Email cannot directly impact your search engine rankings, but you can make the most of email to drive your SEO tactics.
When thinking of ways to drive your search engine rankings, email might not typically be the first tool that comes to mind. As Google and other search engines don’t crawl or rank emails, writing emails for SEO purposes can seem like a waste of time.
While email doesn’t directly impact your search engine rankings, you can make the most of it to affect your search engine optimisation (SEO) results. In doing so, you will find that your SEO tactics can also have a positive impact on your email marketing efforts.
Here are some of the ways in which email marketing and SEO complement each other.
Reuse email content to create blog material
If you write long-form newsletters, reuse the content as a blog post. Rewriting your newsletter as a blog and implementing keyword phrases ensures that Google indexes your content.
Reusing email content for blog material gives you more quality content to rank for, and allows you to share your content elsewhere. Through social media and other messaging apps, your insights can be read by audience members who are not yet subscribed to your list.
Encourage engagement
As well as giving you more quality content to rank for, reusing newsletter content will inspire you to try new approaches in your email marketing efforts. For example, if the aim of your newsletter is to share your company’s latest news and projects, and you mention four items, you can write short blog posts for each of these.
Next time you set up a new campaign, rather than writing a long email, divide the stories throughout the newsletter.
Write punchy headlines and compelling descriptions for each story to encourage your subscribers to click and read more on your website.
While there’s a difference between writing for search engines and humans, your skills for writing meta titles and meta descriptions will pay off when it comes to this.
Adopting SEO writing techniques for email can also improve your deliverability and open rate.
Keywords are key to open rates
Implementing keywords throughout your campaign won’t do anything for your rankings in search engines but it will help you to be found in inboxes. With so many campaigns filling up inboxes, people simply don’t have the time to look at them all at once. Implementing keywords will make it easier for your subscribers to find your email when they come back to search for it later. Making it easier for them to find you will help improve your open rate.
Alt text in all images
Some email service providers require users to download images before viewing them. Therefore, the images in your campaign won’t load immediately once it arrives in your subscribers’ inboxes. Images are crucial for grabbing subscribers’ attention which is why you need to write alt text to let them know what the image contains. This will help to keep subscribers on the page long enough to encourage them to engage with your content. In the same way you would write alt text for images on your website, keep the text relevant, include keywords where appropriate, and don’t be spammy.
So, we can see that combining email with SEO tactics can have a positive impact both ways.
Adopting SEO techniques in email can improve engagement, which in turn can positively impact your website’s search rankings.