There are a lot of scary things on the web these days – viruses lurking on unsecure sites, pop-up ads, videos without cute cats in them! A recent scary trend popping up for many website owners is the SEO scare tactic email, and it goes a little something like this:
“Hi [Business Owner’s Name Here] – I work for Best of the Best SEO and I wanted to let you know that I took a look at your website and ran it through some of our important-sounding scanners and you’re not ranking as high as your should for important keywords, and you have 800 errors on your website. Here’s a list of all the errors. When is a good time for me to call you to help you clean up your SEO?”
If you’ve ever received one of these emails, it likely made you more than a little nervous, and probably had you questioning your current SEO strategy. Is my site really that bad? What’s up with all those errors? Should I call this company for help? And that’s exactly what the email is intended to do.
This is a new, and pretty shady, sales tactic that some SEO firms are embracing – pulling error lists for your site and showing them to you without explaining what the errors are or if they even require fixes. Some will even tell you that they are representatives of Google, which makes them sound very important and knowledgeable, but here’s the thing: It’s a lie. Google will never contact you about your website errors because Google isn’t in the business of helping you improve your website. Their sole aim is to create an algorithm that helps people using their search engine find what they are looking for. Yes, they crawl your website in order to evaluate its content, but they do not contact individual companies to let them know that they could improve their SEO and get ranked higher. Can you imagine how time consuming that would be, even for a company as large as Google?
Intimidation vs. Relationship Building
Oftentimes, these less-than-ethical SEO firms pull what look like very specific stats and paste them in their emails, hoping to make you panic and call them. For example, they may email an Atlanta home care company to let them know that their business isn’t ranking at all for the keyword phrase “home care in Macon, GA,” when, in actuality, that may be perfectly fine. Or, they might produce a list of duplicate content errors with no explanation of what is causing these errors or if they are causing an actual problem.
Legitimate SEO companies take the time to research your company, competitors, and the marketplace when determining what keywords to target and whether those target keywords have relevant search volume. When errors come up, they evaluate their validity and what affect, if any, they have on your website’s ranking. Scare tactic SEO companies simply want to wave what look like flaws in your SEO in front of your face to literally scare you into calling. They are looking for a short-term sale, not the long-term relationship that it takes in order to build and maintain your site’s SEO. And that is the biggest difference. A quality SEO provider, like corecubed, will build a relationship with your business, do the research, and help you build authority and great content over time.
We know the world of SEO can be intimidating and a little scary. That’s why our SEO experts stay on top of Google algorithm changes and best practices so that we can create strong SEO strategies for our clients that help them build authority, rank high, and get results. If you’re looking to improve your website’s SEO the right way, contact corecubed today.