How Can SEO and Email Marketing Work Together and Generate Results?

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and email marketing are two different marketing strategies. SEO is improving your website’s position on search engines like Google through tactics like link-building and guest posting. Email marketing, on the other hand, is using email like newsletters and other promotional content to generate leads and sales.

These two strategies, although they have different applications and methods, actually have a lot in common. Both approaches even continue to evolve, adapt and change according to new trends like mobile optimisation, which is improving the email or website for mobile use. However, have you ever considered combining both?

You can intertwine or combine them to improve your overall marketing strategy. For example, you can use high-quality and optimised content with high-ranking, low competition keywords in your email’s content. Then, linking either the call-to-action (CTA) button or anchor text to one of your website’s landing pages, which in return, brings organic traffic to your website.

Below are some methods and tips on how you can use SEO and email marketing to help your business:

1. Gain more organic traffic through an email promotion

You can cross-promote your website’s content into your emails. For example, you have an interesting content or a new product or service that you want to promote and gain traffic. In addition to backlinking, a SEO strategy that improves the page’s search engine standing and visibility by building links back to the original content, you can also use email marketing. With email marketing, you don’t have to scout for an audience because you already have them – your subscribers or email list. You just need to add and present your new content in your email, so they know it exists.

To include your new content in your email, you can:
• Summarise your post’s content and add a CTA button or link on your email so that they can keep reading it on your website. Alternatively, you can use images or GIFs that pique your subscribers’ interests to encourage them to click.
• You can send a series of email newsletters that have useful information and link it to the full version in your blog or website.

2. Increase content engagement and improve bounce rate

In addition to increasing traffic, you can also use email marketing to encourage engagement like social media sharing or blog commenting. In your email, you can include short phrases or questions like “Marketers believe email marketing is not dead. Do you agree?” This will encourage your subscribers to view the page, join the conversation, and even share your content. What does this mean for your ranking? If a subscriber spends more time in your website instead of leaving immediately, it yields to better bounce rates.

You can also strategically place call-to-action buttons within the content of your email such as:

• You can ask your readers to leave comments on your posts.
• Write about a good cause, or any useful information that your business is involved with, and encourage your subscribers to share it.
• Drive people or subscribers towards your social media channels and encourage them to comment as well.
In the landing page of the new content, don’t forget to add social media sharing buttons so subscribers can easily share your blog post to friends and colleagues.

3. Write better subject lines

The method behind creating catchy email subject lines is similar to creating titles and headlines for blog posts used on your website or blog. It needs to be appealing, direct, and thought-provoking to encourage clicks and open rates. Look into your SEO report and find which keywords are bringing traffic to your website. Then, incorporate that keyword in your email’s subject headline. For instance, your website is gaining traffic from the keyword “marketing tactics 2018.“ You can transform it to “These 2018 Marketing Tactics Can Improve Your Bottomline Today” as your subject headline. You can even add a preview text like “Learn how marketers use these tactics.”

People decide to open a link or email just the same way they perform a search on Google. Using more relevant keywords will most likely encourage more customers or subscribers to open the emails you are sending. You can:

• Add in or use relevant keywords when writing your emails.
• Craft your emails similar to blog posts, and apply relevant keywords along with a layout that is simple and easy to read.
• Use long-tail keywords (a phrase that contains at least three words) even if you aren’t using them to rank in search engines.
4. Make your newsletters indexable and crawlable for search engines

Emails are only accessible to subscribers and don’t appear in search engines. The good thing is you can make them into a blog post, which means non-subscribers can now have access to your email’s content and search engines can rank and index it. How do you make your newsletters into blog posts? You can do so by:

• You can separate them into different blog posts. For instance, if one email contains three different content, you can create a blog post for each one. Use the same layout of your previous blog posts, so it doesn’t appear like an email. Insert relevant links so visitors can check other blog posts.
• For short newsletters like product launch and company updates and news, you can combine them together. For instance, this year you were able to produce two new product lines, alongside with 100,000 Facebook page likes and 20,000 Instagram followers. Instead of separating them into different blog posts, you can bundle these achievements together into one blog post.

When transforming your newsletters into blog posts, you need to apply SEO. Add relevant keywords, make sure your content 100% unique, link internally and optimise the meta description. You can also add a sentence or two to encourage engagement from website visitors. Make sure to add social media sharing buttons too.

Wrap Up

Although email marketing and SEO are two different marketing practices, they can be used together to help generate ROI and improve your search engine rankings.

Contact us at Grizzly to learn how we can help you with your website.

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