Is this SEO email a scam?

Almost certainly. You can settle it in about a minute, and you should not reply to find out.

Most owners get several of these a week. The wording varies and the shape never does: your website has critical errors, you are not appearing on Google, respond today and we will send a free audit.

The one thing that separates real from fake

A real finding can be named. This page, this error, this line.

These emails cannot do that, because nobody looked at your site. They were sent to thousands of addresses scraped from domain records, and the “audit” is a template with your domain name dropped into it. That is why the problems are always described in general terms, and why they would be equally true of any website ever made.

If an email says your site has errors and cannot say which page, it is not a finding. It is a form letter.

The rest of the tells

It is unsigned, or signed with a first name only. No company, no address, no way to work out who is writing. A real business selling something is generally willing to say who it is, and one that will not is telling you something.

The reply-to address is not the sender address. Worth a look before anything else.

There is a deadline. Respond within 24 hours, offer ends Friday. Nothing about a genuine technical fault expires on a Friday.

It mentions a Google penalty. Manual actions do exist, but they appear in your own Search Console, which is the only place Google communicates them. Google does not email strangers about your rankings, and neither does anyone acting on Google’s behalf, because nobody acts on Google’s behalf.

It promises a position. Number one, guaranteed, in thirty days. Nobody can promise that, and the ones who do are describing luck they have not had yet.

Check the claim yourself, free

“You are not indexed.” Search Google for site: followed by your domain, with no space. If your pages come back, you are indexed and the email is wrong. If nothing comes back, that is worth looking into, but not with them.

“Your site is not mobile friendly.” Open it on your own phone. Then run it through PageSpeed Insights, which is free and made by Google.

“You have critical code errors.” Open Search Console, which is also free and the actual source. Anything genuinely wrong is listed there in plain terms, with the pages named.

That is the whole verification. It takes longer to read the email properly than to disprove it.

Not every cold email is a scam

Some are real businesses doing something legal and irritating. The way to tell is the same test: did they look.

An email that names your town and your actual service, points at one specific thing on one specific page, and does not claim your site is broken, was written by a person who spent five minutes on you. You are still allowed to ignore it. It is not fraud.

The fraud is the alarm. Telling somebody their livelihood is quietly failing, knowing nothing about it, in order to sell them the cure.

What to do with it

Do not reply, not even to decline. A reply confirms a live address being read by a real person, and that address gets more valuable, not less.

Do not click the audit link. Mark it as spam so your provider learns, and move on.

If you have been getting these for months and they have worn you down, that is the intended effect rather than evidence about your website.