How Email Marketing Can Help SEO

Email marketing isn’t just a great way to build up a social media marketing platform and a robust customer base on the Internet. It’s also a way to use Search Engine Optimization (SEO) input to raise a website’s visibility through major search engines such as Google or Bing. 

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Email marketing can improve SEO by helping direct potential customers to high-quality site content such as blog posts filled with relevant resource links and keywords that improve SEO rankings. This makes the website more visible and rank higher on the search results in major search engines.

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Taking deliberate action in linking email marketing initiatives with a SEO marketing campaign can increase the effectiveness of both fronts. Keep reading to learn more about how email marketing can help SEO optimization for your website.

How Can Email Marketing Help SEO?

To learn how email marketing can help SEO, you should know a little bit of what email marketing is all about. Email marketing is a facet of digital social media marketing that establishes customer rapport by distributing content and services directly to your audience which encourages them to engage with your brand which increases SEO ranking and visibility. (Source: Mail Chimp)

Here are some of the other reasons why email marketing is commonly used to optimize search engine results: 

• Building a customer email list: Emails are a way to keep reaching out to customers after they’ve left your website. When a customer leaves their email contact, this is a positive sign that they want further engagement from your brand. Businesses can use this to their advantage by offering special discounts and other incentives to increase the chances of a repeat sale.
  
  
• Increased brand recognition: Email marketing is not just a way to remind customers that a brand still exists, it’s also a way for businesses to refine their identity to the customer base through the tone of their communication and other landing page content. This brand recognition is one way to turn a one-time customer into a loyal repeat customer.
  
  
• Offering seasonal or regular email content: One way to engage customers positively with new rotating sales and other offers is to send out newsletters and links to blog posts that correlate with major business cycles and seasonal events like back to school sales and holidays. By paying attention to seasonal events, social media marketing managers can set up an entire year’s worth of high-quality content related to their business brand. 

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Driving traffic to your website through email marketing is generally a good way to increase your SEO ranking and your visibility in search engines like Google. But there are also many other major benefits to keeping up with a dynamic email marketing campaign for your business. 

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However, the caveat of email marketing is that email content must be unobtrusive enough and of a high enough quality that it isn’t considered spam by the recipient. Otherwise, customers will be turned off by the email marketing and may unsubscribe or block the emails altogether. 

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How Email Marketing Supports an SEO Strategy

Email marketing supports a strong SEO strategy for brands in several ways. Here are a few of the notable ones: 

• Email marketing drives new traffic to the website: The more popular a website becomes with visitors, the higher it rises in the SEO rankings (and therefore visibility and brand exposure) on major search engines. That means you want to get as many people visiting your website as possible. However, that’s not the only aspect you need to look at—people also need to spend time on the website as 'time on site' is a ranking factor for google and not just visitors that click in and immediately exit the page.
  
  
• Email marketing directs customers to the content they’re already invested in: Adding high-quality content to a  website such as tutorials or how-to articles can increase the number of keywords in the website that can affect its visibility in search engines. These pieces of content also encourage customers to visit the website and stick around. Brands can bring in customers that weren’t even considering a purchase just by providing relevant information. (Source: Content Marketing Institute)
  
  
• Email marketing drives repeat business: The more click-throughs a website gets, the better it will do in SEO rankings. This includes repeat customers and new customers. Repeat visitors have a higher chance of a repeat purchase if you can get them to re-engage with a website through an email link. Those who use an online business multiple times are also more likely to recommend that brand to others. (Source: Constant Contact)

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SEO ranking and visibility are determined by various factors, such as the volume of relevant key words and visitor traffic. The best way to use an email marketing campaign to support SEO is to conduct an SEO audit and use the results to link readers to content relevant enough to be worth sharing with others. 

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How to Use Email Marketing to Improve SEO Results

The main goal of email marketing for SEO is to use links to deliver real content value to potential customers such that they will engage long enough to register as a real visitor rather than a bounced view in SEO traffic statistics (also known as bounce rate).

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Here are a few of the ways marketing managers can use email marketing to improve SEO results: 

• Use emails to direct customers to high-visibility content. Blog posts and other dynamic website content that feature high levels of keywords and links to resources will drive through more visitor traffic and increase visibility. When it comes to email campaigns, quality is more important than quantity, as too many emails can cause customers to become turned off and unresponsive. (Source: PC Magazine)
  
  
• Targeted email marketing helps improve your Bounce Rate: Your bounce ratio is measured by the number of visitors who visit your website and immediately click away compared to those who are real visitors. Visitors who bounce are not counted as highly in SEO rankings as the views of visitors who click onto a website and remain browsing for some time. Targeting your email list with campaigns can help make sure the people who click on your website do it because they are interested in your content. (Source: Campaign Monitor)
  
  
• Email marketing that leads to great content increases social media value: It’s not just good enough to get your customers to click through to your brand website. There has to be strong, interesting content capable of keeping visitors on your site long enough to explore other aspects of the page (such as the product listings). If a website’s content is relevant and actionable, this can lead to more shares on social media platforms which will continue to drive quality engagement. 

When it comes to improving your SEO results for your website, it doesn’t just matter how many people you get to visit. The quality of their engagement—such as the amount of time or the click-throughs to other pages on the site other than the landing page—can also affect your SEO ranking at the end of the day. 

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Email Marketing Delivers the Right Audience for Your Brand

Spamming uninterested customers with emails isn’t an effective way to convert website clicks to actual sales, and it can be a good way to turn off customers from purchasing through your website altogether. High-quality email marketing campaigns can go a long way toward improving SEO results and maintaining customer rapport and engagement long after the initial sale is complete.