When it comes to growing or sustaining a business, one thing all smart business owners should know is the importance of ROI. Paying attention to the return on investment is imperative if you want to not only sustain your business, but watch it grow. If you spend money on something specifically to increase revenue and grow your business, and it does not, you shouldn't be spending money on it… It’s that simple. So if you are spending money on SEO (Search Engine Optimization) every month, and it’s not working, you need to reevaluate the expense.

At this point, if you are doing it in-house, you should be looking for a digital marketing agency to handle this for you. If you are already using an agency for your SEO and you are not seeing results, nor getting clear reports on your growth, you should be moving to a better agency. However, does finding a better agency have to mean going way over your marketing budget? Ultimately, this leads me to my point of this article, or the question at hand… can you get SEO on a budget, or simply put, is there such a thing as cheap SEO?

If you are looking to save money, and not spend it on SEO, my recommendation is for you to do it yourself. There are lots of tools, and websites that provide a plethora of information about SEO, including ours. In fact, we wrote the definition here, and most of our writings have been plagiarized for decades, as we can demonstrate by looking at historical web archives… But that’s another article. However, this information is freely available here and elsewhere to help you do SEO yourself. This probably leads you to another question, why would an SEO agency recommend you do SEO yourself?

I personally believe in doing what you can until the point you can’t. I’ll fix a plumbing issue, until it’s beyond my capabilities. I’ll try my hand at accounting until it’s time for a bookkeeper and accountant to get my finances in order. This leadership quality is all about my desire to learn and do as much as I can myself, while also recognizing my limitations and realizing when it’s time to call in the professionals. The problem is, unlike plumbing, which requires a specialized license, or accounting which requires an understanding of IRS forms, SEO has no licensing, and anyone can claim to know how to do it, but it doesn’t make it so.

SEO agencies tend to be broken up into 3 groups; large expensive agencies, small and mid-sized agencies, and individual SEO contractors. Any of these could be the solution you're looking for, with caveats. Large agencies have a price that matches there size. If you are expecting to rank at the top, you should expect to pay top dollar. Let’s say you have 5 business locations and you want to rank for each, as well as rank for your corporate website. If it costs $1000 per area to show up on top on online ads, would someone good at building organic rank really offer cheap SEO?

The answer is no, they would not. For most SEO companies, it’s about volume; that is, how many invoices they receive each month. For others, it’s about quality, and paying the project manager to handle the company, so their job is to push and get you good results, but this is going to cost you. For others, mid-sized agencies like ours, we are somewhere in the middle, offering great service at a good value. However, that doesn’t mean we are going to be cheap. We have had large companies call us and ask how much we could do for $250 per month. My response is pretty much “we can edit your online directory listings for that price” Some call us telling us they have had companies propose to them that they could do all their SEO, write blogs, add backlinks, etc. for that price. They are either lying, or don’t know what they are doing.

If someone knows what they are doing, they are going to charge accordingly. If we regularly see our clients reach the top of search engines, and I are spending 4-10 hours per week on these clients (16-40 hours per month), do you think our agency is going to be cheap? To be clear, we are far from expensive… but we are also not marketing cheap services. We have mom-and-pop pizza restaurants, and large manufacturers’ as clients, paying anywhere from the hundreds to the thousands, and we treat them all the same. Whether someone is paying $500 or $5000, they will get professionals who will work hard to grow their organic rank and build their SEO. The only difference is that the company paying more, will get more hours per month (10 months of work each month in the case of the example above).

So, our recommendation is that if you are looking for cheap SEO, do it yourself. Otherwise you get neither. Spending $250 to net nothing is not cheap at all, it’s a waste of money. Instead, invest in spending time learning SEO, and doing as much as you can. Once you do start doing better, you can give us a call to take over, so you can spend your time focused on other areas of your business.