When it comes to crafting an effective marketing plan, email marketing continues to have a strong impact. Email is low-cost and offers quick results. There is also significant customer engagement with email which is why it continues to offer a significant value proposition.
SEO is the process of making sure content, in whatever form, ranks as high as possible when the target audience looks them up on search engines. Using the right keywords and phrases can help ensure your content is the first thing that shows up on search engines.
EMAIL AND SEO
It might not seem obvious at first, but email marketing and SEO are intimately connected. So long as you are showcasing the content you have in your email to your website, or linking it, you ensure both have a strong correlation.
Increasing engagement to your website can be achieved by driving legitimate and qualified visitors to the site. Using email to promote the site’s content is one way to get backlinks as well as gaining social shares which directly impacts SEO.
Below are a couple of ways on how email marketing can boost SEO.
1. Driving Quality Traffic
Between two competing pages from different domains that use the same keyword, excellent optimization plans, and suburb backlinks, only the one with the best traffic score will succeed.
Why you may ask.
Google puts a lot of weight for pages the receive higher traffic than its competitors. If one page gets 5K of traffic, and another one has 10K, it will rank the one with the higher traffic score in the SERPs.
The formula for getting quality traffic relies on two factors: low bounce rates and high session rates. And these are two things that email marketing is quite good at.
It’s easy to include links within your emails and newsletters about the latest features and updates. You can decide which links to add. Some prefer links to recently published content while others choose to highlight older articles on their blog sites to drive traffic into those pages.
And because the recipients of these email marketing content have consciously signed up to the list, you are guaranteed that they will have better engagement and higher session time.
2. Improving Bounce Rates
The term refers to the percentage of visitors who visit the site but then leaves without continuing to explore other pages of the site. Generally, a site with a high bounce rate is seen as bad, and a low rate is seen as good.
The bounce rate is an important metric in your search ranking.
A crucial step in decreasing your bounce rate would be to create high-quality content. Linking such content to your newsletter that you sent out through emails is one way for you to control the quality of visitors to your site.
Visitors that come through the site through email links tend to be more engaged and are more interested in your content. This makes a lot of sense since they were interested enough in the first place to sign up for your email list.
3. Improving On-Site Engagement
Another great advantage of qualified traffic driven to your site is that it helps you attract more readers that are most likely to engage with pieces of content and other resources on your site.
As a result, your session time improves while at the same time your bounce rate decreases.
This greatly benefits your SEO as visitors spend more time interacting with your site and your content. They are also more likely to convert eventually.
Using effective strategies, like email marketing, to drive subscribers into the content they find valuable and matches their interests, the better it is for your search visibility in the long run.
4. Boosting Content Targeting Strategy
Content, no matter how amazing it is, is only effective when it’s presented into the hands of people who find value in it. Imagine an advertising agency sending links to content about construction tools to college kids. That demographic wouldn’t find any use in that.
But in order to group different types of audiences and determine your target demographic, you would need certain information such as age, gender, interest, or even previous search history.
Such information can be achieved through CRM tools used to compile your email list. Surveys and polls are another way to gain insight into your subscribers and help you build personalized content base on their needs and interests.
- Also read: Marketing strategy for eCommerce
5. Boosting Social Media Engagement
Search any business website and you will be hard-pressed to find one that doesn’t feature their social media pages and accounts. Social media platforms continue to change how marketing plans are planned, with more emphasis given to shares and likes.
It was a couple of years back when the world of marketing hit a pivotal moment and social media engagement became a very important engagement.
Emails that contain links for sharing on social sites encourage loyal visitors to promote your content into their own social channels. It’s important that you include a CTA in the email, implicitly telling readers to share the new content to help foster organic engagement.
6. Repurpose Old Content
Content creation is not an easy business. It requires a lot of effort to craft the right topic, not to mention the countless hours you need to spend doing research. So it can be disheartening when you see high-quality content not perform as well and fail to gain any traction.
Emails are pieces of content in their own right. They offer valuable and relevant information and deliver them right into the inbox of your audience. You can repurpose older content and insert them into email content.
Long-form content can be deconstructed and broken into small batches and sent out as email. Similarly, you can group smaller batches of email content to create a blog post that can benefit your SEO. Older content can be archived in your site and offer and then give non-subscribers limited access to top-shelf content that only subscribers had access to previously.
FINAL THOUGHTS: Email marketing continues to play a huge role in ensuring SEO strategies remain effective. If implemented correctly, it not only boost traffic, but it could also improve your conversion rate.