Three Ways to Leverage Email Campaigns to Boost SEO

Email is an often-overlooked way to boost results in an SEO campaign—after all, emails have no real impact on search engine results and are chiefly used as a marketing tool, rather than an SEO or SEM resource. But, what if your email campaigns could actually impact your SEO efforts? If you think about email as a lightning rod, its effect on SEO can be more easily addressed. Consider sending out an email to your database with a call to action that sends them to your website. By effectively pointing the lightning rod at your site, you’re creating hits that Google is going to rank. Now, let’s go deeper—say that call to action was to comment on a blog. You’ve now directed the lightning rod at your blog, which plays an integral role in SEO. It might take a few steps to get there, but email campaigns are extremely important to SEO campaigns if used correctly. Take a look at three ways you can use email to boost your search results rankings:

Encourage engagement

Just like in the example above, an email can be used to create engagement, which is invaluable when you consider how Google views highly active pages on the Web. Take a look at a few quick engagement options that could send your value skyrocketing in the eyes of Google:

• Links to a YouTube video. Because YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world today, you’ll be getting a boost from people watching your video, which in turn boosts your branding and SEO value through Google’s regular search.
• Links to a blog. When people read a blog or even comment on it, it means that it’s content of substance, which Google loves to give attention to. Having a fan base that regularly reads your blog can also result in organic shares, which are link gold!
• Links to a survey. If you’re able to host a survey on your website, a link to that survey is going to be invaluable coming from an email campaign. People will spend countless minutes on your site filling out the survey, which means a higher on-page time and more traffic for Google to view.

By giving people a reason to leave their email and travel to your site, you might be unknowingly be contributing to your SEO campaign!

Regular content consumption

Google also loves to see returning visitors to your site because it means that you’re giving people something that they want—be it blog posts, products or videos. Return traffic is a great way to boost your rankings, but it can also be hard to achieve, due to the fickle nature of people. One great way to make sure they keep coming back is to email them and entice them back. An even better way to make sure they keep coming back is to connect them to your RSS feed, where information will be available to them constantly. Subscribers to your blog, YouTube channel, Tumblr or any other such site will perpetuate your content on a daily basis, boosting the chance that these items are shared and passed on. Create easy to follow instructions and simple links in your emails and make sure that people are aware of their options—doing so will increase your subscribers and boost your SEO efforts when these people become recurring content distributors for you.

Repurpose your newsletters and emails

We all know by now that content duplication is bad and is often penalized heavily by Google. But, since Google pays no mind to emails, you can effectively get double the exposure from one source of content! Turn your emails into blog posts, web pages, splash pages or social media posts and Google won’t pay them any mind! In fact, if you’re putting in the time and effort to create email campaigns and newsletter content, make sure that you’re doing so with the ability to use this content somewhere else in your SEO campaign. Customers will see the parallels between their email and your newest batch of content, creating continuity, while Google will rank your content as fresh, without any knowledge of the email you sent out. It’s a win-win! The next time you pass up the chance to send out an email or dismiss an email campaign as nothing more than B2C clutter, consider the impact that it might be having on your SEO campaign and realize that it might just be worth the time and effort to craft an email!