I get incredibly annoyed when I receive an email offering SEO services, especially when the sender notes that he or she has looked at my site, checked my rankings and can tell me why I’m doing so poorly in Google. If you’re an SEO, I’m sure you get tons of these emails, too.
While I know that it’s just automated spam, I’m still offended. This type of email clogs up inboxes and likely prevents legitimate outreach requests from being read. Since our main method of developing links involves email outreach, this poses a serious problem for us.
I’m not trying to slam automation at all here, either. It definitely has its place, and in many cases, it can be used very well. But this is a perfect example of automation at its worst. Just slap in some email addresses and spam us all. Send us enough spam in one day, and we’ll delete anything that doesn’t come from someone we know.
My number one rule for my link team is this: check the target site. If human eyes aren’t on that site and on it for enough time to verify that they’re a worthy candidate to reach out to, we have no business contacting them.
That takes time, though. It takes effort, and it takes human labor. To me, it’s worth it — and it’s why our response rate and conversion rates are much higher than they were when we used to cast a wide net and deal with what we pulled in.
Outreach is tough work, and I see so many poor examples of it, so let’s take a look at what I consider to be the 7 worst outreach offenses.
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