Blog

Every SEO client I’ve ever worked with has a budget that is, at some point, limited. This SEO budget generally falls somewhere between $50 and $50,000 per month. Whether your budget is $250 or $5000 you are looking for the best marketing value for your money and the most results per dollar spent. (View our own SEO pricing here.)

Hiring a Cheap SEO Agency

Almost every SEO agency would love serving more clients and be doing more work. While it’s a busy lifestyle, it’s one we love. Good marketing agencies want to provide substantial value to their clients and that value is limited by budget. (If you want to see how agencies may think about this topic, see Selling Cheap SEO Services.)

Consider this from a paid ads perspective. Your ROI may be $3 for every $1 you spend or it may be $10 for every $1 you spend. Either way, you need to be spending. The guaranteed return on $0 ad spend is $0.

SEO does not have a fixed cost per click or lead but there are expenses involved – most importantly time and content creation. The more resources we have to work with the more content and time we have. Thus, bigger SEO budgets do typically translate into bigger results.

When you hire a cheap SEO agency you are sacrificing some of that budget. You are sacrificing time and content yet you most likely expect the same results. Those conflicting desires – to pay little and get a lot – often lead to agencies cutting corners with the intention of helping your business grow but the side effect of creating problems such as penalties from Google, potentially significant rankings drops and incomplete marketing strategies.

Finding an Affordable SEO Company

So you have a small marketing budget and you want to get the most out of it by hiring the most affordable SEO agency in Australia. What should you be looking for?

• Set Realistic Goals – Understand what you’re working with and live within the limits. It’s possible to grow your business from the ground up by having a small budget at first and growing those available resources as you get more money coming in. Don’t forget to increase your budget as your situation allows.

• Stay Within Scope – Once your SEO agency has created a strategy that utilises your budget effectively, try not to waste those precious resources by exceeding the scope of the project. If you are granted 2 support calls a month, the sixth one is costing you those valuable resources. Your team may not tell you that explicitly but every call has a cost to the agency.

• Don’t Hire Until You Can Afford It – I’ve seen SEO packages for $99 per month and $149 per month. There is nearly no way to make money on a proper SEO campaign for $99 per month. If there was, we’d offer it. We are happy to run local campaigns with a narrow focus and extremely specific deliverables but a full campaign with site audits, content, link building/outreach, and all the proper campaign management simply can’t be had for $99. Don’t get caught in the trap of buying into the dream and losing your money.

Conclusion

We would obviously love your business to choose Stack Digital as your marketing agency. However, we’re aware that we’re not right for every business and every budget. We are not looking for any work under $350/mo and only that in rare circumstances. We will happily try to meet your budget and get you results but in the event we can’t do it, please keep these tips in mind.