On Wednesday I received the following e-mail. My comments are in italics.
from Joan Richardson info@theseoco.co.uk
reply-to info@theseoco.co.uk
to neil@neilmonnery.co.uk
date 19 October 2011 10:55
subject Re: I Can Help Get neilmonnery.co.uk higher!
Good Morning,
Hello,
My name is Joan Richardson, and I hope you do not mind me contacting you. I have recently visited your website, neilmonnery.co.uk , as I was hoping to be able to help you secure more traffic to your website via the Google, Bing and Yahoo natural listings.
I have no issue whatsoever with you contacting me. However you say you recently visited my website for the reason that you were hoping to secure me more traffic? You went to my website just for that one reason. Really?
I work for an established optimisation and Internet Solutions Agency based in the North West of England. We have been involved in optimising websites for over 10 years and are confident we can help you in achieving your goals for the forthcoming year. Furthermore, we are so certain we can deliver first page rankings for your chosen search phrases, that we will also offer your money back against the fee paid for each keyphrase that we fail to push up to the first page rankings.
My goals for the forthcoming year involve moving up the political ladder (maybe – I still really don’t know if I want to do that or not), lose a bit of weight, become a better writer and blogger as well as maybe find some new interests. Can you really help with that? As for first page rankings – I rank on the first page for quite a lot I’ll have you know…
Rather than simply sending you a general e-mail about our services, I thought I would point out a few simple facts about your website that are impacting on your current search engine rankings.
Excellent.
Firstly, I checked the number of back links Bing are reporting as this gives us an accurate reading compared to Google. Bing are currently reporting 148, which you can check for yourself by typing in, inbody:www.yourwebsitename.com into Bing. Backlinks play a significant role within ranking of your website. Without relevant and quality backlinks, even the best of websites will not be found! Just compare some of your high ranking competitor sites to your own to see the difference!
My competitor sites? I think you’ve made a gross error there as I have no competitors. This is a personal blog. I’m not competing with any alter egos here.
Secondly, I checked the number of pages being indexed by Bing. The reported number of pages Indexed is 1180. The more pages indexed, the more information the search engines can return to their users about your website. If the content is unique and plentiful then you have a good chance of getting higher up the ladder! Your current page count suggests it can be improved upon significantly.
I think 1180 pages is rather high for a personal blog don’t you?
My final check was the Google Pagerank score. Currently your home page has a Pagerank of 4. which, when compared to other high ranking competitor websites, is definitely restricting your rankings.
High ranking competitor sites? Not too sure about that as again I don’t have any competitors. Can you tell me who my competitors really are? I’d love to know.
There can be many reasons for these low scores which we can help to identify and then resolve.
PageRank is such an old fashioned way of looking at SEO – and even then a PR of 4 is solid enough. These ‘low scores’ aren’t really low scores in reality for a personal blog now are they?
So, here’s a recap of my findings on neilmonnery.co.uk
– Your Google Pagerank is 4 – You have 148 back-links – Your website has 1180 pages indexed
My apologies if I am stating the obvious here, but the higher your website is ranking for your most important keyphrases that outline what your business offers, the more traffic will visit your website, therefore securing more revenue.
Dang really? The higher in google the more hits I get? Well I never. It’s not as though I’m earning a living in the SEO industry myself now is it? Oh wait… – Also my business (with regards to this blog) offers nothing except my take on things happening in my world and in a broader sense depending on what is occupying my mind at this current juncture.
This is where we can help. We operate successful optimisation campaigns for many different types of businesses and have secured many top rankings such as: Maternity Clothes, Dubai Properties, Gravel, Health Store, Van Hire, Fire Extinguishers, Coffee Machines, Swimwear, Limo Hire and more.
Good for you.
If you would like to hear more on exactly what we can do for you to take your website to the next level or about our unique money back offer, then please feel free to contact me on 0844 740 4951 and press Option 1 or simply reply to this mail with a convenient time to call you so that I can produce a full and detailed proposal outlining exactly how we can help you dominate your chosen field of business. Alternatively please feel free to visit our service website at http://www.theseoco.co.uk/
You know what? I think I’ll give it a miss but I will blog about it as it’s awesome. This was clearly a template e-mail (due to the fact I work in this industry I can see them a mile off) and also the erroneous spaces in places where you have copied&pasted results in. A word of advice in future – make every opening paragraph of any e-mail personal – to show that you have actually been on a website and understand what it is about. Otherwise you look like a fool.
PS: I fucking hate the subject line, ‘Re: I Can Help Get neilmonnery.co.uk higher!’ – I just fucking hate it.
Kind regards,
Joan Richardson
Senior Search Consultant
The SEO Co
0844 7404951
Providing SEO for clients since 1999
Note: This email is not spam, it was manually sent by us, our sole purpose being to introduce ourselves to you with no obligation on your part. Your email address was found to be publicly available and it has not been added to any list. We consider this to be a polite way to contact you and apologize sincerely if you have been inconvenienced in any way. We are obliged to offer you an ‘OPT-OUT’ from future mailings from us; should you wish to exercise this right, please reply with “OPT-OUT” in the subject field.
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[…] SEO Co trying to help me get my website higher in Google. I laughed so much I wrote a blog about it An SEO linkbuilding masterclass – well nearly… but it seems as though ripping her e-mail to shreds wasn’t enough for Joan as she’s […]
It’s unusual that for a company that have been experts in SEO for 10 years that they only regitered their domain in 2010! Also, you would think that such an amazing company woudl actually have an address listed on their contact page instead of just a phone number. And their own page rank of 0….lol.
I had the same email as well. I think they are quite cheeky and want a slap. I dont have a high page rank but here is the best bit and this is what make’s me really laugh have a look at there site its got a page rank 0. So i’m going to wirte about them too on my blog. I think the thing to say is you cant help someone else before you help yourself.