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That Email Saying Your Website Has SEO Problems? It's a Scam.

July 29, 2025
It arrives in your inbox looking almost professional. Subject line something like "Quick question about your website" or "Noticed a few issues with your site." The email goes something like this:
"Hi, I came across your website and I have to say, it looks great! However, I ran a quick analysis and noticed some critical SEO issues that are preventing you from ranking on Google. Your competitors are already taking advantage of this. I'd love to help, we offer affordable packages starting at just $299/month."
If you own a business website, you have received this email. Probably multiple times. Possibly this week. It is a scam. Not in the "someone is trying to steal your banking credentials" sense, more in the "you will pay money and receive nothing of value" sense. Here's exactly how it works and what to look for, so you can delete it with confidence and move on with your day.

The Anatomy of the Scam Email

These emails follow a script so consistent you could set your clock by it. Once you see the pattern, you can't unsee it. The vague compliment. It always opens with something nice about your site. "It looks great." "I was impressed by your design." This isn't genuine, it's social engineering. Starting with a compliment lowers your guard before the bad news lands. They have never actually looked at your website. The compliment was generated along with ten thousand other emails sent that same day. The fake audit. Next comes the alarming diagnosis. "Critical SEO issues." "Your site isn't optimized." "You're missing out on significant traffic." These findings are always vague enough to apply to any website on the internet. There are no screenshots, no specific URLs, no actual data, because no audit was performed. They found your email address in a database and sent a template. The urgency. Your competitors are already doing this. Google is about to penalize you. The window is closing. This is a classic pressure tactic designed to short-circuit your skepticism. Real SEO professionals don't manufacture urgency because they don't need to. The package. Somewhere in the email or in the follow-up is a "package." $199/month. $299/month. $499/month. The number is always suspiciously round, never tied to any specific deliverables. Ask what's included and you'll get a list of buzzwords: "on-page optimization," "backlink building," "monthly reporting." Ask what that actually means for your specific site and the answers get very vague very quickly. No verifiable identity. There's usually a name, often a Western-sounding name on an email from an IP in Southeast Asia or Eastern Europe, but no company with a real web presence, no portfolio of client sites, no LinkedIn profile that checks out. Sometimes there's a website, built last month, with stock photos and fake testimonials.

Why These Emails Keep Coming

Because they work, at least some of the time. The economics are brutal but effective. Send 100,000 emails, get a 0.1% response rate, convert a fraction of those into $299/month subscriptions, deliver essentially nothing, and collect the money until the client gives up. Scale that across thousands of domains and the math becomes very profitable. The reason business owners fall for it isn't stupidity, it's that SEO is genuinely confusing, Google is genuinely mysterious, and the anxiety of "am I missing something?" is real. These emails are engineered to exploit exactly that anxiety. The people sending them are not web developers. They are marketers who have figured out that "SEO problems" is a reliable fear trigger for business owners.

What Legitimate SEO Professionals Actually Do

Here's the thing: some of those SEO issues might be real. Most websites do have things worth improving. But the way you identify and fix them looks nothing like a cold email template. A real SEO professional:
  • Can show you their own site ranking for competitive terms (if they can't do it for themselves, they can't do it for you)
  • Provides a specific audit tied to your actual URLs, with screenshots and data from tools like Google Search Console or Ahrefs
  • Explains what they found in plain language and why it matters for your specific business
  • Has verifiable clients who will speak to real results, not stock-photo testimonials
  • Charges based on actual scope, not round monthly packages with undefined deliverables
  • Does not contact you cold via a generic email template
The bar is not high. It's just very different from what lands in your spam folder.

How to Check Your Own SEO Without Paying Anyone

If the email spooked you and you want to actually know how your site is performing, here are three free tools that will tell you more in five minutes than any cold emailer will tell you in three months: Google Search Console: Google's own tool. Shows exactly which searches your site appears in, which pages get clicks, and any technical issues Google has flagged. If you don't have this set up, that's worth doing regardless. Google PageSpeed Insights: Paste your URL and get a real performance score with specific, actionable issues. If your score is below 70 on mobile, that's a real problem worth addressing. Ahrefs Webmaster Tools: Free tier that shows your backlink profile and on-page SEO issues. More depth than PageSpeed Insights for content and link-related problems. If you run your site through those three and find real problems, hire someone with a verifiable portfolio to fix them. If everything looks fine, close the email and get back to work.

One More Thing

I'm a web developer. I also receive these emails, about my own website, which I built and maintain myself. The last one informed me that my site had "critical technical errors" and offered to fix them for $399/month. My site scores 98 on Google PageSpeed. It has no technical errors. It loads in under a second. Delete the email.
If you have genuine questions about your website's performance or SEO, the kind that require an actual look at your actual site, get in touch on WhatsApp. No packages, no templates, no fake urgency.
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