How to Make Your SEO and Email Marketing Work Together
If you know anything at all about marketing and you want to grow your business, you’re probably working on your SEO–and you may be doing email marketing as well. But did you know SEO and email marketing don’t have to be two entirely separate endeavors?
Great SEO and email marketing campaigns can work together to support each others’ success. In fact, when you think of the two as being part of a holistic strategy, you’ll find that both your email campaigns and SEO efforts fall into place much more easily.
Factors That Influence Search Engine Rankings
Your email marketing campaign can do double duty for you. In other words, it can perform its primary job–to encourage purchases, free trial signups, form fills, or whatever other goal you had in mind–while also helping Google see your site as valuable and authoritative and increasing the likelihood Google will offer your site as a result to those searching for a related keyword.
To better understand how this works, it’s important to first understand what factors affect how pages on your site rank in the search results.
- Quality Content: Content is one of the biggest factors that affect your website’s rankings in search engine results. Great content means landing page and blog copy that is useful, relevant, and informative, written for your audience, and takes your business’ keyword landscape into consideration.
- Traffic and Engagement: Google is pretty sophisticated, and one of the ways it evaluates your site is by analyzing how visitors interact with your site. When users click through multiple pages on the site, spend time reading content, and interact in other ways (such as by signing up for a newsletter), this signals to Google that your site has legitimate value to offer users. In other words, just having a lot of traffic to your site isn’t enough. In fact, having lots of users landing on your site only to immediately leave signals to Google that something is wrong–perhaps you didn’t provide visitors what they were promised or your site is difficult to navigate. This will ultimately damage your rankings.
- Core Web Vitals/Page Load Speed: Core web vitals are metrics that Google uses to determine how a web page performs. They measure things like page load time, mobile friendliness, and whether elements on the page move around as they load (which can make the page more difficult to interact with). Google pays attention to these metrics because they affect how users experience a site.
- Page Titles, Headings, and Meta Descriptions: On-page SEO components such as meta page titles, H1 and H2 headings, and meta descriptions affect how web pages rank in search results because Google uses them as signals to determine what a given page is about, in order to serve up the best and more relevant results in searches.
- Links: Internal links, i.e. links between pages on your site, help Google better understand how your site is organized and which pages are most important. Outbound links help your website build credibility and can offer value to visitors. Inbound links or backlinks, in which another site links to a page on your site, are incredibly important for SEO. Not only do they send traffic your way, but, even more importantly, they help build your site’s authority in the eyes of Google, making it easier to rank for relevant keywords overall.
How Email Marketing Can Support SEO
While email is a outbound marketing technique (unlike SEO, which focuses on increasing inbound traffic), a great email marketing campaign can reinforce your SEO efforts, creating a virtuous cycle.
So how can email marketing help support SEO? One thing good SEO and email marketing have in common is content: great email content is critical, just as great content on the site is, and content in blogs can be repurposed for emails and vice-versa. Successful email marketing campaigns also encourage traffic to your website. Quality, engaged traffic, such as users who visit multiple pages on the site and interact with videos or fill out forms, helps signal to Google that your website is valuable and authoritative. This can make it much easier to rank for keywords, even competitive ones.
Here’s what to keep in mind when designing an email marketing campaign that will boost your SEO efforts:
- Email and website content should have consistent messaging that encourages subscribers. Emails should encourage website visits and the website should contain a clear CTA to encourage more email signups.
- Nurture and segment your leads. Depending on the content consumed on the website, marketing automation can send emails that are specific to a given visitor’s interests. One statistic says that marketers using segmented campaigns see as much as a 760% increase in revenue. Not all emails should go to everyone on your list; segmenting your email list based on common characteristics can increase your email open rate and lead to more interactions with the email and with your website, which ultimately boosts SEO.
- Make sure your emails offer value and direct people back to your website. Getting people to open your emails is a feat in itself, but that’s just the beginning. A good email marketing campaign should draw the user back to your site to consume related content, like a blog, video, or FAQ, or to take action by making a purchase or starting a free trial. These interactions are crucial to your website’s SEO.
- Clear CTAs are key. Make sure your emails have a clear call to action, so readers know what the next steps are and how taking those steps will benefit them. This ensures fewer people will immediately bounce from your site after clicking the CTA.
- Keywords can be useful for both email and SEO. You’ve probably heard about how writing content around relevant keywords is an SEO best practice. You know that it’s crucial to ensure that the content on your site and blog are relevant to terms your audience is searching for, in order to make sure that your audience finds your site. But keywords are important for email campaigns, too. Popular keywords can reveal topic areas, problems, products, and services that are important to your audience. This can help you put together an email campaign that targets the areas of most interest to potential customers–and makes it more likely your emails will get opened.
A/B testing, in which more than one version of a campaign is sent to a certain audience in order to find out what resonates best with users (success can be measured in email opens, click-through rates, or another metric you define), can also reveal insights which can be useful in SEO. A/B testing is a good way to quickly get a sense of what gets potential customers interested. This is knowledge you can draw on when choosing what blogs get written and what landing pages your site should include.
More Ways to Boost SEO Through Email: Reviews and Social Media
Aside from driving high-quality traffic to your website, there are a couple additional ways you can improve your website’s ranking ability through email marketing.
- Ask for reviews. Once a user becomes a customer, use your email marketing to ask for a Google review. With the right email automation, you don’t even have to do this by hand; you can set up your automation to send emails to new customers based on a certain activity, such as a purchaser sign-up through an email link. These reviews have a big impact on SEO, and can also help potential customers doing research on your product or service to choose your business as opposed to a competitor.
- Include links to social media. Social media interaction does have a small impact on the Google algorithm. Include links to social media like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter in your emails to allow users to connect with you. B2B businesses in particular may want to consider a link to LinkedIn. These links can also encourage users to share the email with others on any platform, increasing the reach of your content and, in turn, your website traffic.
SEO and Email Marketing: More Than the Sum of Their Parts
Ultimately, thinking of SEO and email marketing as different facets of a larger, holistic strategy will benefit your website and customers overall. Your email campaign should offer value, be segmented to appeal to a certain audience, contain quality content with consistent branding, and be built around a subject that you know matters to potential customers. Campaigns that follow these tenets are valuable even when they don’t lead directly to sales. That’s because they still support your SEO goals–by driving interested, quality traffic to your website.
If you’d like to find out more about how to make your SEO and email marketing work together to boost your site’s sales, traffic, and visibility in search results contact us online to speak to an Australian SEO expert.
