Digital marketing is a blanket statement used to categorize all types of marketing that happen via digital and internet-enabled devices. Ideally, every digital marketing campaign should incorporate every possible channel to maximize its return. Each channel works differently in how they reach out and engage with customers, but using them together is the best way to get the best out of their individual and collective efforts.
Unfortunately, when it comes to small business marketing, many brands either employ one channel or use a number of them independent of each other. Some of them think the aim should just be about keeping their branding and messaging efforts consistent with each channel.
What is needed is a symbiotic approach. Granted, the immense mutual benefits that having all these channels brings aren’t usually evident right off the bat. But this doesn’t mean that these advantages do not already exist from the beginning. This is especially true in the case of SEO and email.
These channels are among the biggest digital marketing routes, and understanding their mutual relationship can kick things up for your marketing significantly. We have outlined a few ways in which your email marketing strategies can rub off on your small business SEO efforts in the right way.
Emails help you achieve your SEO goals by bringing in qualified traffic
The ultimate objective of SEO marketing is to bring in more customers, and consequently, more revenue. Email can rake in massive traffic to your website — especially if you have a massive email list — like no other marketing channel. And not just any kind of traffic, but qualified traffic; people that have a higher propensity to follow through and convert after reading your email.
This ability is down to how effective personalization is with emails. Personalization allows marketers to send subscriber-specific emails and newsletters to everyone on their email list. When a customer knows that an email was crafted specifically for them and their interests, the potential for a click-through from them shoots up significantly.
If you haven’t started doing this yet, it’s thankfully not that difficult to get started. The first thing you should do is to segment your email list according to subscriber interests. For instance, writing service review companies like Best Writers Online and Online Writers Rating can categorize their email subscribers according to the type of writing service they need. Options include research papers, dissertations, essays, and paper writing.
This way, when they review new writing services, they can notify the different segments of their email list about only the writing services that align with their interests. The ability for an email to bring in this traffic lessens the burden on SEO and enables it to meet its target faster.
Email traffic will boost engagement on your site
No one wants visitors who hop on their site and then go off as quickly as they came. A huge factor that causes this is a disinterest in your site’s resources, content, product, or service offerings. Of course, this means that such visitors are not targeted, high-quality traffic.
However, with your email list, you can solve this problem somewhat. The traffic coming from your highly personalized emails are already interested in your offering and content. This interest causes them to spend more time engaging with your site’s resources. This can only be a good thing for your SEO needs. An average longer site visit and a lower bounce rate help your website rank better on search results pages. No one is sure how important these metrics are to ranking a website, but they certainly do not hurt your chances of ranking.
So even though these site visitors are coming from your email list, they are helping you boost your positioning for keywords. Generally, as long as you remain efficient at driving the right subscribers to the right content, your visibility on search engines can only continue to grow. Essentially, your email marketing will continue to make your SEO efforts and entire small business marketing look good.
Use data from your email testing to plan your on-site content strategy
When it comes to emails, a marketer’s job is never really done. It is common practice for email marketers to tweak the emails continually they send to their list to see which iteration converts the most. And there’s a lot to tweak and test: subject lines, tone and length of copy, CTA, personalization, sender name, target audience, sender’s name, and landing page, among other things.
Besides better conversion, another benefit of continuous testing is that you’re garnering a huge bank of data and insights from the results of your testing. These insights can be employed in your other digital marketing channels to significant effect.
For instance, let’s say that during your testing, you notice that your subscribers responded favorably to a particular email newsletter headline, you may want to consider using that as the title for the corresponding on-site page or to use it as a title for a related article. You may also discover that a particular call-to-action is responsible for a considerable majority of clicks. Consider using such a CTA all over your website, especially the home page.
The good thing about using these insights is that they come from your email list, which is an already proven customer base. So essentially, you’re planning your content strategy with reliable data. This method of “email marketing SEO” helps to draw a connecting bridge that can carry the successes of your email marketing planning over to your SEO efforts.
Repurpose your high-value emails and newsletters as content for your site
Coming up with original, new, and valuable content consistently is sometimes tricky, even for the best marketers. One way to keep delivering content to your email subscribers is to curate some of the best content from within your industry that is relevant to their interests. Use emails to send these posts across to your subscriber lists.
You could also focus on finding gaps in the way your industry talks about pertinent industry-specific issues. Then address these gaps in your emails.
But what if it is site content that is your problem, and not email content? It is still essentially the same problem — a content problem. It can even be solved with a combination of curated and original content. However, another huge source of site content could be your emails. At this point, you’ve probably already sent a lot of high-value content to your subscribers via email. Consider repurposing these topics for your blog and resource pages. Besides, emails can only be so long. Making your emails and newsletters into full-blown high-quality site content not only gives your site more SEO juice, but it also gives you an avenue to expand on relevant information in a way that emails do not allow.
Encourage your subscribers to share your content on social media
If your subscribers connect with your content, they’ll most likely have no problem sharing it on their social media. But asking for the share through your emails allows them to share socially through your marketing campaign.
Google has come out to say that social media shares do not directly help site ranking. Still, a rise in social visibility positively impacts your SEO and improves search visibility, as this Hootsuite study reveals.
Conclusion
As I stated earlier in the article, digital marketing channels are best deployed to complement each other. Don’t be deceived if these channels look unrelated at first glance; the real gem is beneath the surface. Using the small business marketing advice on this list will put you in good standing with your subscribers, and with Google’s rankings and search visibility.
Guest Post: About the Author
Aaron Swain is a writing specialist. He is passionate about marketing and SEO. He expands and improves his skills throughout the writing process to help and inspire people.