Should You Optimize Your Email Marketing Campaigns for SEO?
When most businesses think SEO, they think about the content on a website; most specifically, a business website that is trying to climb the rankings of Google. In other cases business owners and marketers might think about content that is placed on other websites in the form of guest posting, thereby building links back to the primary business site via another relevant site. These two categories make a lot of sense. After all, getting ranked at the top of a SERP is really all about the links. You want your own site to be easy to navigate and you want other sites to link back to your site to help you appear reputable within your industry.
When you really break it down into these two categories, it might seem that email marketing doesn’t quite fit into the SEO equation. This leads many to wonder: Is there any reason to optimize an email marketing campaigns for SEO?
How to Get SEO Benefits from Your Email Marketing
The logic discussed above is correct—Google is not going to index your email marketing messages and use them to help you rank well on a SERP. However, companies have figured out a few different ways to make sure that they get an SEO benefit from their email marketing campaigns. After all, it seems silly to create content and NOT show it to Google.
The biggest way to make sure that your email marketing works toward your SEO goals is to post this content as an article or make sure that it is visible on the web in certain ways. Below are a few tips and tricks to make this happen:
Newsletter Section
If you do not want to post this content as another article in the same way you typically would on your blog, you can actually create an entire section for newsletters. Readers will understand that this is different than your typical articles and Google will be able to index this content. The only downfall is that some people may choose to opt out of subscribing because they think they can just read the content on your site, so try and have some sort of reason why subscribing is worth it (offer a coupon, inventive, or some kind of perk that your content alone does not). Remember to link to other places on your website and to relevant reputable sources just as you would with a typical blog post. Workshops for Warriors is one organization that publishes quarterly newsletters on their website, all falling under “Workshops for Warriors’ Email Campaigns” vertical.
Repurpose “Timely” Content for Relevancy
The biggest challenge with posting your email marketing content on your website is the way the content is written. Because email marketing usually offers special deals or mentions timely events, it might not flow well on your website. You are going to want to make sure you do a bit of editing so that this content will be read for years to come. Often times newsletters are a great starting point for longer-form content that can be elaborated in ways that are not so time constrained. Another way to expand beyond the short copy of a newsletter is to reflect back on the events (or sales) that you have had and showcase your happy customers. You will get to use the content you worked so hard to write in more ways than one.
Add a Canonical Link
This is something that can be done to your actual email message. This will help ensure that your email marketing message and its SEO benefits can be transferred to another webpage without any kind of duplicate content penalty. You can visit Practical Ecommerce for more information about how to get started with canonical linking.
Share Links in Your Email Messages
In order to drive engagement, sharing, and get people to your website, it is important to share links within your newsletter. You can share the top 5 most recent blog posts, for example, so that your audience can go check out some of the other valuable content on your site. Always remember to include a link to your home page and to your social media pages as well. Remember, all of these clicks can be measured! Below is an example of a recent message I received that has plenty of opportunity to take me away from my email and read that same content on the website:
Write Newsletters with SEO in Mind
Just as your write blog and website content with specific keyword and SEO goals in mind, use this same approach when designing and writing your email mail marketing messages. This can help everything be seamless to repurpose and use your content places that are truly going to benefit your SERP rankings.
Build Your Reputation
While not directly impacting in the same way, emailers can really help to build your brand’s reputation. When your audience takes your business as credible, they are more likely to click on to your site more regularly and this traffic impacts your SEO directly. By using monthly newsletters as an opportunity to build your reputation and credibility, you capture your audience’s attention and drive up engagement. The Miami SEO Company does this all the time by using blog posts as email marketing messages. They aren’t designed to sell, but rather to build up a reputation of a company with thought-out and frequent content:
Use Your Campaign Feedback
The feedback that you get from your email marketing can be used to improve your marketing strategy and improve your SEO over time. There is a lot of valuable information you can learn about content, clicks, and overall impressions that will help to improve your content and marketing efforts over time. It’s all about Analytics!
Note: If you’re not tracking your email campaigns via Analytics (learn more here), your email marketing software should still be gathering data for you. Below is an example from ConstantContact:
Although an email marketing campaign’s first goal should be to teach readers and increase visibility, SEO should always be in the back of your mind. Whenever there is content that’s written there is always the option of optimizing it for SEO. Use keywords and promote the content on social media to make sure that you’re getting the most for your hard work. Email marketing is also a fabulous way to improve your reputation and overall user engagement. Plus, the feedback and stats you get from your email marketing campaign can really help your SEO efforts in the future.
Have you discovered a way to help your email marketing campaigns benefit your SEO efforts? Let us know in the comments!
About The Author
Jason Hawkins / http://www.themiamiseocompany.com
Jason Hawkins is the CEO & Co-Founder of The Miami SEO Company. He has over ten years of experience in search engine optimization, conversion rate optimization and lead generation. His core responsibilities include identifying ways to increase value of services rendered, training staff on advanced SEO topics, and A/B testing internal processes to consistently improve client return on investment.
