Somewhere along the line, you’ve gotten an email from an SEO company you never heard of, claiming your website is an SEO disaster. The email probably included some dire statistics about your website traffic and poor rankings for various keywords.
It’s a myth that these emails mean anything. The truth is, you’re merely getting a sales pitch by an SEO company that has no idea how well your website is optimized.
Why These Emails Are Misleading
Anybody with an Internet connection can pull SEO statistics for a website — free and fee-based rank checkers, backlink checkers and other SEO tools are a dime a dozen.
So there’s no trick or time that goes into the statistical “analysis” contained in many of these emails. However, this is just the tip of the iceberg:
- The accuracy of the data provided by these SEO tools varies, and there is really no way for a third party to know how accurate the statistics are for a given website — you’d need to compare the numbers with your own, protected website analytics to gauge accuracy.
- The SEO company that sent you the email has no knowledge of your SEO strategy. The keywords it arbitrarily checks rankings for may or may not be important to your SEO campaign.
- The SEO company that sent you the email can selectively report data that indicates poor performance, and not report data that indicates success. For instance, if you have a rock-solid backlink profile, there may be no mention of this, while instead you read about horrible rankings for three keywords that are not relevant to your campaign.
The reality is, this type of email is a sales technique. A reputable SEO company will make a diligent effort to provide truly useful information, but even then, any conclusions drawn from it can only be tentative.
If you really want to find out how well your SEO is doing, hire a consultant. We offer full-blown SEO consulting services for companies that want more than a cursory review of their campaigns. If you have a big-budget SEO campaign underway, and/or if your results are flat or declining, an A-to-Z review is the only way to reliably identify the core performance issues.