When an SEO agency outsources their campaigns offshore, the agency will have very little control over the quality of work being performed.
What I can tell you is that to keep costs low, they will use article spinning programs to create poor quality plagiarised blog posts. Then they’ll point thousands of really low-quality links to your site and sit back with their fingers crossed hoping to God your website doesn’t get penalised.This tactic doesn’t work and frequently leads to Google penalties and ranking drops. How do I know this? Because it’s happened to more than half of my SEO clients.
These types of SEO services will usually set you back a couple of hundred dollars a month. They’re usually the $299 per month deals you see being spruiked all over Google Adwords with a “guarantee to rank your site!”.
Anyone guaranteeing rankings is really only promising to waste your money.
The way these guaranteed rankings work is that they will rank your site for a keyword that absolutely NO-ONE is searching for. When you go to question why your traffic isn’t increasing, they will attempt to pull the wool over your eyes and say “But you’re on page one for X amount of keywords.”
And as a result, their sites have suffered a massive amount of damage from these low-quality strategies.
Once the damage has been done, it can take months to attempt to undo the damage and get the site performing well again. I’ve had clients that have stopped these low-quality campaigns 6 months before coming to me, and yet 9-12 months into their new campaign they’re still getting hit with hundreds of low-quality links from business directories in Mumbai!
Some client’s sites have been damaged so severely they’ve had to rebuild their website, starting fresh with a new domain.
Low-cost campaigns have a one size fits all approach to them. To a large SEO agency, there is nothing unique about your business. Your business is the same as every other business engaging in their SEO services.
As part of their low-cost deal, you may get 3 blog posts and 1 backlink per month. Will this on par with your competitors, and is it what’s required to reach the first page? The answer? No, probably not.
When you charge $299 per month, you don’t have the budget to provide thorough competitor research. They can skip straight to their cookie-cutter plan. After all, they aren’t focused on client retention, they’re focused on client acquisition.
How can you outrank your competitors when you haven’t researched what your competitors are doing?
A ‘copy and paste plan’ of 3 blog posts and 1 backlink isn’t going to cut it if your competitors are building 15 backlinks and 10 blog posts a month to their already well-performing site.
It would be the old saying “you get what you pay for”. Make sure you find an SEO Consultant that provides quality work and genuinely cares about the success and performance of your business.
In the end, that $299 SEO deal that sounds too good to be true is often precisely that and can impact your sales, revenue and reputation, costing you big time in the long run.