In Need Of An Affordable SEO Agency?
Finding an affordable SEO agency is important, especially for small business owners, as having your content found by the right audience is crucial to long-term success! It's also important to find a reliable agency as you don't have much money starting from the bottom, so your budget will be tighter.
SEO (search engine optimization) works as a multi-faced set of strategies that help to increase visibility through organic research alongside building rapport as your website’s content will be in the first few pages as 75% of people don’t look beyond the first page by sometimes changing web design, page content and off-page approaches, therefore ideally ranking in the first to get better odds of people discovering you.
It’s difficult nowadays because of the mixture of low-quality, high-quality, and in-betweens that are advertised online without filters for newbies to look through!
Why hire an SEO agency and not “do-it-yourself”?
It's understandable why you would prefer to do it yourself as you'd save money and will avoid possible scams and bad outcomes like possibly losing ranking after splitting from an SEO service provider or being refused vital parts of your site.
But it’s beneficial to hire a company for your SEO-related concerns because they’re specialized in such and can focus on updating your content regularly as it’s a dynamic industry to ensure your website is accurate and ensures quality so it’ll be seen in the searches alongside being able to decipher the data they collect like demographics, successful calls-to-actions and highly visited pages to implement ways of optimizing your content strategy.
Hassle of doing SEO yourself
It’s not an overnight pursuit as it requires dedication that can span over the course of months. And that dedication of increasing traffic to your site could be growing existing and future customers to your site instead of having an add-on burden on keeping up with regularly changing features of SEO like maintaining an updated site.
Thinking about how the difference between SERP, PageRank and page ranking can be mind-boggling for some! This is partially why it’s recommended that you go with an agency for all of the reasons listed above but you can improve your SEO by also asking and responding to customer reviews alongside making sure your “contact us” page has a detailed NAP (name, address and phone number) on your website assures viewers your site is real because of the accurate information.
Affordable SEO services for small businesses
On-page SEO
Refers to the elements that are on your website and it's a practice of optimizing the title tags (i.e. title tags with questions get more clicks), heading tags, link building through external and internal alongside relevant, high-quality content throughout the webpage in order to improve the search engine rankings and gain organic traffic because it’s relevance.
Off-page SEO
Is about optimizing everything that’s not on your website through means like strategizing link building, social media, content marketing, guest posting, gaining reviews and more. The goal is to build authority with your website. One way to accomplish this would be reaching out to influencers or people with higher authority with relevance to your niche to reference your brand to help build more credibility.
Technical SEO
Is about making sure search engines access, crawl, interpret, render and index your website without any problems.
The main goal of technical SEO is to optimize the infrastructure of a website to be found more through organic search as Google gives preferential treatment to features that technical SEO like SSL (secure socket layer) which is an encryption-based security protocol identified through “https://” that’s aimed at protecting data sharing like passwords, usernames and more for customer purchases because people like to know that their information is secure.
Another aspect of technical SEO is solidifying usefulness by managing site functionality in regards to things like mobile usability (e.g. smartphones and tablets) to ensure proper playback and display as Google measures how fast it loads and ranks you accordingly.
Having proper mobile use and design is important as people spend hours on these devices daily and 44% of people in a study said that they would second-guess using a website because of poor mobile design.
Local SEO
Focuses on optimizing your website so you can be visible to customers in a certain location. This is optimal for small businesses as they rely on their products and services being found to profit. Local SEO can be implemented by engaging in a mixture of off-page SEO and technical SEO like engaging social media, ensuring good mobile usage and more. One way of engaging in Local SEO would be having your Google business information updated alongside embedding google maps on your website for customer ease of use.
eCommerce SEO
Is a type of SEO that focuses on attracting potential customers as this focuses on sales that would benefit from emphasis on organic SEO and off-page SEO. Combining these services are important for eCommerce websites because 53% of shoppers almost always do research before purchasing and the most popular channels to reach buyers would be: website (74%), email (43%), social media (38%) and retailer’s mobile apps (36%).
How to vet SEO agencies: good and bad qualities to look for
Searching for a cheap SEO service should be avoided as that might as well be their learning curve, therefore they’re not going to produce the best as they wouldn’t have the incentive to do their best when there’s a little external incentive like money.
Qualities of a good “Affordable SEO Agency”
1. They have good communication.
If they respond to your means of communication (e.g. call, email, etc) promptly with sufficient answers. If they’re very much a step ahead, they might want you to start a plan regarding the extent of contacting you and with what updates alongside your role is in the project and your right to resources like objectives, duties, and deadlines are.
2. They have in-house workers.
This ensures that they aren’t exploiting the labor of people in different countries alongside the fact that they keep your information confidential easier as it’ll be between the group of people working on it.
3. They have a diverse range of customers that they’ve helped.
This ensures that they care about user experience not only through producing quality work, but they have enough skills to cater to your visions and goals for your website. A bonus would be if they include revenue testimonies.
4. They use white hat strategies.
Google is a tech company that has nearly 87% of the search market as there are 3.5 billion searches on it daily. Because of this, they’re adamant about detecting spam or irrelevant websites to ensure customer satisfaction. It’s important that their SEO strategies are not only following rules but are ethical as some just care about giving a high-ranking that wouldn’t necessarily appeal for the short term goal of selling you the success of quick financial gain with fluff, spam, hidden text, spamming and or irrelevant or broken backlinks in order to rank higher in searches that will be bad for you in the long term as it damages credibility and can get your website penalized and remove from search results. You should ask them about their strategies if they confirm they’re white-hat approved and if they use Spam or PBNs.
Qualities of a bad “Affordable SEO Agency”
Be wary they have poor or inconsistent communication
Good communication is essential for agencies as they'll be dealing with your brand success and statistics like algorithm updates, sharp sparks or drops for organic traffic and overall updates regarding your success. If they aren't able to consistently talk with you for a significant amount of time, like a few hours a week, regarding these things, it could mean that they have poor internet management because of bad scheduling practices like having an overflow of clients to keep up with because they aimed to maximize profits.
Be wary if they outsource
This is important to think about because the quality control from places may not be as regulated in the qualifications or experience that they have.
Be wary if an agency promises quick success
It can take months to half a year to achieve results as it depends on factors like the age of your site, the authority it has, if your website has any upstanding penalties and if you want short-term success at the cost of sustainability and rule-following.
It’s also impossible to guarantee success as Google changes their algorithm daily and they protect it as the majority of the revenue’s success comes from the search engine. For example, Google made a revenue of $17.3 billion within the first 3 months of 2015. Guaranteeing quick success is a red flag for these reasons alongside the fact that even ranking can take as Ahrefs’ 2017 study showed that “almost 95% of newly published pages don’t get to the Top10 within a year”.
Be wary if they don’t specialize in SEO
Many brands are adding SEO as a thing they do instead of specializing in to generate more revenue, but it’s better to stick with the experts as you might not get a quality job since they don’t know all the ins-and-outs like a lot of web design sites and web designers having their focus on SEO. This is best avoided as the specialists have experience with strategies that work and don’t work so they can quickly and effectively assess how to make you successful.
Be wary if they have flat-rate pricing
Flat-race pricing is generally frowned upon as there are nuances in needs and wants for every business like the website's competition, age, goals and things they want to be modified so the proposal price should be flexible in order to fit with what your business’ needs are but some are still well-reputable and have fixed prices.
Be wary if they offer affordable packages consistently
According to CognitiveSeo, you should be wary if an SEO agency “offers affordable SEO packages on a monthly basis” as it could be a “good indication that they’re automating everything”. This is bad because that can lead to patterns that make search engines like Google be suspicious and could lead to a possible suspension and suppression of your site.
Be wary if they give excess in quantitative data over quality
It’s good to know lots of information about what’s going on with your website. The campaign analysis should contain what has been done every month and your current standing in regards to the organic traffic, sales, conversions and similar to the website. You should also be wary if they don’t tell you or give you vague answers about the SEO campaign results and how they improve, the current obstacles and how often they’ll send it out.
Tips for deciding what you want
The first part in choosing the best agency has to do with what you need to be done to get your needs met. Do you want the entire website re-done, a new website or just SEO done? How often would you like to talk? What’s your budget? What would you like to specifically improve? These are good things to look out for and talk about in a consultation.
Things not to disclose to the agency
“I have worked with many SEO companies before”. You might mention this because you want to build rapport and experience in such. But they might think, “Do you have to keep searching for more because you’re unreliable? Or is it because you’re a difficult customer to work with?”
That you don’t know much about the work. This gives the advantage of not being held accountable because you don’t know what to look out for. So avoiding putting yourself in this information hierarchy is the best.
Questions to ask the potential agency
What is your experience in our industry?
It’s important to know that the agency you’re interested in has experience with writing in your industry. That way your success won’t be on a trial-or-not basis alongside the quicker success rate as they would have tried tactics for your specific area.
Do you work with any of our competitors?
Having a conflict of interest can lead to inconsistent growth as your competitor may have more money to invest to outrun you.
What happens after I terminate the contract?
This is important to know and ask about what will happen after you may end the contract, like ownership of work, because you might have to end the business relationship due to suggested allocation of new funds, tight budget and more. The last thing you’d want is for the links that were built to be on their site and have them either refuse to give it back or coerce you by paying more. Some contracts have planned termination and require a fee for cancelling sooner. Lastly, keep in mind that SEO companies have website ownership clauses in their contracts. Terminating early may cause you to forfeit any built websites as a consequence.
What locations do you provide SEO Services?
WHR Marketing provide Worldwide SEO Services including the US, UK, Australia and Canada.
For example, in the UK we provide SEO Services in:
WHR Marketing – A truly Affordable SEO Agency
If you want a business that’s dedicated towards quality optimization, look no further than WHR Marketing. They’re an online digital marketing agency founded in 2018 in London with a tight-knight group of 2-9 employees. They are focused on helping the online growth of entrepreneurs and businesses of all sizes.
A successful statistic they’ve received coming from an anonymous client regarding their work is the following: “WHR Marketing increased one of our client's local business profits by an average of $1,245 per month just 4 months after using our Local SEO Services.” For beginner local SEO users, WHR Marketing’s Local SEO packages offer necessary services for small businesses that include services like on-page content optimization, website audit, link building, GMB (Google My Business), web content editing and rewriting and more start at $749 and go until $1,999 monthly!
All the tiers for the local SEO packages offer the same deal with the exception of the guaranteed hours of work. They also have great SEO packages to improve your organic rankings and traffic.