SEO Spam Emails: 5 Signs You Got a Junk SEO Proposal

When you love SEO as much as I do, it breaks your heart to see email spammers and lazy “search marketing gurus” clutter people’s inbox with awful SEO proposals.

In this scenario, I define awful as lacking in content creation and filled with unrealistic / unethical link building among other things.

These proposals will also mislead the customer or recipient on which SEO tasks actually lead to better rankings and more traffic.

If SEO is new to you, don’t worry – I’ll break these items down in more detail as I run through the top 5 signs you just received SEO email spam.

1.They promise a large guaranteed number of links per month

If you’re getting a cold email from a SEO company that says they guarantee 50 or more links per month and they have no idea what your business or industry is about, that’s a huge red flag. Small businesses, for example, aren’t going to be able to add 50 do-follow links a month. It just wouldn’t be possible without an insane budget.

Natural link building during a SEO campaign is important. Links are still anywhere from 20% – 40% of Google’s algorithm.

This part of SEO marketing includes handcrafted guest blog outreach, networking with people in your field on social media, and sharing custom designed infographics about your product, service or customer demographic.

Someone who cold emails you hasn’t done any industry specific research yet, so there’s no way they could know how many links per month they can get your business.

2. There’s nothing about new blog posts or web pages

Another trademark of SEO email spam is a proposal that doesn’t include anything about new content.

These proposals generally focus on unethical link building (which can get your website penalized) and some weird guarantee about getting all your content indexed (Google does this 99% of the time all by itself).

But the bulk of SEO success comes from 1500+ word articles that are well researched, hit your top keywords and get shared on social media because they’re so useful. Articles and web pages that are really well done will be favored by Google’s algorithm, which is evolving to focus more on great content, informational depth and UX.

If you have a lot of different keywords you want to rank for, you basically need a web page or blog to target each one. You can update existing content, but SEO service providers should always have a plan to create new content for you that will be search optimized.

3. The spam emailer wants to bill you for things that don’t add value

SEO email spam will often contain proposal items like:

• We submit your site to all major search engines
• We’ll provide weekly rankings checkups
• We can make 5 updates to your site each month
• We’ll remove any robots.txt files blocking your website

It all sounds sort of good, right? But weekly rankings checkups are just that – where is the work to actually improve rankings?

And 5 website updates each month? I do that many in a day sometimes.

Plus, all major search engines will index your site on their own, and I’ve never met a company that had a robots.txt file blocking their website from Google. Unless the web designer left that in there after the job was done, it’s just not something to worry about.

So don’t let this type of SEO jargon fool you – none of it adds much value or is even totally necessary. 

4. Greetings of the day!

Let me explain.

The last couple years I’ve been working with my friend Anna, who runs a marketing agency in San Francisco. Every now and then we screenshot the spammiest marketing service emails we receive and then text them to each other.