I don’t know about you but not a day goes by where I don’t get ten emails, promising me instant Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) success. Claims such as ‘#1 Ranking on Google’, ‘Instant Website Submission Services’, ‘First Page Google Ranking in 30 Days’ and many more. Any true SEO professional knows that any of these claims have no foundation and can’t be delivered.

SEO is about defining your business goals and online marketing objectives, followed by a continuous, focused and well structured process of search engine optimisation. In most cases, SEO success will take months if not years to deliver successfully.

Here some of our tips on how to deal with SEO Spam emails:

Ignore SEO email promising guaranteed, instant results.
Nobody can guarantee results and by making such claims clearly shows only one thing: The SEO company making this claim does not understand SEO. They are just fishing for new SEO business. The best strategy here is to ignore the email, mark or report it as spam and delete it from your inbox.
It is fairly easy to spot these types of spam SEO pitches. They normally have a headline grabbing subject line like ‘guaranteed ranking’. They tend to be sent from free google, hotmail, yahoo email addresses or domains without a website.

If in doubt, check how the SEO company can help your business.

If you think the SEO email received is well written, does not make to many outrageous claims and has got some substance, you might want to take it one step further. After all what have you got to lose. However, make sure you respond to the email with some very specific questions. Ask specific questions on what the SEO company will deliver. Best to challenge them immediately on how much they know about your business and what they can do for your website. Questions should include:

• What search terms would you suggest to target for my business?
• By how much can you improve my target traffic?
• What do you know about my business and my target market?
• Where is your business based?
• Explain the process of optimisation (specific to my website and my target market)
• Provide case studies for previous successful SEO optimisations delivered

If you consider engagement, ask for a proper SEO cost proposal.

If you feel the SEO email is very interesting to your particular business, make sure you ask for a proper SEO cost proposal. It is important that you fully understand all elements of SEO, all associated costs and cost to deliver a successful SEO campaign. Typical cost drivers for SEO campaigns are:

• Keyword research & analysis – one-off
• Optimising your website for keywords (on-page optimisation) – one-off
• Building inbound links for your website (off-page optimisation) – monthly

The more keywords you are trying to target, the more expensive the SEO campaign will be. As a rule of thumb if you aim for a 12 months campaign for 10 keywords you should budget £5k. Your budget should be significantly higher if your target keywords are highly competitive. Lower,  if your target keywords attract little competition. Things you should ask for in the SEO proposal:

• How many keywords will be targeted?
• Who will make keyword selection?
• How will keyword research be delivered?
• What exactly will be analysed?
• Who will be writing content for your website?
• Who will be making changes required to your website?
• Who will be maintaining your website to make sure it stays optimised?
• How many inbound links will be built by SEO agency?
• What type of links will be built?
• Is all the link building done manually?
• What will be the success criteria?
• Will the SEO agency make some gurantees?

Any serious SEO company will be more than happy to submit a well structured cost proposal.

How you will find a good SEO company

As a general rule, good SEO companies know the value of inbound marketing and get work through referrals, word of mouth or by being found on search engines. Good SEO companies don’t rely on spam emails to find customers and will have many other ways of customers finding them. If you need the service, you will find a good SEO professionals and not found by spam emails.

These are some examples of the kind of SEO Spam best to be avoided:

‘Guranteed #1 Rankings! No Cost Website Analysis and Ranking Report of Your Website! Is Your Website Ranked at Number One in The Search Engines?’

‘We are interested to increase traffic to your web back to us in order to discuss the possibility in further detail.’

‘Your site should be at the top of the major search engines.
Want a free site analysis? If you are interested, just reply to this email and we can give you a free appraisal with no strings.’

’75% of WEB SURFERS searching the Internet will never find your site unless you’re located on the first page of Yahoo, Google and MSN. If I assist you to achieve at least 7 times more WEB traffic to your online business by getting you to the top of the search engines would you be interested?’

‘At No Cost to You, our search engine optimization experts will run a ranking report showing you exactly where your website currently stands in all the major search engines. Then we will email you our analysis report along with the recommendations of how we can increase your ranking, and improve your websites traffic dramatically!’

‘I’m going to be brief and straight to the point. I will list your website in our search engine for free with static links to your website. With thousands of our pages indexed by Google and Yahoo!, you will literally get hundreds of links to your content pages in relevant static pages. These are the example of pages our users benefit from (just examples, your site will be listed in pages relevant to your content)’
If you have a website out there I am sure you will have  seen many more spam SEO emails. They are fairly easy to spot!

Filed under: Online Marketing, Search Engine Optimisation, Web Business Advice by admin