SEO Cold Call
There’s a lot of buzz (or steam coming out of ears) in the SEO blogosphere about cold calling and unsolicited emails from SEO companies.
Even some of the biggest names in SEO get approached by complete SEO rookies offering to get them to the top of Google. Some of them make ridiculous claims such as being “former Google employees” or “SEO specialists for Google”.
I get emails and calls every week. However annoying it is though, there is one thing I’ve had to come to terms with.
It works.
It must do. Otherwise there wouldn’t be so many cold callers. Or would there?
Despite the fact that being pestered by pushy telesales staff from call centres drives most of us up the wall, some people must be buying what’s being offered by these cold callers.
Even if only one in every thousand calls results in an order, that’s enough to make it worthwhile for some. Regardless of whether they deliver on their promise. Regardless of reputation (you can just mutate and operate under a new alias next month). Regardless of any consideration except for just generating some income.
But does the fact that it clearly works for some, legitimise it?
At one extreme, an unsolicited email from one SEO company to another SEO company, which has somehow found its way onto an email marketing list, is just dumbass spam.
But what if you have spent several days carefully researching a handful of targets and decided to make a tailored, considered approach to businesses that you know would benefit from your services?
Maybe there is a case for cold calling. Maybe it’s just the indiscriminate, pushy mass marketing techniques of call centres that gives traditional outbound marketing a bad name.
Should those selling SEO services – which is inbound marketing – perhaps practice what they preach and win their business using solely inbound marketing techniques?
Is cold calling, in itself, prima facie evidence that the caller must be an SEO butthead?
What do you think? No, don’t call! Comment below!
Here are some recent, sometimes hilarious, comments I’ve stumbled upon from well known SEO bloggers.
Ian Lurie – SEO butthead detection in 5 easy steps
Andrew Shotland – Local SEO bullshitters please stop calling me
David Naylor – Is cold calling still a viable option?
Feel free to give full expression to your feelings below!
Please 
Love this, Ewan! So true as well. Like everyone else, we get so many of these calls. The next time I get one I think I’ll refer them to this excellent blog post
Thanks Elspeth and welcome to the blog!
You think the SEO Cold Callers are bad just wait until you get the Facebook Cold Callers on to you.
I run an online directory and have numerous honeypot listings set up to monitor cold callers abusing my listings. Some days I get half a dozen calls all using exactly the same sales spiel and bs.
Problem is they sound so convincing unless you do the maths and know how facebook advertising works
I blogged about it here – http://www.v1seo.co.uk/11/facebook-advertising-scams/
They regularly go through directories like mine, praying on new businesses registering as they know a lot are small start-ups and are still naive when it comes to cold call promises.
I try to block them from the site as much as possible, tricky though as have to be careful not to block legitimate people too.
I get these cold calls all the time, which is very ironic because #1, I wrote a book called ‘Never Cold Call Again’ and #2, I also own an SEM agency. (Granted it’s not SEO but it’s a close cousin.) Cold calling is especially ridiculous for an SEO company to do because they’re supposedly experts in online marketing – something companies try to improve to avoid or even eliminate cold calling altogether – yet there go the SEO “experts” cold calling anyway!
TJ – as to Facebook advertising, as an experienced SEM guy my opinion is that it’s rubbish and one of the worst PPC engines anyone could waste their money on!
Hi Frank,
Thanks. I’m interested in your take on cold calling. I must admit I’ve made the rather wild assumption that it must work because so many do it. Maybe, you’re right and it doesn’t work but these people don’t know what else to do. I’ve just downloaded your free “Never Cold Call Again” guide from your website and will read it with interest.
Thank you! As far as sales go I’d also recommend books by Jeffrey Gitomer since he also has the opinion that cold calling is the least productive way to go, and his materials are excellent. Start with the “Little Red Book.”
I’ve heard the argument that SEO companies should be using SEO to get all their business but that just isn’t a good argument as far as I’m concerned. The reality of marketing is you should never have all your eggs in one basket, which is why as an SEO company we advertise using SEO, PPC, social media, and some telemarketing. I agree with many of your points in the post, and yes cold calls can be annoying, but at the same time just relying on SEO as an SEO company would be foolish–after all not EVERYONE who would benefit from SEO or who is looking for SEO things of searching for a company online.
Now as far as the “seo companies” that don’t deliver, that is an unfortunate reality of the industry, but as a reputable SEO company that delivers results, I don’t think telemarketing is as awful as some make it out to be.
Hi Brendan,
Yes, I agree that it makes sense to consider avenues of marketing other than organic SEO and I wasn’t suggesting otherwise. I can also see there may be a case for cold calling. It’s just that when one SEO provider cold calls another without first checking to see what service they’re offering, then I think things may have gone a little too far.
We get masses of emails and calls too offering SEO. Many even state they will optimise our, or our clients sites for phrases they are already in the top 3 for.
Talk about divvies. Don’t even bother searching in Google for the phrases they are saying they will optimise for.
And why is it, they charge the same price regardless of business sector?. (FP).
I tease the life out of them and string them along for ever, actually talking them into thinking they are up-selling me. If they are wasting their time on me, they are not hassling somebody for 15 minutes.
Although, when I first started up in 2006, I did do some cold calling, but not as a total out and out call centre. So, Ewan, you are right, it does work. Fortunately now, all new work is refer or rom somebody finding my link on one of my clients websites.
When I first got into he online marketing and SEO field, I was actually working in call centres specifically as a telesales operative. If you have good sales people, as some of the companies i worked for did, the figures on the board can be quite mind boggling. 8 sales people averaging £1500.00 to £2000.00 per week in sales from cold calls? It certainly adds up.
Back in 2002, one company I worked for were selling Alta Vista banners. One cold call, followed by a few follow up calls and email and one company spent £50,000 on them (nice commission on that).
There were other companies like ‘Touch’, selling Lycos banners. The figures they produced from cold calling were phenomenal.
All in all, cold calling does work, however, as you rightly stated in your post, not many of the cold calling SEO companies and online marketing firms can deliver. Especially those that are offering a one off payment website optimisation package.
Interesting article. SEO cold calling is very difficult the reason being is most of non-it people dont know what SEO is & mostly our clients come through referals.