Business owners get overwhelmed with emails daily. Clients, potential customers, and way too much spam.

For someone trying to grow their business an email claiming to get them maximum traffic can sound tempting, and occasionally, an email will come through that says, “SEO Proposal” from a person who is an “Expert Online Strategist” who has reviewed your website and “only wants to help”.

It’s nice to imagine a perfect world where complete strangers would go out of their way to help your business do better.

These mysterious people claim they can magically unlock the secrets to Search Engine Optimization, grow your company’s online presence and make your website the most beautiful powerful website on the internet while sending you so many new customers you won’t know what to do with them all. How can this all not sound amazing? Unfortunately, when you dig a little deeper you find this is nothing but a total scam and these criminals are only out to get as much money as they can from you.

You may think the email is real and that their intentions are pure but if you look closely you will notice that the body of the email is quite generic. It’s common for business owners to be told that their site is failing to rank for important keywords, they won’t identify or specify the ill ranking keywords to you.

It may seem like the email has been directed at you or your company. These scams work in much the same way that horoscopes are written to be generic so hundreds of thousands of people will all read the same horoscope and believe it was for them.

If you’ve received one (or 20) of these emails recently, it was not a personal note to you but very likely a piece of spam generated in bulk by a software program. Often, the sender is an SEO lead generation company whose function is to collect contact information from unsuspecting leads (like you). You can be certain that no human being has spent a single second analyzing your website.

If you contact the sender to discuss web services or search engine optimization, you will be sold to some other unidentified SEO company that will run a quick “analysis” of your site and then try to sell you on a contract for their SEO services that will be a total rip-off.