It’s common in our business to hear people say, “we’ve found a cheaper SEO company” or “such and such company will do it for half of what you charge.” When people say this to us, we don’t fight them on it, we just educate them.
The first question we have to ask is, “Will they actually do it for cheaper?” Lets’s look and compare some other, more common things you may be more familiar with:
Are you more impressed with the Quality of a Dodge or a BMW?
How is your food at Applebee’s compared to a Morton’s Steakhouse?
How is the Community College Education viewed compared to one at Stanford or Harvard or MIT?
What’s the difference between a Rolex and a Timex?
Would your wife rather have jewelry from the Mall or Tiffany’s?
How did your minimum wage employee work out vs. your $50k per year guy?
What kind of gas are you going to put in your prized 1970’s collector muscle car?
How did your cheap Chinese furniture hold up against that expensive American made Amish Furniture?
Will your wife be more happy with shopping at Walmart? or Nordstrom’s?
How will your girlfriend appreciate the date at TGI Friday’s as opposed to one at a Zagat-rated non-chain restaurant?
Were you more happy with Apple’s Customer Service (in America) or Microsoft’s Customer Service (In India)?
Exactly. All of the higher quality things we’re talking about are more expensive. So why would you think that SEO & Marketing is any different? Pay special attention to the result of using each thing mentioned above, what is the result? Cheap = disappointment.
As a business owner, I never go on the cheap, especially on anything having to do with growing my company and marketing. Why? Because in my experience whatever I got “on the cheap”, never achieved my expectations. Then, I would have to pay more money (after spending money already) to hire another company (wasted time and schedule setbacks). I need things to work, not be cheap, which brings me to the actual point of my article:
What is the actual cost of discount and cheap SEO services?
This is hard to answer, but easy to analyze for yourself. Ask yourselves these questions:
How much in lost revenues do you have from having an ineffective company doing your SEO?
How much lost time does your company have in expansion due to bouncing from one cheap company to the next only to get subpar, or no results?
How much does it cost to hire three ineffective companies who don’t help you realize any more revenues, than to just hire one good one?
How much is your time worth?
How much is your satisfaction worth?
How much is your stress due to ineffective marketing worth?
How much is it worth to work with honest people, not people who just want to sell you?
This is a serious weak point of most novice business owners: They don’t look at what is not there to look at. And that happens to be the dollar lost that they didn’t make in the first place. They focus on saving, as it is there to be seen, unlike the unmade dollar. Ask your most experienced business owner friend and they’ll tell you the same thing. Let me give you an example:
I had a client who was making a lot of money from our SEO services, they left to go with a discount SEO company stating that we were half the price and would do “the same thing”. This client’s ROI was about 10x their spend with us – a very respectable return. They ended up going through two companies that year and then came back to us. When they came back, their online income, which was over $20k per month, had dropped to nothing. They had “saved” about $2700.00 that year by going with this other, cheaper SEO company. They lost approximately $200k by saving $2700.00. This happens way too often, hence why we educate our customers on it.
This is why, at some point in the future, our clients come back to us. They go to the greener (cheaper) grasses, find out they are actually brown grasses, come back, we fix everything and get them back on track again.
Sometimes the most expensive dollar you’ll spend is the one you’re trying to save.
Sincerely,
Dan York
Founder, The SEO Surgeons