Fiverr debuted as a novel concept; a fixed price point of $5 for services, where anyone could offer to do anything for that price. Regulated by a free market experience, some services quickly dropped in quality, while others have maintained some utility. SEO through Fiverr is no different.
A Bad History
One of the most common is backlinks. Another is followers. If you were to visit the site today, you would see people advertising a guaranteed 2,000 followers, or a 500-link pyramid, or other schemes. Needless to say, none of these are legitimate. The followers you receive are generally going to be completely disengaged from your brand. The links you get will be spammy at best, and can actively hurt your search ranking. These sellers prey upon businesses looking for an extremely short-term bump in traffic, or those who don’t know any better.
If Fiverr has such a bad rap, why does anyone ever consider using it? Well, because some services on the site are legitimate. No, you’ll never be able to buy organic backlinks through the platform, but you can have some other work done and save yourself both time and money.
A Word of Caution
When you’re browsing Fiverr, you’ll often see certain sellers labeled top sellers or highly recommended. These sellers are best avoided. It’s very easy to game the review system on Fiverr, so many of the top rated sellers just used their own resources to create dozens of positive reviews to boost them to the top.
Essentially, you’re going to have to be willing to invest some time and money in searching for the right sellers. If you avoid certain types of services – like followers and links – you’ll be able to avoid any permanent damage to your site. The worst that can happen if you buy an article, for example, would be losing $5 when the article comes back low quality.
With that in mind, ?
Basic Graphics
Fiverr is great for some basic graphical work. Need an illustrated cartoon tiger to promote your brand as a mascot? Find a graphical artist doing animal illustrations and work with them to create a handful of poses you can use throughout your site. Many of these talented artists could potentially sell their work for much more, but living in the Philippines gives them more leeway and a lower cost of living. Any basic graphical work, from icons to clip art, can be found through Fiverr. Just make sure, with any graphical work, that you’re the copyright holder when all is said and done.
EBook Covers
Browse the Amazon Kindle Direct feed for a while and you’ll come across hundreds of ebooks with covers that look pieced together from Google image search results slapped and layered in MSPaint. The DIY look does you no favors in the world of ebooks. Instead, you can easily to put together a compelling ebook cover for you. All you need to do is give them a title and a little direction. You still have to write the book itself, of course, but a compelling cover puts you ahead of the pack right out of the gate.
Logo Design
A professional American graphic designer will charge anywhere from $50 to several thousand dollars. Top-end consulting firms spend much of their time and money harvesting competitor data, testing potential designs with focus groups and carefully considering every facet of design, including negative space and black and white versions. Obviously, you won’t get any of that with a Fiverr gig. What you will get is a slick, professional-looking logo that only costs you $5. Come up with a basic concept and work with a designer to put together a logo that’s both attractive and simple.
Post Illustrations
Everyone says you need images in your blog posts, but what sort of images should you choose? You can go with abstract pictures that vaguely illustrate the emotions behind your piece, or you can go with more literal cartoon depictions of what you’re talking about. It’s not rare to willing to take your concepts and run with them to produce something interesting that plays off of your content. Once again, like all graphical work done through Fiverr, you need to make sure you’re the holder of the copyright at the end of the process. Doing otherwise is not a risk you should take.
Video Transcription
Have a video? Want a basic transcript written to upload to YouTube along side the video itself? You could go with YouTube’s basic automatic captioning, but you’re going to have mistakes. Instead, why not scan through Fiverr and get one of the many content creators to write your transcript for you? It’s cheaper than a professional transcription house, and you’ll have a reasonable degree of accuracy. It might not be a complete 100% accurate transcript, but it shouldn’t take more than a single review to catch any leftover mistakes.
Voice Overs
There are a surprising number of talented vocalists on Fiverr willing to read something in a professional radio voice for your purposes. Use them to create a background track, an opening introduction or a complete video voice-over. If you’ve ever watched a show like How It’s Made and wished you could produce videos like it, well, Fiverr is your place. You can even get those speed-sketch style art pieces for an intro from other Fiverr gigs.
Data Entry
When running a business, a huge amount of your time is spent doing repetitive tasks you could potentially outsource. Hiring an intern or another employee requires training, but some of the more basic tasks can easily be . Basic data entry is prominent as a Fiverr service, and you don’t even need to go through a detailed interview process. Just make sure you’re not giving away sensitive company data for $5 data management.
Data Harvesting
Fiverr is also a great place for legitimate content scraping. For example, if you have a database of products and you want certain descriptive information recorded for each, you can submit the task to a Fiverr gig and work with someone to get it compiled the way you want it. Anything too complex for a basic scraper might be possible to harvest using a Fiverr gig that knows PHP.
You may note that none of these are actual SEO services. There’s a good reason for that; pure SEO services require an investment. For $5, you very much will get what you pay for. Bad links, bad content, bad followers and the like can haunt you for months after a single mis-spent $5 investment. Keep the real SEO work to the professionals; use Fiverr for basic work you can afford to screw up.