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The Frustration of Spammy SEO Emails
Ah spam, glorious, spam!! Don't you just love the smell of spam in the morning? Well, no, not particularly, for us and for some of our customers this seems to be an inevitable consequence of having an online web presence and an email account.
What type of spam am I talking about? Well it's the SEO kind. The emails which target our customers, even though their websites feature quite well on Google (and other Search Engines), but yet are still targeted by spammy SEO companies, whose emails claim they make your website number 1 on Google and improve your web presence online immeasurably.
Why these unsolicited emails in particular? Well, usually they are written in a way to bypass email spam filters and are addressed to your website domain personally, and for all intensive purposes they look legit, however when you actually read them, it is a load of utter rubbish! They have just copy and paste the same email message over and over again, with the same concerns, the same claims, just with different companies. It's a scaremongering technique using out-of-date SEO lingo, and unfortunately there are no repercussions for them - complete lack of accountability.
One of our clients recently received an email from one of these SEO companies - and brought it to my attention. I personally believe sending an unsolicited email, which is incorrect and full of fake claims, to a random company is the equivalent of door-to-door selling to vulnerable people. Knocking on enough doors with the same aggressive waffle may eventually lead to a sale - but a complete dishonest and hollow sale - which is simply exploiting vulnerable people.
What makes it even more frustrating is the cost in which they claim they can do it for - we've worked with online marketing and SEO for many years, and understand the process is really never complete - it's an ongoing and continual growth which is not fixed by a quick £200! If it were, surely everybody would be top of Google on page 1.
Adding more insult to injury is the fact their own personal website doesn't even feature at the top of Google for their chosen keywords, and what's worst is some companies do not even add their own personal website link to their email (probably too ashamed) - and then there's the companies who send emails using third-party services like Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo!, etc - companies sending from third-party email addresses should always be a red flag!
The best way to analyse your website is using Google's own developer tools, these will give you a good indication if there is something seriously wrong with your website.
Here's one of the email templates used by spammy SEO: https://lists.debian.org/debian-embedded/2015/09/msg00002.html
And here's a link which even better explains the problem at hand: https://www.mariehaynes.com/dont-fall-for-small-business-seo-scams/
Famously, the founder of Microsoft, Bill Gates, predicted a spam-free world by 2006! Unfortunately, his prediction wasn't quite right and it looks like the problem is here to stay. Personally I think spam is inevitable - email filters are improving but as long as spammers can make money from sending spammy emails without any repercussions, they will continue to find loopholes.