How to Combine Email Marketing and SEO Efforts to Gain Stellar Results

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is not just restricted to search engines and websites. While on-page SEO and technical SEO are important, off-page SEO is also necessary. Although link building is one of the most essential parts of off-page SEO, email marketing can help with it too.

SEO helps you reach the top of the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). This, in turn, can give added visibility to your brand and help establish you as an authority in the industry. However, competition makes it difficult to rank high. So you need to put a lot of effort into link building. You must also be ready to adapt to any changes in the search engine algorithms.

Emails are a great way of communicating with your audience and increasing your reach. Email marketing is one of the most lucrative forms of marketing and has an average ROI of $32 for every $1 spent. The biggest challenge that email marketers currently face is a lack of coordination between departments. You also need to get your target audience right to get the most out of your campaigns.

Both SEO and email marketing are similar to each other in the sense that they both use content to promote your brand. It is solely through the power of content that they both drive people to your brand. This is why you can use them together and further improvise to get the most out of your marketing efforts. Let’s see how you can achieve this:

1. Lower bounce rates

With email marketing, you can get highly targeted traffic to your website. You can share your blog posts with your email list with a clear call-to-action (CTA). Those who are genuinely interested in your content will click on the CTA button and go to your website.

They will be highly-qualified visitors, so you know that they will like the content of your posts. This reduces their chances of bouncing away from your website, hence decreasing your bounce rate.

2. Discover the intent behind the query

Google focuses on enhancing the user experience. They do so by showing results which are relevant to what the user is searching for. To serve content that is the most relevant to a searcher’s query, you need to figure out the intent behind the query.

To do this, you can use email marketing. All you need to do is come up with a survey and send it to your email list. This survey should have questions that ask your audience about their desires, challenges, fears, etc. related to the topic.

Based on their answers, you’ll be able to figure out what is going through their minds. You can then write an article with answers to the questions that the majority of your subscribers have provided.

This tactic works because you get to know the state of mind of searchers from the searches themselves. Thus, your content is more likely to connect well with their intent.

To increase its effectiveness even further, you can send the blog post to your email list. This will improve their chances of opening and reading it even further. Which can reduce the bounce rates too.

3. Repurpose newsletter content

Newsletters may seem like tools to help you promote your latest blog posts, products, or services. However, you can use them for a lot more than just that.

You should make it a point to send out newsletters with exclusive content to your subscribers. As always, make sure that all of your newsletters are designed well. To do so, you can use newsletter templates.

This exclusive content can be used to create a blog post or any other type of content in the future. When your newsletter is repurposed for a new audience in a different format, it might start ranking in search results too.

You should, of course, follow SEO best practices to ensure that the content ranks higher up in the SERPs.

Also, make sure that you mention that the content was initially sent to newsletter subscribers. And it’s a good idea to let people know that such content isn’t published regularly and that subscriber-only content still exists.

Doing this will motivate people to sign up to your email list. At the same time, it’ll make your subscribers feel that you care for them.

The key is to repurpose the newsletter content regularly. However, you need to make sure that you don’t overdo it. Otherwise, there’ll be hardly any incentive for people to subscribe to your email list.

4. Use automated sequences to generate traffic

Emails give you the power to automate things. You can create automated email sequences and let them work their magic. Whenever you get a new subscriber, they will be able to see your best posts without any manual effort from your end.

Such email sequences give you an automated flow of traffic that will keep growing with the size of your list. When Google notices this increase in engaged traffic, it’ll start ranking your website higher up in the search results.

This is because Google will see that your visitors are finding what they are looking for on your website. To find out how your brand is performing in real-time, you can use Mention.

5. Improves social media engagement

When you send out an email that has social sharing buttons, it can encourage subscribers to share your content. You must, however, ensure that you include a CTA asking them to do so. This can improve the chances of them doing it.

The shares can help generate more organic social engagement and can drive traffic to your website. Additionally, the higher engagement on social media can help improve your SEO. This happens because social media engagements affect rankings positively.

Image via Hootsuite

Not only does the engagement improve but so does your reach. When people who aren’t aware of your brand notice it on social media, they may search for it on Google.

This increase in search volume can also make Google take notice that people are looking for you. Which can improve your search rankings.

6. Use CTAs

A call-to-action (CTA) is one of the most integral parts of an email. It asks the subscribers to make a particular action by directing them to do so. This way, there are higher chances of people making that particular action as compared to a case where you let them decide.

The same applies to sharing your content on social media. A well-placed and beautifully crafted CTA can help you multiply the number of shares you get on your posts.

One great place to add your social media sharing buttons is in the footer section of your email. Additionally, you can do the same for your blog posts too.

Another CTA that you can include in your emails is to ask your subscribers to forward the email to their close circles. This can prompt them to send the email to those who may be interested in reading your blog posts. That way, you can get even more traffic on your website.

7. Deliver personalized content

Email segmentation can come in very handy when it comes to delivering personalized content.

When people receive customized content, they are more likely to find it relevant to them. This increases their chances of responding well to it.

In fact, about 98% of all marketers believe that personalization has some effect on improving customer relationships.

Image via Evergage

According to the same report by Evergage, about 78% of marketers use personalization for email marketing. This is the highest percentage among all the channels used for personalization.

Image via Evergage

To figure out what your subscribers want, you can send out surveys or email polls. Based on the results, you can create personalized content and share it with them through emails. Additionally, these surveys can help you segment your email list more effectively.

For instance, HubSpot has marketing and sales blogs, among others. They give their subscribers a chance to choose which blogs they want to subscribe to. Accordingly, the subscribers only receive updates from the blogs which they have subscribed to.

What personalized content does is improve the relevance of your content. When your subscribers read personalized and relevant content, they are more likely to share it or even link to it.

This, in turn, can improve the reach of your content and can also earn you some natural backlinks. Such activity by your subscribers can increase your traffic and inbound link profile, which can improve your search engine rankings.

8. Ask for reviews

A good way of using email marketing to push your SEO efforts is by asking your subscribers for reviews. This is especially helpful for local businesses as reviews are one of the most important ranking factors in local SEO.

Image via Moz

For local businesses, it is critical to rank higher up in search results locally rather than overall rankings. These businesses can ask their email subscribers to write reviews for them. Not only do the reviews help with local SEO, but they can also help you win the trust of other consumers as well.

This is because about 86% of consumers read customer reviews for local businesses. The more reviews your business has, the better are your chances of getting new customers.

Additionally, the reviewers may use relevant keywords, which can further help you rank higher in the SERPs.

You can send emails with CTAs that ask your subscribers to write reviews on third-party review websites. These reviews can, in the long run, help you rank higher in searches. And to keep track of your rankings, you can use tools such as SpyFu.

It allows you to save keywords easily and even organize them any way you want. You’ll also get weekly reports about your SEO and PPC rankings for both Google and Bing. Lastly, with in-depth insights, you’ll be able to see how well your keywords are performing.

Lastly, the reviews will also give you insights into what aspects of your business your customers like or don’t like. Accordingly, you can put effort into improving the aspects where you’re lagging behind.

Final Thoughts

While email marketing doesn’t directly influence SEO, you can use it to your advantage to drive traffic to your website. And getting relevant traffic can help reduce your bounce rates. You can also repurpose your newsletters and create blog posts, which can rank in searches.

It’s also a great idea to ask your subscribers for reviews as more reviews can help with your local SEO. Delivering personalized content and using CTAs well can also improve your social media engagement. These, in turn, can give a boost to your SEO as well.

And there any other ways that email marketing can help SEO? Let us know in the comments.

Shane Barker is a digital marketing consultant that specializes in sales funnels, targeted traffic and website conversions. He has consulted with Fortune 500 companies, influencers with digital products, and a number of A-List celebrities.