What is Email Marketing?
Email marketing is a form of marketing that uses email to share information with customers. It may be more dated and less glamorous than other forms of online marketing, but when done correctly, email marketing is a consistently effective method of generating leads and sales.
How Do Email Marketing Campaigns Impact SEO Initiatives?
Although email marketing campaigns cannot directly impact search engine rankings, they can be utilized to further SEO initiatives. So how are email and SEO related?
Google definitely isn’t crawling and ranking your individual emails, and having a ton of subscribers in your email account won’t necessarily help you rank better through your keywords. However, regularly emailing your audience will keep them engaged and wield traffic to your site.
A smart online marketer will use email as an extremely effective tool to enhance search engine optimization initiatives. Let’s take a look at three strategies to help turn email marketing into an SEO booster.
1. Encourage Interaction With Email
It is ineffective to send out 20 emails about “email marketing in Los Angeles,” hoping to rank better for those keywords. Rather, if you utilize helpful marketing resources, you will be able to attract customers for various marketing related terms.
An email that engages your audience through sharing, encouraging comments, and links to your site can boost search engine optimization.
Let’s say, for example, that you’ve recently written a blog on your website about email marketing in Los Angeles. Your blog may get some organic traffic, but an email to your subscribers about how they can utilize email marketing strategies to boost their business sales can increase the number of views, shares, comments, and reposts that your blog gets.
You may even want to consider engaging your audience through specific calls-to-action in your emails:
- Ask readers to leave a comment on your blog detailing how they can use email marketing to boost their own business
- Encourage readers to share your post if you’re involved with a non-profit project, spreading a good cause
- Drive users to your social media marketing channels (Instagram, Facebook, +Google, Youtube, Twitter, etc.) and encourage them to comment on those sites as well
You may even consider using surveys and past activity to segment your email subscriber list, separating the active readers who comment and share frequently.
2. Encourage Social Media Interactions
Encouraging your audience to interact with your emails can benefit SEO, but it’s also important to offer your readers other ways to get hooked on your content.
Ideally, email marketing should encourage the subscribers to follow your content through other methods so they won’t constantly rely on email reminders:
- Link to blogs in your emails, but encourage connecting through RSS for those who are hooked to your content
- On your website, offer an option for users to subscribe to a separate email list specifically dedicated to daily or weekly updates about specific blog topics
- Encourage users who love your videos to subscribe to your YouTube channel
- Encourage users who love your images to follow you on Instagram
Encouraging these separate interactions will help subscribers stay connected to your updated content consistently, whether your specifically drive them to that content or not.
Think about how your search engine rankings would improve if a part of your email subscribers were also following you on Facebook, or if you had ten times as many subscribers via RSS who want to stay updated on your latest blogs. Through the encouragement of social media followers, your SEO strategies can get an incredible boost.
3. Save Newsletter Content
Finally, email takes a lot of time to write if you’re doing it well. Regularly sending out thoughtful and useful content to your subscribers is no easy task. Does this amazing newsletter content “register” with Google or have any impact on your rankings?
Valuable email content can be reused and turned into blog content:
- If your emails are lengthy, you can convert them into stand-alone blog posts by adding essential links to the same content and posting it live on your blog. This allows you to share the same message to those who follow you on social media channels but don’t subscribe to your email newsletters
- If your emails are short and brief, you can integrate a few related emails together and share them as one valuable blog post
Great email newsletter content can and should be reused and repurposed as blog content, and this can be done in a number of simple ways:
This is a valuable process because not only will your non-subscribers also receive your valuable information, but you will have more quality content to rank for instead of just hiding in your inbox. Also, you will not have to write up a similar story from scratch for a new blog post.
Email Marketing Power
These email marketing strategies have the power to drive search engine optimization rankings. The next step would be to determine which SEO initiatives are a priority for your business, and how you can use the email marketing strategies listed here to boost those SEO rankings!