Aussie SEO Experts Spam
I got some email spam yesterday purportedly from an Aussie SEO Expert. Whilst I have singled out “Aussie SEO Experts” in today’s video, this is not the first time I have received email spam from an SEO company. I got another one back in June from another Sydney SEO Company. They called themselves Smart SEO. I even emailed them politely asking where they got our email address but I had no response.
I understand the temptation to do it, I really do. Back when I was starting out I thought about buying a list and doing it too. Fortunately I came to my senses. This week on the Beer Blokes & Business podcast we were discussing dark patterns in Internet commerce. Email spam is not so much a dark practice as it is a dumb practice.
3 Reasons SEO Is Better Than Spam
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SEO Is Not Illegal
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All Email Marketing Is Interruptive
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Good SEO Builds Your Business
Under Australian law sending out bulk commercial emails with out consent of the recipient is against the law. Just a couple of weeks ago a local online retailer was fined $165,000 for the practice. Check out http://www.spam.acma.gov.au/ It seems ridiculous to me that in 2013 we are still asking businesses not to spam us. In the case above Gray’s was sending out to people who had been on their list previously, most of the spam I get is derived from one of three places. A harvested email address off our website, a harvested email address off linked In or a harvested email address off Google Places. These spammers are not harvesting these emails themselves, most likely they are buying some sort of list or services. The main communication I get through LinkedIn the days is spam, either directly or via an email address I use for the service. Given their latest effort called LinkedIn intro it doesn’t look like that experience is going to get better anytime soon.
That is not necessarily a bad thing, if you have a loyal list who love your content. If you are just stuffing inboxes with junk mail though your conversion rate will be close to zero. In comparison when people are searching for a product or service they want it now! They are actively looking for you. You just need to be ready.
When I talk about good SEO, I mean the kind of SEO that comes from caring about your audience and establishing a relationship with them. Others may call it content marketing but that would leave out a crucial part of the equation for me. Yes good SEO is about regularly publishing great content but if your site looks like it was coded by a bunch of monkeys with hammers you’re not going to rank to well. That’s why for me good SEO is about understanding the health of your site as as having a content strategy.
SEO WIll Give The Best Return
Search marketing whether it be Adwords or SEO will always have a better return than email spam. Email spam may seem cheap at the time but in Australia at least you can cop some pretty hefty fines. So I beg of you please do not succumb to email spam. Please try building your presence instead in the search engines, maybe even hire an SEO company, probably not Aussie SEO Experts though. Do you still get email spam from local Aussie business? Or local businesses in your neck of the woods?
UPDATE: I think I must be invoking the Law of Attraction. I just got more email Spam from another Sydney SEO Company
Jim’s been here for a while, you know who he is.
