SEO spam - personal yet vague …with a high conversion rate!
June 30, 2009 – 11:11 amA friend/customer recently forwarded an email he received from an SEO company. The company sent a personalized form letter appeared to specifically created for the customer’s site. It pointed to specifics and generated some concern and fear….. I’m sure the response rate for these emails is high. Here’s the short email conversation where he asks about some specifics that this SEO company pointed out.
———-My Response———
Sure, no problem.
First of all, this email was, most likely, not written by hand and it was not created after someone reviewed our site manually. It’s just specific enough to be personal and seem relevant. This is really good spam. I assume you already know this. ….My partner firm uses this tactic and it works well for them.
Point 2: One question… relevant to what? This depends on the search term, the content of the page and of course, the actual page they’re referring to. A page about green widgets with a title of “green widgets model number WIDG-1000 for use with blue diamonds” contains some non “relevant” information. Only the green widget part is “relevant”… Though, the market for green widgets may deem the other information important. These guys may see your add for green widgets and tell you the title is only 20% relevant.
Point 3: They’re referring to dmoz.org. It’s a huge listing of sites that’s used by search engines and even people to find sites that are relevant to almost any topic. It used to be a potent inbound link and was worth the wait and time it takes to submit. It’s free to get listed but it can take weeks, months and even years to get in. The effectiveness of these listings is questionable these days.
-JB
—–Original Message—–
From: <CUSTOMER>
To: Jeremy Brooks
Subject: Fwd: Message from
I would like to undersatnd what thoer points 2 and 3 are just for my education.
Sent from my phone
Begin forwarded message:
From: Sales Team
> Date: June 30, 2009 3:40:43 AM PDT
> To: Sales
> Subject: Message from <CUSTOMER>
>
>
>
From: Sales Team
> Email: sales@auroin.com
>
> ——————————————————
>
> Subject: SEO – <CUSTOMER’S SITE>
> Dear Head of Business Development at
>
> Were you aware that you are paying every time your online marketing
> advertisement is clicked? It hurts! I know, as many of our clients have
> shared this frustration when I first talked to them about how to drive more
> quality prospects to their sites - without having to constantly pay for
> every click.
>
> We thought you might like to know some of the reasons why you are not yet
> getting more organic (free) search engine traffic for
> 1. Your home page rank is 5, this can be improved further.
>
> 2. Your title is 85% relevant. This can be improved for higher Google
> ranking
>
> 3. Open directory listing is not available.
>
>
> If you can stomach more bad news about what your site needs, and are curious
> to know what our working together would involve, then I would be glad to
> provide you with further detailed analysis in the form of a SEO SITE REPORT
> - FREE OF CHARGE. I would first need to know that you are serious about
> using our services, as the report would involve several hours of our
> research.
>
> To brief you about the company, we are an ISO 9001:2000 certified team of
> over 530 SEO specialists in the USA, UK, Australia and India and would like
> to talk with you about how you should be winning new business from the
> search engines, without paying advertisers over and over again for it.
>
> SEO is not instantaneous, it is not free, but it is the only sensible
> internet marketing choice. Your return on investment (ROI) after 6 months of
> SEO will be at least 3 times that of paid advertisements, and many times
> greater than our cost. In fact, we guarantee that in the first month of our
> work you will see an improvement in ranking, link popularity and traffic or
> we’ll work for free until you do! Our clients’ consistently tell us that
> their customers find them because they are at the top of Google. Being on
> the top left of Google (#1- #5 Organic positions) is the best thing you can
> do for your company’s website traffic and online reputation.
>
> Ironically, It’s very likely that had you spent your last 6 months of online
> marketing dollars on SEO instead of paid advertising that you would have 3
> times or greater the traffic today and not need the paid advertising at all.
>
>
> Fortunately you can still start today and begin getting that traffic in just
> a few weeks. We look forward to discussing our SEO plans with you. Please
> email or call us today +1 202.657.5242 or +1 202.657.5242 or +61 28.011.3995
> or +44 207.193. 0857
>
>
> Best Regards
> Sales Team