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How To Harness The Power Of Email Marketing And Boost Your SEO Footprint
By Rodney Laws | Marketing
By Rodney Laws | Marketing
Email marketing and SEO: what’s the link? Find out how the two channels can work together to help make your business more profitable.
Writing a successful SEO subject line is much like writing a title or headline for one of your blog posts. It’s the single most important factor that determines your email open rate. Aim to strike a balance between keeping it succinct and making sure you include important keywords – preferably near the beginning.
When writing your subject lines, give some thought to how people are searching for your services online. These are the key phrases to include, and you can identify them using keyword research tools. The more relevant and topical keywords you’re able to include (without producing something nonsensical and overstuffed), the more likely your emails will be read.
As anyone with a working knowledge of SEO will know, the more links you have directed to your website, the higher your domain authority will be. Think of your email campaigns as another opportunity to get linkworthy content into the hands of other website owners. When you create a great piece of content – perhaps a how-to guide or research piece – be sure to share it with your email subscribers and explain what makes it valuable. You can even go one step further and ask them to share the link directly.
Studies in particular are excellent at accruing backlinks, as people often link to them in blog posts to demonstrate a point. Just look at Hubspot. If you’ve recently carried out an interesting piece of research or uncovered some unusual findings, make sure people know about it.
There are lots of ways to encourage users to engage with your content – one being to spark conversations around the topic in the comments. Email marketing is another easy way to get subscribers hooked on your content updates. Consider using email automation to help you get the most out of your SEO efforts and convert leads into customers – doing so means you can track the results of your campaigns to see which yields the best results.
Using email, you can gradually encourage more subscribers to stay connected to your content, nudging them in the right direction by suggesting they connect via RSS and providing the option to receive updates from a dedicated list tailored to their interests. With regular email blasts, you have the ability to keep people connecting with your content again and again, reminding them to navigate back to your blog.
We’re past the days of keyword stuffing – nowadays, we know that as far as search engines are concerned, it’s all about providing valuable, user-focused content. So when it comes to including relevant keywords, it’s important to do so in a natural way that doesn’t appear openly manipulative. The aim is to balance genuine articles with targeted long-tail keywords so that your content ticks both boxes: readable and relevant to what people are searching for.
In addition, consider adding an archive containing your email newsletters on your website. This way, all of the content you’ve invested in will still get ranked by search engines, and new readers will be able to get a sense of the kind of content you send to your subscribers.
Finally, to boost your SEO footprint using email marketing, keep in mind that it’s better to include more text than images. You’ll still want to include imagery for design and attention-grabbing purposes, but for the most part, keyword-rich copy will serve you better. Avoid random keywords that could muddy the waters and stick to varied, popular long-tail terms that your keyword research has uncovered – as long as they’re a natural fit.
Try the following keyword tools to find long-tail keywords to include in your email copy:
In summary, while email marketing alone doesn’t directly impact your search rankings, this regular correspondence does have the ability to do so indirectly by influencing user behavior – building links and fostering engagement. High traffic and on-page activity are both contributors that affect your SEO profile – and by archiving your newsletter content on your website, you have even more keywords to play with. So why not start now?
