Don’t Be SEO Penny Wise, Pound Foolish
I had been working with this ecommerce SEO client for 4 years (who I shall refer to as Client X throughout this post) that had decided they wanted to do a site overhaul. I was all for it at the time and really excited for the opportunities brought on by the redesign. The site definitely needed to update their content on the homepage, increase the amount of content on other pages, and better incorporate call-to-action buttons throughout the site, etc. Plus, this gave me the opportunity to go in and incorporate appropriate SEO tactics into the site as it was being designed, which is always easier than doing it after the fact. I thought Client X had a great opportunity on their hands and was excited for the project.
Now Client X wasn’t the best at keeping a clear line of communication open, so sometimes I wouldn’t get the answer to a question I’d email over for a few days, they’d be late in giving me article and press release topics they wanted written/ submitted and so forth. I probably should have seen this one coming: unbeknownst to me, Client X published their new site and didn’t transfer any of their previous on site SEO (almost a year’s worth of link building) over to the new site. Their site went from 40k unique visitors a month to a mere 2k! Sure, the site looked much better, but they lost nearly all their ranking positions for every keyword. It was a brand new site, which meant it also didn’t have any trust established with the search engines.
Working with Client X reminded me of the old adage, “penny-wise, pound-foolish.” It’s the idea that you are trying to cut corners now to save (money, time, etc), but that those cut corners will actually end up costing you more in the long run.
The easiest way to be “penny-wise, pound-foolish” is to hire an SEO company or professional who is only going to charge you $50 for a month’s link building activities. $50? What a great deal, especially if they promise that this includes blog commenting, content marketing, blog writing, press release distribution and directory submission. Let me be the first to tell you that doing all of that can take 20, 30, 40, even 50+ hours when done right. If someone is only getting paid $50, chances are you aren’t going to be getting their best work. They might be employing black hat SEO techniques or outsource their projects overseas. Both of these scenarios are going to cause problems down the road for you and your website.
It’s always better to pay for quality work now that is going to positively affect your site long into the future. What SEO efforts you do now can still impact the ranking of site your site a year down the road, even longer if you’ve been red flagged by a search engine. If you went the penny-wise route and got low-quality work (which, let’s be honest, is what you should have expected to get considering how little you were willing to invest), you’ll just end up having to pay a second SEO company to fix the penalties brought on by the first one. You’re back to SEO square one.
11 Responses to “Don’t Be SEO Penny Wise, Pound Foolish”
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Totally agree with this post! If I had $1 for ever time I’ve seen this, we could both retire to Fiji tomorrow. Recently, I made a proposal to a large automotive group. They were “commited” to search engine marketing and the “seo’s” and “the facebooks” and “twitters”. I didn’t get the account. A “competitor” offered “everything” we offered for $599 a month (total) for 13 dealerships.
All but two of their websites are black listed or sand boxed, and they can’t figure out why their Internet sales have dropped 79% over the past 5 months. Word on the street is that they are defaulting on their floor plan financing, and going out of business. Hope those few bucks they saved, in the big scheme of things, was worth it.
At the end of the day, the investment in quality always trumps the pain of lowest price short term exuberance turned SOUR!
Hi Tiny,
Thanks for reading and sharing your story!
Take Care,
Nick
Most of the time when I’m talking with clients that want everything completed for a couple hundred bucks or something ridiculous like $50, I invite them to use the other person. If they truly believe at that time that they can get great service and results for that small amount of money, no amount of persuasion is going to get them to come to me.
We’re expensive and I tell people that.
Thanks for stopping by Jared and for your comment!
Its not about the cost, its about the outcome and you do truly pay for what you get!
Take Care,
Nick
I agree with Jared. If you have a client who is cost led, best to let him try the cheapo service – he’s going to anyway whatever you argue
Nick – feel like you are reading my mail. I have been in month long negotations with a big group evaluating SEO vendors for a group of 225 websites that they manage (all in separate markets)
We came in as one of the most expensive vendors but our proposal was vastly different in that it focused on content marketing and true link building activities.
We gave a little on their pricing, helped change their perception of value and to their credit they stayed open minded enough to make budget a secondary priority. We won the opportunity.
Word of advice to fellow vendors – don’t price match, stay true to yourself and seek to educate – it will pay off in the long run.
Hi Nick.
While I agree with what you say, it is also true that paying a hefty fee does not guarantee good work. The SEO/social marketing firm I hired was paid $12,500 total for 6 months work yet they messed everything up, including “losing” my site with no back-up! I’m still paying for that 3 years later.
My problem was that I did not know how to check up on what they were really doing, plus I trusted them so did not really think it was necessary. Dang, I got screwed.
Great article. Totally agree with this article. I am the Web Content Manager / SEO Specialist for Houston based Renegade Advertising and I can tell you we have clients who want quick fixes for cheap and we always tell them that good SEO takes time and a lot of effort. Sometimes they agree with us, others they don’t but those who don’t always come back, some months later, to engage our services. You get what you pay for…Thanks again for a good article.
I 100% Agree with you Nick that clients get what they pay for. However you said that “they might outsource their projects overseas” … (which is) going to cause problems down the road for your website”
I assumed that most professional SEO companies do outsource manual tasks (or use software) to do grunt link building work like Social bookmarking, local directory submissions. I was a bit surprised for you generalize outsourcing as bad and comparing it with blackhat tactics…
IMHO its not the outsourcing that’s the problem; its the quality of and training provided to the outsourced company – are they quality linkbuilders using a whitehat process?
You are right though in the end, if its only $50, then its probably being outsourced to a cheap overseas team which either uses blackhat tactics that can get you banned or is not effective.
My question for you is: Honestly do you outsource any of your manual SEO or link building tasks and if you do, how do you ensure quality for your clients?
Thanks Nigel for reading and sharing your thoughts!
Bottom line is, we do not outsource any SEO related tasks as we have the in house staff to handle it…sometimes we need to hire a specialist that might need to work on a certain US based CMS or graphic designer, etc. For those situations I hire them based on their resume and overall references and of course their work…
Take Care,
Nick
A friend did this exact thing just a month ago because he was lured by the cheap cost. Interested, I checked the site and noticed the meta tags were completely changed and alerted my friend that this could cause him to lose precious rank. It’s amazing how almost anyone can call themselves an SEO expert yet not know something as basic as meta tags. My friend is now investigating getting out of the relationship.