An email dies the minute it is sent – are you sure?

What if I tell you, that your email marketing can play an important role in your off-site SEO optimization. Yes, you heard it right, your emails can improve your chances of gaining the crown position on Google page one.

Does email marketing help SEO?

Email marketing is typically used for engagement, but if you use it more creatively for SEO purposes, you can get more out of your marketing than you can imagine. That’s right, the ROI on your email marketing would be worth every penny of your time and resources.

For example, by using personalization and segmentation in your email marketing strategy, you can lead a specific part of your audience to targeted pages, increasing engagement levels and, as a result, search engine rankings.

You can also use the information and analytics collected from your email campaigns, to create more targeted content strategies and even “re-use” your best-performing emails as content for your blog or website.

To get both engagement and visibility, here are five ways to make your email marketing SEO friendly:

1. Make newsletters go public

Why is it that newsletter content is only confined to your email inbox. Why not let them breathe fresh air on your blog page – turn the content into a blog and make it go live.

If you do not have enough content on your newsletter to turn it into a blog, add a couple of them to make it into one blog. All you have to focus on is writing an SEO friendly copy for your email content. This way, your content would reach a larger audience. Google crawlers will surely take notice of this, thus, increasing your visibility.

Another way to make your email content go public is by archiving newsletters. Directly take all your emails online, where people can find it using relevant keyword search. Moreover, you can link your blog page from your email archive page, this way it diverts the traffic to your website.

2. Canonicalization

Once your newsletters are archived, make sure you add canonical tags. Insert it into the HTML coding of your newsletter archive page. Here’s code sample of how to put the tag in.

But why do canonical tags matter?

Many times, Google crawlers pick up the wrong URL due to a similarity in content. Canonicalization makes it simple for search engines to get the right URL by managing duplicate content.

What that means is that canonical tags help you tell Google which version of the URL needs to appear in search results. This is important since you do not want your archive page and blog page to get mixed up just because they might have similar content.

3. Take customer reviews

Ever seen those survey emails, asking for your feedback. You probably wouldn’t have realized that those questionnaires are being used to improve one’s local search rankings. Many businesses are more dependent on how they rank locally (within a certain radius of an area) than how they rank overall.

Using email as part of your customer review strategy can make your business rank higher. When customers provide a review, they might write in the same language that they type in for searching your business. This helps in boosting long tail keywords, which is coming right from the customer.

When you collect customer feedback, it allows you to work on the roadblocks. It may be your UX design, loading time, content, and so forth and so on.  The more you rework on these aspects, the better are your rankings (one of the best ways to improve SEO ). Thus, your email marketing can improve your local SEO directly as well as indirectly.

4. Inbound link

Inbound links (also known as backlinks) are one of the foremost factors in deciding the vitality of your SEO. You have to be smart with these links while you make sure that all of them are directed to your website. The more inbound links you have the higher is your Domain Authority (DA). Simply use a backlink monitoring tool, like Linkody, to find Inbound link opportunities and get in contact with these websites.

For example, you have a research paper that needs to be promoted. Create an email campaign, where you send the research report to bloggers. So when they write a blog, they refer to your research paper thereby providing a link to your site.

A high DA provides greater credibility to your site, which is another factor that Google considers. When your site attains both visibility and credibility, you are able to carve a niche for your brand.

5. More text, less images

Coming back to your archived newsletter, remember to use more of text than images. It does go against the popular belief that email newsletter needs to be less on the text side and more focused on the image – for instant user attention.

This principle is great only when your newsletter is confined to your inbox, but once they are in the public domain, they need to be majority text-based, filled with rich keywords. It makes it easy for archived email content to rank higher.

But, do not get carried away and start putting in random keywords – that will adversely affect your email marketing, blog engagement, and overall website traffic. If you are not familiar with placing keywords in the right manner, here are a few tips that might help you:

Use Google keyword planner to find keywords relevant to the theme of your content.

Pick one primary keyword, and two or three long tail keywords and subtly insert them in your content.

Make sure the keywords are a natural fit, randomly inserting them or overstuffing might actually affect your rankings.

 

How Can You Turn High-Performing Emails into New Site Content

 

Now that you know how to make your emails SEO friendly get ready to turn the best pieces into blog content. Here is a step-by-step process on how you can do this:

 

1. Copy the text from your email and ensure the content is still relevant.

2. Perform quick research to find keywords for which this content could rank for.

3. Read the top-3 articles on the specific subject to see what your content is missing

4. Adjust the text to make it more SEO friendly

5. Add headers, images, and GIFs where necessary.

6. Upload the content on your blog.

Infusing an SEO strategy with your email marketing will not only help you increase your engagement rates but, will also provide you the attention you deserve. But like all good things, you need a bit of patience and a lot of proficiency

Make it a habit of writing an email content which is SEO friendly, it doesn’t matter if it is public or in your inbox. Ultimately, it will help you strengthen your email marketing and your SEO strategy – that’s killing two birds with one stone.