This is the cold email plan we'd run for a technical SEO agency that fixes big websites for one industry. All the signals on this page can be checked from outside the company before a single email goes out. Run it yourself or have us run it for you.
Cold email fits a technical SEO agency when these things are true.
Your market is every company in your industry whose website is big enough to break. A ten page site rarely needs you. A site with thousands of product pages or location pages has plenty of places for things to go wrong.
A crawler sees the same site Google sees. The problems are public and you can find them before you send anything. These are the signals worth looking for.
Ahrefs or Semrush shows how many of their pages get any search traffic at all. A catalogue of thousands of products with a few dozen pages bringing in visitors is a site Google struggles with.
Screaming Frog crawls a site the way Google does. Broken links and redirects that bounce several times before landing are easy to count and easy to show.
Google's PageSpeed Insights scores the phone version of any page. Run their best selling product page and their biggest category page. Red scores are a problem anyone on their team can check.
BuiltWith shows the platform a site runs on and when that changed. The Wayback Machine shows the old site. A platform move is where old pages lose their redirects and rankings go with them.
The traffic history in Ahrefs or Semrush shows sudden falls. A steep drop that lines up with a relaunch is something the owner already feels and wants explained.
Stores and catalogues often create a new address for each filter a visitor clicks. A crawl shows thousands of near copies of the same page and Google has to guess which one to rank.
Group the list by the problem you found. The email then leads with their problem and not with your services.
Lead with the old addresses that now return an error. Name two of them.
Lead with the month of the drop and what changed on the site that month.
Lead with the phone score of their best selling product page.
Lead with the number of near copies the crawl found.
A distributor catalogue and a software help center break in different ways. Split them and write to each problem separately.
A technical lead magnet has one big advantage. The crawl runs by itself so it scales to a whole list and the findings are specific to each site.
The ten biggest problems from a Screaming Frog crawl of their site. Show how many pages each one touches and what fixing it involves in plain words. Rank them by how many important pages they affect.
It works because nobody else has looked. The report shows the size of the job and the job is what you sell.
For sites that moved platforms. Pull the old addresses from the Wayback Machine and Ahrefs and test which ones now return an error. Add the redirect each one needs.
It works because it is a finished piece of work they can hand to their developer. Owners who see it usually ask who is going to fix the rest.
Technical fixes need access to the site. The front end offer should be something you can hand over without logging in.
Map each broken old address to the right new page and hand over the finished redirect file. Their developer uploads it in an afternoon.
It works because the win is fast and easy to check. Broken pages start working again and the links pointing at them count again. The bigger fixes on the crawl report become the project.
Deliver it within five working days of the call.
Keep emails under 100 words and lead with a number from their own site. Technical owners trust a count more than an adjective.
Hi {{first_name}},
Looks like {{company}} moved to {{new_platform}} around {{migration_month}}.
Tested the old addresses and {{broken_count}} of them now return an error. Some of those pages still have links pointing at them.
I mapped each one to the right new page. Want the file?
{{sender_first_name}}
Hi {{first_name}},
Ran a crawl of {{company}}'s site this week. It found {{issue_count}} issues and the biggest one touches {{page_count}} product pages.
Wrote up the top ten in plain English with what each fix involves.
Should I send it over?
{{sender_first_name}}
Hi {{first_name}},
We fix the technical side of search for {{industry}} websites. Crawl problems and slow pages and broken redirects.
{{proof_line}}
Worth a look at {{company}}?
{{sender_first_name}}
Swap {{proof_line}} for one real result of your own. A traffic chart after a fix works well. If there is no result yet then leave the line out.
At a small company the owner or the head of marketing makes this call. At a bigger one it is the head of ecommerce or digital. Bring their developer into the thread early because the developer owns the fix.
Reply fast and keep it to two sentences and two times for a call.
Results depend on the offer and the list. Three outbound agencies that publish their own numbers land between one booked meeting per 1,000 people contacted and one per 2,000. One of them also tested 650,000 cold emails with a plain offer and got about 3 to 6 interested replies per 10,000 people.
Those are other people's numbers and not a promise about your market. Your market's number only comes from testing it.
We build and run this campaign for one agency per industry.
Thirty minutes on your market and how we'd reach it.