Similar to many other industries where the simple rule applies that you get what you pay for. Not only will you see complete transparency on work, this is designed to last for a long time, unfortunately this can take slightly longer to see results.
It’s like building a house with low quality materials, sure it looks good on the outside but who knows how long it will last – just do it right the first time.
Over the last 10+ years there have been a lot of blackhat SEOs who would manipulate Google’s Algorithms into boosting rank for a short period of time then quite often resulting in a severe penalty on the website. Unfortunately, they would be paid for increasing the traffic and would have vanished by the time Google has punished the website – with zero accountability to the SEO.
At Sapling we pay close attention to all changes Google makes to their algorithms and guidelines. We are very aware of what is right and wrong in Google’s eyes.
If you receive a pitch with points like the ones listed below, we recommend avoiding the SEO:
- Guaranteeing first page rankings
- Contacting with non-business email addresses (then claiming once you reply they will contact on a corporate id)
- Offering directory submissions (this is against Google’s Quality Guidelines)
- Offering blog/article submissions (this is generally spamming low quality sites for backlinks)
You may feel that the low cost means you have nothing to lose and it’s worth trying to improve your SEO, however, Google will not be so forgiving with these types of techniques used to manipulate their algorithms into rewarding you.
For example; your cheap SEO may flood multiple directories and websites with followed backlinks using rich anchor text to one of your pages – resulting in a boost in ranking. Google may crawl these new links and see they are of no value to users and unnaturally gained, the Penguin algorithm may then penalise you and severely decrease your traffic. Your only option now is to find these links, remove them or Disavow the domains they come from.
