Have you ever thought about the ways you can use email marketing to boost your SEO performance? The link between Email and SEO isn’t an obvious one since search engines do not rank individual emails directly. However, it does not mean that there isn’t any connection between the two.
Email marketing can help to trigger users’ specific behaviour – such as commenting, linking to your page, or sharing your content. By encouraging people to undertake activities like these you can indirectly lift your pages in search ranking. In fact, a study shows that 51 per cent of people discover new web pages every day via email.
Let’s look at some of the ways email marketing can enhance your SEO.
1. Boost Social Engagement
A newsletter that contains links for sharing will encourage your keen subscribers to share your post on social platforms.
For example, you may have written an excellent article and published it on LinkedIn. Even though your post may receive some organic traffic, sending an email with a link to your subscribers can help accelerate the number of shares, comments, views, and likes that your post receives.
Also, remember to add a CTA (Call-To-Action) asking readers to promote new content. As such your subscribers can help you in sowing the seeds of virality, which in turn, will drive organic engagement.
While SEO and social media sharing have an unclear connection, research by Cognitive SEO shows that the top 5 ranked websites were also highly shared on Google+, Facebook, and Linkedin.
Enjoying this blog? Register now for your free monthly roundup email >
2. Improve Bounce Rates
Your site’s bounce rate indicates how many viewers have entered on a webpage and left without visiting any other content on your website. Your bounce rate is an important factor in your overall search ranking. If your site has a very high bounce rate, it will negatively affect your ranking.
In order to minimize your bounce rate, you should try to create outstanding articles and provide a link to your content when you send email newsletters. In doing so, you will encourage higher quality visits to your article, who are more likely to go to further pages.
People who visit your blog via emailed links are usually more engaged and interested in your article, which makes sense as they did sign up to receive your email newsletters in the first place!
3. Grow your Social Following Organically
Email marketing is the best way to get visitors to read your posts, and it is also an excellent way to promote your social media content. Once you have the attention of your visitors, why not try to make them engage with posts off your site too?
By using your email campaigns you can cross-promote your social channels. For example, you can ask readers to follow your Twitter handle or subscribe to your YouTube channel. In doing so, you can grow your following organically which should, in turn, result in more visitors to your site (and more social mentions too). Both of these should help your search rankings.
4. Improve Engagement via CTAs
Since Email is personal in nature, it is an ideal place for CTAs (Call-To-Action), so in terms of shares and comments, you can simply ask for them by using a compelling CTA. You can then make use of segmentation to determine the most engaged visitors (see below).
The same applies to reviews – use CTAs to ask for them. Better yet, incorporate your emails with review links of your Google Business and review forms. This is quite essential for retailers and anyone who is keen on local targeting. According to Moz, the impact of reviews on local search results is 13 per cent.
5. Target Content
CRM and email segmentation play a significant role when it comes to targeting content. If you use demographic or engagement data with your email list, you can increase your chances of sending content to those who are interested and find it valuable.
Segmentation and personalisation are more crucial than ever: over 65 per cent of marketers are taking advantage of personalized email content already. With surveys and email polls, you can also determine what your subscribers want, create posts around their interests and needs, and then send them in your newsletters.
Furthermore, segmentation allows you to mail only the most fitting information to your audience. A very engaged audience is more likely to share a link, and link shares (depending on where they are shared) can, in turn, boost search rankings.
Conclusion
As you can see, email marketing is an excellent way to connect your high-quality content with high-quality visitors. Search engines focus on separating quality posts from the rest, and SEO is all about demonstrating the quality of your posts.
Email marketing enables you to send only the best posts to the best possible audience. Also, the process of determining what your audience is interested in and needs becomes much easier with segmentation tools.
By matching the best content you have with the most appropriate audience you are creating a highly engaged audience. This audience is more likely to follow you on social media, share your posts, engage on a deeper level with your site and do all sort of things which send positive signals to search engines.