In the online marketing world, everyone is eager to make money from their websites so it’s no surprise that mastering SEO is a much-desired skill. However, a small group of people would rather outsource it to someone else and while that’s not a wrong thing to do, you should never buy cheap SEO services. Let me tell you why.
Most of Them Aren’t Professionals
SEO is a valid industry and those who use it to build a career do so by getting themselves educated and learning from experiences. It’s a time-consuming process that makes their services more dignified and hence, their sometimes highly-priced fees.
However, every industry has a bad apple and the same goes for SEO. When there’s a profit to be made, some people will always take advantage and do it at the expense of others. And how they do that? They offer the desired service for a very low price that’s hard to resist.
They creep into the consumer’s mentality and try to manipulate from every possible angle. They operate behind the vague names and bogus companies because they know that their identities must not be seen in the light. Yet, they continue to thrive and they do so by targeting newcomers who don’t know any better.
Yes, people like you who just started a business website and eager to get traffic and maybe a small percentage who are just impatient and want overnight success. Their services come in different packages and are literally everywhere if you cared to look.
Where Can You Find Them
#1 Marketplaces (you go to them)
Despite the shady activities, it’s not uncommon to see them promoting on marketplaces. Why would they be allowed to do so in the first place? I don’t really know, but I am guessing that the lack of legislation could be one of them.
When I started my blog in 2014, one of the earliest places I went to search for graphic resources is Fiverr and that’s the first time I saw ‘them’. Under the SEO category, I would find a ton of services that claim to boost web traffic in the shortest amount of time. Even today, I still see them. They would provide a lot of testimonial for their work along with many boosted customer reviews.
Back then, I was interested but also guarded at the same time. Can you buy online traffic? Is it even legal? I asked the question and many advised against it.
The logic about using automated systems to manipulate traffic pattern which subsequently leads to a website’s downfall makes a lot of sense to me from the very beginning.
The more feedback I read online, the more I learned about the harsh reality of fake traffic and how it caused many websites to reach a point of no return. Many who use it, regretted and I certainly don’t want to share the same fate. But those who still crave for this type of fake SEO, they will continue to search for these activities.
Enter SEOClerks, an online marketplace that specifically caters to all things SEO. The number of sellers here outweighs Fiverr many folds and the services are more diverse. You can purchase comments, traffic, reviews, and even social media likes for as low as $1!
Over here, the identities – name, face, and origin – are more exposed so you will have a rough idea who the seller is. Most of these people claim to be freelancers, some have customer reviews and some don’t. However, when you read the sales pitch on their offer page, it’s very obvious that you will be very disappointed with the quality, even though the service may look legitimate.
For example, under the ‘Articles for Sale’ section, when I read some samples, a few things came across my mind. Is the article written by someone who’s an English native? Did it come from a spin writing machine or a bunch of PLR articles? Read the examples below and judge for yourself.
If you asked me, I would pass the offer. Even though English is my second language, I am pretty sure I could write better than that. As much as I support the freelance market, I just can’t see how this type of work can offer anything beneficial to SEO.
#2 Email Promotions (they come to you)
Since I don’t use those marketplaces, I thought I would have nothing to do with these services until recently, I started getting a stream of emails invading my inbox. They came through the contact page on my website, which means they are probably doing this manually.
Over the past month, I’ve received the following offers;
- Free traffic generation from real visitors.
- Link Building.
- Boost Alexa rankings
- Instagram followers (I don’t even have an Instagram account)
- Targeted traffic from the US and European countries (no thank you, most of my traffic derives organically from the US and the UK)
Honestly, I couldn’t care less and most of the time, I just delete them, but it’s quite annoying when they spam you this way. Out of curiosity, I clicked through a few links from the emails and discovered a whole new range of (underground) SEO services altogether.
These people are now creating their own sites to promote their stuff and the ‘cheap’ offers that you would see in the emails are just the dangling carrot. It seems like they are moving away from the marketplace setting to form team collaboration for more competitiveness. However, ‘raising the bar’ doesn’t change the fact that they are still doing it for all the wrong reasons.
Just to show you what’s going on, one service offered me these backlink packages and they are certainly far from cheap. The importance of backlinks has been diluted over the years because so many people abuse it so this type of service will not help at all.
Another one was trying to sell me hand-written articles (whatever that means) for this amount of prices without offering any samples.
And here’s another one – skyrocket my Facebook traffic from the US with a software. Wow, there are so many red flags in the advert!
The tactics they use to get your attention are shocking and invasive. I don’t know how many more emails I’ll be getting (or what I can do to stop them) and what sort of offers I’ll be seeing tomorrow.
But something tells me they aren’t going to stop and the only way I can protest is to write articles like this to educate more people. Using such services isn’t only a waste of time and money, but it will also compromise the presence and quality of any type of online business that you are trying to build and sustain.
Don’t Fall for Short Cuts
After reading all the emails, it makes me wonder. If they could find my website on the search engines and initiate contacts, chances are, I am already ranking for certain keywords in my niche. That means, my current understanding AND practice of SEO are working.
Hence, I don’t need to buy cheap (or expensive) SEO services to gain visibility. Yes, I do spend hours researching keywords to come up with original content and certainly don’t get any burst of traffic overnight. But that’s okay.
At least I know that I am serving humans instead of robots. At least I am not using any type of unlawful automated system to gain rankings and risk getting slapped by Google. In doing so, my site will only continue to thrive and gain all the positive effects of natural online engagement.
The bottom line is this – SEO isn’t some kind of rocket science. You can learn and master it on your own through good online training platforms like Wealthy Affiliate. If not, engage with professional services that can do the right job. Don’t be gluttonous and certainly don’t hope for success through shortcut methods.
I hope this article has been an educational piece for you. If you’ve anything to add to the subject matter, feel free to discuss it in the comment area below.
Hi Cathy,
I have seen these services several times on Fiverr. Sometimes, I’m tempted to try it and see how effective it really works. I did try some cheap traffic which cost ONLY $5. Apparently, the one offering the service, didn’t know I have a special plugin that keeps tracks of all my website traffic.
This plugin shows all the traffic I receive on my website in REAL time. It tells me when a bot visits my website and also let me know when I get a real human visitors. So this person from Fiverr started giving me the traffic and I asked where the visitors will be coming from. He said social network like Facebook, but then I realized, he was ONLY giving me bots traffic!
I took a shot of the traffic produced and showed it to him, and he was shocked because he didn’t know I have something that could detect bots traffic. Since then, I have advised myself against using any cheap traffic, whether they are from Fiverr or wherever.
This article will go a long way to save many people out there from buying such fake services.
Hi Cathy, thanks for this useful article. When I started online, I fell into this trap and used some rogues. As you can imagine, I got very little results. What I would add is if you are even thinking of using these services (which you shouldn’t ) pay using a service like PayPal. In my case, I was able to get my money back when I was not happy with the service. Honestly, the money is better spend on learning proper SEO from training platform like Wealthy Affiliate.
This was a very informative read. I receive tons of emails about driving “organic” traffic and like most others, I delete them as well. Mainly, as you pointed out, it’s expensive and with a little hard work, I can actually do better. It might take some time to research the keywords needed to drive consistent traffic, but it is a lot better than the fly-by-night traffic that does nothing for your business.
I agree that they offer the newbies an expensive short-cut and a more than valuable lesson once they realize that the acquired traffic is probably from a list of spammers.
You are right when you say some of these places have been around a long time and let me tell you, they can cause havoc to your earnings and I am a real testimonial of that.
Years back, I was making pretty decent money from my sites and one of the income streams was Adsense. Of course, I got greedy and wanted more traffic so I bought what I thought was something legit. Yeppers, my traffic went up and in about 3 days, I got an email from Adsense saying that my account was being closed for fraudulent traffic.
Fast forward a few years later and yes I am a lot smarter now. I was lucky enough to get another Adsense account. So at the end of the day, we do need to be careful as to what we do. The best traffic is organic that comes as a result of our hard work in writing content.
Hi Dale, thanks for sharing your experience with us. We can always learn from other people’s mistake.
Good read Cathy, thank you for sharing your knowledge on SEO. I have been online for sometime and when I started out 5-6 years ago, I was drawn to the allure of easy cheap traffic, but learned quickly that it was all garbage.
Slow and steady is the reality. I am sure that there are still many people falling into the fake SEO trap as the number of sellers, while they come and go, are still very plentiful on both SEO Clerks and Fiverr.
Just like you, I have been receiving messages saying that I can buy traffic for my website, but I was not convinced as I know that they can potentially be scams. As a newbie, it’s easy to fall for these traps so thanks for sharing this insightful article with us.
I have just recently created my website and I have only three blogs up. Your article is very insightful and now I know what I mustn’t do. I want my traffic to grow organically like yours did. Two of my posts just got indexed and since it’s only been a week, I’m going to keep posting contents regularly to build my authority and hopefully in the future, all the work would pay off.
This article is relevant to my current attempt to learn SEO, and comes at an excellent time. Thanks for the education and deep insights. It’s good to have a reference point when starting to dive into the subject. I’ve known for a while that people should not trust everything they see advertised, and your article showed me what specific clues to watch out for in order to make an informed judgement.
Whenever I see some advert with a title like ‘Buy Cheap SEO Services’ I automatically keep on moving. SEO for the most part is nothing you should have to pay for. If you follow best practices that are easily learned with a simple Google search and some time to learn how to address SEO as you create your content, that will suffice.
Of course there are those businesses that may have deep pockets and are in competitive markets where some of the finer points of SEO are important, but they likely would not go to a site like Fiverr or use a service that hits their inboxes. For the rest of us normal online marketers, not needed.
Not only is buying SEO services often a waste of time, it can cost some pretty good money too. That money can be used elsewhere in your business or for your family in my opinion. There are some plugins out there that will keep an eye on what you publish too that work pretty well.
These will point out improvements that you can make in the backend of the posts easily so the search engine bots can find the content and keywords that you determine you want to go after, and the changes recommended can be quickly implemented.
I totally agree with your assessment that the online marketer should not waste their time on buying cheap SEO services, not the expensive ones unless warranted in special situations. There is no need. This holds true for video content as well, by the way. YouTube product and tool vendors promise the world, at a hefty price, and often, that too is a waste!
I’m glad that you could prove that your current understanding and practice of SEO is indeed working for you. And you’ve also proved that you (we, the rest of us) don’t need to buy into any of those cheap SEO services. I agree – they’re a waste of time and they flood your inbox with unnecessary emails that won’t ever stop unless you tell your mail program to block the senders. I’d rather help people than machines, any day.
I have purchased SEO services in the past and although I did spend a lot, I didn’t get any good results either. Now I basically use my Facebook Page, Google Plus and Twitter to promote my website. Gaining traffic from the SEO is an acquired skill and I am diligently working on that. One bad experience can really ruined everything. Now I have to work just like an honest marketer, building my website out.
This really takes me back to my earlier days online. About 9 years now I tried some of them myself especially through Fivver before I realized it was such a waste of time. Not only that, the site ended up getting me banned from Google Adsense too. Even now, it seems Google does not approve of my Adsense account. This information is true in every aspect – do not pay low if you want quality!
This is an eye-opening article. As a newbie in online marketing, my mind is always preoccupied to get fast traffic and earn more. I too received a lot of offer on traffic generation and actually applied for one. But after reading this, I think I’ve made a very wrong decision. Wish I’ve known about this before.
This is an interesting article and a good eye-opener especially for newbies who are new to online marketing techniques. I do see all kinds of offer for traffic, but somehow, it seemed too good to be true.
I am an entrepreneur myself, and I know in order to produce good quality work, you need to invest, time, dedication and some times, money. If you start with a bogus product, you’ll end up getting bogus results as well.
Hi Cathy,
Like you, I also get emails offering services like increasing traffic and etc. I just ignore them, because I know that writing good content consistently with the correct keywords will bring the traffic that we need.
I have yet to make a substantial profit from my blog so outsourcing these tasks isn’t in the plan yet. Plus, even if you pay for writers, you still need to review and edit their work to be sure that they have all the SEO stuff in it.
That’s for sure Marita. You can’t leave the optimization of SEO to someone who’s not a professional. If you are hiring cheap, it could be plagiarized or come from PLR products. Publishing low quality content on your site can give a very bad impression on your readers as well as Google.
It is interesting to note that you do not need these SEO services. You say that you are now ranking for certain terms in your niche. I was wondering how long that took you to achieve? Do you get a lot of organic traffic this way? Do you have a number 1 SEO tip? Thanks.
Hi Chris,
1/ When relying on organic traffic, it can take a couple of weeks to get to the first rankings. If it’s a mature blog, the process would be faster.
2/ 70% of my traffic sources come from Google organically.
3/ Number 1 tip – Publish content using the right targeted keywords for your niche. Write long but meaningful article and get them out as frequent as possible in a week’s time.
Hope this helps.
Hey Cathy, this post is a good read. You definitely made some valid points that I’ve never considered nor read before but I can say beyond reasonable doubt that it’s all spot on. I signed up for Fiverr recently and I kind feel a little out of place because I’ve always counted on my writing talent to get me jobs so buying things like SEO services, especially cheap ones, doesn’t go well with me.