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 an Angela using an @gmail.com email, although a reply came from Stacey via an @hexagentechnologies.org email (although Hexagen’s site is actually at hexagentechnologies.com!).
Dear whyeaster.com Owner,
Hope you are doing well.
This is just to inform you that Google Ads are great for instant ranking & generating leads for your business, but what happens when you stop paying?
You stop paying Google for clicks, you will be no where in search engine and the leads will stop coming.
Also you have to pay for every clicks whether you get a conversion or not.
If you haven’t optimized your website organically then you are losing a lot.
Ranking high organically is great because:
Organic results are non-paid.
Organic results are not “sponsored”. Users trust organic results more.
Organic results have a higher conversion rate and are more profitable.
Imagine having a website that is optimized with SEO and producing organic results for the keywords that matter to your business. You could actually save the money you’ve been spending on Google Ads.
Ready to optimize your website? Simply reply to this email and we’ll provide a complete plan of action.
Looking forward to your reply.
Warm Regards,
Angela Gates | DM Expert .
I replied and got a reply from Stacey. So let’s see what their report says about my Easter site!
Their Report & Recommendations
The report/plan I received from them was in the form of another email which is below.
Dear business owner of <<whyeaster.com>>,
It is my pleasure to write you this mail. As per your email conversation with my team member, Angela Gates, you were interested in our branding and marketing plan for your website.
I have undergone a thorough analysis of your website, it is amazing to browse through. But there are some major errors I have noticed:
Low online presence – Facebook and Twitter present yet less online mentions: SMO, SMM required
Technical errors:
Low Keyword Density
Alt Attributes to images missing
No Web Analytics tool
Very long Meta Title
Low Text to HTML ratio: 9.83% (Ideal> 20%)
Mobile non-responsive
Fix these errors to optimize organic SEO ranking.
Also, your website design does not meet present google and SEO standard: Consider a Redesign of your site.
Because of all these errors you are losing about 60% of traffic per week.
Thanks & Regards
Stacey Budd
Business Analyst
So let’s look, in some more details, at the ‘technical issues’ they say the site has…
Low online presence – Facebook and Twitter present yet less online mentions
For whyeaster, I actually use whychristmas’s Twitter and Facebook accounts, to save having extra social accounts. These are linked at the bottom of every page on the site. So this could be better but isn’t really an issue.
Low Keyword Density.
This is WRONG – The site is about Easter. The word Easter is on the site A LOT!
Alt Attributes to images missing.
This is WRONG – All the images on the site have alt tags. Some are ’empty’ – which is the correct thing to do with visual elements are only adding ‘eye candy’ with no ‘meaning’ on the page.
No Web Analytics tool
Well yes and no… I’m not using any third party analytics tools (like Google Analytics) because I don’t want or need to track my site’s visitors. However, I am using the analytics tools from the server’s logs. So this is basically WRONG!
Very long Meta Title
Well again, yes and no. The current title tag is 100 characters long. The recommendation from Google is that about 80 is about as long as you should go. However, 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 and this error isn’t actually applicable to my site (and being longer won’t actually hurt you, it’s just that not all of it will be displayed)…
Low Text to HTML ratio: 9.83% (Ideal> 20%)
This is also known as ‘thin content’ with some SEO people. Although it’s the home page of the site, it’s actually one of the least entered pages via search engines. The site has lots of pages about Easter, and that’s how most people actually enter the site using search engines – like going straight into the page about The Easter Story (Which is #1 on all of Google for ‘the easter story’ out of several hundreds of million of results!!!).
Mobile non-responsive
This is WRONG – The site is fully mobile friendly and passes mobile friendliness tests with flying colours!
Also, your website design does not meet present google and SEO standard: Consider a Redesign of your site.
This is WRONG – The site gets VERY high scores on web and SEO tests. I’m guessing this is in all their emails as a scare tactic!
So out of their 8 ‘errors’ about the site, four are wrong, two are irrelevant and the other two could be issues but actually aren’t…!
They also say: “Because of all these errors you are losing about 60% of traffic per week.” Well considering they have no idea about what my level of traffic is, I’d love to know what magic ball they’re using to come up with this figure – again more meaningless scare tactics!
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: http://hexagentechnologies.com/
For HTML Validation, their site has: 31 Errors and 5 Warnings! (My site doesn’t have any…)
On Google Pagespeed their site gets:
Desktop: 86/100
Mobile: 58/100 (That’s actually pretty good for the site’s of SEO spammers.)
My site gets:
Desktop: 100/100
Mobile: 97/100 – so both considerably better using Google’s own speed testing tool!
On GTMetrix their site gets:
F (41%) / D (60%)
On GTMetrix my site gets:
A 94% / A (94%) – so my site is better!
Using the ‘WAVE’ Accessibility Testing Tool, my site has a clean bill of health – their site has 12 accessibility errors and 9 alerts
Their site doesn’t use SSL/HTTPS. They don’t have a privacy policy and they collect a visitor’s IP via tracking analytics. All three of those are not good.
They also have no ‘Heading 1’ tag on their home page. This is one of the most important things in SEO – that an SEO company doesn’t have one, shows you about all you need to know…
They also don’t have a meta ‘description’ on their home page – again this is a vital SEO factor! Opps…
Their about page has lots of filler latin ‘lorum ipsum’ text left in and all their ‘staff’ are default stock images – so not real people from the company (hmmm, not good).
All the ‘social links’ in their site’s footer are broken – and if they weren’t they’d go to the accounts belonging to the creator of the site theme they’re using.
So basically they don’t even know how to set-up their own site properly.
Conclusion
Sadly this is yet another SEO spammer that doesn’t even know how to set-up their own site correctly.
They also don’t seem to understand the basics of SEO with all the non error ‘errors’ they say my site has…
So if Hexagen Technology say your site really needs some help, I wouldn’t bother.
But as ever, the choice is yours…