How Email Marketing Can Boost Your SEO

Email marketing has no direct correlation with search engine rankings, however, it can boost your SEO indirectly by increasing visibility and engagement.

If used properly, email marketing will keep your audience engaged and coming back for new content, and drive a considerable amount of monthly traffic to your website.

Unfortunately, Google and other search engines do not consider emails as a direct ranking factor. So don’t think you will rank higher for your main keywords just because you have a large email subscribers list in MailChimp.

You will have to be strategic and creative on how to use your email campaigns. Here are some of the best strategies you can follow to boost your SEO using emails.

Build inbound links

We all know that links are one of the most, if not the most important ranking factor in Google. The more links you have pointing to your website, the higher you will rank in search engines. Links tell search engines that people are finding your content useful and trustworthy.

Building inbound links may not be as easy as you think. You can’t force someone to link to you. They will only link to you if they find your content valuable.

You can use your email marketing campaigns to encourage users to link to you. For example, share valuable reports or checklists with your email subscribers. At least a few people ought to be interested in what you share and may link to that piece of content in the future.

Encourage Engagement

Google determines the value or worth of a given webpage using metrics such as click through rates, inbound links, time spent on page, and return visitors.

Use emails to keep your audience engaged and coming back to your website. You can also encourage them to share and comment on your articles.

For example, lets say you wrote an article about “How Email Marketing Can Boost Your SEO”. You can send an abstract of the article to your subscribers with a link at the bottom if they are interested in reading the rest.

You could enhance user engagement even further by adding other call-to-actions within your email. Ask readers to leave a comment stating how they would use the information in your article, or encourage them to follow and subscribe your social media accounts by including their links at the bottom of the email.

Promote your content

People don’t have time to visit your blog every 5 minutes to see whether you have posted new articles. Yes, they may have activated Google Chrome notifications but what if they miss them as well?

You could use email campaigns to promote content that some people may have missed, or to send weekly or monthly newsletters recapping the most popular blog posts of that week or month.

You would be surprised to see the number of people engaging with your emails, leading to more inbound links and higher web traffic (which ultimately boosts your SEO).

Gather customer reviews

You can send survey emails to your audience, asking for their feedback about your website.

Local businesses can use customer feedback to improve local search rankings. When customers review your business, they will probably write in the same language they use to search for your business in Google.

This provides you with valuable long-tail keywords, coming directly from your customers. You can then focus on those keywords to get a higher ranking in local searches.

Another advantage of collecting customer feedback via email campaigns is that you can identify the issues customers are facing with your business or website, may it be the site’s design, content or loading time.

As you optimize your website according to the feedback given, your search rankings will naturally increase as well. On-site SEO plays a huge role.

Build brand reputation

Email campaigns can help build brand reputation. When your audience see your emails over and over again, they will become familiar with your brand and will start to trust the content you provide.

They will be more inclined to click on your results in SERPs instead of others because they already know and trust you.

This increases the Click-Through Rates of your results, therefore, Google will be inclined to give higher rankings for your results.

Also, as your brand reputation increases, more high-authority sites will link to you.

Provide more content hooks

Using email campaigns to drive more traffic and encouraging people to comment and share on your articles is good for SEO but you shouldn’t rely only on your email list to boost your monthly traffic.

The end-game of email marketing is not only to drive traffic and sales but also to encourage your subscribers to connect with your content in other ways so they won’t need email reminders.

One option is to include a link to the RSS feed of your site so that people can automatically get notified whenever a new post or article is published.

But let’s say a user only wants to receive emails about marketing, not SEO. You should have a system in place to give users the option to subscribe to newsletters dedicated to one category. You could even let them choose when to get emails; weekly or monthly.

Make the most out of your email content

If you are really serious about email marketing, you should create stand-alone content for subscribers rather than just sending an abstract of your most recent blog post with a link at the bottom to direct them to the full article.

If your emails are long and descriptive, you can turn them into stand-alone blog posts by copying and pasting the same content, inserting relevant links, adding a conclusion, and finally publishing the content live on your website.

This will allow non-subscribers to read and engage with posts, which were previously sent out to subscribers via email.

However, if your emails are generally short, you can bundle up some of the related newsletters, join them smoothly, and publish them as one big blog post.

This way you won’t have to worry about search engines not crawling emails and not giving your content the rank it deserves because now your content is live in a public domain.

Conclusion

Email campaigns will not affect the search rankings of your website, nor will Google ever crawl them. However, they can increase the visibility of your content, which leads to more inbound links, social shares and comments, ultimately leading to more SEO.

It’s all about using emails the smart way.