Have you ever gotten an email like this?
We got one just last week. Somehow it got past our spam filters.
We’ve decided to publish this and leave out the man’s name and contact information. No point in naming particular individuals, as these kinds of emails are all too common in the industry.
Our problem with this email is not that he contacted us cold. Cold outreach is a legitimate business-building strategy when done right.
Our problem with this email is that it’s full of lies and deception, meant to make the recipient feel like their SEO isn’t enough. In other words, they sent this email to the wrong people.
At SEO Guru Atlanta, our reputation has allowed us to grow consistently for 13 years in operation when many fly-by-night SEO agencies popped up and disappeared. These types of SEO agencies use low-touch tactics to find clients and use language that preys on their insecurities. They take advantage of the fact that SEO takes time to see results in order to lock clients into long-term contracts. By the time they’ve paid for six months of service, it’s already too late.
So how do these spammers lie and deceive prospective clients into working with them?
How SEO Agencies & Freelancers Deceive Business Owners
Let’s go back to the email he sent. Here’s what he claims is wrong with our site:
The sender provides no proof that these are problems for SEOGuruAtlanta.com. Whenever we encounter issues such as these, we will use SEO tools to verify whether or not it’s the case.
He claims that we have a low online presence for competitive keyword phrases. That’s not true at all: one of our biggest sources of traffic comes from search engines! This is unlike most SEO agencies, who find SEO too competitive in our industry. Only the best, most optimized sites can have top rankings for SEO-related keywords. We rank #1 for the term “SEO Guru” and we rank on the front page for “seo company atlanta”.
This happens when a company decides it’s a good idea to send out mass mailings to gigantic lists of companies. They make claims that cannot be verified and “personalize” their marketing with lies.
Here is the next part of the email that this person sent:
This part implies that they did a full audit of our website, as we do at SEO Guru Atlanta free of charge for anyone who wants it. But we’ll show you that this is not what they did!
Here is the following part of the email:
This isn’t so much an “action plan” as it is a list of services. “Complexity” is meant to present these things as difficult or something that the business owner isn’t already doing. If they had actually audited SEO Guru Atlanta, they would have noticed that we regularly check the items on this list and fix them when they crop up! For example, we do regular scans on our website for duplicate content; there’s nothing complex about it. Anyone can use Copyscape on their website to check for duplicate content. Anyone can use SEO software to check for these issues.
Clearly, this spammer didn’t actually do an audit and wanted it to seem like they did one.
They then proceed to tell us what they will do for us off-site:
Again, this isn’t the result of an audit. It’s just a list of things they’ll do. They give you a number of backlinks they’ll build and posts they’ll make, but they say nothing about the quality of the backlinks or the website content. For all we know, they could be using unedited copy-paste content from ChatGPT and backlinks to random directories that will hurt your SEO instead of help it. Why not mention the quality of the backlinks?
Our favorite part of the email, though, is at the end:
“We are not spammers” despite spamming us with services we don’t want. They don’t follow CAN-SPAM regulations as they have not provided business info. This is textbook spam.
Why Trust SEO Guru Atlanta?
Our website ranks #1 for “SEO Guru” out of over 25 billion search results. We’ve demonstrated that we can optimize our own site for the search engines. But that’s not all. We’ve had hundreds of satisfied clients and several #1 ranked sites for highly competitive keywords over the years.
We’ve been around since before the biggest Google algorithm updates, and our clients have not only survived these updates, but actually improved their rankings in the long run! Most SEO tactics fall apart as soon as one big Google update happens.
You can read our customer testimonials here. If you want proven results from a team led by one of the foremost experts in online marketing, schedule a free consultation with us below!
