How to combine SEO with Email Marketing and Boost Your Rankings

Email marketing is one of the most effective channels to reach your target audience and interact with them. It has shown its value in marketing through the years and in 2020 it’s stronger than ever.

SEO on the other hand is a marketing strategy proven to drive website traffic and raise brand awareness. Moreover, it is a highly effective way to increase search engine rankings.

However, these two are not incompatible with each other. In fact, they are both the two sides of the same coin. The coin being digital marketing!

7 Ways to Combine Email Marketing & SEO

Both SEO and email marketing rely on content in order to promote your brand and improve your ranking.

So, there is no reason why you shouldn’t fuse them together and try to maximize your marketing efforts while you rise at the top of Google search.

Without further ado, let’s see how these two support each other towards achieving the common goals of improving ranking.

1. Leverage engagement through your list

The first thing you need to do if you want to combine email marketing and SEO tactics is to share your content with your email list.

It is common knowledge that sharing educational content over email helps deepen your relationship with your subscribers and makes your brand more trustworthy. So, if your brand is only sending promotional emails, then you should rethink your strategy.

When your audience opens your emails, a circle of engagement begins. Not only do you get more website traffic but you also get more feedback on your blog posts. All this engagement isn’t wasted, since it is identified by Google as a positive signal.

Make sure that you have a compelling email signature and integrate social share buttons in your emails for LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and other social platforms that your brand uses.

This makes it easier for your subscribers to follow you on social media, while it’s sure that they’ll feel more encouraged to do so if they see the appropriate button. After all, it makes sense to follow brands you’re interested in and engage with them.

Some of your subscribers are naturally going to comment on your blog posts or start sharing them with others.

What does this mean for your search rankings though?

This could result in lower bounce rates and much higher time on your page. Consequently, your content ranks higher because those are positive engagement signals.

This is supported by a thorough experiment run by Hootsuite indicating that “there is a positive correlation between social engagements and change in rank.”

2. Utilize content from newsletters on your blog

How about a little reverse strategy now? No matter how valuable and insightful your email newsletters are, they drive no SEO profit if they’re idly sitting in your subscribers’ inboxes. Since there is no way for search engines to index them, you can’t get any direct value from your email campaigns.

What you can do to remedy this is to publish your email content on your blog and Google will notice it immediately! Supposing your keywords are aligned and you’re using relevant keywords anyway, then the process will be much easier because the content isn’t going to need substantial tweaks.

There are various ways to approach this depending on the size of your newsletter content. In the case of short emails, a single campaign might not be enough to turn into a blog post. Therefore, you’ll need to organize and select newsletters with similar topics and merge them into one blog post. Don’t forget to add potential missing keywords and check the content for coherency and up-to-dateness.

On the flip side, long newsletters don’t require much work. You can just copy the content and check for grammatical errors. Finally, you need to add some images to break up walls of text and make it more eye-friendly for visitors.

For example, Canva sends these weekly tips to their subscribers. They could be easily transformed into a blog post.

Repurposing your email newsletters into a different format means that people who aren’t on your list can see your content. So, it is crucial to follow SEO best practices so that your content stands a chance to rank in search engines.

Pro tip: It is a good idea to let people know that repurposing isn’t a regular thing and there is still content that’s subscriber-only. This will work as an incentive for idle visitors to sign up to your list and at the same time it will show how much you care about your subscribers.

3. Create and maintain segmented email lists

If you want to enjoy the benefits of both your email marketing and SEO, then it is essential to segment your email lists. Doing this ensures that you send relevant and appropriate content to the right audience.

There is a high chance that the content you create covers a wide range of different subjects. And the reality is that not all of your subscribers will be interested in every subject covered. Therefore, if you want to maximize your reach, you need to segment your mailing list in order to be able to provide the appropriate content to every subscriber.

Undoubtedly, your target audience prefers to see only content relevant to them. Segmentation facilitates this relevancy. In turn, your subscribers will be more engaged with your content and they’ll want to check it out. Segmentation not only facilitates this relevancy but also helps avoid landing in a spam folder.

Delivering tailored content will result in your subscribers spending more time on your page exploring your content. This is exactly what you need because more time on your website means that Google will rank your site higher so that more relevant leads can find your site. Ergo, you have achieved your goal of boosting your rankings.

4. Leverage email outreach to build links

Links coming from another website to your own are called backlinks. Backlinks are crucial for SEO. The more backlinks you get from authoritative sites, the more chances you have to rank higher on Google, because they boost your site’s credibility.

So, you need to create high-quality content that people will find valuable and consequently link to it. Next, you have to formulate an outreach strategy in order to promote and deliver that content to the appropriate people.

To do that you have two options:

• Ask people directly to link to your resource in one of their posts, or
• Pitch them a guest post with a link back to your website or resource

For most people sending a cold outreach email is fine. However, this tactic is not optimal and it has few chances at success.

To ensure a response to your email outreach, you can use a subject line tester which helps you improve your open rate. An example is Moosend’s Refine. It allows you to personalize your subject line and ensure that your emails get clicked. After all, it’s 2020 and people expect to receive personalized communication.

5. Survey your audience to define your content

Put simply, SEO is about sharing high-quality content that satisfies user intent. It’s common for marketers to plan their content calendars based on keyword research. However, this doesn’t take into account your existing audience.

While it’s true that every day new people are going to find your content and become your audience, to build a sustainable business you need to have a loyal subscriber base that happily engages with you. So, their informational needs come first! According to recent research, 90% of successful B2B content marketers put their audience’s informational needs first.

Consequently, you need to get feedback from your subscribers in order to keep them happy and engaged. This can be achieved by asking your audience at the end of your emails for specific topics that they would be interested in. After you’ve found those topics, you can even go the extra mile and tie them to relevant keywords with decent search volume.

Another way to approach this is to design a survey and send it to your email list. Not only will you capture their intent but also increase your future effectiveness of your content.

6. Encourage repeat visitors

There are more than 200 ranking factors that search engines like Google rely on, when it comes to SEO. Repeat traffic is one of them. According to Backlinko, websites that have repeat visitors are likely to receive a boost in rankings.

Think of it as an indication of loyalty towards the site, a signal that people find the content there useful. To take advantage of this, you can run drip campaigns in order to engage and connect with your audience.

This can take the form of exclusive offers to your customers or an informative newsletter. The goal remains the same. Entice your visitors through your email content to come back to your site for more.

Something to be careful here is that you don’t want to overwhelm your subscribers with emails that they didn’t opt to receive, since they will unsubscribe and never return.

7. Create digests

Digests are an excellent way to bring more traffic to your blog. In order for this method to be effective, you need to cherry pick articles that are both interesting and catchy.

You can select articles on a similar topic or choose your best performing content and create a super valuable digest. It’s up to you. A digest usually looks like the one below.

In this particular example, the digest’s topic is business growth through various marketing tactics and tools. So, it would definitely appeal to businesses exploring ways to grow their brand fast with the help of the appropriate tools.

To create a good digest, you have to come up with a smart email subject line and add only valuable resources to the digest. If you only include promotional material, people won’t open the email. The goal is to save your subscribers’ time, bring quality traffic to your blog and re-engage potentially inactive subscribers.

Moreover, digests have the potential of earning you some backlinks. Let’s say that your digest is brought to the attention of content marketers or thought leaders who might be interested in your articles. They may be more than happy to spread the word about your blog and most importantly link to it. This means more traffic and higher ranking for you.

Conclusion

An effective digital marketing strategy does not rely on a single channel in order to drive the desirable results. Ideal results come from utilizing each channel’s strengths to positively impact the others.

So, while at first glance email marketing and SEO don’t seem related, they are indeed a very powerful combination. Integrating these two has the potential to deliver huge business results for both new and established businesses.

With the right personalized content and email list segmentation, you’ll be able to drive qualified traffic to your website. This will in turn improve your engagement metrics, which are bound to have a positive correlation with search engine rankings.

Don’t be afraid to develop targeted content campaigns or even repurpose your top performing emails into blog content.

The sooner your audience gets relevant content, the more likely they are to engage with it and share it with others. And even if this doesn’t impact rankings immediately, you’ll have definitely improved your search visibility.