Is this SEO email a scam?

Some are. Some are not. There is one test that separates them, and it takes about a minute.

Did they look at your website?

A real email names something specific. This page, this error, this number. A fake one talks about critical errors in general terms, because nobody opened your site before pressing send.

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

The fake ones

They were sent to thousands of addresses scraped from domain records. The “audit” is a template with your domain name dropped into it. That is why the problems are always vague, and why they would be equally true of any website ever made.

The other tells:

1. It is unsigned, or signed with a first name only. No company, no address, no way to tell who is writing.
2. There is a deadline. Nothing about a genuine technical fault expires on a Friday.
3. It mentions a Google penalty. Manual actions are real, but they only appear in your own Search Console. Google does not email strangers about your rankings, and nobody acts on Google’s behalf.
4. It promises a position. Number one, guaranteed, in thirty days. Nobody can promise that.

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

Check the address it came from

This one is a clue rather than proof, so read it carefully.

1. A free address claiming to be a company. An agency that calls itself a business but writes from gmail.com, outlook.com or similar is worth a second look. Plenty of honest sole traders use Gmail, so on its own this proves nothing. Paired with anything else on this list, it is telling.
2. The domain does not match the company name. They sign as one business and send from a different domain entirely.
3. The domain is almost right. A letter swapped, a word added, an extra hyphen. These are built to be skimmed past.
4. The domain is brand new. Search for the company. If nothing exists beyond a one-page site put up last month, treat the email accordingly.
5. The reply-to address is different from the sender.

Any real business is easy to look up. A name, a town, a phone number, a Companies House record. If none of that exists, that is your answer.

The real ones

Some cold emails are from real businesses doing something legal, and sometimes useful.

A real one names your town and your actual service, points at one specific thing on one specific page, and does not claim your site is broken. Someone spent five minutes on you before writing.

You are still free to ignore it. It is not fraud. The fraud is the alarm, which means telling somebody their livelihood is quietly failing, knowing nothing about it, in order to sell them the cure.

Check any claim yourself, free

1. “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.
2. “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.
3. “You have critical code errors.” Open Search Console, which is also free and is the actual source. Anything genuinely wrong is listed there, with the pages named.

That is the whole check. It takes longer to read the email properly than to test it.

What to do with a fake one

1. Do not reply, not even to decline. A reply confirms a live address that a real person reads, and that address becomes more valuable, not less.
2. Do not click the audit link.
3. 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.

We send cold emails too

We do, so it is only fair to say what ours look like and hold ourselves to the same test.

1. We look at your site before writing, and we name what we found. Real numbers, real pages.
2. We say who we are, where we are and how to reach us, and we write from our own domain.
3. We never claim your site is broken, penalised or invisible unless we have checked and it is.
4. We never set a deadline or promise a position.
5. One reply saying no thanks, and you never hear from us again.

If one of ours ever fails that test, tell us and we will fix it.