SEO is a long-term commitment. It takes time and patience to see results, but the effort you put in now will pay off exponentially. You might think hiring an SEO company or freelancer on Upwork is as good as it gets for your business because they promise quick turnaround times with affordable packages. Still, it would be best if you were wary of these services.
Low-cost SEO services cannot often deliver quality work due to their overwhelming number of clients and inability to dedicate sufficient time to optimise your site effectively. Instead, they resort to general tasks such as keyword stuffing, which fail to produce long-term results.
As a business owner, your ultimate goal is to improve your brand’s visibility and increase profits.
However, there are certain things, like increasing competition or consumer reaction to a new product, that you can’t control. But with SEO, you can exercise tremendous control over your page’s rankings. This can help attract visitors and generate higher online sales for your site.
Numerous companies provide affordable SEO packages that promise to enhance the visibility of your webpage. However, it’s crucial to assess the reliability of these claims. While a cheap SEO service may appear enticing, it rarely fulfils its promises.
Here, we will look at the value of search engine optimisation in the modern online world, how you can efficiently budget for it, and why you should avoid cheap SEO services.
So, let’s delve right into it!
What Is SEO?
Before moving on to anything else, we think it is only suitable to define what SEO entails.
SEO or search engine optimisation is how you get search engines (such as Google) to determine which sites are displayed to the user for each query they enter into the search engine. Thus, it shows the top results per user query and helps improve rankings for individual sites.
Undoubtedly, SEO involves numerous intricacies that we assume you are familiar with. However, it’s important to note that manipulating search results and achieving top rankings becomes relatively straightforward. Websites with numerous pages and links can easily reach the top, even with low-quality or software-generated content. In the next section, we will delve into why this approach is detrimental.
Want to receive updates? Sign up to our newsletter
Each time a new blog is posted, you’ll receive a notification, it’s really that simple.
Is SEO Worth It In 2025?
While SEO has been recognised as an effective digital marketing strategy, paid marketing campaigns have gained considerable prominence in recent years and are considered an alternative due to their ability to yield faster results. Consequently, businesses often question the value of investing in SEO. Our answer is unequivocal: SEO remains an essential investment for long-term success.
Around 50% of marketers believe SEO is the most effective strategy to achieve prominence in the digital world.
Low-quality content and lousy SEO techniques that could have resulted in high rankings on Google’s SERPs have become outdated. Still, the concept of SEO itself remains as potent as ever. Thus, cheap SEO services will no longer amplify your content. Besides, even though paid ads are effective, organic traffic is still a long-term way of ensuring site visibility.
The answer is undoubtedly yes to the core question of whether SEO is worth it in 2025. This approach allows businesses to achieve top rankings and drive organic traffic to their websites. However, it is imperative to avoid outdated and ineffective techniques and develop a robust SEO strategy to enhance your brand’s rankings on search engine results pages (SERPs).
To optimise your website effectively, it’s essential to replace keyword stuffing with high-quality content, obtain natural backlinks, and dedicate ample time to developing your website, mainly focusing on technical SEO services. Implementing these advanced practices will enhance your site’s usability and result in higher rankings on Google.
Is SEO Necessary?
Although digital marketing strategies have expanded to encompass pay-per-click and social media advertising, SEO remains indispensable for attracting organic website traffic. If you are a small business owner contemplating the necessity of SEO, the answer is a resounding yes.
Savvy searchers view SEO as an authentic source to determine a site’s credibility. In fact, as per a survey, SEO generates more traffic, and over 62% of desktop searchers click on organic websites over paid links, which creates merely 2.8%. We’ll get straight to the point without boring you with more figures.
SEO is necessary for your business because it will be nearly impossible for users to discover your site or brand. Besides, it keeps the results fair by ensuring the content that ranks high does so because of a successful marketing campaign and not due to black hat practices that a cheap SEO service adopts.
It reduces the chances of manipulation by forcing websites to meet specific criteria to rank higher and appeal to visitors.
Don’t forget SEO is one of the most cost-effective marketing solutions. Investing in SEO may seem risky, but it can snowball over time and drive traffic to your website if you adopt suitable marketing strategies. Unlike a pay-per-click campaign, it doesn’t need repeated funding.
How Much Should I Budget For SEO?
Regarding SEO, a simple rule applies: you get what you pay for. However, it’s crucial to recognise that SEO is just one comprehensive digital marketing strategy component. Additional factors such as PPC ads, email campaigns, and social media posts also impact your business’s growth and online visibility.
Most agencies will also encourage small businesses to run Google Ads as part of their online marketing efforts; Google Ads provide a great way to subsidise the expense of quality search engine optimisations.
There is no fixed answer to this; several factors determine SEO pricing. That said, it largely depends on your goals and website size. If you want to earn more clicks on your website and broaden its reach, be prepared to shell out a sizeable amount. As a rule of thumb, you can allocate a significant chunk of your digital marketing budget to SEO.
Why Is SEO So Expensive?
The adage’ experience is expensive’ aptly portrays the high cost of quality SEO. Reputable SEO companies employ professionals with extensive knowledge and expertise, ensuring their services come at a premium. However, this investment guarantees top-notch workmanship and uncompromising quality.
In addition, the provider understands the intricacies involved in SEO planning and designs a comprehensive and tailored strategy after evaluating your business and website. They will never offer their services as SEO packages because they understand that the time and labour involved in optimisation vary for different companies and cannot be sold as a package deal.
Ultimately, you get what you pay for — so pull up your socks and be ready for a substantial investment if you want to boost the online presence of your small business.
Reasons To Avoid Cheap SEO Packages
Below are a few reasons why you should steer away from cheap SEO packages:
1. Will Not Deliver Quality Content
Quality content and link building are critical components of a successful SEO campaign. If you avail of cheap SEO services, the agency will use software to spin out substandard content instead of putting in the required time and effort to deliver valuable and well-structured content for your website.
As a result, your brand image is adversely impacted, and the value of your website significantly lowers in the eyes of potential clients.
The same goes for link building. The absence of quality links from your website will likely result in low search traffic. SEO companies can adopt different ways of building top-tier backlinks. However, a cheap SEO agency randomly places low-quality links on your website; in such cases, link-building becomes counterproductive.
Hence, even though good content and reliable links cost more, they save your site from Google penalties and help your website attract a larger audience.
Content needs to be high quality and follow a structured plan to have relevant content to your business’s needs, comprising keyword research and keyword placement within the content and ensuring it’s readable. Low-cost copywriting is often sent overseas and does not meet the quality guidelines set out by significant search engines.
2. Focus On the Cookie-Cutter SEO Campaign
Cheap SEO companies operate on a one-size-fits-all policy. The provider does not care about customising the SEO campaigns as per the requirements and goals of your business or industry.
The key focus of a cheap SEO company is not to build long-term relationships or render top-quality services. Their sole purpose is to get more clients on board with their affordable SEO packages, and they place little value on adopting tailored strategies that can boost your business.
3. Will Adopt Short-Term SEO Strategies
A simple fact: good-quality SEO will always take time to produce the desired results. The focus is on developing long-term strategies worth the investment and guaranteeing a high ranking on Google. So, it is highly likely that you will not experience the benefits of hiring good-quality SEO agencies right away.
Agencies offering affordable SEO services use black hat practices and other short-term promotional plans that can generate high traffic but eventually plummet. Although grey and black hat techniques such as cloaking, keyword stuffing, and duplicate content can create temporary buzz, they will likely result in Google penalties.
Once penalised, it will be difficult for your site to recover even if you opt for sustainable SEO practices in the future.
Verdict: Avoid Cheap SEO Services To Build Online Presence
We understand how tempting affordable SEO is, especially if you have a low budget, but it doesn’t justify compromising your site’s ranking potential and online presence.
Cheap SEO providers pay little attention to link-building, technical SEO, and content development. They use short-term practices that draw clients with their low price points. By hiring a cheap service for your site optimisation, you are not merely throwing away money but also causing collateral damage. Bad SEO practices are liable for a penalty and will severely affect your online presence.
So, always hire a reliable SEO provider to ensure consistent traffic and a high conversion rate!
SEO is an investment, not a purchase. You might think hiring an SEO company or freelancer on Upwork is as good as it gets for your business because they promise quick turnaround times with affordable packages. Still, it would be best if you were wary of these services.
They may offer short-term gains in traffic and conversions (which are attractive at first), but the long-term effects can lead to more harm than good if their strategies aren’t aligned with what Google wants.
If you want true ROI from your Brisbane Google Ads efforts, don’t just hire anyone — hire us! We guarantee high engagement rates and conversion optimisation, so you get results now AND later when we execute our proven strategy for boosting organic.
Danny Mahoney
As the accomplished head of web design at sitecentre®, Danny boasts an impressive career of 20+ years in web design and digital marketing. He employs a highly effective approach, harnessing user-behaviour metrics to enhance UX/UI to fuel conversion rates. Danny’s unique skill set allows him to deliver award-winning websites to SMBs at an unrivalled pace while maintaining superior results. His unique skills and vast experience make Danny a powerhouse in the industry.
Find them on their website: sitecentre®.
