How to combine email marketing and SEO

Email marketing and Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) are two very different elements of an online marketing strategy. However, you can combine both of them and leverage each other’s success in reaching your marketing goals and achieving better overall results.

Combining both email marketing and SEO, however, can be tricky.

In this blog post, we share six ways how you can make email marketing and SEO work together.

1. Content promotion

Email is an excellent way to promote your blog’s content and drive additional traffic to it.

Often, it takes some time for a blog post to get indexed and ranked higher in the search engine results pages (SERPs). In the meanwhile, there is a couple of ways you can start promoting and driving traffic to it.

One of the ways is to share your content on different social media channels. The second method is to send an email to your subscribers promoting your latest blog post.

Content promotion is an effective way to promote your new content — especially long-form content and guides that your subscribers would love to read.

2. Building links

We all know how important backlinks are to search engine optimisation. It ranks among the top 3 search engine ranking factors after all.

Unfortunately, most online marketers miss an opportunity to build backlinks via email marketing. There are two ways of doing that:

1. First, you can create an email list of well-established influencers in your industry and start an outreach email campaign seeking backlinks to your popular content. This is a common technique that many online marketers and SEO experts use.
2. Second, whenever you publish high-quality long-form content, study, or original research, you can highlight it at the end of your emails. Also, mention that your post contains exclusive information and/or data, and if anyone wants to mention that information to their readers, they can link to your post. This is a more unique and very effective technique to drive new backlinks to help your overall SEO efforts.

3. Repurpose newsletter content

Most companies send a weekly, bi-weekly or monthly newsletter to their email subscribers. Those newsletters are usually in the form of a digest — containing 4-5 blog posts that they published recently.

Most importantly, quite often those newsletters contain exclusive information and tips for the readers.

Either way, the idea is to repurpose that content and share it on your blog so it can be ranked in the SERPs.

If you are sharing exclusive information with your email subscribers — which you should to encourage more people to subscribe — consider treating it as a “timed exclusive” content.

For example, you can make that information public — by repurposing it into blog posts — after, say, 3 months.

4. Send personalised content to different segments

One common email marketing mistake that some people make is that they send one type of content to everyone.

You shouldn’t do that.

Understand that different prospects may be at different stages of the sales funnel. Also, they may have different characteristics and want different things.

In order to keep them engaged and interested in what you have to say, try to personalise their messages. Share the type of content that they would be most interested in.

Divide your content by different types of customer segments, different stages of the sales funnel, or popularity level. Then share personalised content to different segments for best possible results.

5. Ask subscribers for reviews and content ideas

Online reviews matter a lot — especially to local businesses.

As search engines get smarter, the value of user-generated content and unbiased online reviews will gain in popularity.

This is why you should create email campaigns occasionally, seeking positive user reviews.

Additionally, to support your content marketing and SEO efforts, also ask your subscribers for content ideas. You can also run polls to identify topics that your audience is most interested in.

You are more likely to see higher traffic volume, engagement, and social shares if they give your readers exactly what they want.

6. Create newsletter archives

By creating and sending newsletters, you have already done the hard work.

Why not create archives for those newsletters and publish them on your website at the end of each month?

This method has two benefits:

• First, your website visitors will see what your subscribers get. It will encourage them to subscribe to your email list.
• Second, Google will start ranking that content in the SERPS (more SEO juice). However, don’t include to forget the canonical tag to help Google identify the links to the original blog posts.

Conclusion

By combining email marketing and SEO, you can improve your overall marketing strategy, make it more effective, and achieve your marketing goals more efficiently.

If you have any questions, let us know.