Does email marketing influence your SEO efforts? Will they rank you better?
Yes, they do. Email marketing influences your search engine rankings because you are bringing traffic to your site, and the behavior of each person on your website gets recorded by search engines.
That is the impact I want to discuss. Today, I will show you several ways of how email marketing helps with search engine optimization.
- Email Marketing Reduces Your Bounce Rate
- Email Marketing Increases Average Session Duration
- Email Marketing Increases Traffic
- Email Marketing Breathes New Life into Old Pages
- Email Marketing Improves Repeat Users
Email Marketing Reduces Your Bounce Rate
Once a customer who receives your email clicks on your link, we can say that he is a “warm” traffic. What this means is that he already has an interest and is likely to visit other pages on your website.
Normally, people would find your page via search engines. What they do is they read one of your pages, and then leave. This is a bounce, and it is bad for search engine optimization. The bounce rate is the number of bounces over your total visits.
A high bounce rate sends signals to search engines that you must not be providing high-value content. As such, the search engines like Google may not rank you at the top of the search engine results pages (SERPS).
If you market your content via email, the user already knows you. For starters, you would not have gotten his email had he not subscribed to your website. With email marketing, you are encouraging your fans to read more about what you have to say, and they are likely to explore more.
To avoid a bounce, all the site visitor has to do is to click on at least two pages, so make sure that your search engine marketing articles are designed to encourage the user to visit different areas of your site.
Email Marketing Increases Average Session Duration
Since the person clicking on your link has an interest, it is also likely that he is going to read through your content. The length of time that a person stays on your website has an impact to search engine optimization and your rankings.
Google records how long a person stays on your site. This metric is called the average session duration. The higher the session duration is, the better it is for your rankings.
Why is this important?
In Google’s eyes, long session durations indicate that your users are enjoying your content. It sends a signal to Google that your content must be so good that people are spending a long time there. And if this is so, Google will think that your content must be valuable.
If Google thinks that your content is valuable, it is going to bump up your position on top of the SERPs. This is how email marketing affects your SEO. Basically, you are getting highly targeted traffic who will go to your website to see what you have to offer.
And because they know you already, they are eager to consume your content. For ordinary organic traffic, some may skip-read your content, stay there for 30 seconds, and then leave.
As more and more people stay longer on your site, the better Google will think of your content. And if so, expect for your website to rank higher.
Email Marketing Increases Traffic
Site traffic is like a vicious circle. Google looks at where your traffic comes from—like Facebook and other social media. It could track if your traffic came from emails, too.
The source of traffic is important to Google to determine how to rank your page. If Google detects that you are getting traffic from social media, it will also think that your content must be popular—that people like it.
Google thinks the same way if your traffic comes from email marketing. If people click on your link from the email to get to your site, Google knows about it. And if you are getting massive traffic to your site from email marketing campaigns, then you must be adding a lot of value to your users.
Since this is how Google thinks, it is natural for the algorithm to boost your rankings. This is how your email marketing campaigns affect your SEO rankings.
As you can see, your goal is to get a lot of clicks from your emails. This metric is called click-through-rate (CTR). This metric is visible if you are using autoresponder programs like GetResponse or Aweber. However, if you are merely using a simple email tool, you cannot measure this.
Many autoresponder and mailer tools are free. Take the time to study how they work, and then integrate them on your website. Once you have visibility on your CTR, you will be able to determine if your email campaign works or not.
Email Marketing Breathes New Life into Old Pages
With an email marketing strategy, you can send people to your old content.
Let us be honest here: while it is a good practice to update old content, we really do not have the means to do this. Can you just imagine if you already have 100+ articles on your site?
Updating these articles would be a nightmare. What you really want is to have evergreen content on each page. As time passes by, the rankings of your old pages will decline. This naturally happens because of competition and interest.
As your rankings decline, so will your traffic. But if you send people to these old pages, Google will take it as a signal that your content is still relevant. So, what you really want to do is to keep traffic coming to these old pages.
Google will then improve your rankings, considering that these old pages still get clicks.
Email Marketing Improves Repeat Users
I suggest that you design your email marketing campaign as a series of blogs. This way, you can send one email per week about the same subject matter.
Think of it as an online course, but not a full-blown one.
If you make a good series, then you can expect me, people, to come back to your website to read the latest content for that series.
So, how does this help in search engine optimization?
Google records your users’ identities. If you go to Google Analytics, you will see that Google knows the number of your returning users. If people are coming back to your site, it sends a good signal to Google that your content is rich and valuable.
And what happens if Google believes that you have meaningful content? Google jacks your pages higher in the SERPs. So, if you want to have repeat traffic, email marketing is a good avenue to do it.
The best part is that email marketing is a free tool. You can also program the tool in such a way that it automatically sends emails to your subscribers once a new blog post is published.
Summary: How Email Marketing Helps with Search Engine Optimization
Email is a way to reach out to target consumers directly. It is no different from marketing catalogs that we receive in our physical mailboxes.
With email marketing, you can put your best content out there, and also get the most engaging site visitors. To begin with, people will not click on your link if they have no interest in what they saw in their email.
Use email marketing to improve your traffic—and also to get targeted traffic to improve your SEO rankings.
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