These days, email marketing is good for more than just customer engagement. Relevant email marketing content could lead your audience onto your website, improving your search engine ranking.
When you’re implementing a marketing plan, email still has to be a key component. As a low-cost way to quickly and measurably engage with customers, email marketing has a fantastic value proposition. But it’s one that’s actually better than many marketers realize because good email marketing can also positively affect your search engine optimization (SEO).
SEO is the almost-science of ensuring that your content, whether it’s marketing, articles, or an e-commerce website, appear as high up as possible when your target audience performs web search operations on popular web search engines, typically Google. Trying to get your website or content to land as high up on that first search results page should be top of mind when you’re crafting any marketing collateral, and that includes an email marketing campaign. The right keywords can potentially help distribute your content in search engines or sell your product.
While it may not appear as though there is a direct connection between an email marketing message and optimizing your placement in search results, as long as you’re placing your email content on your website or linking to it, you can build that bridge.
“You could increase engagement by driving qualified visitors to your website. And by using email to promote SEO content, you can gain social shares and even back links that can result in real SEO gains,” said Chris Rodgers, CEO and founder of Colorado SEO Pros. “The big connection between SEO and email is the ability to promote targeted SEO content, improve off-page SEO factors, and drive qualified traffic that leads to better engagement signals for Google and other search engines.”
Off-page SEO factors include social media shares and back links, which are links coming from other websites. Engagement signals include bounce rates and a measure of time on site, he said.
Building search traffic is important for all companies, but it’s especially crucial for small to midsize businesses (SMBs) because they’re looking to grow their brands not only quickly but cheaply, according to Sky Cassidy, CEO at Mountaintop Data, a business-to-business (B2B) marketing intelligence firm. He noted that driving even one more person to search your website when you only have 10 people coming to your website adds 10 percent more high-quality search.
That means search rankings and keywords are important when you’re an SMB just starting out. So, here are seven more tips for SMBs for how to use email marketing to improve their SEO.