Every business owner receives countless generic SEO emails each month pitching various things. In most cases these are automated spam messages send to thousands of sites per day (we get them too!), and the senders are just looking to bilk unsuspecting business owners out of their hard earned money. Here is a common one we have seen a lot, and why you should ignore it:
Message: Hello….
I found a few major issues that are currently harming your website search rankings and wanted to share them.
* I discovered that there are numerous 'bad' links pointing to your website. You can check this by searching your website on Google by entering your website link like this:- Link: www.domain.com
* Your website has various undesirable technical mistakes such as broken links, HTML errors, missing image alt tags etc. You can confirm this by searching your domain or website URL on validator.w3.org,brokenlinkcheck.com, feedthebot.com/tools/alt/
* The number of high quality and/or authoritative links pointing to your site is very low. You can confirm this by visiting ahrefs.com
* Duplicity in the contents has been found which can be adversely affecting your website rankings. You can confirm this at copyscape.com
We can help you to fix these issues and get your website ranking on the first page of Google, Yahoo and Bing!
Can I call you this week to discuss your campaign?
In most cases your site should be very SEO optimized with our system, and these spam bots are just pouring out their messages to anyone that will possibly listen. Some of their tips are useful (if they were true!). However, since they aren't actually manually checking your website before sending this, their information is invariably wrong.
#1- Try it! You'll probably see pinterest, yelp, facebook, and other valuable sources linking to your site. That's good- you have several strong inbound good links to your site. We actively "unfollow" bad sites that link to our clients.
#2 - These tools show warnings from every website on the internet, including Apple.com, Amazon.com, etc. They are used by developers to help determine what broad generic things that site crawlers are looking at, but they are not useful as an indicator alone of site structure/SEO.
#3- This is a paid service, so unfortunately you can't even check if they're telling you the truth. In most cases retail jewelry sites won't have a substantial number of authoritative links pointing to them, except for perhaps vendor sites, social media sites, and places with press releases. That's all you'll ever have, and that's fine for SEO.
#4- Another one that they aren't actually checking before sending. Feel free to use their tool and see if there is any duplicate content. Most of our clients will have none. The ones that do have some duplicate content (ie generic GIA 4Cs for Diamonds stuff) could rewrite it. That will only give a small SEO boost, but you're welcome to do so if you like
Don't fall prey to these snake oil companies that solicit via bots. There are plenty of good internet marketing channels that you can utilize if you are looking to grow your business online. Message us if you want to learn more.