SEO Lessons From Email Spammers

Have you ever received an email saying something like this:

“We are interested to increase traffic to your website, please get back to us in order to discuss the possibility in further detail.”

If you have a contact form on your website and have not gotten a message like this in the past then consider yourself either very lucky or you aren’t getting any traffic at all.  A common line I regularly tell HubSpot customers is, “there are only two types of people that fill out contact us forms, people that are desperate and people that are trying to sell you something.”  An email like the one above falls into the latter category.

Being someone who teaches people how to increase traffic to their website on a daily basis I decided to take the bait and see just how they could "help" me.

“Sure, I’d love to increase traffic to my website.  How can you help me?”

I never received an email back, but a few days later I received a phone call.  Kind of creepy right!?  How did these people find my phone number?  Then I remembered that they probably used a service like WHOIS to gather Domain Name information about me and grabbed my number.  I don’t have a land line so they called my cell phone and probably like most people I don’t answer the phone when I don’t recognize the number.  An interesting voicemail was left and an email was sent back to me shortly with the following information.

So the first response is why would they need to know my domain name?  So I wrote them as such.

I don't understand.  You guys filled out a form on my website and sent an email to my address and still don't know what my domain name is?  You reached out to me.

Despite that I'll see if I can answer your questions.  See below.

This was all about six weeks ago and I still haven’t heard back from them.  I think it’s safe to assume that the gig is up.  They realized they were dealing with someone who wasn’t completely clueless.

Marketing Takeaway

So what I really hope that you get from this story is that getting traffic to your website isn’t something that you can simply “outsource” like this.  Think about it this way.  You pay all this money and these guys get you ranked #1 on the perfect keyword.  Search engines start sending traffic to your website.  The content on your website sucks and you don't have anything of real value or any compelling conversion forms to convert leads .  So what is the point of ranking if you are wasting all that traffic?  These visitors will leave your website and NEVER come back.  Don't fall into this trap!

What they were really selling is SEO services, which also isn’t rocket science and something we have taught thousands of small to medium sized businesses 80% of what they need to know in less than an hour.  At the end of the day SEO is a numbers game and the way you play that numbers game is to create lots of valuable content on your own site. 

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