Although Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and email marketing are two different marketing strategies, they do share the same end goal – lead generation. This means that, whilst the majority of businesses have not considered the benefits of putting the two together, they actually complement each other very well.
SEO marketing revolves around boosting your website’s ranking on various search engines so that it appears as high up in the results as possible, in order that new potential customers find out about and are drawn to your business. This is done through link building, guest posting, use of keywords and a variety of other strategies. Meanwhile, email marketing uses a more direct approach, contacting both potential and existing customers with promotional content in order to generate leads and sales.
Here’s how these two concepts can work in unison for a productive marketing strategy.
Promote new web content using emails
If you are trying to get more unique website traffic, or have a specific product, event or service that you want to get people over to your site to look at, send out a marketing email about it. Using your email list, which will consist of a warmer audience than you will get from a Google search, you can present the information that you want people to know, in order to draw them to your site.
This strategy works by allowing you to contact people that have already heard about your business and shown some kind of interest and letting them know when you have something new on your website to go and look at. You can link to your website in your email to make it easy for subscribers to get to the site, and this will increase your website’s standing with search engines, as well as making it more likely that people will actually head over to the site.
A great tip for ensuring that your email subscribers do go onto the website is to put enough in the email to peak their interest, but have the full version only available on the website, so it is worthwhile for your subscriber to click through.
You could also provide a unique code in your email that subscribers can use on the site for a discount or other offer, to encourage click-throughs as well as help you to track the percentage of people that come over to your site from emails.
Lower your website bounce rates
Your ‘bounce rate’ is categorised as the percentage of single interaction visits there are to your website. This basically means that people navigate to your page, and then navigate straight back out without interacting with the page any further. From an analytics perspective, a high bounce rate means that your page is not engaging visitors, and this will cause problems for your search engine rankings.
Email marketing can be used to great effect to make your bounce rates lower, providing you with a clear opportunity for click-throughs that will stick. You can provide a call-to-action in your email that will let the user know what they are going to get if they navigate to your website, meaning that only those who are genuinely interested will actually do so.
You can place a variety of different call-to-action buttons throughout your email to encourage people to click through to your website or social media, including:
- Links to the purchasing page for a new product
- Asking readers to comment or share blog posts
- Links to your social media pages so that readers can follow them
- Asking for readers to share important or valuable information
Improve your social media engagement
Useful or interesting content is far more likely to be shared by internet users, and the most popular place to share information is on social platforms. Thankfully, this is possible with email newsletters, thanks to email marketing services such as MailChimp or SendGrid, which allow you to place customisable social share buttons in the body of the email, so that users don’t have to go out of their way to share your content.
The more shares you get on social media, the better your SEO ranking, because it increases traffic to your website and also signals higher value among social networks.
Reuse valuable historical content
You don’t need to consistently produce interesting and valuable content, when trying to drive fresh traffic to your website. Content from old email newsletters, that has performed well and is still relevant, can be reused and published on your website as a blog. All you need to do is find content that you feel still works now, tweak it a little by adding fresh images and a few keywords, and you have (what looks like) brand new, SEO-rich website content.
You could also try pulling together a number of shorter newsletters and turning them into one long blog post, perhaps something instructional or that gives advice covering a larger issue. This will require very little work from you as the content is already there, but will also help you to create a truly useful and high-quality piece that will appeal to current customers and a potential new audience alike.
Deliver personalised content
One of the best tactics marketers use to target customers successfully is creating and delivering personalised content. Personalised messages help customers feel valued and listened to, and view your company as one which is relevant to them and their lives.
Email segmentation offers wonderful opportunities for delivering personalised content to your subscribers. All you need to do is send out surveys via email that your subscribers can respond to, and then segment your subscribers into groups based on their responses. From there you are able to send out emails that feel very personal and connected to each individual subscriber, making it more likely that they will take an interest in the emails that you send out.
By the same token, when a subscriber receives an email that they feel is relevant to them, then they are far more likely to share or link to it, increasing the reach of your content and potentially earning you some natural backlinks. Increased website traffic as a result of this will also help to improve your search engine rankings.
Wrapping up
Using tactics created in the SEO world and using them in conjunction with your email marketing is an excellent strategy for boosting your lead generation efforts. An additional plus point is that it does not required a huge expense in time or money as these will be techniques you are most likely using anyway, but just in a standalone fashion.
Here at MaxWeb we not only build exciting and engaging websites, we also provide SEO and content writing services so that they get noticed by clients and search engines alike. Give our friendly team a ring on 0151 652 4777 or email info@maxwebsolutions.co.uk to find out more.
Posted on Wednesday, July 31st, 2019 in SEO.
