This week one of our clients got an email from ‘Steve’ to say he had reviewed their site and found loads of issues with it etc.
Luckily the client forwarded it to us and we went over it and discussed it.
It got us thinking however about the millions of companies and business people who get these things every day.
How do they respond? Do they delete them? Do they email Steve back asking him to fix all these problems?
What would you do?
Email from a spammer about SEO issues on a client site.
Firstly, the obvious things
‘Steve’ seems to be a nice guy although we don’t recognise him.
We’ve never spoken to him and we’ve never asked him to check our website despite him explaining he’s been checking it ‘often’.
Most people would have switched off by this point and deleted the email.
If you haven’t then you might notice the weird language and grammar.
But then again we’ve met loads of business people who can’t spell or write very well either…
But another thing that might put you off is the fact there are no contact details for ‘Steve’ – no phone number, no company name and no address. Why is he being so secretive?
At this point most of us would delete the email – and we’d be right to.
However we looked at what ‘Steve’ had highlighted as issues on our website.
Does the list make sense?
So going through points 1 to 12 we found that a number of them were ok advice, maybe not explained well.
(We should mention that the clients site was perfectly fine and optimised well and also in the top 10 search results for his keywords).
However, a number of points in the list made sense.
Correct usage of tags, ensuring you have good keywords on your pages and improving website speed are all good things to do as part of your search engine optimisation.
A number of other points were lies such as The Products are missing structured data – we have no products, or Word-Press is not correctly installed – yes it is.
So what is the correct response to something like this?
Send it to your web developer.
The best thing is always to pass it on to your website developer and ask them for feedback.
Your web guy can then cover each point and explain what is correct and what is made up.
It’s very easy to dismiss emails like this but very occasionally they can highlight something which your site is missing.
After that just delete the email.
Remember: never click on any links in any email unless you absolutely trust the sender.