This is one in a series of posts reviewing and looking at how some of the SEO companies which use bulk emails/spam with ‘we can help your terrible site’ type emails really can (and actually mostly can’t!) help your site.
Read some simple explanations of some of the SEO terms used on this post…
This email came from a James using an @digitalmarketinggroup.info email, although subsequent replies have come from James via an @delesys.com email, and after the initial email he talked about using their main site/business delesys.com. (digitalmarketinggroup.info isn’t really a site; it’s made using GoDaddy’s free site builder and just points things towards delesys.com).
Hi whychristmas.com Owner,
Hope you are doing great.
My name is James Parker, and I’m a SEO Specialist. I went through your whychristmas.com for some research and got to know few points.
You seem to have a great website, and maybe, you would love to see it on the first page of Google, Yahoo, and Bing.
In today’s competitive market SEO is more important than ever, it provides your website visibility, branding, web traffic, a high ROI, credibility, and insight into customer behavior.
So, if you have a website, then you really need to promote it in the right way. We can help you with this to get the attention of your target audience.
I have compiled a SEO Analysis Report of your whychristmas.com which lists all the areas that your website needs improvement in and I would be glad to share with you Complete SEO Analysis Report of your website in our next mail.
So if you are interested, then please let me know. We will prepare a complete Proposal with our action plan for your website which will give you a brief idea on your website’s current status and our work strategies. We can send you our past work details, company information and an affordable quotation with the best offer.
Waiting for your response!
Thanks & Regards
James Parker, (SEO Specialist)
So I replied and got a reply from James. This SEO spam was for my big Christmas information site (www.whychristmas.com). During each December it gets millions and millions of visits and is #1 on the whole of Google for a huge number of Christmas searches – so any SEO advice about the site is always ‘interesting’…
Their Report & Recommendations
The report/audit I received from them was in the form of another email – no attachments this time. The email is below.
Your website is presently lacking the On-page ranking factors that inhibits your targeted visitors/ customers to reach your webpage.
Major technical issues that need to be improved:
Website search engine tactics
Inappropriate title tag
Incompetent keywords segmentation
Thin content
Presence of broken links
Missing XML sitemap
Your webpage is not making proper use of header tags
We appreciate your chosen website builder platform but the On-page factors are constantly affecting its ranking and more importantly visitor/ customer outreach ratio than required. Doing SEO for your website will be a stepping stone to increase sales. A constant SEO would definitely give you utmost result of success.
Upon fixing the above mentioned technical issues, you will get to see a steep increase in ranking, target audience outreach, enhanced revenue generation platform.
Kindly let me know your interest towards the next step.
I will be looking forward to hearing from you soon.
Thanks
James Parker
All of these ‘issues’ seem to have come from a (free) and automated report done using the SEOptimer site (https://www.seoptimer.com/www.whychristmas.com) – I know this because James kindly sent me an email showing my score of ‘B’ and I know what that site looks like!
So let’s look, in some more details, at the issues they say the site has…
Website search engine tactics – Well, that’s a rather meaningless statement. Considering that my site is actually #1 on all of Google for a huge number of terms (like ‘the christmas story’) I think that over-all my tactics are pretty good…
Inappropriate title tag – Well, what the SEOptimer report actually says is that the title tag is a bit long. I agree that around 60 characters is the ideal but the length shown [on search engines] is now normally based on the size of the screen (maxing out on 600px with Google) so I’m actually happy with what I’ve got…
Incompetent keywords segmentation – Considering the site is about Christmas and the word Christmas is on the page 15+ times, I think that’s pretty good. Also although it’s the home page of the site, it’s actually one of the least entered pages via search engines. The site has A LOT of pages about Christmas, and that’s how most people actually enter the site using search engines (like going straight into the page about Christmas Trees).
Thin content – See above, this landing page isn’t designed to be content heavy!
Presence of broken links – The report actually said there is a SINGLE ‘broken link’. I know about that. It’s the sharing link for sharing a page of the site over WhatsApp. It’s hidden on Desktop/Laptop and it won’t actually work on desktop as you can only share to WhatsApp in mobile browsers!!!
Missing XML sitemap – One of the problems with relying on automated reports like this is that if something isn’t where the bot thinks it should be, it will through an incorrect error… There is an XML sitemap of the site – it was in a slightly unusual place (but that was ok); it’s now in a standard location.
Your webpage is not making proper use of header tags – Again, the home page is a landing page. It doesn’t have many HTML heading tags – it doesn’t need them. All the pages on the site use HTML heading tags as appropriate.
We appreciate your chosen website builder platform but the On-page factors are constantly affecting its ranking and more importantly visitor/ customer outreach ratio than required. – Another meaningless statement. That ‘website builder platform’ is me hand-coding everything on that site!
Doing SEO for your website will be a stepping stone to increase sales. A constant SEO would definitely give you utmost result of success. – Well, if James had actually looked at the site, rather than using an automated tool, he might have noticed that IT DOESN’T SELL ANYTHING!! So another meaningless statement.
So out of the nine ‘issues’, three were meaningless statements and the other six are either wrong or not appropriate.
Looking at Their Site
With SEO spammers, I also like to look at their sites, to see if they practice what they preach (I mean would you trust a plumber who had leaking and rusty pipes all over their own house?!); and also to compare their site with a site they say they can help…
Their site is: https://www.delesys.com [edit: Jan 2021 – it seems that the delesys site is no longer online!]
As they just seemed to have used the SEOptimer tool, let’s see what their score is on it! Oh, it’s C+ – so a worse score than my site! (https://www.seoptimer.com/www.delesys.com)
For HTML Validation, their site has: 9 errors & 40 warnings – my site has none!
On Google Pagespeed their site gets:
Desktop: 58/100
Mobile: 21/100 (THAT’S TERRIBLE!!!)
My site gets:
Desktop: 100/100
Mobile: 98/100 – so both considerably better using Google’s own speed testing tool!
On GTMetrix their site gets:
D (60%) / D (62%)
On GTMetrix my site gets:
A 98% / A (90%) – so again much better!
Using the ‘WAVE’ Accessibility Testing Tool, my site got a clean bill of health – their site has 17 errors and 29 alerts – that’s really not good.
For an SEO company, they also have a very serious SEO issues with their own site – it’s blocking search engines – REALLY! (They have ‘noindex,follow’ in the ‘robots’ meta tag. This means that they are actually asking search engines NOT TO INDEX their own site!!!)
The social icons in their site’s footer don’t actually link to anything. They also don’t have a privacy policy on the site – really not good.
Conclusion
I wouldn’t use the services of an SEO company that seems to rely on a free SEO scanner and might not have even visited my site… The fact that they’re asking search engines not to like their site, also doesn’t exactly inspire confidence…
The choice is yours, but I would seriously think about whether you want to use the services of a company that doesn’t seem to know how to set it’s own site up correctly.
There are variations on the introductory email. The latest as of February 2020 is as follows:
Dear [the commenter’s domain was in here but for privacy I’ve removed it!]
Hope you are doing good.
We’d like to inform you a very important issue regarding your website “redacted.com!” which is the reason why you are losing lots of traffic and conversion.
Your website is good in terms of design and content. However, it doesn’t follow Search Engine Guidelines – 2018-19. So, it has a very low visibility in organic search results.
We’ve done a thorough SEO audit of your website and found that it has a big potential to generate more revenue than what it might be earning at the present.
I strongly believe, our marketing campaign (Organic and paid) can help you to improve high visibility in organic search results and boost in conversion rate.
If you are interested in cost and recommendation, please reply to this email and one of our consultant will share the detailed proposal.
Regards,
Shannon Parker
Lead Consultant
[email protected]
So I try your trick of checking their web site. Must be http://www.growbusinessonnet.com, right? Apparently not. It is a go-between for https://www.usseoexpert.com. If the person cannot get that part right, I usually run for the hills.
Perhaps the only question to ask is who does do a good SEO job these days? Or is it a case of DIY SEO stuff using the right tools and techniques? If it is the latter, has anyone compiled all the latest knowledge and tools into one web page that one can rely on and use for their own web site?
Hi! Yes there are lots of dodgy SEO spammers out there. I’ve not done a review of ‘usseoexpert.com’ specifically. However, any ‘spammy front’ domain (digitalmarketingline.com) also forwards to usseoexpert.com. I’ve replied to two different emails from digitalmarketingline.com spammers and they replied ‘from’ two other SEO spammy companies – see https://seospam.xyz/2019/06/17/seo-email-digitalmarketingline-com-zentryx-tech-solutions/ and https://seospam.xyz/2019/06/07/seo-email-digitalmarketingline-com-runexe-solutions/ – so you really do have to be careful…!
Yes you can do lots of SEO yourself these days. A couple of good blogs to have a read of are:
https://neilpatel.com/blog/
https://moz.com/blog
https://www.searchenginejournal.com/seo-guide/
https://ahrefs.com/blog/seo-basics/
https://searchengineland.com/guide/what-is-seo
https://www.bowlerhat.co.uk/seo-tips-beginners
You can also look and find ‘trustworthy’ sites (like mine!) and also check things like ‘Trustpilot’ to see what reviews are like from real people.
I don’t offer specific ‘SEO’ as I prefer the building side of sites rather than pure SEO side of things (although the sites I build are SEO friendly…). However, I still might be able to help.
I hope that all makes sense.