Investment in SEO Over 3 Months – Why £100 Cheap SEO Is A Waste
Note: Orignally written in 2021, updated for 2024 and I still see jobs on PPH for £50/£100/month for SEO.
Often on People Per Hour I will see jobs with the budget set of £50/£100 a month for Google page 1 SEO. I’m writing this blog post to outline why this is not achievable as this is a very common scenario for companies with an extremely low marketing budget.
“I don’t want to spend more than £50 a month”
“Tell me how long it will take for me to get to Google page 1?”
– I can’t work magic for £50 which is 1 hour’s work?
“I was let down by my old SEO company after 3 months I hadn’t achieved anything”
– This is your fault not the SEO you employ. So you don’t have the budget but want Google page 1 results? You can’t have your cake and eat it.
If you were paying someone £50 for SEO then it’s entirely expected you won’t get any organic results at all. This is why I decline to quote jobs where budget is low.
You have wasted £150 over 3 months and think the SEO person you employed is lacking – when in reality it’s you that are lacking the common sense and basic business skills to realise that investing in your company’s future can be bought for less than a HDTV.
I don’t risk my reputation by working for 2 hours a month as I am not going to prove results and then the client would think I am rubbish and just taking their money for nothing.
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Save your budget for 6 months
Websites that are brand new are always at a disadvantage as Google measures trust by the age of a domain – a domain has more trust when it reaches 2 years of age. SEO work on brand new websites will take 6-12 months to rank in Google and there is no promise of Google page 1.
SEO at £100-£200 a month is a reasonable cost AFTER an investment of 20 hours over 30 days at around £1000. Don’t spend less on your first wave of SEO.
Have you been burned before and have less available cash as a result of being tied to a 12 month contract? Sadly, you’re not alone. I’ve ran out of fingers and toes to give you a figure of how prevalent this practice is. In 100% of cases, the website owner didn’t know what they were paying for, just giving their cash and trusting an online SEO agency (or freelancer). With my Video Consultations I’ve been hired by hiring managers to learn what questions to ask an SEO when their business is looking to employ an in-house digital marketer.
“I paid an overseas company £100 as they offered me so much! Now I feel let down as I didn’t get the results I expected”
“More work will come your way if you can prove the work you do gets me ranked in Google” (when this the opposite applies).
Read: How to find a trusted SEO Consultant.
I have built my reputation on achieving SEO results for a higher cost than most to reflect the knowledge I heave learned over a fifteen years in Digital Marketing. I used to run my own eBay store and know the algorithm displays many similarities with of Google’s algo.
Read my reviews on People Per Hour, and independent reviews from my direct clients.
Here’s a few DIY SEO tips. I’ll provide a few highlights about my on-page SEO methods. Once you have benchmarked your target search phrases in Googgle, you’re ready to create a new URL. For this SEO example, you’ve built a Shopify or WordPress eCommerce website selling matching wedding shoes and handbags in the UK.
1. Blog or Product Page URL Optimisation. So, create a URL that’s short, sweet, and keyword-rich. Example: www.yoursite.co.uk/matching-wedding-shoes-handbags – it’s direct, search-friendly, and easy to remember.
2. Meta Page Title, for Yoast or Shopify CMS. This is your sales headline to encourage people to click into your website in the SERPs (Search Engine Page Results). Think hard to use a compelling title that grabs attention and includes your primary keyword(s). Think: Matching Wedding Shoes and Handbags UK | BrandName – balancing appeal with keyword relevance.
3. Content is King in 2024. Yes, it’s a forty or more years old sales quote. I don’t expect this to change in the next 5 years. Look into semantically related terms and keyword clusters. Go beyond the main phrase to include variations like “bridal shoes and bag sets,” ensuring you cover a wide spectrum of related searches. This captures all the different words different people will type. This content relevance captures a far broader audience.
4. Visual Matchmaking and Colours for Google Search. Since you’re selling visual harmony, integrate colour selection into your content strategy. Highlight popular wedding colours and how your products complement these palettes, enhancing user experience and search relevance.
5. Alt Tags or I’ll come and visit you with a frying pan. Don’t let images be silent sellers; use descriptive, keyword-rich alt tags like alt=”Matching ivory wedding shoes and handbag” to boost SEO and aid accessibility.
6. Keywords in your Tags and Categories. Never underestimate the power of WordPress and Shopify tags and categories to organise content and making it easier for search engines to crawl and understand your site’s structure. Tags could be specific (e.g., product types, colours) while categories are broader (e.g., “Wedding Accessories”).
7. In and out Linking Strategies. Internal Links. Weave your web of connections within your site. Internally link your related product collections, pages, news articles, and guides using descriptive keyword anchor texts. This not only helps Search Engines (Bing, Yahoo, Google, Duck Duck Go, Mozilla etc) SEO but also keeps your visitors engaged longer. Use 1 or 2 external Links to link out to authoritative sites when relevant. This could be trend reports or social media posts, adding credibility and context to your content.
When I get SEO Results I’ll Pay You More Nina
That’s not how SEO works.
It’s actually the reverse – You need to pay for more SEO time first, once you start ranking then the payments decrease. Learn how much a professional SEO Freelancer Costs.
SEO TIP: Save your money for 6 months and formulate a plan of action and a realistic budget.
It’s expensive to be cheap, often you will buy twice, maybe 3 times before you find a trustworthy on-page SEO Freelancer
Educate Yourself in SEO
Book a Video SEO consultation and I’ll teach you in 60 minutes Google ‘secrets’ that will turn your brain into scrambled eggs.
SEO is straightforward and learning the basics is super easy as I’ve been explaining search engine ranking signals to self-confessed “clueless clients” since 2008.
It’s common for a client to spend 18 months developing a brand, having a logo design and a website launched, only to find they have unwittingly underestimated a saturated market.
Hot topics include: Clothing stores, finance, crypto currency, bitcoin, finance, own brand fashion labels, CBD, phone cases and accessories, print on demand Tshirt stores and candles.
I don't know what I don't know - HELP
Imagine, for a hot minute, you decided to invest £10,000 in building a website and paid advertising and then hired a cheap SEO? Here’s a 2020 case study snapshot of how in demand quick Google ranking services are:
- I’ve had three different companies and none have been able to deliver! So I hope we can work together successfully as lots of covid test companies out there and we are just about to launch a new product for Day 2 mandatory testing changing to lateral flow so I would like to be top ranking for this
- I am now paying £500 per month for someone to carry out social media posts/ads which is also a waste of money
they have all been bloody useless if I’m honest! - The market is fast moving so whilst SEO takes time we need some short term marketing as well as long term to get out there all the others seem to manage it with the ads I used one company for 3 months and the others around the same
Client Mistake with SEO
All talk and no action is what I found – no research into the covid testing market
“They should be able to write their own blogs as all is online I had to keep correcting everything and I don’t have the time for it and didn’t see any increase is sales from it”
Here’s where the client made a mistake.
The client is paying £500 for someone to research facts (VERY tricky with covid related articles) then rewrite in their own words (VERY difficult in the medical industry if you’re not qualified and as an SEO you don’t understand terminology).
Writing SEO articles like this will be a day rate of 8 hours at least, however, this client knows the inside facts so much, they have to rewrite and tweak the articles delivered, then get angry about it.
Writing SEO Articles
If you are an authority on a subject, asking someone else to write to your knowledge standard is a huge ask. This is why I’m a premium subscriber for ChatGPT.
As part of my 30 Day SEO Booster, you’ll get a fully trained, ready to interact, ChatGPT4 custom chatbot. Please note: subscription required.
Something has to give, either you pay another expert more money in a competitive and popular industry or you write articles yourself.
Paying a blog writer for accurate SEO content in this instance – even if it’s £500 – is still money wasted.
This scenario could havebeen avoided if the client had chosen the right Digital Marketer in the first place and 9 months previously.
Quick SEO On Demand - Declining to quote
In this instance, I would have quoted for the work, however my portfolio is almost at capacity at the time of writing.
This example is a huge project best suited to a Digital Agency team, not a sole trader SEO freelance consultant hired for 8 hours a month.
Emotions do make me feel sorry for this client, she didn’t buy cheap, she hired mid-range in cautiousness of her budget. This is understandable. In the end I offered her a Zoom SEO Consultation to teach her what to look for with a Digital Agency, what questions to ask, identify the right and wrong answers and agree KPI’s and targets. I’m still waiting for a reply.
