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 Daniel who was using a gmail.com email, although a subsequent replies have come from Sukanya from Infoicon Technologies with a infoicontechnologies.com email address (and the bit before the @ was a random looking ‘sales’ type one…).
Here’s the initial email from Daniel:
Hi
We know you must have been receiving unsolicited emails like these, WE ARE DIFFERENT.Because:
o We provide you a top notch white label SEO dashboard for your client.
o Our dashboard integrates, Google analytics, Search console, SEMRUSH, Moz, Ahrefs data in one place.
o We are technical SEO people and are geared towards performance only. We have a success score of 80% for our SEO campaigns
o We are working with 100+ SEO agencies which have grown to be some of the US’s top agencies in their area because of our backend operationsGive us a try, I am 100% certain you will like us.
If you are looking for a reliable partner, you will find it with us.
If you are interested and want to give it a shot, I would be happy to share our Methodologies, past work details and client Testimonials and Prices.
Please reply with your Skype id or phone number to start the chat.
Regards,
Daniel Sam
Business Development Executive.
Daniel is right that I’ve had lots of emails like this! But I’m afraid he’s wrong about Infoicon Technologies being that different, as we’ll see below!
Anyway, I replied to Daniel, saying that I couldn’t do Skype and I got a reply from Sukanya.
Hello James,
Greetings of the day!
My name is Sukanya, I am the Business Development Manager with Infoicon Technologies. I get to know about your requirement with my online marketing executive Daniel. From now I will be taking this conversation ahead.
Yes, I think I can do a lot for your website (https://seospam.xyz/) and help you to get maximum organic traffic on your website. For that I will follow certain on-going SEO process that will be as per the Google trends. If I talk about your website I have reviewed your website from Search Engine Optimization perspective and found it is not upto the mark hence not ranking great on Google.
We have designed Customized SEO packages to cater different clients needs, based upon your web presence our Bronze Package will be a great fit for you which includes 10-12 keywords optimization along with loads of other activities.
Regular pricing of Bronze Package is USD 175/ month, however perceiving a long lasting business relationship ahead I will be glad to offer you our Bronze Package at a discounted pricing of GBP 120/month.
I hope above mentioned information shall help you understand our offering, please have a look and let me know your views so that we can take this forward in accordance.
At your disposal for any further query or concern you might have.
Looking forward to hear from you soon,
Thanks & Regards,
Sukanya [surname removed for privacy]
I replied to Sukanya asking why they thought my site needed help, as his email hadn’t actually told me… and I got the following reply from Sukanya:
Hi James,
Good to hear back from you.
As I have taken a quick analysis of your website, I found some major on-page shortcomings like:
We didn’t detect an analytics tool installed on this website. Google analytics let you measure visitor activity on your website. You should have at least one analytics tool installed.
Backline score of your website is poor. The backlinks score is calculated by looking at a combination of link signals. This includes the overall number of backlinks together with the number of linking domains, as well as rating the overall quality of the backlinks pointing to a website.
You need to improve the social media presence
Traffic estimation on your website is low. It means you are not getting maximum visitors for your service.
Fir this you need to follow certain off page SEO process that will be ongoing and as per the Google trends.
First, I will resolve these issues to make your website 100% searh engine friendly and then follow some off-page promotional activities that will help you to take your website on the top pages of Google and other search engines.
Best Regards,
Sukanya
Their Report & Recommendations
Let’s see about those four items that Sukanya are “major on-page shortcomings”.
We didn’t detect an analytics tool installed on this website. Google analytics let you measure visitor activity on your website. You should have at least one analytics tool installed.
Yes, they are right. I don’t have Google Analytics on my site. I used to, but now I use a different, server based, analytics tools. There are a couple of reasons for this. The UK Government has updated its advise about how tracking cookies can be used on sites and this affect things like Google Analytics. I don’t want visitors to my site to have an annoying pop-up and I like privacy, so I’m happy to now use a non tracking system… So basically this is WRONG.
Backline score of your website is poor. The backlinks score is calculated by looking at a combination of link signals. This includes the overall number of backlinks together with the number of linking domains, as well as rating the overall quality of the backlinks pointing to a website.
That is all good information. However, I think my site is actually doing pretty well for backlinks! Looking at their site, they also have lots of backlinks. But the vast majority of their links come from people having a link to their site in the site’s footer. This can be seen as somewhat spammy. Some of my clients have links to me, but I certainly don’t make it a requirement of using me (like many SEO companies do…).
You need to improve the social media presence
Well that’s rather vague! I’m very active on Twitter and frankly that’s all the social media I want to do! I’d rather spend my time making good sites (and having a life) rather than spending all my time doing fancy social media things!
Traffic estimation on your website is low. It means you are not getting maximum visitors for your service.
They have absolutely NO WAY of knowing how many visitors my site gets! So the statement is basically meaningless.
So those are supposedly four ‘on page’ shortcomings. Only NONE OF THEM are ‘on-page’ things at all! On-page means things like the content on a site and how it’s coded. Anyway, ignoring that they’re not ‘on-page’ things; one of the four is simply wrong; one is meaningless and two could indeed be better, but certainly wouldn’t be ‘silver bullets’ or particularity ‘major’ for SEO…
Remember that, in his first email, Sukanya also said that he looked at my site and “found it is not upto the mark hence not ranking great on Google”; well, I’d love to know just how know he knows that as he doesn’t actually know what I’m trying to rank for! So again a meaningless (and could be argued scare-tactic) statement. If you Google ‘minehead web design’ I’m on the first page – so that’s pretty good then (you know as I’m a web designer from Minehead)…
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.infoicontechnologies.com
For HTML Validation, as we saw above, their site has 4 errors. My site has no errors!
On Google Pagespeed their site gets:
Desktop: 35/100
Mobile: 22/100
My site gets:
Desktop: 99/100
Mobile: 96/100 – so both considerably better using Google’s own speed testing tool!
On GTMetrix their site gets:
F(34%) / E(56%)
On GTMetrix my site gets:
A 97% / B (89%) – so again much better!
Using the ‘WAVE’ Accessibility Testing Tool, their site has 39 errors. My site has no errors!
They track site users with Google Analytics and a Facebook Pixel. There is a Privacy Policy on their site, but they don’t tell you that in their privacy policy (they also don’t say what cookies they use on their site…).
And rather hilariously there’s this para on their privacy policy:
Policy for Content And Anti-Spam
Infoicon Technologies keeps itself working to keep the website away from any kind of content spam, ad scams, and various other practices thar are deceptive. Infoicon Technologies strictly repudiates any attempt by an automated system or a user to take up any of its services that could result into tarnishing the services that are offered in the website. We never keep up with any content that can end up tricking other for their monetary profit. To remove such spams from our website, we employ a mechanism to keep a track.
It’s a shame that they don’t extend their anti-spam work to their spammy SEO emails…
On their contact page, they list two addresses. One in Noida, India and one in a suburb of New York. Each address has the image of a busy looking office behind them. But doing a reverse image search, shows that the photos are actually from the office of the bank ‘Goldman Sachs’! Looking at maps for the two addresses, the one in India is indeed in a business area. The USA address is for a small block of shops on a suburban street and at the address they give is a ‘mom and pop’ computer repair store (with a completely different name – I wonder if they have any connection whatsoever with them) – and certainly not a large and fancy office complex!
They also list US and UK phone numbers as well their main Indian one. However, the US phone number is actually an Indian one as it starts with +91 and putting the number into Google connects it to at least one other SEO company based in Noida! The UK number is indeed a UK number, for London, but the second part of the number is a subset popular with phone scammers of all types, so this is most likely a forwarding number and not a ‘real’ one for a place…
Conclusion
On their site, they do have lots of videos from happy customers from around the world. So it seems that Infoicon Technologies can indeed do some good work.
However, the fact that they have to spam to get customers, initially from random Gmail accounts; and the fact that when asked why my site needed help, their ‘major on-page shortcomings’ were neither on-page SEO items nor very major doesn’t inspire confidence in me.
And the fact that the SEO speed optimisation on their site (which is on-page!) is pretty terrible, it doesn’t greatly encourage me as to the kind of work they could do…
But the choice, as ever, is yours.