Updated on November 4, 2019
Both email marketing and SEO have the same basic goal regardless of your industry: to promote your product, service, or organization. However, they are usually seen as parallel lines that do not meet, since emails are not indexed by search engines. This approach results in two marketing channels being developed separately.
Why not combine them to achieve more tangible results more efficiently? Emails can also help you with SEO-related tasks like driving traffic to your site, increasing on-page activity and average visit duration, which, in turn, improves your search rankings. There are several ways to create chemistry between SEO and email marketing to improve your results.
1. Increase traffic through links in emails
It is extremely important to let your readers know not only about your offers, but also about new posts on your blog. It seems to be an obvious way to get more people visit your website, but companies usually forget to do this. Write a catchy brief description leaving your subscribers motivated to learn more and paste a link to an article in it.
You can also make subscribers your part-time link builders if your company's blog content is actually useful. There is a good chance that there are bloggers, industry experts, and thought leaders among your readers. They often subscribe to newsletters in the hopes of catching interesting case studies or reports that they can reference in their own posts. If you have unique information you can share with a wider audience, make an article, report or a white paper and announce it in your email. This way you can kill two birds with one stone: some readers will click on the link and visit your resource while others might repost and link to it on their websites.
2. Increase time people spend on your website
The amount of time people spend on your site is very important for Google to determine whether your content is useful enough to rank it high. With emails, you can encourage your subscribers to participate in a discussion by asking them to leave a comment under your article.
You can follow up on your emails about a new post with another message citing the most controversial comments and ask your subscribers to share their opinion on a subject. This way you can significantly increase user engagement, and even reactivate inactive subscribers.
It is also possible to increase the average time on site through linking to your website’s search bar in emails. This way you can make people visit several pages at once.
3. Remind about your previous blog posts
Useful content plays one of the most important roles for your rankings, so you probably put much effort into its creation. Unfortunately, it often becomes forgotten faster than it loses its relevance. Why not to remind about your articles in emails?
For instance, you can make a digest with editor’s picks, or the most popular materials of the week. If created thoughtfully, it is not perceived as just another attempt to get your content noticed, but as a convenient way to prevent your subscribers from missing anything important. Make sure you offer really valuable information you’d find interesting yourself.
4. Use content for your blog and emails interchangeably
There are many recommendations on how to repurpose your blog content like creating presentations, podcasts and infographics, etc. You should not limit yourself – try using articles or other materials from your site for writing emails and vice versa. For instance, you can use text from your letters as a base for creating new blog posts by either adding flesh to one email or combining several of them.
If your letters are informative and contain data that remains relevant for a longer period, you can create an archive with them on your site. This way readers can easily find emails in one place, and, in turn, drive traffic to your site. Moreover, your website visitors will have an opportunity to get a glimpse on what you usually send your subscribers and will be more likely to subscribe too.
In case you decide to add newsletters to your blog and save it in the archive as well, make sure search engines index the right location by using the canonical tag pointing to your blog page.
5. Encourage your readers to share your content on social media
If your content is really useful, people are likely to share it. To simplify their life, you can provide them with a possibility to do it just from their mailbox. Most email marketing services like MailChimp, AWeber, and SendGrid let you create share buttons and even customize them by using your own images.
More shares result in more visitors to your website and social signals that are one of the most important factors in SEO rankings.
If you are not sure, whether your emails really help you with SEO, use UTM codes to track where the traffic comes from and what types of emails perform better.
The bottom line
There are several ways to make the most of your SEO and email marketing campaigns by optimizing your efforts. The ones mentioned above do not make an exhaustive list, and you can come up with other tactics. Different methods should be tested, so you can find out what works best with your audience.
However, what is certain is that combining email marketing and SEO does not make any sense if you do not create quality content. This is what you should work on first and foremost.