Your Guide to Affordable SEO Packages

by Alison Weir-Smith, 11 Jun 2018

Every so often we get an email in our inbox telling us that our website has come under scrutiny and that the sender found that it just doesn’t rank for anything related to your industry. Believe it or not, the sender has the solution! Affordable SEO packages! Or do they?

It is too easy to fall into the traps set by these spammers if you do not know what to look out for. The affordable SEO packages are often either totally useless or very dangerous to your website.

The totally useless category

These affordable SEO packages will generally be a couple of hundred dollars once off or, at most, over a period of a few short months. If you ask for a list of the things that they will do for your website, you will likely see the following items:

  • Keyword research
  • Meta tag creation
  • Search engine submission
  • Content editing

And that will be about it.

They then send you reports showing that your site is ranking better than it was for a selection of keywords that they ostensibly targeted. They will create some kind of custom Analytics report that shows your traffic and bounce rate and the queries that your site ranks for.

What they don’t tell you is that what they have done is pretty much nothing.

Search engines will find your website all on their own. Search engine submission is actually a totally useless activity. Who cares if ten thousand small search engines know about your website. It is the big engines that count – Google, Yahoo and the like.

Yes, meta tags are important. But editing them to include your keywords does not do very much for your ranking on its own. All that really does is tailor the first impression potential visitors get of your site and its content. If you don’t actually check those edits you may end up with really bad spelling and grammar errors in the search results. Not the kind of first impression I would want to make.

The keyword research is a potentially valid activity. You do need to know what your audience is actually searching for if you want to get traffic. What they don’t tell you is that they will use the research you have paid for to look for the lowest competition keywords that they can possibly find so that they can show you how well they did in getting you to rank for something super relevant to your industry.

The thing is – these one-off tactics will never get your website to the top of the search results for the searches that really matter. They are not extensive enough.

The really dangerous

If you have fallen prey to some of these affordable SEO packages and seen no results – be thankful. You have not run across one of the dangerous kinds of packages. The kind that will get your website deindexed, never to see the light of day again.

The key item to look for in these packages is the term “link building”. The thing is, link building is strictly against Google’s guidelines for SEO. If you are caught – and with the cheap techniques used by these affordable SEO packages you will be – Google will deindex your website and not allow you to rank for anything ever again.

So, what should you be looking for in affordable SEO packages?

You should be signing up for a long term package – not just a couple of months. It should extend for at least a year. This is because it takes time to establish the relevance and authority that Google uses to rank your website.

You should see content creation, not just content editing. An active site is a happy site, at least in Google’s books. You need to be continually adding content to your website. The content should be original and relevant to the topics that you want to rank for.

You should see intra site linking, not inter site linking. The service provider should be taking a look at your content and mapping references to your main topics to the pages for those topics so that Google can easily see exactly which pages on your site are the most relevant for any given topic or section of keywords.

You should also see keyword research and meta tag editing, but the keywords that are recommended should be both relevant and in demand. The meta tags should be edited so that they present an enticing sales pitch to the potential client. Even affordable SEO packages should adhere to Google’s guidelines and should actually accomplish something. They should be just as good as more expensive packages, they will just tend to take a bit longer to take effect as you cannot do the same amount of work for a smaller budget.