How Businesses Can Stop Spam Emails

If you’re a business owner, you’ve probably received a Spam email or two (or thousand!) promising some great insight into your Google SEO rankings. You’d think these would have died out 10 years ago. So why do you keep receiving them? Who sends them? How can you stop them?

The fact is, business owners still read these emails. I get about one a month forwarded to me saying, “Jon, check out this email. Is it true? Is there anything we can do to fix these problems?” So all it takes is 1 of 10,000 to act upon it, and give business to the company sending it, to make it worth the effort.

And here’s my insight – there is no effort. These emails do NOT actually review your website. They are automated software systems that send messages to ANY website owner it can find. They give vague messages that can apply to any website owner, such as, “We see your Google rankings could be better.” There is almost no cost of time or money from the sender.

Who sends spam emails?

Typically these emails come from overseas. You’ll notice plenty of typos and misspellings, and non-sensical statements. Most are a Gmail or Yahoo email address, not a professional business. That’s because these, too, can be automatically created with little effort. Many of these may not even be companies, but a person trying to win business.

What happens if I respond to a spam email?

If you actually reply to one of these spam emails, there’s a good chance the person/bot on the other end won’t even respond. If they do, chances are very likely that if they do perform a service, it has no strategic element whatsoever. They are selling something tangible, such as adding your website to online directories. Being off-shore, they don’t understand your target region, American culture, and English keywords and terminology to actually do Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Not to mention, SEO hinges upon content, which they cannot provide.

How to stop spam emails

If you still receive spam emails daily or weekly, there are three ways you can greatly reduce them.

1. Make sure your web form has a “captcha” filter on it. You’ve seen these, where you have to type in letters or numbers to “prove you are human.” These are working very well, and reduce spam by at least 90% for my clients.
2. Make sure your actual email address, i.e. name@companyname.com does not physically appear on the website. If it does, automated scripts that “scrape” the internet can add it to databases that become the target of spam.
3. If you are listed as the owner of a website (you can find out here: https://www.godaddy.com/whois?sp_hp=B) that is another prime resource that scripts use to “scrape” addresses. And in this case, they know you have ownership of a website.

Stopping spam emails are a small part of what we can help with. At jSinger Marketing, we are happy to earn your business even with this small level of assistance. Call us anytime!