Fiverr is home to a lot of freelancers, and if you’ve been searching for someone to handle your search engine optimization (SEO) needs, you’ve probably happened on a Fiverr freelancer promising you heaven and back for just five bucks.
Which is no surprise really, I mean, until very recently, with the launch of Fiverr Pro, the entire premise of Fiverr was getting services at dirt cheap prices. There are $5 backlinking services promising 1000 backlinks in a matter of days. If you look hard enough, I’m sure you’ll find a so-called on-page SEO expert who promises a full day of optimization for just $5.
But I guess the real question is, are Fiverr SEO services worth it? Can you hire a decent SEO professional on Fiverr? If you do decide to take a bite, what should you look out for when hiring an SEO expert on Fiverr?
First things first – can you hire a solid SEO professional off Fiverr
For the short answer, yes. For the long answer, hiring an SEO professional off Fiverr is not quite as straightforward a process as you would imagine. It’s certainly not as easy as hiring a graphics designer or cartoonist. If you’re not careful, you’ll land yourself a hack who might not only waste your time and money but also leave your website in a worst state than it was before.
Fiverr is a huge marketplace with hundreds of SEO freelancers offering different services. The majority of people who go on to Fiverr looking for an SEO professional don’t even understand the rubrics of SEO. They most likely heard backlinks are most of what you need off a guru’s SEO podcast and jumped on the first search result for ‘where can I get backlinks’ – Fiverr is heavy on Google ads.
When they get on the Fiverr site, they see a dude from India offering ten thousand backlinks for $10, and something goes zing ‘I’ve finally found the perfect way to dominate SERP’ in their head. They pay to get a shit ton backlinks, leave a five-star review, and everyone’s happy, at least in the meantime.
How does this concern you? You probably think I’m not that dumb to go chasing backlinks on Fiverr. Well, you’re not dumb, but Fiverr’s freelancer ranking algorithm is somewhat dumb. Because many naïve webmasters purchase these hack-SEO services on Fiverr (and because they’re literally making money for Fiverr), these guys (the hack jobs) get pushed to the front pages of Fiverr’s SEO service category.
A simple search for SEO services, and you’re greeted with multiple gigs, all promising one form of backlinking or the other. Forget on-page or off-page optimization, technical optimization or content curation as valid SEO strategies; backlinks are king, even if they’re from spammy websites with little to no SERP presence – that’s the Fiverr picture.
But if you’ve been ranking websites for long enough, you’ll know backlinks are not exactly the most important piece in the SEO jigsaw puzzle. They’re very important, no doubt, but a successful SEO strategy is the right mix of all the relevant ingredients in the optimization soup. So how do you get a professional who understands this concept on Fiverr? They are there (on Fiverr) alright; you just need to know how to look.
Finding an SEO expert on Fiverr
Ignore most freelancers promising heaven and back for $5
Obviously, the first step to finding a reputable SEO specialist on Fiverr is to wade your way through the huge pile of pseudo-professionals who call the platform home. There’s a lot of them, and as I said, they occupy top positions in the Fiverr SEO category. Here’s my three-point strategy for weeding hacks on Fiverr away.
I like to call it the three A’s of hacking off hacks.
Analyze what they’re saying and the service they offer
Anyone telling you they’d rank your site for a specific keyword within a specific timeframe is either a liar or an SEO wizard.
Now I’ll add that there are SEO ‘wizards’ who can pull off some crazy SEO stunts, but those guys usually use Blackhat techniques and charge a shit ton of money. I’m not talking about the $10, $500, $1000 price tag you see for SEO services on Fiverr; Nah more in the thousand-dollar $10K range.
Also, there are certain very low competition keywords for which you can grab some page one real estate with little or no effort.
Except it’s these two unique scenarios; an ‘SEO wizard’ (good luck finding SEO Gandalf) or extremely low competition keywords, anyone making outlandish claims of how they’d put your site on page one, spot one is just looking to make their next quick buck from you.
The thing is, no one can guarantee with 100% certainty what spot a website would take on SERP. SEO and ranking on SERP are very nuanced plays. There are just so many variables that come into play, and even an SEO wizard might not get the results they target after applying their SEO wizardry.
Any SEO professional worth his or her mettle understands this, so rather than tell you what they’d do TO your site and rankings, they’d define what they can DO for your site to impact its ranking.
That’s where the conversation should start from – what can they do for your site?
Analyze if the deliverables are reasonable considering the price tag?
Whatever any SEO expert claims they can do should be tangible. I will improve your on-page technical SEO by working on headers, and alt text is better than I will optimize your site. You want to then gauge the deliverables to see if they’re actually achievable, especially in the context of the SEO professional’s charge.
Someone telling you they’d farm 1000 backlinks on a budget of $10 is just plain bonkers. You’re getting shit links that’ll be discounted as spam. Another person claiming they’d get you a backlink on the Wall Street Journal for $100 either just recently hacked the platform or has a WSJ writer kidnapped and locked up in their basement.
I’m not saying high pricing for SEO services automatically means they’re legit. No. But low pricing with outlandish claims is an almost surefire way to screen out hacks.
Are their deliverables white hat?
Let me prefix this by saying the line between white hat, grey hat and outright Blackhat SEO techniques are very murky. People have used so-called Blackhat techniques to rank page one for very competitive keywords and gotten away with it – no penalties whatsoever. I mean, there are SEO specialists who still run private blog networks (PBNs) today and dominate SERP with links from those networks.
All that said, however, as a business owner, entrepreneur or organization looking to rank and retain such rankings over time, it’s a better strategy to steer away from anything Blackhat. Yes, they might bring some success today, but with every new Google Algorithm update, there’s a higher risk of getting hit with a Google penalty.
What’s an example Blackhat SEO service popular on Fiverr? PBNs, yeah, what I just talked about. Many of the link building services you’ll get on Fiverr utilize one form of a Private Blog Network or the other. Another popular Blackhat service on Fiverr is targeted traffic. What you’re getting nine out of ten times is bot traffic. You should walk away if any of this is on the table; it’s not worth the time and investment.
Pick freelancers with solid deliverables at a reasonable price and ask for portfolios
Now, if you’ve applied what I just described, you should have sorted your way out of multitude SEO hacks on Fiverr. If you applied it well enough, you should’ve also seen a few SEO services that tick the mark of professionalism. That is, SEO services;
- Not offering outlandish promises
- With solid, measurable and reasonable deliverables
- That employ white hat techniques
Here’s an example service from Fiverr that ticks all that ***algomez17
Notice how they explicitly detail what they’ll do for your site over a defined period? Also, notice how there’s no actual SERP guarantee compared to this other service, for example.
Are you looking to rank on the 1st page of Google? Yes, I am – here’s what we will do to make that happen vs I will take your site to position one, page one with my ‘special’ backlinks.
Passing the non-hack assessment is, however, not enough. You want actual proof of work or proof of success if you like. An SEO professional might understand all the fundamentals of SEO and SERP, but if they don’t have gilt-edged tactics (and know how to implement these tactics), they’ll only pull in average results. In the world of search engine optimization, average doesn’t cut it.
You want someone who’s on top of their game. How do you know someone who’s on top of their SEO game? Easy, let them show you the results of the game they’ve been playing so far. Ask for case studies and results they’ve had both in terms of actual rankings and other business side metrics (sales, conversions, revenue increase).
No, a Google marketing certificate doesn’t cut it, neither does an Udemy certification for ‘SEO expert.’ I don’t have any certificate, and you probably reached this article through a search engine. I’m sure I speak the mind of actual SEO experts when I say practice – trying out strategies to see what beats big brother Google – beats theory when it comes to search engine optimization.
Check out their reviews
Reviews are a way to get a feel of a freelancers’ services before actually purchasing the service. With Fiverr reviews, however, you need to be careful. A bunch of what you’ll see are expertly spun fake reviews geared towards selling what, in reality, is an awful service. Here’s how I approach reviews on Fiverr to avoid the fake reviews pitfall
Pay little attention to the five-star reviews
They’re all basically saying the same thing. The SEO specialist is great and whatnot. If you got to the freelancer using the steps I outlined above, then it’s not farfetched to assume that said freelancer is good at what they do. No need to dwell on this especially considering that most fake reviews are usually five-star reviews.
What do the negative reviews say
What you need to know about your select Fiverr SEO specialist at this point is/are the pain point(s) associated with working with them, if any. Negative reviews show these pain points. Very good Fiverr SEO specialists have a low count of negative reviews, so an obvious red flag in the first place will be a high count of negative reviews.
Next, you want to check out what these reviews say. I generally discount one-star reviews, except there’s a theme going on with them.
Focus on the three two-star reviews and try to read between the lines. Most reviews in this rating category are from usually level-headed clients, compared to one-star reviews, which is just usually someone going on a rant.
A review assessment should be enough to make your mind up on anyone Fiverr SEO professional. The next step after this would be to schedule a consultation (or interview, if the project is large enough) where you outline your requirements to see if the freelancer is a perfect fit. I talk about scheduling these sorts of interviews in my hiring an SEO specialist Post.
What kind of SEO services can you get from Fiverr?
Now sometimes, instead of hiring a full-on professional Fiverr SEO expert, you might want to take more of an a la carte approach – break down your SEO problems/goals and take it up from there. This is the approach I recommend in fact.
First, because it’s easier on your pockets and also cause it allows you to gauge the impact of any SEO strategy accurately. It’s hard to tell what’s actually working when everything is muddled up as a full service. SEO done right is SEO that’s tracked.
With that in mind, here are the best SEO services you can get done on Fiverr.
Keyword research
A keyword research is an analysis of keywords (what people input in search engines) relevant to your site or business. The goal of keyword research is to find out how people reach your website, assuming it already has a SERP presence and the opportunities available for capturing relevant traffic from search engines.
Done right keyword research will identify both low competition and valuable high competition keywords that you can target with your site. Low competition keywords are easier to rank for, so it’s where most sites attempting to get their foot down start from. High competition keywords are usually harder to rank for; however, many offer better economic opportunities. So while you might not immediately go for high competition keywords, it’s important to factor them into your long-term SEO plan.
Keyword research is a relatively low-level SEO skill (I do my own keyword research), so there are a lot of sellers available on a whim and on a budget to handle this task for you on Fiverr. Just make sure to go through the selection process I detailed earlier in this post. Or, if you’re too lazy, check out my summary of the best keyword research SEO freelancers on Fiverr.
On-page SEO
On-page SEO is a blanket term for several things, all geared towards making any one particular page on your site more attractive in the eyes of search engines. Of course, it follows that if it’s attractive to search engines, it should be more attractive for web users since the metrics that make web content ideal for search engines all orient around what’s good for the end consumer.
- The ideal Fiverr on-page SEO optimizer will cover everything from
- Optimizing the content for keywords it targets
- Optimizing title, header, alt, description tags
- Internal and external linking
- URL structuring
- Schema markup
- Image formatting and optimization
- Page speed optimization
Like keyword research, this is not a high skill SEO maneuver, so again tons of SEO freelancers offering on-page optimization on Fiverr. You want to be careful, however, to hire someone who’ll do a thorough job. Many SEO freelancers advertise on-page SEO as a service and proceed to only optimize your header, title, etc., tags. Ask for a clear outline of what they plan on doing before giving the job out.
Technical SEO
There are a lot of behind the scenes factors that affect ranking, and most of them are more on the technical side of things. An example is page speed. While there’s a lot, you can do on-page to tweak how fast your website pages load, the off-page technical stuff is often the determining factor.
As I said, technical SEO is expansive, and usually, SEO experts start with a technical site audit to see where and what needs attention. Depending on what they find your site, technical SEO can include:
- Optimizing site and URL structure
- Fixing crawl and index issues
- Implementing breadcrumbs navigation
- Page speed and technical page optimization with attention to load times, first contextual paint, cumulative layout shift etc.
- Fixing usability issues
This is a more complex side of search engine optimization, so you need a Fiverr SEO specialist who really knows what they’re doing. Sticking to the mini Fiverr SEO hiring guide, I detailed above should point you the right way. For any Fiverr SEO candidate you consider hiring, make sure to ask for example gigs they’ve done before that shows how they rectified technical SEO issues and the effects on SERP after.
A simple ‘please can I see example sites where you did this or that should be enough to gauge their skill.
Competitor analysis
One of my sites was founded on the backdrop of a competitor analysis I did. Well, I wasn’t an actual competitor at the time of research, but you could say I was aspiring to be one. I didn’t do any keyword research, any niche research, or any of that stuff webmasters tell you to do before launching a site.
I simply researched sites ranking for a batch of keywords I was interested in, did a competitor research and reverse-engineered their entire site. Sounds scummy, I know, but it just goes to highlight how powerful a competitor analysis can be for your business or site.
In my case, the niche was low competition, and the top sites covering it were doing bare minimum to cover the topics. I could easily beat them with better content, all things equal. So rather than go through the sometimes extraneous task of finding keywords and determining if they’re worth attempting to rank for, I just analyzed the so-called competition and pulled off their keyword data. Easy peasy.
I should note that a properly done competitor analysis does more than just highlight keywords. It can outline your competitors content strategy, backlink profile and strategy, weak points, strong points and much more.
The major premise of doing one is to understand their overall SEO game so you can capitalize on whatever weakness while also improving on areas where they outgun you.
A competitor analysis, like technical SEO, requires experience and an in-depth understanding of key SEO metrics that matter. Someone could just pull off a dashboard report from Ahrefs, but that’s hardly an analysis – it’s just a report.
Ask any Fiverr SEO specialist you plan on hiring for a sample analysis they’ve done before or commission them to analyze a segment of your site as a trial and then assess the insights (which is what differentiates an analysis from a report) they present.
Link building
I saved the best for the last. This is the reason most people seeking SEO services land on Fiverr in the first place.
Let me clear the air first. Backlinks are important, but you shouldn’t be hiring that dude who’s promising you 1000 backlinks on a $10 budget. They’re useless. Google will most likely discount them as spam, and if anything, they dilute your backlink profile.
Actual backlinking, the kind that boosts SERP rankings (and retains such rankings), requires a tacit backlink strategy. What the $10 backlink dude is doing is spamming your web links on directories, social media pages and other irrelevant websites just as he’d done for hundred clients before you.
Backlinks that impact SEO positively need to be contextual (at least in the eyes of Google), relevant and placed in domains with a low backlink toxicity score. You know, the kind that doesn’t accept links from every scummy backlinker out there.
The ideal backlink expert on Fiverr should have a network of sites they are affiliated with that meets this requirement. Alternatively, they could be practitioners of known white hat backlinking strategies like the HARO technique and Grey stuff like guest posting.
Whatever the case, the most important thing is that your links:
- Get live on sites that are relevant to your niche with a significant SERP presence
- Are placed with contextual anchor texts
- Are placed in the most organic way possible
From your potential Fiverr SEO hire, ask for evidence that they can deliver on these requirements. Don’t get fooled by the high DA (Domain Authority) metric many freelancers will throw at you if you come looking for backlinking services. A site can have a high DA and still be toxic. It can have a high DA without any significant SERP presence.
That about sums it up for the SEO services you can conveniently find on Fiverr. And with that out of the way, let’s quickly cover the services you should never attempt to purchase on Fiverr.
SEO services to avoid on Fiverr as a website owner
I already made references earlier to the most popular ones, so you probably already have an idea of what I’ll be talking about
Scummy backlinking services
This includes everything from the 1000 links for $10 offers to the automated backlinks providers and sellers who offer PBN guest posting. They might get you a very small bump in SERP rankings but trust me when I say you’re just setting up your site for a big Google hammering down in the nearest future.
Regardless of what the seller promises, it’s simply not worth it. Google is au naturale. Anything that hints automated, spammy or unnatural can get you on its wrong side.
Guaranteed first page gigs
No one, not even the SEO ‘Wizards’ I talked about, can guarantee with 100% certainty that your site is going to land the first spot on SERP. Yes, there are things you can do to increase your chances of getting to the top spot, and usually, they work, but a 100% guarantee is just someone making a sales pitch.
If the sales pitch was from an SEO veteran who’s ranked tons of sites and charging you $10000, then yeah, it might not be a bad idea to take a bite. But when it’s from a Fiverr SEO’ specialist’ who’s charging you $50, I think I’ll pass. Getting to the first page of SERP requires effort, skill and significant monetary investments. Except you’re dealing with extremely low competition keywords, it’s not cheap.
The guys on Fiverr selling these services know that, and that’s why they always include a waiver saying it takes time to achieve their guaranteed rankings. It takes to climb SERP for sure, but in this case, the time reference is just so you’re patient enough for such sellers to clear their money off of Fiverr.
SEO reports masqueraded as analysis
There are a lot of sellers offering so-called audits that are, in truth, just SEO data pulled off a tool like Ahrefs or Semrush. While they can provide an insight on what’s happening to your site, in most cases, you’re better off paying for such a tool yourself and generating your own report. Ahrefs, for instance, has a $12 trial package that lasts seven days – enough time to pull out all the data you need.
Sure, there’s a learning curve to using these tools, but it’s nothing out of the ordinary. It took me less than an hour to get a basic hang of Ahrefs. Plus, there’s literal tons of support material available to guide you through.
Don’t get me wrong, however. It pays to pay for an analysis, especially if you’re still learning the ropes. But an analysis is very different from a report. Exactly why you must ask for sample analysis from a potential Fiverr SEO hire to confirm you’re not just getting another report template pulled off of an analysis tool.
To conclude
Hiring an SEO expert on Fiverr is not a bad idea, but you must know what you’re looking for in an SEO expert and how to screen the many hacks from the actual professionals on the platform. It takes some getting used to, but you don’t need to rush anyway. Ask questions, get clarifications and stick to the basics I’ve outlined in this guide.
