Trying to Find the Cheapest Prices SEO Services? You Get What You Pay For!
So the day before yesterday I was heading to some auto body shops to get some quotes for some damage to my car. I was probably 5 miles away from the road I was headed to go find quotes to repair my car. Starving, I stopped off at Rubio’s for a fish taco. Damn was it good. And it was the most expensive taco I had ever eaten too. $500 bucks. Here’s why I say that. As I was parking my car, a guy comes up to me and says , “I can fix that for you today. If you go to a body shop, that will cost $1,700 to repair but I’ll do it for you for $500 bucks”. Apparently the brain cells weren’t working because I agreed to it. To make a long story short, I completely wasted my money. And then some. When I took it to a body shop that I knew was good, the quote was for $3,300. Part of that cost was to fix the damage done by the idiots who didn’t know what they were doing. Thinking of this story, it got me to thinking that the EXACT same thing happens in the SEO world. Too may times I’ve had clients come to me with the same story. Sometimes I can fix the damage. Other times, too much damage has been done to a website by some clueless SEO who link spammed the hell out of the site. Be forwarned, DO NOT GO THE CHEAPEST ROUTE WHEN IT COMES TO THE SEO FOR YOUR WEBSITE! Most the times you will end up wasting your money or they will do more damage than good. The last thing you want to have is for your website to have a bad reputation with the search engines. That doesn’t mean the most expensive SEO company is the best, but never go for the cheapest price. You’ll get what you pay for. So how do you know that a SEO company is good?
1. Results: Have them show you results they have for either themselves or their clients in Google. Keep in mind, coming up for terms that people won’t search for is not impressive. If they show you something like “Purple Turtleneck Wearing Octopus” and say “Look, # 1 for that term!”, that’s not impressive. That’s not a competitive search term. Showing you something like “California attorneys” that people typically search for everyday is much more impressive if their on the 1st page of Google. Keep in mind, if you’re looking for someone local, type in “(your city) SEO company” or “(your city) search engine optimization company”. If they don’t come up in their own city, that’s not a good sign.
2. Referrals: Ask them for referrals from their current clients. If they can’t provide you with anyone to speak with, probably a sign that you can’t trust them. Anyone who I’ve done work for has always been more than happy to tell others about my work. Unless they’re your competitors, speaking to an existing client of theirs can help uncover the positives and negatives of that SEO company.
3. Honesty: This can be hard to determine but if they’re making guarantees to get you to the top of the search engines in two weeks, stay away. It takes time to get to the top of the search engines but a lot of that depends on the level of competition for the keywords you’re targeting. How can you tell how competitive a keyword phrase is? There are tools to help you look at the number of searches conducted each day. There’s the Overture keyword search tool or Digital Point has a great tool as well. This will give you a better idea of how many people search each day for those terms. The higher the number, the more competitive it’s going to be of course. Keep in mind, if you’re starting out with a brand new domain, in most cases it will take 9-12 months before you start showing up in Google searches for competive terms. Yahoo normally takes 3-4 months. MSN, 1-2 months. Anyone who makes crazy promises to you and doesn’t set up realistic expectations is trouble. If you have a bad feeling and don’t feel comfortable with who you’re talking to, find someone else.
There’s other factors of course, but these are some of the biggest factors. If you can see the results they’ve attained and you speak to happy clients, odds are that you’ll be satisfied as well.
