

That being said, this is our history and not a hard-and-fast rule. Our rule is to promote only sites that Google would agree are high-quality. IF an affiliate business were to show up and convince us they actually provided value to the end-user, we would work with them. This is possible. I could see a community-oriented site that brings revenues from affiliate programs. I could also see a review-oriented site that pulls together real reviews from real consumers, and makes money from affiliates as a good site to SEO.

Hope that answers your question.

05/22/10 - Ross said:

Hi Adam,

Just wondered if you have started working with affiliates ?

05/24/10 - Adam said:

Not really. Our clients and SEO resellers are generally working with small and medium sized businesses. To-date, we have not really seen that the "affiliate world" is a great place for us. We are always open to adding a program if it made sense. But from what we've seen in the affiliate world, it has not so far.

08/17/10 - Affordable SEO Services said:

You are right about most, well everything here, but there are a few things you failed to mention. The most commong ground of judging if the services were affordable is by the results. Of course, hiring an india firm or any opf the above mentioned is a bad idea, but you don't have to pay $1,000 per hour like SEOmoz charges!

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