You’ve just launched your new business website, and suddenly your inbox is filling up with concerning emails. “Your website has critical SEO errors!” “Your Google ranking is in danger!” “We noticed your website is missing from Google!” Sound familiar?
As a website owner, these messages can be alarming. After all, you’ve invested time and money into your site, and these emails suggest something’s seriously wrong. But before you click that reply button, let’s talk about what’s really happening and how to protect your business from these predatory practices.
What these SEO spam emails look like
These emails follow a predictable pattern. They typically start with a worrying statement about your website’s performance. There is usually a huge scary sounding hook designed to scare you into action, and are then followed by a list of supposedly critical issues. Here’s what you might see:
“I noticed your website [yourwebsite.com] is missing important SEO elements. Your competitors are ranking higher than you on Google. We can fix these critical errors and get you to page 1 of Google.”
The dead giveaway? They rarely provide specific details about the actual problems. Instead, they use vague, threatening language designed to create anxiety about your website’s performance.
Why these emails are problematic
Beyond the obvious spam factor, these emails represent a larger issue for small business owners. They prey on common concerns about digital marketing and SEO performance. Many business owners already feel uncertain about their website’s effectiveness, and these emails exploit that uncertainty.
I’ve had several clients in the past who receive these emails and freak out, thinking that their website isn’t set up well, and that there is a huge problem that is costing them business.
The truth here is in almost all cases, these are automated tools to harvest email addresses from newly registered domains, then blast out thousands of identical messages. They’re hoping to catch business owners at a vulnerable moment – right after launching a new website when they’re naturally concerned about its success.
How to evaluate SEO claims
Instead of falling for spam emails, here’s how you can actually assess your website’s SEO health:
- Use Google Search Console – it’s free and provides genuine insights directly from Google
- Check if your website appears when you search for your business name
- Monitor your actual traffic through Google Analytics
These tools provide real, actionable data about your website’s performance – no spam required.
If you’ve used a quality website designer or developer, they should have installed and set up these tools as part of the go-live process.
If you’re concerned there might be serious SEO or technical issues, raise them with your designer or developer.
You hopefully have a good relationship built on trust, and they can help you evaluate the issues, using their expertise and knowledge to let you know if these are legitimate or not, and if they need to be addressed.
What good SEO actually looks like
Legitimate SEO is about creating a better experience for your website visitors while helping search engines understand your content. It involves:
- Creating quality content that answers your customers’ questions
- Ensuring your website loads quickly and works well on all devices
- Building a logical structure that’s easy for visitors to navigate
- Maintaining consistent business information across the web
Notice how none of these involve secret tricks or guaranteed rankings? That’s because real SEO is about steady, sustainable improvements.
How should you handle these SEO spam emails?
So now we get to the important question – how should you think about and handle these SEO spam emails?
In short… treat them as you would with any other unsolicited bulk spam email – ignore them!
These can, however get quite annoying as they can be aggressive, alarming and unfortunately frequent.
To help redue these:
- Mark them as spam in your email client to improve filtering
- Never click on links in unsolicited SEO audit emails
- Be wary of any SEO service promising guaranteed rankings or instant results
- Consider setting up additional email filtering rules for common spam phrases
Most importantly, remember that no legitimate SEO professional sends unsolicited audit emails.
Good SEO partners take the time to understand your business and its specific needs.
Should you include your email address on your website?
This is a common dilemma for business owners. You want to be accessible to potential customers, but putting your email address on your website does make you a target for SEO spam emails.
You can use a contact form that hides your email address, or there are some email obfuscation tools which make your email harder for bots to read and scrape.
If these are viable options does depend a bit on your business and your customers, but they can be good to consider.
Taking control of your website’s SEO
Rather than letting spam emails cause anxiety, focus on understanding the basics of SEO for your business. Start with Google Search Console, review your website’s content, and make sure you’re meeting your visitors’ needs.
Not sure where to start? We know it can be overwhelming to think about the challenges with your website and getting found online.
Our website care plans can help with keeping your website professionally maintained, making it secure, reliable and visible online.
If you’re building a website with us, we make sure it’s set up well for SEO perspective right from the start. It is however also really important to understand the difference between on-site and off-site SEO, as the ongoing promotion and activity that happens outside your website is a huge factor on how visible your site is in search engines.
If you have questions, or want a quick review of where your website is at, get in touch anytime for a obligation free chat.
