7 Ways Email Marketing Can Boost Your SEO Ranking

Intro

Although email is an important part of any marketing strategy, it's not often tied to SEO. However, this powerful form of customer engagement and outreach impacts your SEO far more than most people realize.

In fact, some of the most beneficial aspects of email are among the very things that can boost your SEO strategy.

The Benefits of Email Marketing

Email is one thing that all of us have in common, regardless of our industry or occupation. Not everyone has a social media presence, but nearly everyone has at least one email account.

They're needed for work, at school, to create profiles, and to open online accounts.

In fact, of the nearly six billion people currently on the internet worldwide, 99% check their email daily. It's the first thing most of us do in the morning, even before we check our social media.

Email is widely used in marketing, with more than a third of all marketing pros sending weekly emails to leads and existing customers. Over the past year, more than 77% of business owners have noted an increase in email engagement.

What's more, 81% of B2B marketing professionals state that email is their primary form of content marketing.

Aside from the obvious advantages like reach and customer engagement, email marketing provides a host of benefits that indirectly impact your SEO in a positive manner. It's a great platform for self-promotion with a built-in base of potential leads.

Email marketing is also very cost-effective. Many email accounts are free or work-provided, and premium services are very inexpensive and scalable. You can create custom content and interact with customers more personally for fractions of a cent per lead.

This, in turn:

• Increases revenue. Marketing Automation allows emails to be sent when a customer makes a purchase, abandons your shopping cart, or leaves your website. This helps save sales, cross or upsell clients, and reduces bounce rates.

• Generates leads. When you're in need of an inbound marketing method, look no further than email. It's a lead generation dynamo that helps you nurture clients along their journey toward conversion.

• Supports timely interaction. No two people are at the same point in their journey. However, most will be checking their email during the day, which puts your content in front of their eyes on a regular basis. Even if a lead is not yet at the point of conversion, your brand is on their mind whenever they see you in their inbox.

This allows you to add incentives like discounts and flash sales that are curated according to customer history and activity. It also helps you make marketing decisions based on other insights gleaned from analytics.

You're keeping leads in the loop and primed to purchase at every point of their journey.

Given the above information, you can see how email boosts your SEO efforts. Let's take a deeper dive into how one powers the other and vice versa.

7 Ways Email Marketing Improves SEO

When you consider the main factors that help you rank on search engines, you'll notice that they have more to do with the customer experience than with keywords and other technical aspects of SEO. Even the fact that Google prioritized mobile-first indexing and most email is accessed from a mobile device makes optimizing email for SEO a no-brainer.

Here are some very tangible intangibles that will inspire you to step up your email outreach for more robust SEO.

1. Email Increases Web Traffic

Right off the bat, sending an email with a link to your website will increase traffic. It's almost automatic when you lead into the link with compelling copy that inspires the reader to click. Algorithms look for a lot of things when evaluating web pages.

Sites with a high traffic volume must be doing something right. However, getting more eyes on your pages isn't enough.

2. Email Allows You to Provide Consistent, High-Quality Content

Another factor in search engine page ranks is customer engagement. Although email isn't directly evaluated and indexed by search engines, your website is.

When you create compelling content in your email that directs leads to a website with relevant, equally quality page content, they'll come back more often and stay longer while they're there.

This increases time on page and click-throughs, which will reflect your higher page rank. It's also great for link-building.

For example, say you send your leads emails about how to ace interviews, the chances are that such leads will check out your website for more of the same tips.

3. Email Marketing Supports Lead Generation

Whether you get email subscribers through a form on your website, your social media posts, or a signup sheet at a local event, your leads are automatically nudged from awareness to consideration just by virtue of being on your email list.

They are voluntarily stating that they are aware of your brand and want to have further contact with you in the future.

These are no longer cold leads from random people but warm leads who've expressed interest in your brand.

You can further refine, and segment leads based upon email interaction at any point in the customer journey. This means that they are more likely to convert when visiting your website because they're already more inclined to do business with your brand.

Higher conversion rates mean a more favorable place in the SERPs.

4. Email Leads to Lower Bounce Rates

Email is more likely to be opened and read than any other digital medium or a traditional form of outreach, such as direct mail. Sales brochures can be discarded or forgotten under a mountain of other junk mail. Social media posts can be lost in the clutter of dozens of other posts.

But, an email that has an enticing headline and an unbeatable deal will generate a response.

Lower bounce rates on your email analytics won't do much for your SEO. But, it will increase traffic and reduce bounce rates on your website, especially when you use automation to recapture leads and direct them back to your site. That will decrease bounce rates.

5. Email Automation Curtails the Impact of Shopping Cart Abandonment

While shopping cart abandonment doesn't directly impact SEO, the fallout does affect several factors that search engines use to evaluate content. When a customer stops mid-transaction, they usually also leave your website.

It could be that something came up on the user side, but that doesn't matter. Search engine bots don't know why a cart was abandoned. They just know that your click-through rates and conversions decreased. It also implies an unsatisfactory user experience.

You can't save every cart or prevent people from browsing. But, you can decrease cart abandonment rates and the collateral damage they cause through retargeting emails.

6. Using Email Helps Develop Your Content Strategy

Customer engagement is all about the content. It starts with the subject line on your email and leads them to your web page.

The numbers from your email analytics provide you with information that directs your other content. This allows you to make data-driven decisions for everything from content creation to budget allocation.

Through your email, you can link to blog posts and get feedback from subscribers to create future posts that are more relevant and engaging. High-performing emails can also be expanded into new content on your website.

Make sure to add social media links to every email. Engaged subscribers are active subscribers who share content. More social shares and being active on those platforms will drive more traffic to your site.

You'll also have a better idea of where your traffic is coming from so that you can put more time and resources into those platforms.

7. Email Marketing Makes Your Brand More Accessible

Even a negative experience can be turned around or neutralized with one-on-one engagement. When you encourage leads to reach out to you through email, you provide a more personal level of engagement that leads to customer satisfaction.

It also prevents unhappy customers from venting publically. Even when you get a bad review or negative mentions on social media, responding personally in a comment and inviting the individual to email you directly for a resolution will go a long way toward improving your online reputation.

Email Marketing Best Practices for Better SEO

Email that supports SEO doesn't happen by accident. Like most marketing solutions, it takes planning, persistence, patience, and some level of expertise. Business owners and marketers who don’t have all these turns to SEO service providers for help. You, too, may consider doing the same to get your email-for-SEO game right.

That said, here are some best practices that will help ensure that you get results.

1. Keep it short.

You only have a few seconds to get someone's attention and keep it, especially when it comes to email. Get your point across quickly and conclude with an actionable CTA.

2. Add visual interest to your email.

Formatting the email with short one- or two-line paragraphs, bullet points, and video clips or .gifs adds visual interest and gets your message across faster than a wall of text.

3. Make it mobile-friendly.

More than half of all emails are read on a mobile device, and we've already mentioned what search engines think about mobile responsiveness. Mobile optimization helps search engines evaluate your content, and it improves the user experience.

Use fonts that are ideal for mobile screens, optimize images and video for faster massage load times, and preview your message to see how it looks on a smaller screen. You want to calm the reader's eyes rather than make them swipe from side to side just to take it all in.

If you have a responsive email editor, designing mobile-friendly emails is an easy task.

4. Test and test again.

In order to gauge the effectiveness and get good data, you should test each element of your email to see which approach gets the best results. Test different subject lines and CTAs. You should also make sure that all links are working and take readers to the right page, that videos load and play properly, and that image files are clear and small enough to load fully.

5. Keep it unique.

In the current world, people always accept unique content. Checking your content from a plagiarism checker helps you know whether some other has used similar content or not. So making it unique will make your emails more attractive and results in more leads.

Final Thoughts

On their own, Email and SEO each provide powerful, cost-effective ways to supercharge your marketing and drive traffic to your website. Together, they're dynamite.

Increasingly, search engine algorithms gauge content relevance by how well they align with user intent and satisfaction. It's not just about keyword placement anymore.

Optimizing your email marketing strategy will also boost your SEO efforts in terms of increased traffic, click-through rates, added value, and a satisfying user experience.

These are the things that will cement your place in the SERPs!