Should I Use Go Daddy’s SEO Services? No, You Shouldn’t!

GoDaddy is one of the best-known hosting services there is, with more than 20 million customers in 2020. Having taken a large share of the hosting market, GoDaddy has also spread out into other, related areas including Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

GoDaddy claims that its SEO services are easy to use, with just 3 simple steps involved. They claim that a dedicated account manager will manage your account for you and, once you’ve had a chat with them about your business, they get to work and you can watch your traffic grow. And all of this at a very affordable price. 

GoDaddy is one of the best-known hosting services there is, with more than 20 million customers in 2020. Having taken a large share of the hosting market, GoDaddy has also spread out into other relevant areas including Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

In this GoDaddy SEO review, we will dig deeper into GoDaddy SEO services, how they work, and their alternatives.

What Does GoDaddy SEO Services Work?

GoDaddy claims that its SEO services are easy to use, with just 3 simple steps involved. They claim that a dedicated account manager will manage your account for you and, once you’ve had a chat with them about your business, they get to work and you can watch your traffic grow. And all of this at a very affordable price.

GoDaddy’s SEO services start from just around $2.99/month, although that will rise as more services are added on. They don’t show the prices on their website so you will need to contact them for more details. Some users have said that they will end up paying around $500/month.

In comparison, a good local SEO agency will cost between $1k to $2k/month. For a national campaign, you can expect to pay more than $3k/month.

Paying somebody else a little to manage your SEO for you sounds a little too good to be true. The catch is that it’s just not very good, and this Godaddy SEO service review looks into why we came to that conclusion. 

How We Evaluate SEO Tools

SEO tool

Before our Godaddy SEO services review tells you why you should avoid GoDaddy’s SEO services, it’ll help to define what a good SEO service would look like.

Contrary to GoDaddy SEO, search engine optimization is a long and ongoing process. We will explore some components of effective SEO below.

Good Quality Content

Search engines like Google like to see a lot of good quality content on websites and will let them know that your website is useful to people. The content should be well written with minimal grammatical and spelling errors and be easy to read. It should contain accurate information and facts with citations provided where necessary. The content should also be structured in a way that makes it easy for both people and Google’s bots, to read.

The goal of content is to be informative, well-designed, and easy to navigate, you want the lowest bounce rates possible.

Keyword Research

Keywords are how people find your website from internet searches, making it very important to research which keywords you should be using. It’s important that your keywords attract the right people otherwise users will just leave your site as soon as they arrive; it’s also important to attract them in sufficient numbers. 

Keywords need to be located strategically to help Google understand your content well. You also need to avoid overusing them (keyword stuffing); otherwise, Google might think you’re trying to play the system and that can result in penalties.  Keyword clustering is our approach of organizing keywords into groups, then we use these clusters to rank keywords by search volume, difficulty, and business opportunity. Good keyword research is the foundation of SEO and content strategy.

Backlinks on Relevant and High-Quality Websites

A backlink is a link to your website that’s placed on somebody else’s website. When Google finds a backlink to your site, they see it as a referral. Such referrals tell Google that your website should rank above other sites with fewer referrals. 

Onsite SEO

Optimizing the structure of your website will also help to give you a boost in the search engine rankings. Website optimization involves structuring written content with headers and strategically placed keywords that help make your content easier for search engines to read. Meta tags and descriptions also give search engines more information, while images can be optimized with an image alt tag. Internal and external linking will help search engines navigate your site, while external links will let them know that you’re providing useful information to your visitors. 

User Experience

Search engines like Google want their users to have a good experience when using their services. Not only does this mean showing them relevant websites with lots of useful content, but also websites that are a pleasure to use. To provide a good user experience, a website should load quickly and be easy to navigate.

GoDaddy SEO Are Not SEO Experts

When you need a job done, it’s best to go to an expert for the best results, and SEO isn’t really GoDaddy’s thing. There is some overlap between hosting and SEO, which is probably why GoDaddy got involved with SEO in the first place. However, their business is providing hosting services for websites. It’s best to use the services of a company that specializes in SEO, rather than one that offers SEO as a service on the side. 

What Does GoDaddy SEO Offer?

GoDaddy claims to offer a complete SEO service that includes keyword recommendations, content creation, keyword link building, onsite recommendations, submissions to directories, and article submission services. They offer an SEO tool that helps to make SEO easy for you and access to an account dashboard that helps you monitor how well your website is performing.

All this, and there’s little for you to do. 

Sadly, our GoDaddy SEO service review found that their SEO services don’t live up to their own hype. The service is missing too many features and the features they do offer are missing in both quantity and quality. 

GoDaddy Hosting is Poor for SEO

GoDaddy is in the business of hosting websites, so they provide fast and reliable website hosting services, right?

Not quite.

According to many of GoDaddy’s customers, their hosting is slow, and slow websites are a real problem for SEO.

As mentioned above, websites are ranked in part according to user experience, including speed. If a website loads slowly then Google will know this and they don’t want their users to have to wait a long time for pages to open. Aware that your website will not provide a good user experience, search engines will rank your site below other, faster websites. Make sure to use a host that gives you plenty of bandwidth to make sure you rank well.

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Godaddy Website Builder is Poor for SEO 

GoDaddy also offers a website builder that claims to make it easy for anybody to build a great-looking and functional website. This claim is pretty much accurate, but it comes with a downside that affects other page builders as well: bloated code. The additional code that page builders create can cause pages to load more slowly – again causing a problem for SEO. Page builders are also not as flexible as building from scratch, making it harder to create customized designs. 

Unclear Payment Plans

Our GoDaddy SEO service review found that they don’t mention their payment plans on their website. You will need to contact them for details where you will certainly have somebody trying to upsell you.

While they claim to offer their search engine optimization services for a very affordable price, extra services can soon add up and some people have ended up paying around $50/hour. Not only that, but the minimum subscription is quarterly with no monthly options available meaning you’re tied in for a while even if you’re not happy with the service. 

GoDaddy Search Engine Visibility Tool

The GoDaddy search engine visibility (SEV) tool wizard scans your website to look for areas where you can improve your SEO. A keyword ranking report created by the GoDaddy search engine visibility tool will tell where you’re ranking for particular keywords, help you find the best keywords, and guide you on how to use them. The GoDaddy search engine visibility tool will also recommend updating meta titles. adding alt tags on images, and submitting a sitemap to Google to tell their web crawlers where to go. 

This might all sound rather good to a beginner, and it probably is a good place to get started but, in reality, the tool is actually quite basic and only offers limited information. 

It’s difficult to find information on the exact GoDaddy SEO services. Most other SEO service providers will proudly provide a full list of features so they can boast all about how great their service is, but not the GoDaddy SEO tool. Nowhere on the GoDaddy website can you find proper information about GoDaddy SEO services.

On the other hand, you should not expect a tool to fix issues for you. While some integrations do make some fixes easier to perform, they mostly suggest what should be done, which is far from ideal for beginners. 

Perhaps the main reason to not use GoDaddy’s SEO tool is that better options are available that won’t cost you a penny.

The Godaddy SEO Tool Is No Better Than A Free SEO Tool

The world of search engine optimization is vast and there are many SEO tools available for free that may work better than GoDaddy SEO. Some of these SEO tools include: 

A few of the SEO tools above give you full, unlimited access to their features without having to pay a penny. Others have free plans but with limited access to features and usage levels. Some have a basic plan or standard plan that is still very affordable, and some offer discounts for paying annually. If you want access to the most powerful insight SEO tools available then you can buy a premium plan, and some of these premium services will also give you access to email marketing tools and other features that will help your business to flourish. 

Furthermore, some free SEO tools, like Google Analytics and Google Search Console, are used by seasoned SEO experts and still boast ease of use. With so many other SEO tools available that will give you a much more thorough and detailed analysis, and for free, there’s simply no reason to pay for GoDaddy’s service. 

Short Content On Poor Quality Blogs

One GoDaddy SEO service review on Reddit has complained that after having paid $500 for what was supposed to be 10 hours of work, they received a single 200-word article that was placed on a poor-quality website. They claim they also received 3 links placed on forums that had “no-follow links”.

GoDaddy’s website claims that they usually create short articles of around two paragraphs. 

This is problematic for several reasons:

  • Just a couple of hundred words or so falls far short of what’s needed for content to be effective. Indeed, a survey by Hubspot shows that the ideal length of a blog post is somewhere between 2,100 and 2,400 words. That makes the ‘blog’ provided by GoDaddy LESS THAN 1/10 the optimal size. 
  • Spamming backlinks on forums is not a good SEO practice. If anything, it’s likely to be quite the opposite because it can be deemed spammy.
  • “No follow” links are not that useful for search engine optimization. They do not act as a recommendation like “Do follow” links do, meaning they do not affect rankings.

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Poor Customer Service

Issues will occasionally arise even with the best service out there. What really matters is what’s done to correct them. Sadly, this is another area where GoDaddy fails quite badly. 

GoDaddy is quite notorious for poor customer support. One GoDaddy SEO service review on the popular review site hostadvice.com has the company scoring just 2.8 out of 10 for support, with many of the written reviews making direct complaints about the poor standard of customer services they received. For a service that already seems to be very flawed, poor customer service is going to exasperate the issue even further. 

They Can Actually Harm Your Ranking

Search engines like Google don’t like people trying to cheat the system to have their website rank high up in the search pages. If they do think you’ve been cheating the system then your website may face penalties.

If you let GoDaddy create poor-quality content on poor-quality sites using your backlink then Google might think that you’re using black-hat SEO techniques. Having your link on multiple forums is something else that they’re unlike to like favourably upon. The result could be that your website plummets in the search results, achieving the exact opposite of what you were paying GoDaddy for in the first place. 

Good SEO Costs Money

GoDaddy’s claim to provide SEO services for low prices should be enough to start setting off alarm bells. SEO is not easy. It requires expertise and manhours and these don’t come cheap if you’re paying competent professionals to do it for you.

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SEO is competitive. While you’re trying to get your website listed high in the search results, you can be sure that your competitors will also be trying to take any advantage that they can get to rank higher than you do. With such fierce competition, your SEO efforts must be better than your competitors’ otherwise you stand little to no chance of ranking well. GoDaddy SEO services just don’t come close to competing to providing what you need.

GoDaddy SEO Review: Conclusion

It’s not that GoDaddy’s SEO services are a scam per se. You get what you pay for, but you’re not paying for much. Their SEO services might work fine for businesses that have just one or two competitors but there are going to be very few businesses with such little competition.

If you are serious about getting your website on the first page of Google then you should be prepared to pay for it and this means using professional SEO services from a reputable SEO agency that can help you achieve your goals.  

It’s not that GoDaddy’s SEO services are a scam per se. You get what you pay for, but you’re not paying for much. Their SEO services might be fine for businesses that have just 1 or 2 competitors but there are going to be very few businesses with such little competition. If you are serious about getting your website on the first page of Google then you should be prepared to pay for it and this means using a professional SEO service that knows what to do and works hard to help you achieve your goals.  

FAQs

  • Can using Godaddy’s SEO services harm my ranking?
  • Is it important for SEO that I use a fast web hosting service?
  • Does GoDaddy offer good customer service?
  • How much do GoDaddy SEO services cost?
  • Are GoDaddy’s content creation services worth the money?

FAQs

  • Can using Godaddy’s SEO services harm my ranking?

    Practices like having too many backlinks on poor-quality websites can cause your SEO ranking to fall.

  • Is it important for SEO that I use a fast web hosting service?

    A slow website will affect your website’s user experience, potentially causing a drop in your SEO rankings.

  • Does GoDaddy offer good customer service?

    Godaddy receives mixed scores for their customer support, chat support is especially unhelpful however phone support usually routes to more knowledgeable users.

  • How much do GoDaddy SEO services cost?

    The Search Engine Visibility feature costs $6.99/month. You will need to contact GoDaddy for prices on their other services.

  • Are GoDaddy’s content creation services worth the money?

    Blog articles are usually just a couple of paragraphs long, making them ineffective for SEO.