Cheap SEO Companies WILL Cost You a Fortune

Andrew Radics and Ian Hopkinson can’t say it enough Cheap SEO Companies WILL cost you a fortune. We will be discussing an email sent to us by a client this morning that offers 17 different so-called SEO task for $150/month. Half of it you don’t need, the other half will cost you a fortune if you lose your standing with Google and close traffic and revenue as a result!

 Transcript:

Ian: Today we’re going to talk to you about why cheap SEO companies will cost you a fortune!

Andrew: Or two!

Ian: So wound up about this, we’ve been talking about it a lot. This morning we got an email from a partner of ours slash client, (we haven’t actually done SEO for this client, we’ve done multiple other things) and it’s what we’ve been talking about isn’t it Andrew?

“Hello, hope you are well. I am … business development manager (which is a pretty interesting kind of term for this person who knows clearly nothing about SEO or marketing). We have an SEO discount offer going for the following package; $150 a month.”

What do they get for that? My blood’s boiling just seeing this again.

Andrew: These are all the things that we have been baning on about the last few weeks. Alright, this is what you get; 150 directory submissions. Okay, what sort of directory submissions is she talking about?

Ian: And who needs 150?

Andrew: Yeah

Ian: Well who needs them at all? We’ve already gone through this. You don’t need to direct, this is three or four maybe five years old this way of thinking, this is like ancient. And three or four years old in SEO world is 50 years.

Andrew: Remember all of this is per month, this is every single month. Ten social bookmarking submissions, well ten per month is really not going to get you very far at all. Guaranteed.

Ian: And it’s not even the right terminology. Submissions, it’s not a submission.

Andrew:  Ten article submissions, that is to say, one article times ten article directories.

Ian: The same article to ten directories?

Andrew: Yep, ten directories. Not 100, but only ten. That’s fine, ok, old hat once again.

Ian: But if it’s the same article it will get you duplicate content, one.

Andrew: Yeah, eventually.

Ian: And Google will frown on it because they’re onto this whole directory thing.

Andrew: Yep, it gets even worse; ten press release submissions.

Ian: I might have to go and take some deep breaths in the other room I think and come back.

Andrew: One press release by ten press release websites. Now, just on that, to submit anything to a decent press release website, you’re looking at you know, depending on the package you get, but probably minimum of about $30 per article or per press release. Now we’re talking ten press release websites all for $150! Now what sort of press release websites are we talking about? The real cheap nasties?

Ian: Well, they’ve got to be the real cheap nasty ones, which will have a very low PR and will be actually useless.

Andrew: Yep. Then this person says ten blog submissions. Ok, what are you going to submit to ten blogs and what sort of blogs are they? What sort of PR are they, are they reputable, are they just junk, are they part of a blog type network? One unique 400 word article written, ok that’s fine. One unique 400 word wordpress, oh this doesn’t even, one unique 400 word press releases, (great grammar). Fifteen one way backlinks with a mix of PR. I mean fifteen, I’m sorry.

Ian: How do people believe this stuff?

Andrew: Because they don’t know any better, you know?

Ian: Well that’s what we need to change.

Andrew: Just as well this client of ours is a little bit more educated. In his reply he says this looks a little dodgy, what do you think?

Ian: At least he’s onto the fact that it’s looking dodgy.

Andrew: Yeah, but he wasn’t 100% sure. Ok, but now we can reply to him or he can watch this video if he wants. Then they talk about metatag changes suggestions. Ok, they’re not even going to fix the tags for you, they’re just going to say well this is what you need to do.

Ian: So they’ve given you the suggestions and then you’ve actually got to get a “real” SEO company to do everything for you.

Andrew: Yeah.

Ian: Yeah that’s great.

Andrew: I’ll leave a few more for you to have a whinge about. But what gets me the most is number one, this person doesn’t have a website, doesn’t work for a particular SEO company, and they use a hotmail address. Ok, look, this person is probably set up in their basement or their backyard or somewhere in some exotic land, which is fine. I used to work out of my home for quite a few years, there’s nothing wrong with that.

Ian: So did I.

Andrew: But at least I had a professional website, and I had a professional email address. Not a hotmail or a gmail or a yahoo or a God knows what.

Ian: And you knew what you were doing. You weren’t five years behind.

Andrew: Well, yes. So anybody who sends you this stuff who has a hotmail address, a gmail address, or some other generic address, well. Now I’m going to come down a bit and you can do the rest.

Ian: Oh dear. Competitor analysis, I mean I’ve lost confidence in this SEO company already, what possible competitive analysis could they do? They’re making me an offer to do all these things and they don’t know anything about my brand, they don’t know anything about what my goals are or what my intentions are. Number 14, interlinking wherever required; what the hell is interlinking?!

Andrew: I think they mean linking pages from one of your pages on your website to another that’s on your…

Ian: Well that’d be internal linking! Interlinking? Great, we’ll have to do another hangout: What is interlinking?

Andrew: No, we should do a hangout about grammar! What is proper grammar?

Ian: It’d be a short one wouldn’t it? With what is interlinking?  We don’t know, okay thanks have a great day. Keyword density in site content. Keyword density? What, another four year old concept, so what are you deciding to do? You’ve got a keyword strategy or there’s keywords you want to rank highly in, so lets pack the website with all of the keywords that you want to rate highly in? Yeah, that works! It’s called keyword stacking people and Google will penalise you for it. Not straight away necessarily, but eventually they will get onto you. And that is why Penguin, Panda, these big updates in the last 18 months have been done to stop these kind of tactics working, because nor should they. HTML site map; well that may be the only thing that’s useful on this list.

Andrew: Yeah but, in it they do an XML site map and a HTML site map. Come on, you only need one.

Ian: Yeah, well the XML site map, do that one because that’s obviously dynamic, that changes if your site changes. Submission in webmaster tools, well yeah. That’s part of setting up the XML sitemap, but if you’ve got wordpress you don’t even have to do that. So, that’s the end of the list and I’m going to pay our best rates for this, in USD $150 per month per project, at the beginning of every month. So not only am I going to be given a whole lot of crap, but I have to pay for it up front?

Andrew: Yeah, before you get the crap.

Ian: That’s our rant, we’re pretty wound up about it.

Andrew: It’s just that it’s so prevalent, it just never ends. We can’t stress highly enough; using one of those services can really stuff up your website. Plain and simple.

Ian: There’s only one good thing I can find about that email, and do you know what? They didn’t do the cliche thing, which everybody is saying “Your website is terrible and it is ranking not even on the map!”  What frustrates me is people believe that these guys actually go and look at your website and they’re talking about your website specifically. They’re not, they send the same thing to everybody, they tell everybody their website is rating badly. We’ve done SEO for people for a period of three months and they’ve got an email saying that their website is not ranking for keywords and is terrible and that they can do all of these things for it. But they clearly haven’t looked at their website because we’re doing SEO on it and we’re getting good results. Frustration plus.

Andrew: So, bottom line is if you get one of those emails just delete it, don’t even pay any attention to it. If you’ve got an SEO company that’s doing a fantastic job, keep going.

Ian: Just delete it. Or send it onto us, you can see we love talking about it. Whatever you do, don’t reply to it. Don’t start a conversation with them at all, because they will not leave you alone and it will just make you angrier and angrier about SEO, and this is not SEO. This is junk. This should not even be associated with those three letters SEO. This is why we’ve got a gripe about this kind of thing, because all we deal with everyday is people coming to us saying SEO is a bunch of invisible magic that is just a rip of that’s done with smoke and mirrors. It’s not.

Andrew: Just to give you a quick example, I worked on a cleaning website here in Melbourne. Within about, well cleaning is obviously a very competitive area, within five or six months I had all of the keywords that he wanted on the front page. Once again not necessarily number one, but he was at least on the front page, and he was getting there. Then he decided to give the work to somebody in an exotic land because of  the price. He came back to us a few months ago and said I can’t be found anywhere now I’m not in any of the top ten pages can you do anything? So we had a look at his backlinking profile, the work that these people had been doing for him and yeah, there was a lot of junk sites that he was being linked to. We just said to him, this is going to cost you an absolute fortune to bring this back. So, he was on the first page, that’s what gets me, he was on the first page doing well. Then he was guided because of money, to go to some cheaper mob, and that’s what happens. I’ve heard this time and time and time again.

Ian: And the worse case scenario is you do a lot of that and you get penalised by google and like we’ve talked about other examples, you end up doing a costing of it and it costs you over $5,000 to fix it. It’s cheaper to actually start a new website and a new domain name. This is why we’re saying cheap SEO companies will cost you a fortune. This is not $150 a month that you’re risking, this is way more than that.

Andrew: Well it can be too that you might not necessarily get penalised, but the links that they’re building to come into your website are rubbish, so there is no value in them whatsoever, so that’s why your ranking might drop. So you don’t necessarily have to get penalised by Google for them doing something wrong, but when you work out that ok, in this case $150 for their service, fine whatever. But how much is it costing you in terms of lost revenue? You save a few hundred or a grand going with these types, but how much is it going to cost you in revenue that you’re missing out on through your website?

Ian: Exactly.

Andrew: It could ten, fifteen, twenty times that much.

Ian: There’s the revenue you’re losing through your website, there’s the money you’ve got to spend to fix it; there’s the time time you’ve got to be completely and utterly mesmerised by all this and try and work through the issues; there’s the money that you might have to spend to get someone like us to go and look to see what’s wrong and fix it, or advise how to fix it. I mean, $150 a month – no way. That email may as well say we’ll charge you -$3,000 a month. How does that sound? Would you like to start today?

Andrew: Or, we will cost you $3,000 a month.

Ian: Well yeah, ridiculous. We’re wound up about it, cheap SEO are an absolute joke. And while we’re talking about cheap, cheap across the board. Cheap in price, cheap in knowledge, cheap in delivery, in promises …

Andrew: In results! Big thing, results.

Ian: In results; cheap cheap cheap. I think we’ve covered it.

Andrew: I think we have. Cheap cheap, no no.

Ian: Cheap cheap, that’s our gripe for today. If you get those emails delete them, they’re dodgy, don’t reply to them. If you want to send them on to us for entertainment, great, we’ll happily read them come on and comment about them, we’ll give you a shout out for sending on some of the worst ones.

Andrew: Absolutely.

Ian: You can come on the show for a week and we can showcase your business. But for God’s sake, don’t reply to them, don’t fall for it, don’t do it.

Andrew: I think it’s time for us to go.

Ian: It is.