3 min read

How To Avoid SEO Phishing Scams

How To Avoid SEO Phishing Scams

You’ve likely spent a lot of time optimizing your website for SEO value. It’s critical for online businesses where competition is high to rank well on search engine results pages (SERPs). SEO is sometimes confusing and challenging, and many companies hire individuals or have a staff member do the optimization. However, many SEO agencies and freelancers are just waiting to scam your business to make a quick buck.

Optimizing your website to rank higher on SERPs can take weeks or even months to see any measurable results, even when you do everything right. Unfortunately, the time spent waiting to see results makes you a prime candidate for SEO scam phishing emails. These freelancers and agencies promise near-immediate results, don’t often follow SEO best practices, and the money you spend hiring them is gone. You’re left with no positive results, and sometimes even negative results.

How To Spot An SEO Phishing Email

These scammers often make their way to your inbox. Sometimes they get your phone number and call you. Their sales pitch sounds great, and they reach out, feigning concern for your website load times, on-page SEO, and other website-related issues. Typical email subject lines look like the examples below.

The scammer claims to be an SEO expert or online strategist and notifies you that they’ve analyzed your website and noticed it is underperforming. They may say things like, “I see your organic traffic is down this month,” or, “I noticed your website is loading slowly.”

  • Unspecified “problems” or “errors” are mentioned, and they tell you it’s causing your website to underperform.
  • The email promises to rocket you to the top of Google search results.
  • They guarantee more traffic and more online customers.

Sounds great, right? However, any legitimate SEO expert will tell you that these are inaccurate representations of website performance or SEO value. How do they know? Because you have to give access to your website analytics to specific individuals – no one else can tell you that your traffic is down. When it comes to these undefined problems or errors, they have no idea if they can’t provide specific code snippets or other measurable results. If you’re worried that your site isn’t performing well, plenty of free tools will analyze your site performance for you. And lastly, if someone “guarantees” quick or immediate results, you can be sure they are scamming you. Now that you know what these phishing emails look like, let’s look at how to weed out scammers and find legitimate help if you’re looking for SEO help.

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Do Your Research

Don’t panic because someone emails you about your website performance or traffic. The information they have is extremely limited, or they have none. Instead, they use language to get you hooked and believe there is a problem.

Check your website performance using a legitimate website. A few we recommend are:

Google PageSpeed Insights

Webpage Test

GTmetrix

Even if a scammer hasn’t hit you, it’s a good idea to regularly check your site with these tools to identify any apparent issues. Taking the time to analyze your website ensures that it runs at optimal performance. A word of caution, while these sites help you identify problems on your site, these scammers have the same access. Sometimes, they’ll attach a screenshot or snippet of the results, but there’s no guarantee that it’s your site, as images can be modified and changed by anyone with an image editor.

Hire A Trusted Partner

If you’ve done your SEO work when your site launched and haven’t touched it since then, or if you see your performance isn’t as positive as you’d like, it’s time to hire a professional. SEO rankings degrade over time, and if you’re not keeping up with current SEO trends and best practices, you’ll show up lower and lower on SERPs.

Some large businesses have content managers on staff who regularly check, update, and manage your website SEO and traffic. Their entire job is to increase SEO value with engaging content, run analytics reports, and check that your site performs at optimum speeds. Another option is to hire a trusted partner to audit and maintain your website while you focus on more important things, like increasing your sales.

Kensium is the ecommerce SEO expert you need and want on your side. We provide the SEO and performance power to help you rank higher on SERPs, optimize your site for speed and load times, and troubleshoot any issues. In addition, our Technology as a Service program offers a holistic view of your website performance, suggests best practices, and provides support before minor problems become big ones.

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SEO Best Practices

A trusted SEO partner follows best practices and maintains your site optimization. There are five crucial actions your ecommerce partner should do to boost your SEO and keep your site running.

  1. Optimize products with relevant keywords and phrases – keep the method consistent.
  2. Regularly monitor and audit analytics to indicate growth and reveal potential performance issues.
  3. Monitor your website for page, image, or download issues.
  4. Ensure you have an SSL Certificate to protect your website from hackers and protect sensitive information by encrypting it.
  5. Keep your website active – frequently update content, products, images, and social media engagement.

Don’t Let Bad SEO Keep You From Selling

Besides SEO, there are many other factors to consider to increase conversion rates and encourage visitors to purchase. But SEO is one of the top methods to ensure customer engagement, offer personalized buyer journeys, and eventually, get a customer to make a purchase.

If you’ve received a website performance phishing email and are worried about your website performance, Kensium is the partner you need. Our Creative Services team has the expertise to check your website performance, help you increase your SEO value, and even help you with social media marketing. So give us a call today, and let’s chat about your SEO and website performance needs.

 

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