The new financial year is only days old and already the spam mailbox at GOOP Digital’s Geelong website development HQ is bulging with junk emails about search engine optimisation opportunities for our website.
If we were to believe the “SEO experts” hammering our email account on a daily basis it’s a wonder the GOOP Digital website works at all, let alone stands out in Google searches.
If you own a business with a website you’ll know precisely what we’re talking about:
- Your website is currently not being properly promoted online.
- Your website doesn’t feature in Google’s first search page for keywords relevant to your business.
- Would you like your company to be listed on the first page of Google?
- Your website is full of errors affecting its search engine optimisation.
- We’re offering an obligation-free audit of your website to improve its performance.
The emails with those messages come thick and fast, every day. At GOOP Digital we’re lucky. We work in the industry and know the torrent of emails is nothing more than garbage sent by crooks preying on unsuspecting business owners.
But your average website owner doesn’t have the online knowledge and resources of our Geelong web developers and each one of those emails that arrives in a business owner’s inbox sows seeds of uncertainty and doubt.
We’ve had a few GOOP Digital clients on the phone after they’ve received emails from dubious “marketing consultants” and “SEO agencies” casting misleading doubt over their website’s performance. Fortunately, it’s pretty easy for GOOP Digital to prove the prominence of our clients’ websites in Google. Actual Google searches for what clients do, where they do it, are a good starting point and our comprehensive SEO reports of website performance are further proof.
We’re not saying for a moment that it’s not possible to improve website search engine optimisation – there are always opportunities – but unsolicited emails will rarely, if ever, provide those opportunities.
What to look for in SEO spam
In the interests of helping website owners identify dodgy SEO operators, here’s GOOP Digital’s top five list of what to watch for:
- Any emails from SEO companies that have [at]outlook.com, [at]gmail.com or [at]hotmail.com in the From address line. Surely a real SEO business would have a genuine domain email address such as seoguru[at]goop.com.au! That’s not a real address, by the way.
- Any SEO email addressed to “Dear owner of www.whateveryourdomainis.com.au”. You can bet your last dollar your email address has been scraped from somewhere and you’re on a list with thousands of other businesses.
- Following on from the previous point, any email in which the email author has no idea who you are or what your name is. Hardly a personal approach, is it?
- Claims your website is not ranking for many keywords related to your business. How would Mr Dodgy SEO know? GOOP Digital spends hour after hour researching and identifying the keywords most suitable to each and every one of its clients and the products and services they offer their marketplace. Good organic SEO is seriously hard work, not something identified in a moment or two while “surfing your website”.
- Anybody offering free website audits and SEO reports. Why make the offer? If it’s free, just hand over the report. The enticement of free is just bait for what will become a costly trap.
The previous list just scratches the surface but hopefully helps website owners identify scammers trying to separate their business from its cash.
Our final piece of advice to business owners receiving emails about their website’s performance is that no reputable SEO company would chase business with an informal generic email.
Think about how your own business operates. You advertise your business through its website and other platforms and those advertisements attract clients. Your happy clients in turn become advertisements for your business because of the quality of products and service you offer.
You wouldn’t send out vague emails to strangers listing imaginary shortfalls in their products and hoping that’ll convince them to use your services, would you?
And if you are doing that, then you should stop it now because those emails, like the SEO emails you’re worrying about, are nothing more than spam and do more harm than good.
If you’d like genuine guidance and advice about search engine optimisation or online marketing in general, contact GOOP Digital, website developers in Geelong who don’t spam anybody.