Investment in SEO Over 3 Months – Why £50 Cheap SEO Is A Waste
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.
Click here for the guaranteed increase in rankings 30 Day SEO Booster
Champagne Taste and Lemonade Wallet
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.
It's not my job to convince you to hire me because you lost trust in your last SEO
“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”
There’s no reason for me to discount my services.
It’s exactly the same that there’s no reason for you to discount your products / services if a customer emails you about your prices and offers to pay 75% less than the list price on your website. 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 decade in Digital Marketing. I used to run my own eBay store and know the algorithmn has characteristics of Google’s algo.
If you paid me (or any other SEO) £100 to target your keywords and you don’t see an improvement, wouldn’t you think that you have wasted your money? I am unable to take on work at such a low budget as my reputation would be at risk. Read my reviews on People Per Hour, and independent reviews from my direct clients.
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 and talented SEO Freelancer
Educate Yourself in SEO
Book a Zoom 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 2009
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: PPE, Covid testing online, finance, crypto currency, bitcoin, finance, own brand fashion labels 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?
- 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.
Should you not have time to write an article yourself, and you can do this in 2-3 hours, please don’t be suprised when ‘rubbish SEOs’ are not able to meet this incredibly high bar.
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.
Red Flags - 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.
