We all get those emails from someone telling us our website and SEO just aren’t up to expectations, even though we’ve been very happy with our providers. I know the majority of us just dismiss them, but we always have that little inkling in the back of our minds “could this guy be right?” I decided I would ask our SEO group, Local Giant ( localgiant.com) ) to help me answer those questions we all have. Here is the response…..the sender is in Italics and and Bold and Local Giant’s excellent response is in regular type:
I saw that your website is currently not listed on the first page for your niche and popular keyword (Product) search
- You don’t sell a product, and therefore wouldn’t be listed in the google product/shopping search results. If he had actually been to the site he wouldn’t have included that in his form letter.
- Depending on the software he used to scrape results, or even his location he will see something different than everyone else. According to google, you currently have an average rank of 5.1 for “dental consultant”, and have several other 1st page organic rankings, in addition to the paid ads we are running. so saying you aren’t listed on the 1st page would be inaccurate. To talk about “rankings” but not include key terms searched is also misleading.
Your website needs high quality inbound anchor text links The types of the link are extremely important to achieve top rankings, and I can create these quality links to your website. I can prove to you how effective and risk free this system is.
Sure, the search engines certainly use links to help determine if a site should show up in their results, but I would assume that since he is spamming from a generic @gmail address, he isn’t really concerned about following their terms of service, or the long term viability of your business. If he can create the links, they are likely not natural or editorial, and sounds like he would be violating Google TOS. “anchor text links” are what the entire Google Penguin penalty was created to stop.
Bottom-line, most solicitations that come from SEO companies via email are very misleading. Those that come from @Gmail, @yahoo, or other 3rd party accounts are typically the worst offenders. I cannot imagine why a qualified “SEO” or internet expert wouldn’t have his own domain specific email. This just makes so much sense, I had to share it with our blog readers!
