Over time we continue to have people pass us a communication along the lines of “I got this SEO Report, what do you think?”

The image we used was to get your attention to a serious long term topic. We do not want you to view your marketing like a baby who can enticed with candy. We know that is not your intent, but many others realize how vulnerable you can be. Treat this seriously and know people are hoping you think for the cheap short term. We want you to think about the future and not be swayed otherwise.

The practice of SEO is one of the marketing topics that can be endless, some valid topics and some a waste of time and money. Some treat SEO as a pain while others treat it as passive topic to those who are obsessed with SEO being the answer to life itself. Bottom line, SEO is an important topic that must be balanced among the other important online marketing topics, but by no means should SEO be passively passed on to someone who is clueless about your industry or business.

Some people do not even know what the word means. It stands for Search Engine Optimization and is important for your online marketing. So let’s get one thing clear, no one will ever be perfect with their SEO. No one will never not have room for improvement. But the reality is, you do not need to put all your marketing dollars in one basket.

Marketing is important not just with SEO, but your overall execution for many topics from your website, images, videos, social and more. SEO has an important part in all these topics, but it is a subset of the marketing picture. SEO is not the entire picture.

When we talk about SEO improvement, we need to take a moment to understand the difference of the strategic SEO topics versus the quick and cheap SEO services.

We introduce this in further detail, while revealing the key reasons to avoid SEO packages that are marketed as being ‘cheap’ or ‘quick win.’

Never forget for one second that SEO is very important when it comes to enhancing your online marketing, so do not outsource it just because someone delivers you a fancy report pointing out a weakness. Regardless of your SEO weakness, if you are consistent with all other marketing objectives that you can still obtain high rankings against the competition.

Notice we included “competition” into our statement above. Your competition, especially in the construction and remodeling industries usually are weak at marketing too, and there is an advantage. Simply having a weakness fixed doesn’t automatically help you. Having your weaknesses fixed as they are compared to your competition is where we separate the adults from the children.

Run, Not Walk, from ‘Cheap’ or ‘Affordable’ SEO Packages

Most will not even deliver the basic content needed to support your branding, service and target locations. Unfortunately this is an area that takes the most time and money to make happen, so others will prey on you to save time and money in an area where you should spend time and money. Do not let someone convince you that Target Fresh Content is not important – since it is critical. Perhaps time consuming. Perhaps a little more than you wanted to spend. But it is the right thing to do over a period of time if you wish to master your marketing.

Target content needs to be well-structured and informative. Yes, creating target content requires some skill and effort, but that is what branding is all about. Without the necessary content, low quality SEO providers see you as prey similar to piranha watching the animals walk into the river. Why would anyone ever tell you “we visit your website quiet often and see room for improvement”?

We are taking a moment from this regularly scheduled program to make new readers aware that MyOnlineToolbox has won marketing awards in 2017, 2018 and 2019.  Not looking to brag, just showing how committed we are.  Anyhow, back on with SEO.

These low quality SEO folk simply want to charge you to enhance whatever report they sent to you, but at the end of the day they can damage your reputation among consumers when they create garbage content to represent your business.

Eventually the cheap SEO person will tell you something about Links and how they can get more to your site. That is like you purchasing friends to vouch for you. Last thing you want is for search engines to punish you for deceptive link building. Run from this topic.

How can a service offer a price when they really do not know about your business? Do you give estimates out without knowing the job? Do not get suckered into the word “ONLY”. We could not believe when people say to us things like “We have someone doing our SEO for ONLY $199 per month”. Last time we checked, that is $2,388 per year. To make matters worse, the SEO company didn’t even log in for almost a year. The owner was too busy to even check on the firm since it was only $199 per month.

Free is even worse than ONLY. We can not believe how many people tell us they were trying a FREE service. In today’s economy, why would anyone provide a service for FREE? Who has the time to work for FREE on one of the most important topics in Marketing. And why would you risk your long term objectives on anything FREE. Think about it. Enough said.

Anyone worth it will want your long term marketing interests at heart. These include factors such as how active you are with your Fresh Content for your website and other social environments. They will not be solely focused on just the words SEO. A reputable SEO providers will also want to understand the structure and focus of your business, industry type and locations, etc. They need some form of fact-finding before offering you anything. And they even should be willing to walk away if they may not be able to help you. Some SEO may help you build your ranking, some SEO will help you maintain a competitive edge while some other SEO may do nothing at all other than improving an ambiguous report.

Remember you will never have leverage on a cheap SEO company to be accountable. Watch how fast you will just have the service cancelled and listen to a dial tone when you complain. Cheap SEO companies are not looking for a long term relationship other than the monthly residual. They are a high volume business not looking to offer customer service. They want a simplistic business model that doesn’t allow the time to care about your ‘unique needs’. By the time you’ve become frustrated with their service and are ready to terminate, they have already found the next fresh-meat to chew on and will be super happy to say good bye to you.

So you lose money, but even worse, you lost time! If you receive a generic email from an SEO provider, the chances are that this message has been sent to countless others just looking for someone to take the bait.

Stay focused on the long term planning of using SEO to support your web pages, your images, your videos and all your social posts. It may take time to watch your rankings improve, but at least it will be quality improvements that are sustained for a long period of time. The search engines are not stupid. Search engines rank brands based on quality and continuity.

Look for reputable SEO providers who care about your company and view the relationship as a long term investment.

Want to really understand?  Then spend just a few hundred on either the MyOnlineToolbox Basic Marketing & SEO Class, or the Advanced Marketing & SEO Class.  For us it is not the money, but rather are you willing to give up 3 or 6 hrs (9 hrs combined) to clearly see all the issues relating to online marketing.  Keep in mind many never went to school for Marketing but it really is a Business 101 topic.  So take a moment and pause.  You will be amazed how much your life can change when you see these issues as clearly as others do.