Author:
Malcolm Porter
It’s 9 am on a Tuesday. You’ve barely touched your morning coffee, and already your inbox has three new messages:
Whether you’re going it alone or working with an SEO agency, these kinds of messages can feel unsettling. Even if you trust your team, it’s natural to feel rattled when a stranger points out ‘errors’ in bold, red lettering.
This article is for business owners who keep getting those mysterious emails from ‘SEO experts’ and wonder: Should I be worried? And what should I do?
In short, your website and marketing efforts have value to them. If the salesperson can poach you as a client, they generate revenue for the agency and a healthy commission for themselves.
To be more specific, SEO cold outreach is an entire industry in its own right. Many of these agencies – or individuals claiming to be agencies – scrape publicly available data from thousands of websites, which they use to conjure up contact details and create a sales pitch.
If you’ve got a website with traffic (or even a brand-new one with the potential for it), you’re a sales target; it’s no more complex than that.
Even though these emails might seem specific to your business, with details referring to your company and web pages, they’re probably automated.
A cursory audit of a website can be completed in just a few seconds with the right tools, and it’s not difficult to mail merge the results. Most senders won’t even have glanced at your website – they certainly won’t know what your business does, how it works and what you want from your digital marketing.
If the SEO agencies offer data, such as the organic traffic to your website, it’s likely generated from third-party tools such as Ahrefs. These tools do not measure actual traffic. Instead, they use estimates based on keyword rankings and approximated search volumes.
In our experience, the actual data and the estimated data are often very different, especially for local searches, where volumes are low and estimates inaccurate.
The only way to obtain reliable traffic data is through Google Analytics and Google Search Console, which is only accessible to you and your agency. Building a new marketing ‘strategy’ off cherry-picked data that these wannabe agencies know is inaccurate is a bad way to start a working relationship.
Look, we’re not calling them outright fraudsters (not all of the time).
Identifying faults in a current marketing campaign is a fair sales tactic – just like a roofer will point out cracked tiles to their customers and propose a solution. In all honesty, we’ve done the same – but only when we’ve performed a thorough, personalised audit of a prospective customer’s website.
The issues arise from the manner in which these audits are performed. As mentioned above, they are often automated, with little insight into your company. Either the ‘faults’ are irrelevant or they’re downright wrong.
Here are the most common ‘recommendations’ we’ve seen in these emails and why you shouldn’t worry about them:
The ‘correct’ title tagging is dependent on your keyword targeting, so external agencies can’t say whether your title tagging is correct without knowledge of your SEO strategy. Any other on-page ‘faults’ are similar – without knowing what was agreed, they can’t know what was right.
Domain authority is a metric calculated by third-party tools, based on the number and quality of backlinks a domain has. Whether your domain authority is considered ‘low’ depends on the competition and your budget.
If you’re ranking well for your target keywords, your domain authority is ‘high enough’. Sure, everyone would like to have a high-authority backlink from a national newspaper, but if the would-be agency is claiming they can deliver such feats on a low budget, they’re trying to hoodwink you.
This data also comes from third-party tools, which are notoriously inaccurate at measuring keyword rankings for local (relatively low-volume) keywords. The keywords they count are inaccurate and limited in scope.
Your agency tracks your actual target keywords in a dedicated tool, which offers a far more accurate reckoning and often demonstrates better results.
Third-party tools are also bad at tracking traffic, especially for the small(er) websites. Only by referring to actual traffic data in Google Search Console and Google Analytics can you get a clear picture, and only you and your incumbent agency can do that.
Sometimes they’re just trying to catch a bite. If their message claims your website has ‘issues’, they haven’t even bothered with an automated audit. They’re hoping that when you reply to their message, they can roll you up in misinformation and make the hard sell.
Sometimes the data is just plain wrong. We’ve seen outreach emails flagging ‘broken pages’ that don’t exist or saying a site isn’t mobile-friendly when it absolutely is.
What many of these emails leave out is context. They cherry-pick potential red flags but ignore the actual goals of your site – your traffic quality, lead generation, conversions, or whether your content is even supposed to rank for what they’re measuring.
It’s like a mechanic pointing out a scuffed hubcap and telling you to write off the vehicle and buy a new car – oh, and guess what, they just so happen to be selling theirs.
In short, if you’re receiving good traffic and enough leads, you’ve got nothing to worry about.
These are actual examples forwarded to us by our clients. Let’s take a look at why they don’t make sense.
These are actual examples forwarded to us by our clients. Contact details have been removed for the sake of privacy. Let’s take a look at why they don’t make sense.
Let’s face it, this audit hasn’t even happened yet. Where is this magical report? And why don’t they include some of the details if they’re so damning? They’re just knocking on the door to see if you’re home
First things first – have they actually visited your website other than to fill out your contact form?
And did they really trawl through all your keywords to see which were ranking on Google, Yahoo and Bing? How would they even know which keywords you are targeting?
Surely if they had put all of this work into discovering these ‘poor rankings’, it wouldn’t have taken much to include the detail in the message to make their pitch more convincing.
This is auto-generated spam – ignore
Okay, this one is a little more sophisticated. It’s detailed, backed up by ‘data’, and, above all, it’s actually alarming. But you only have to lift the lid a little to realise it’s inaccurate and misleading.
The data for this email was taken from AHRefs, which, as highlighted above, is based on estimates. It is particularly inaccurate for relatively low-volume, local keywords, as is the case here. Using the data from our keyword tracking software and Google Analytics, which shows the actual traffic data, we demonstrated that the opposite was true.
During this time period, traffic and rankings had improved substantially – the exact opposite of what the email claimed.
What’s more, the claim that the website ‘has not been optimised properly’ is vague for a reason – the website is optimised correctly. Its claim regarding the ‘Archive’ pages being incorrect is wrong and contrary to the client’s wishes.
At first glance, it’s an alarming email, but with accurate data and an open conversation, we were able to put our client’s mind at ease.
First things first: We wouldn’t blame you if you still had concerns. To the untrained eye, these audits can look professional and urgent. They use red text, charts and language that feeds on your fears.
If, after reading this, you’re still feeling insecure about your website’s performance, have an open conversation with your current agency. They shouldn’t get defensive.
In fact, we don’t mind at all when clients forward these emails to us. Aside from the fact that the sly tactics and outright falsehoods give us a good laugh in the office, the messages open up honest conversations and allow us to highlight some of our good work.
Need reassurance about a cold email or call you received? Get in touch – we’ll tell you exactly what’s real and what’s just noise.
Running a business can feel like spinning plates. Accounts, marketing, recruiting, inventory, prospecting – the to-do list goes on and on (and on…). And then on top of it all, another problem lands in your lap; a one-star rating on your Google Business Profile.
You’ve invested time and money into your website, and you’ve dabbled in SEO. The homepage looks good and appears to be ranking okay for the right keywords. But you still have a nagging concern: Is the website generating enough leads?
At times, a Google Business Profile (GBP) can feel like a website in its own right. It appears when someone searches your business, it displays your hours, phone number, directions, reviews and photos.
Between managing your fleet, sorting permits, handling logistics and juggling customer service, marketing can easily slip to the bottom of a skip hire company’s to-do list.
Changing agency wasn’t supposed to be this difficult. Really, it wasn’t. But your incumbents have decided to drag their feet because – well, just because, and it’s all turned into a bit of a nightmare.
They flood your inbox. They clutter your browser. They ring you up when you’ve finally – finally – found a moment of peace.
That’s right, we’re talking about companies offering ‘cheap’ digital marketing.
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