Integrating SEO and Email Marketing: A Unique Way of Thinking for Marketers

Intro

Ranking on SERP is every marketing team’s dream.

Content creators, marketers, and SEOs work hand-in-hand to pull their best resources and landing pages on SERP. But sometimes they forget, there are some indirect factors that might contribute to their efforts.

This article is about one such way of thinking that could help take your content on SERP to the top.

Email marketing is a widely known practice, but marketers don’t relate it with SEO often. I’m talking about some ways where SEO and email marketing can complement each other and help you boost your rankings.

Keep in mind, ranking is not the direct benefit of these practices, but they contribute to your overall efforts.

4 reasons why you should integrate SEO and email marketing

Below are four reasons you must incorporate the combination of SEO and email marketing to generate better results.

1. To drive quality traffic to your website

The obvious benefit is to bring quality traffic to your website through email marketing. These are the people who’re already familiar with your brand and they relate with it.

If you share your recent blog content via weekly newsletters, it gives you the initial boost of readership.

It’s safe to say that search engines take a few days to crawl your content and give a steady position on SERP. According to this Impact article, it could take up to 6 months to crawl your page.

You can use these days to promote content via emails and get a headstart. While search engines crawl and index your content, you’d already have a loyal set of readers.

And that’s a positive sign.

2. To lead targeted content strategy

Email marketing is an additional signal of what kind of content your audience really enjoys. As you have clear data on open rates and click rates.

You can use this data to create new content for your website. You’d be able to identify the right topics with the proof of success.

For instance, your real estate subscribers are clicking on TOFU content from your newsletter. That shows that your real estate audience is seeking more TOFU content from you.

Adding more content in that direction would be super-helpful to your overall content strategy.

3. To lower the bounce rates

According to Semrush, the optimal bounce rate would be between 26% to 40%. You can maintain the optimal bounce rate range with email marketing.

Your subscribers are already familiar with your style and the kind of content you produce. This is probably the reason why they subscribed to your email list.

You can leverage this reason and improve your bounce rate. These subscribers are likely to spend more time on your blogs than people landing from organic channels.

4. To increase subscribers to the list

While you can leverage email marketing for SEO, this use case is the opposite.

You can encourage organic visitors to sign up for your newsletter and become a valuable subscriber. You can trigger a simple popup and request readers to subscribe to your newsletter.

Here’s an example:

You can implement such a popup using a website live chat software with automation.

4 ways to integrate SEO and email marketing efforts

Check out these 4 ways you can leverage SEO and email marketing with combined force.

1. Re-purpose your newsletter

One of the finest ways to integrate SEO and email marketing is through newsletters. On the forefront, they might just seem like a tool that would help you promote your products or services, but they are much more than that.

NextDraft, a news newsletter initiative by Dave Pell shares their newsletter on website as well.

(Image Source: NextDraft)

This way your website visitors can quickly take a looka at all your previous newsletters, and you have a fair chance of earning more subscribers. If people would know what they’re signing up for, there’s a high chance they’d do it!

2. Try an industry-based approach

Creating valuable, relevant, and consistent content attracts a clearly defined audience and drives profitable customer action. Security is as important as content. Keep your eye on your DMARC report not to get hacked or arrive in the spam box when email marketing.

If you cater to multiple industries, you can segment your newsletters for these industries. For example; January is specifically for Real Estate readers, February is for Information & Technology, and so on.

With this exercise, you’d be able to analyze which industry is your strongest reader. You can dig deeper into open and click rates to find out the top performing content from these industries.

This exercise will also help you identify the most liked content topics - which is a great insight for upcoming content ideas.

3. Use Google Analytics for newsletters

This method is somewhat similar to the above one, but here, we will leverage SEO for email marketing.

Your Google Analytics will show you the top performing articles on a specific industry or topical clusters. Let’s understand this with an example:

Let’s assume, I want to shoot a newsletter to my audience on the sales pipeline. However, I have multiple resources on this topic. Which ones would be the best pick for me?

The answer lies in your Google Analytics:

As you can see, these are the five blogs/resources that are performing well on SERP, and users are finding them useful. These would be my perfect picks.

Why?

Because I already have a proof of success. There is a high probability that my email list would appreciate these articles and resources.

In return, I can expect higher click rates and even conversions!

4. By starting an opinion based series

This is quite a unique idea. Considering if you have a quality list of emails in your list, shoot a campaign and ask subscribers for expert advice!

Yes. People love to share their thoughts and you’ll provide a platform.

The process is quite simple, but the magic is in choosing the right topic.

Ahrefs shows this particular topic's real potential. These 3 keywords combined have the potential of 800 monthly traffic globally.

Salesmate reached out to the top influencers via email marketing and 7 industry-leaders shared their thoughts.

(Image Source: Salesmate)

This practice will help you find quality opinions via email marketing. Then you can use such articles and get hefty benefits from SERP and social media.

Final word

Intergrating email marketing and SEO will not directly impact your SERP results, but it’s definitely a boost. As a marketer, this is a great and unique way to look at two channels that you’re already using.