4 Ideas to Combine Email Marketing & SEO for Stellar Results

Email mar­ket­ing and SEO can work togeth­er to help you reach your mar­ket­ing goals.

In fact, SEJ con­trib­u­tor Brad Smith recent­ly shared five ways email mar­ket­ing can help your SEO efforts.

Email can have a huge impact on your SEO efforts.

So how can you actu­al­ly make them work together?

Here are sev­er­al ways to com­bine email mar­ket­ing and SEO for your dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing campaigns.

1. Repurpose Newsletter Content

To some mar­keters, a newslet­ter is typ­i­cal­ly an email pro­mot­ing their lat­est blog post, or on occa­sion, their prod­uct or service.

Often, this is the promise:
Many newslet­ters promise exclu­sive con­tent and notifications.

But the real­i­ty is gen­er­al­ly different.

Regard­less, you can’t apply this point if you only send emails when you pub­lish a new post.

Make it a point to send your sub­scribers exclu­sive con­tent to make them feel special.

After all, it’s the decent thing to do – espe­cial­ly if your sign-up copy made that guarantee.

It also gives you future con­tent you can use as a blog post or any oth­er con­tent for­mat (e.g., a research report, info­graph­ic, tool/software) you may choose.

That’s where the SEO ben­e­fit comes in.

Google loves great content.

When you repur­pose your newslet­ter into a dif­fer­ent for­mat for peo­ple who aren’t on your email list yet, the con­tent stands a chance of rank­ing on search engines – pro­vid­ed you also fol­low SEO best prac­tices as well.

Be sure to indi­cate that the con­tent was orig­i­nal­ly sent to sub­scribers of your newsletter.

Addi­tion­al­ly, let peo­ple know that such repur­pos­ing isn’t a reg­u­lar occur­rence and there’s still sub­scriber-only con­tent. This serves two purposes:

• It may encour­age cer­tain bystanders to sign up to your list.
• It will also show that you care about your subscribers.

Repur­pose your newslet­ter con­tent, but don’t over­do it or there will be lit­tle to no incentive(s) to sign up for your email list.

2. Create Epic Content

I know.

“Epic” and “con­tent” are two overused words in the SEO world. So much so that many mar­keters just roll their eyes when they see those words togeth­er these days.

But you know the best part about it?

Many mar­keters now have an idea of what “epic con­tent” is.

“Epic” applies whether you’re cre­at­ing newslet­ter con­tent from the scratch or you’re send­ing an email to pro­mote your lat­est blog post.

I’ve defined high-qual­i­ty con­tent in the past as con­tent that achieves its mar­ket­ing objec­tives — what­ev­er those are.

In an SEO con­text, qual­i­ty con­tent will keep vis­i­tors on your site longer, which will improve your on-site engage­ment metrics.

Google may not direct­ly use bounce rate in Google Ana­lyt­ics in their rank­ing algo­rithm, but as Gillon Hunter wrote in Under­stand­ing Bounce Rate & How to Audit It:

“9 times out of 10, I would rather have a low bounce rate.”

How can you make your con­tent more epic? By improv­ing your:

• Head­lines.
• Con­tent qual­i­ty (e.g., match­ing user intent, answer­ing ques­tions com­pre­hen­sive­ly, being useful).
• Images and visuals.
• Exist­ing content.

Search engines want to reward bet­ter con­tent. That doesn’t mean its word count or format.

Over time, a low­er bounce rate and longer time spent on your site from your email sub­scribers will send good user sig­nals to search engines.

3. Send Personalized Content to Your Email List

A recent study has shown that 77 per­cent of busi­ness pro­fes­sion­als like receiv­ing per­son­al­ized content.

There are sev­er­al ways to incor­po­rate per­son­al­iza­tion into your con­tent and even newsletters.

But we’re more inter­est­ed in the lat­ter and how it can ben­e­fit SEO.

Sur­vey your audi­ence and ask how often they want to receive your newsletter.

You can give users options when they’re sign­ing up, like this:
Sev­er­al stud­ies have shown that read­ers who come to your site through emails are usu­al­ly more engaged than oth­er visitors.

Also, sur­veys can help you seg­ment your sub­scribers accord­ing to the type(s) of con­tent top­ics they want to receive in their newsletter.

For exam­ple, Hub­Spot has sev­er­al blogs, includ­ing mar­ket­ing and a sales blog. Sub­scribers to the mar­ket­ing blog won’t receive updates about posts on the sales blog (and vice ver­sa) unless they’re sub­scribed to both.

Such seg­men­ta­tion helps you send only the most rel­e­vant con­tent to your subscribers.

Rel­e­vance is a key pil­lar of SEO.

When you send per­son­al­ized, rel­e­vant con­tent to your email list, they’re more like­ly to share and link to it.

This expos­es your con­tent to more peo­ple, which increas­es the like­li­hood of you get­ting even more shares and links.

All of this activ­i­ty can both, direct­ly and indi­rect­ly, help your con­tent rank bet­ter in search engines.

4. Ask Subscribers for Reviews via Email

Depend­ing on where they’re sub­scribed to, even mar­keters have occa­sion­al­ly received emails from brands ask­ing for reviews.

Anoth­er Moz study report­ed that review sig­nals account for 13 per­cent of local search rank­ing factors.

The truth is that for some busi­ness­es, rank­ing local­ly is more ben­e­fi­cial than their over­all ranking.

They can use email to solic­it reviews from their customers.

An added advan­tage of cus­tomer-writ­ten reviews is word usage — cus­tomers may end up writ­ing these reviews using key­words or city names that are ben­e­fi­cial for your business.

Accord­ing to the study by Local SEO Guide:

“At a high lev­el, hav­ing a key­word you are try­ing to rank for, and a men­tion of a city you are work­ing to rank in, in reviews has a high cor­re­la­tion with high rank­ing Google My Busi­ness results.”

Send links to third-par­ty review sites to your sub­scribers with com­pelling CTAs to encour­age them to click through and write their reviews for your prod­uct or service.

In the long run, such efforts, though seem­ing­ly insignif­i­cant, can enhance your SEO efforts.

Addi­tion­al­ly, cus­tomer reviews also tell you what aspects of your busi­ness need improvement.

Conclusion

When it comes to SEO, you’ll need patience and per­se­ver­ance to see results.

Use these tips to make sure your email strat­e­gy also helps you achieve your SEO goals.

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