Email marketing and SEO have nothing to do with each other, especially at first glance and if that glance is coming from a layman.
Here’s the deal – there are two types of SEO. One is the SEO which we perform by producing content, targeting keywords and creating something relevant to your audience. The other is the off-site SEO where you are focusing your attentions on posting content elsewhere, thus building inbound links for your website.
But there are also other, peripheral ways to improve SEO. Just like you can use social media to make your content go viral, you can also use email marketing to improve your campaigns. To do this, first you need to focus on your goals.
What do you want your email marketing to do for your SEO? Here are some examples:
- Inbound links: if you directly hand good and useful content to your subscribers, they will be much more likely to link to it in the future.
- Promoting content: a weekly or monthly newsletter can bring back more audience to some of your content.
- Engagement: audiences coming back to your website and staying there for longer is a definite plus in Google’s eyes.
- Social media impact: while it has no direct effect on rankings, just allowing your subscribers to share email content or links from your email is a good way to get more eyes on your content.
- Building awareness: the better your reputation is, the more likely it is you will get featured with authority publishers.
- Information for the long term: email marketing is the perfect tool to see what your users react best to. This leads to better targeting and thus, better ranking.
Email is definitely a valuable tool in your SEO arsenal, if you know how to use it properly. Depending on your goals, your uses of email marketing will also shift, but in general, here are some things that you should do with your email marketing to increase your rankings:
Driving traffic to your website
This is one of the most obvious ways to use emails to boost your search engine rankings. It’s quite simple and effective, and the best part of it? It can work both ways.
For one, you can send emails whenever a new blog post is published to notify your subscribers. These are the people that are most interested in what you have to say so they will be more likely to click and spend some time with your content, thus improving your bounce rate.
Hope Franklin, Sales Manager at 1Day2write and Australia2write, says that you can also create ‘a weekly, monthly, or yearly roundup and drive attention and traffic that way’.
She adds: ‘This means that you can drive traffic to some of the posts that your readers skipped, some of the less popular posts and so on.’
Finally, this works both ways because good content on your website is good for your email list – the better it is, the more your list will grow.
Improving your engagement rates
Because you are delivering content directly to the people who are interested in these subjects, you can get an increase in engagement. Google uses plenty of factors and metrics to measure engagement since it’s not as easy as views or traffic. Some of the most important ones are the time spent on the page and shares.
Because someone opened your email and clicked on the link specifically, you can count on them being more interested in your content than the average person that lands on your page. They will spend more time there which will lead to better bounce rates. They might also share the content on social media since they were interested enough to click.
Developing a targeted content strategy
Email is a great tool to get all of the information you need on one of the hardest concepts – what do readers like? Your readers will be brutally honest too – they will not click on a topic they don’t like, they won’t click on a headline if it’s not interesting and so on. Even subject lines are easy to test, so you can see which tone works better for your audience.
Michael Green, an Email Marketer at Writemyx and Brit student, says: ‘Gathering this information on customer behaviour, you can create content and headlines that will actually be specific to your target audience. When you do that, you will see lower bounce rates, more inbound links and more traffic in general – from the right audience too.’
Did you know there is a tool for finding email addresses that can help you build relevant and engaged mail lists?
Turning emails into content
Finally, you can turn those awesome emails into content, instead of letting them die. Start by creating an archive to store all of your newsletters – because you can optimise emails with keywords, this will be a great way to boost SEO. But this is also why it’s good to think of SEO when writing emails – place keywords in them, just like you would in regular content. You never know when you might need it.
Using email marketing to boost SEO seems like a bit of quirky practice to some, but a trained eye can see specifically how this strategy helps you boost your rankings. Use these tips and expand upon them depending on your SEO goals and what you are lacking in your digital marketing strategy.
Author bio
Adelina Benson is an email marketer at Academic Brits and Origin Writings. She also develops marketing strategies and works on improving integration between websites and email newsletters at PHD Kingdom. In her free time, she loves to blog to help people reach their full potential.
