It seems there is an endless supply of people getting random solicitations by people claiming they can help with SEO or getting leads. I want to cover this in a newsletter.

I too never go a week without someone sending me an email asking something along the lines of: “Hey MyOnlineToolbox, I just got this email, what do you think?” We randomly selected the most recent examples from the endless stream of scams. Look at your emails closely and I’ll point out a few things that are suspicious.

Unsolicited offers to improve your rankings are a scam. Many of them come from a gmail or other free email service. Why, if they are so successful at SEO Ranking Improvement, don’t they guide you to their own business website to learn more? A smart SEO expert would always guide you to their website to improve their own rankings.

Unsolicited ranking reports are created automatically, and they are also a scam. These emails say something like, “Hi, enclosed is a report for your site I generated and you received a score of 48 out of 100. Please review it so we can discuss how we can quickly make a decision to increase your leads.” Trust me, someone blasting out emails isn’t manually generating any report for you, and they definitely didn’t look at it before sending it. There are many tools you can use for free that generate these reports. Many of them are automated; enter your website address and a report comes up.

One such tool is Woorank.com. The WooRank for the MyOnlineToolbox site at time of this post is 51. Anyone know if that is actually good or bad? Anyone want to guess if we really care?

Unsolicited requests asking for your photos so they can further your profile are a scam. These usually start with something like, “Our customers are checking out your profile, so I want to add your latest photos for you.” They come from someone with a fancy title like Contractor Relationship Manager.

What does it mean when they say customers are checking out your profile? A better question is, who set up the profile in the first place? What will they do with your photos when you send them without reviewing the Terms & Conditions on their website first? The usual next step is an offer to advertise with them, or pay them for the leads you helped generate when you sent your photos.

Another scam is getting an unsolicited communication asking you to Claim or Confirm your Google My Business Account.    Usually it begins with some information that sounds correct, and most of it is already publicly visible which is why it sounds correct in the first place.  Now that your guard is down, they move into a sales pitch for some form of SEO related topic.  The bottom line is you were tricked to start the conversation into whatever it is they are selling. We do not support any follow up conversations that begin with a cold call trick to charge you money.

An unsolicited email informing you that Google is removing your account is a scam. The goal is to get you nervous by saying that all reviews of your company will be purged if you don’t update important aspects of your website. If this was true (and it’s not), you’d receive a notice from Google, not a third party. And Google won’t remove your site simply because it’s terrible at drawing traffic. They won’t reward you with higher rankings, but they won’t remove your website.

One funny scam begins with an email that says “Your Title Tags are preventing you from getting more leads.” It follows with a quick comment like, “We can see you are having problems getting more leads and your current provider is missing one of the most important aspects for your website to get leads. Please reply with your website, phone number and email so we can call to provide fast and inexpensive options.”

Title Tags are important, it’s one of the first things we address in my classes or consulting. But if what they see you doing on your website is so bad, why are they asking you to provide your website address? Wouldn’t they already know?

Our suggestion is to move these communications to Junk as fast as possible without going beyond the first sentence. Use the communications as nothing other than a reminder to be proactive and take a few quick actions you can do on your own to generate leads. Make a new Facebook post. Pursue another review for either your website or on Google. Add a few new photos to your website.

Don’t get distracted from your own marketing plan when you get a blind solicitation that is feeding off the industry’s weakness at marketing. You only have few minutes to allocate for marketing so stay focused on what you can do, not on these diversions.

Your own marketing efforts, with a little focused education and consistency, will pay off immensely in the long run.

We could even finish the blog post without having yet another solicitation arrived in the inbox, and it brought up even yet another topic, so look closely here by scrolling to the bottom and it even says “Disclaimer, this is an Advertisement”.

I have been checking your website quite often. It has seen that the main keywords are still not in top 10 rank.

I have found out that there are few things need to be done for better performances (Some we Discuss in this email).
Let me tell you some of them –

1. Title Tag Optimization
2. Meta Tag Optimization (Description, keyword and etc)
3. Heading Tags Optimization
4. Targeted keywords are not placed into tags
5. Alt / Image tags Optimization
6. Google Publisher is missing
7. Custom 404 Page is missing
8. The Products are not following Structured markup data
9. Word-Press is not installed properly, in the blogs
10. Website Speed Development (Both Mobile and Desktop ) Please check via Google Developer – https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/
11. Favicon needs to be changed too.
12.Off –Page SEO work
13. Lots more to tell you

You can see these are the things that need to be done properly to make the keywords others to get into the top 10 spot in Google Search & your sales Increase.

Also there is one more thing to mention that you did thousands of links that time for your website, which are considered as spam after Google roll outs several updates of Panda and penguin. We need to remove them too.

Please give us a chance to fix these errors and we will give you rank on these keywords.

Many thanks for your time and consideration,

Disclaimer: This is an advertisement. We have found your mail address through our own efforts on the web search and not through any illegal way. If you find this mail unsolicited, please reply with “unsubscribe” in the subject line and we will take care that you do not receive any further promotional mail.

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