7 Ways Email Marketing Can Boost Your SEO Ranking

• Updated on: 2019-06-03
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7 Ways Email Marketing Can Boost Your SEO Ranking Personalize Your Email Content
7 Ways Email Marketing Can Boost Your SEO Ranking
PCMag provides expert techniques on how to use email marketing to get your audience on your website
Brian T. Horowitz
eWEEK, Fast Company, Men’s Fitness, Scientific American, and USA Weekend. Brian is a graduate of Hofstra University in New York. You can follow him on Twitter at @bthorowitz or email him at brian_horowitz@ziffdavis.com .
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1 Jun 2019, 6:44 p.m.
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When you're implementing a marketing plan, email still has to be a key component. As a low-cost way to quickly and measurably engage with customers, email marketing has a fantastic value proposition. But it's one that's actually better than many marketers realize because good email marketing can also positively affect your search engine optimization (SEO).
SEO is the almost-science of ensuring that your content, whether it's marketing, articles, or an e-commerce website, appear as high up as possible when your target audience performs web search operations on popular web search engines, typically Google. Trying to get your website or content to land as high up on that first search results page should be top of mind when you're crafting any marketing collateral, and that includes an email marketing campaign. The right keywords can potentially help distribute your content in search engines or sell your product.
While it may not appear as though there is a direct connection between an email marketing message and optimizing your placement in search results, as long as you're placing your email content on your website or linking to it, you can build that bridge.
"You could increase engagement by driving qualified visitors to your website. And by using email to promote SEO content, you can gain social shares and even back links that can result in real SEO gains," said Chris Rodgers, CEO and founder of Colorado SEO Pros . "The big connection between SEO and email is the ability to promote targeted SEO content, improve off-page SEO factors, and drive qualified traffic that leads to better engagement signals for Google and other search engines."
Off-page SEO factors include social media shares and back links, which are links coming from other websites. Engagement signals include bounce rates and a measure of time on site, he said.
Building search traffic is important for all companies, but it's especially crucial for small to midsize businesses (SMBs) because they're looking to grow their brands not only quickly but cheaply, according to Sky Cassidy, CEO at Mountaintop Data , a business-to-business (B2B) marketing intelligence firm. He noted that driving even one more person to search your website when you only have 10 people coming to your website adds 10 percent more high-quality search.
That means search rankings and keywords are important when you're an SMB just starting out. So, here are seven tips for SMBs on how to use email marketing to improve their SEO.
Personalize Your Email Content
'Not only is high-quality content important in an email campaign, but the content should be personalized so that it catches the attention of the correct audience. Of course, if you're a gardening publication sending out newsletters with blog links to readers who garden, then they're more likely to be engaged with the content and search for it in Google in the days following the email delivery. A Lowe's email blast advertising barbecue grills for the summer would be relevant to people looking to buy products for their home, and those emails could lead users to drive traffic to the store's website.
"Personalize content based on verticals and the demographics of who you are targeting," Cassidy said. "The more targeted and relevant your emails, [the more they will help you] amplify positive SEO results."
Cassidy used the example of a genealogy website sending out an email about the family history of particular recipients. If the email is about your history, then you're more likely to open the email. And then you're more likely to search for similar content on this genealogy website later.
"The deeper you can go with the personalization of that genealogy, the more interested you're going to be and the more likely you are to search through later," Cassidy said. "That's the extent of where personalization can go. The more relevant it is to [recipients], the more likely they are going to engage."
To create this personalization, full-service email marketing platforms like Mailchimp are incorporating artificial intelligence (AI), which helps deliver insights on which content might appeal to various users. Then companies can personalize that content at a granular level.
Keep All Email Marketing Content on Your Website
Especially when you're sending blog posts or articles through an email newsletter, you want to make sure you're posting all of this content to the website rather than keeping it in email. Afterward, people are more likely to search for it in a search engine rather than through their email inbox.
Readers or customers "intend to come to your site, but they're using keywords to get there from your email marketing," Cassidy explained. "The important thing is that you hammer in the right keywords with your email creative."
For example, let's say a marketing professional received an email newsletter from a vendor containing a link to a webinar on SEO and the individual didn't register for it right away. The person can search for the term "SEO" later and be able to call it up if the webinar or related content is posted on the company's website. A lot of the time, email marketing messages come at the wrong time for people when they're not ready to fully engage, so they search for it later.
"It's like using Google to find stuff in your own house," Cassidy said. "It's just quicker to ask the computer where it is."
Include Social Media Links in Your Email
Incorporating social buttons into your email blasts is a good way to build search traffic through the exposure on social media . Not only can sharing email content drive searches, but it can drive traffic to your website, too.
"Every email newsletter that goes out should have social media links so people can easily share the information," Cassidy said. "It's just a multiplier of the effect that sending out the emails has, and [it] drives searches."
Deb Gabor, CEO of brand strategy consultancy Sol Marketing , noted the importance of sharing the content. "If you have high-performing emails with compelling content, highly visual content, really shareable content, and you encourage the people reading your emails to also share that content with their own networks on other social platforms with links back to your website, that can drive traffic," she said.
Maintain a Highly Engaged Email List
Spend the time to develop an email list of contacts who are highly engaged. These recipients actively open emails, read the content, and click through to your website. They're likely to be interested in searching for the content online later. Most email marketing tools, especially more sophisticated ones such as Salesforce Pardot , offer a plethora of tools to measure audience engagement. You can even automate those metrics so they'll appear in dashboards immediately following an email blast.
To build a list of engaged users, you need to study your audience and learn about their preferences, Gabor noted. "If you have a really good, highly engaged email audience, you know a lot already about the kinds of people you're trying to attract," she said. "Using that content to make your brand into a magnet is a really good way to make those two things—[email marketing and SEO]—kind of dovetail together."
When you work on your email list, you also want to segment it according to the interactions you've had with them before to boost SEO. That involves studying digital body language, according to Gabor.
Conduct Testing to Try Out SEO Keywords
Conducting testing is a great way to try out various SEO keywords. These methods include A/B testing and multivariate testing. A/B testing is when you compare two different versions of an email. Multivariate testing involves you using several versions of an email. You'll get to learn which email content appeals to your audience and leads them to search for your content later. Most email marketing tools will offer these kinds of testing tools, with more advanced tools, such as Infusionsoft , capable of even deeper analysis.
"You can get a lot of information from your emails, especially if you do some testing and see with which emails people are engaging," Gabor said. "You can get a lot of cues about...which specific words you want to optimize on your site."
Subject line testing is another important tactic. You want to try out keywords in your subject lines as well as in the body copy of emails. That way, you can learn how to optimize keywords based on the emails your audience is interacting with, Gabor said.
Reverse-Engineer Your Keywords
When you reverse-engineer keywords, you think about which words your audience will search for online while crafting the copy for your newsletter. Cassidy compared the process of coming up with the right search terms to playing "Family Feud." You need to incorporate into your email copy the phrases people will think of rather than simply the best phrase.
"There's a subject and they have to come up with answers that people on the street gave, and they don't always make sense," Cassidy said. "It matters what the majority of the population thinks of when they think of this topic."
Create Top-of-Mind Awareness
The purpose of all email marketing is to deliver content into your audience's inbox that will resonate in their minds when they perform an organic search in the future. "You'll remember to search content from an email like you remember to search for Campbell's soup in a supermarket," Gabor noted. Campbell's soup is a top-of-mind brand for soup because people have seen plenty of ads for the brand.
To help create that for your brand, don't simply blast out as many emails as possible. That's a great way to become classified as a spammer. Instead, incorporate email marketing as part of an overall marketing strategy to create this top-of-mind brand awareness. Go beyond just email marketing and think holistically. Build a strategy to promote your brand through different types of content, such as blogs, video, and social media.
"Email supports everything else you are currently doing in your other brand-building activities," Gabor said. "Email is another touch point in which your audience becomes aware of your brand and starts to form an image of it."
It's a little difficult to quantify, since the exact procedure for reaching top-of-mind status will vary greatly from brand to brand. But it's a combination of channel coordination and excellent creatives designed specifically for your particular offering. Marketing automation tools, such as HubSpot , can help since they can take customers on a multi-channel journey and measure the results. But before that's possible, this process will require some heavy creative lifting from you and your marketing team. But the results are worth the work.
"Top-of-mind awareness allows you a lot of privilege because people are already aware of you, and it's easier to convert people who are aware of you," Gabor said. "It's easier to convert people to buy stuff when they're actually considering you. Content helps drive consideration."
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