What To Know About Unsolicited SEO Audits

We have all seen them.

You’re doing your morning inbox cleaning, and you are hit with a 20 page pdf from some unknown company using unknown tools. These often contain a bunch of “red flags” and claim your website is basically a trash heap.

These are mostly nonsense.

While the allure of quick fixes and magical growth can be tempting, it’s crucial to understand that these are mostly full of shit. Here’s what you need to know about unsolicited SEO audits and why you should be wary of them.

The Nature of Unsolicited SEO Audits

Unsolicited SEO audits are typically unsolicited emails or messages from self-proclaimed SEO experts or agencies offering to analyze your website’s performance for free. They promise to uncover issues that are supposedly preventing your site from ranking higher in search engine results. These audits often claim to provide valuable insights and actionable recommendations to improve your website’s visibility and profitability.

While at first glance this might seem like a generous offer, the reality is often far from it. Here are several reasons why you should be cautious about these unsolicited SEO audits.

Questionable Motives

The primary motive behind unsolicited SEO audits is often not to help your business but to generate new clients for the agency or individual offering the audit. These audits are essentially a foot in the door strategy, designed to scare you with alarming claims about your website’s performance. The intention is to make you feel insecure about your current SEO status, hoping you’ll be desperate enough to purchase their services to rectify these purported issues.

These emails are usually sent in bulk to a large number of recipients, without any prior research into your specific business needs or current SEO strategies. This one-size-fits-all approach rarely addresses the unique challenges your business might face.

Lack of Personalization or Fake Personalization

A significant red flag of unsolicited SEO audits is their lack of personalization and fake personalization.

Unsolicited audits, however, are often generic, offering broad and vague suggestions that might not be relevant to your website.

Sometimes, these companies will try to create the illusion of personalization. They will slap your logo on the document or cite your specific industry. It’s all just a lazy attempt to try create some type of uniqueness, and quite frankly an insult to your intelligence. Even worse, they will try to fool you into thinking they want to be a valuable “marketing partner” with them.

These audits typically include basic, automated reports that you could easily generate yourself using free online tools. They might highlight common SEO issues such as broken links, missing meta tags, or slow page speeds—issues that, while important, are not always critical and can be identified with minimal effort using tools, like Moz.

Questionable Expertise

Another concern with unsolicited SEO audits is the questionable expertise of the individuals or agencies conducting them. The SEO industry, unfortunately, has its fair share of charlatans and opportunists who prey on the ignorance and fear of unsuspecting businesses.

These so-called experts spend a lot of time developing these documents, but have no real expertise or intention of following up on the work.

The audits they provide might be filled with technical jargon and impressive-looking graphs but lack substantive value. They might also recommend outdated techniques that are ultimately a waste of time.

Risk of Scams and Fraud

In addition to the questionable quality of unsolicited SEO audits, there is also a significant risk of scams and fraud. Some unsolicited audits are merely a ploy to gain access to your website’s sensitive information. They might request administrative access to your website or urge you to install specific plugins or software under the guise of performing a thorough audit.

Once they have access, they could have a free for all inside your websites backend. It’s crucial to protect your website and business information by never granting access to unknown parties or installing software from untrusted sources.

False Alarms and Misleading Information

Unsolicited SEO audits often rely on fear tactics to spur you into action. They might highlight minor issues and exaggerate their impact, creating a sense of urgency and panic. For instance, they could flag non-critical issues like a missing alt tag on an image or a slightly slow loading page as major problems that need immediate attention. Anyone who suggests that your alt tags are a major factor should be immediately disregarded. It is still absolutely mind boggling that these tactics are still being employed today.

By magnifying these issues, they aim to convince you that your website is in dire need of their services. Its almost embarrassing, like they are begging for your business under the disguise of an “audit”

However, these issues are almost always not as catastrophic as they are made out to be.

Redundant and Generic Advice

The advice provided in unsolicited SEO audits is often redundant and generic. They might suggest basic SEO practices that you are likely already implementing or could easily find through a simple online search. For example, they might advise you to use keywords in your content, create high-quality backlinks, or optimize your site’s meta descriptions—tips that are common knowledge to anyone with an elementary knowledge of SEO.

While these practices are indeed important, they are not groundbreaking insights that warrant paying for a professional service.

Protecting Your Business from Unsolicited SEO Audits

Given the numerous downsides of unsolicited SEO audits, it’s crucial to protect your business from falling victim to these dubious offers. Here are some steps you can take:

1. Use Your Own Tools: Utilize reputable SEO tools like Google Analytics, SEMrush, or Ahrefs to perform your own audits. These tools provide decent data and insights without the risk of scams or fraud.
2. Educate Yourself: Take the time to learn some basics of SEO. Understanding the fundamentals will help you discern between legitimate advice and fear-mongering tactics. Combine your natural intuition with some resources online. Does this make sense? Does this seem like something legitimate?
3. Consult a Trusted Professional: If you feel your website genuinely needs an SEO audit, seek out a professional you can trust. A thorough audit from a trusted source is far more valuable than a generic, unsolicited one.

Conclusion

Unsolicited SEO audits are an outdated tactic that I hope people are catching onto. These audits can be driven by questionable motives and often come from unserious companies or people. They often use scare tactics, provide useless advice, and at worse can lead to a website security breach.

These style of audits are usually not worth the time. Time wasted reviewing and fumbling around an audit is time that could be much better spent actually completing action items that make an impact.