Experiences of the last week have forced me to write this blog post on quality versus cost. I’ll write down three separate incidences of the last week and two other similar ones.
1. One of my very good friends called me and asked me if I can help their air conditioning and boiler repair guy with his website and SEO. I asked my friend to give my mobile no to the guy and after receiving call from that technician, I felt so sorry for him. He signed up for ‘cheap’ vendor in India to do SEO for his website. He spent 6 months of time and a lot of his hard earned money to bring his site on top of the Google and desired to get some result. When I visited the website, there was nothing done on the website for SEO, not even a single step. When I told him, he was shocked. To my surprise, even the contact form on the website was not working. He lost his trust, valuable time and money. The reason for all this was: cheap or low cost, but the end result: zero
2. The second incidence is quite interesting. I’ve been in touch with an entrepreneur who has started a new business. When we met in the first week of July, he said that his website will be ready soon and then he can take me on board for branding, digital marketing and social media campaign. He has outsourced the website development work in India. After 5 months, his incomplete website was uploaded this month. I was surprised with poor user interface, very low quality of contents and I am not sure if any search engine will like that. Now this entrepreneur guy wanted some additional site to be developed and attached to the main site. After receiving my quotes and comparing it with his vendor, he again went with his vendor. I lost the business again. Even despite of my warning that his project will suffer in the long run, he is still weighing on cost versus quality.
3. A dental surgeon has outsourced his website development and SEO to an Indian company as that was the cheapest option for him. This happened 5 months ago. Even after 5 months, website is still incomplete. When I just visited few ready pages, I was surprised to see the grammatical mistakes in the contents and above all on the SEO contents. The surgeon will spent more money in rectifying those errors and if by any way, site gets penalise by search engines, his time, money and efforts will all go in vain.
4. Around 4 years ago, one of our very big clients asked us about link building companies that charge $50 or $100 and create numerous back links. I personally cautioned him against any such practices, but despite of my warning, he went ahead and paid $100 to get back links from some Indian company. His first page, among top 5 position website was severely penalised by Google and within six months, he lost traffic, business leads and ranking on search engines. Later he spent more than £20,000 to remove those links and buy a new domain to restart the business.
5. In August, we received an enquiry to analyse a website for its SEO work. The client told us that they’ve hired some Indian ‘cheap’ vendor to do their SEO and now Google has severely penalised their website and it has lost all ranking. At that time, some freelancer SEO guy was trying to revive the site, but so far no success.
One common thing in all these incidences: these business people have opted for the ‘cheapest’ or low cost services just to save some money in the short run. But they have paid or will pay the heavy price of their wrong choices. One thing needs to be clearly understood. Only quality work can bring the results and quality comes with a price tag. We have a list of satisfied and happy customers in the last 50 months of our business. Most of our business is coming from word of mouth publicity. We create TRUST among our clients. We give them HONEST and FRANK advice. Our dealings are completely TRANSPARENT. And we deliver RESULTS and projects ON TIME.