If there’s a universal question that every business owner, marketer, and ecommerce entrepreneur asks, it’s this: How can I increase my SEO rankings and rank higher on Google? Admit it – you’ve asked this question before.
And while it’s a good question, you’ll mostly hear the same recycled answers: updating headers, speeding up your website, choosing the right long tail keywords, and publishing more blog posts.
But what if there’s another hidden method for boosting your rankings?
We’re talking about email.
The Power of Email Marketing
Email is one of the most powerful arrows a digital marketer or business owner has in their quiver. It generates an astonishing $42 for every $1 spent, which is a 4,200 percent ROI. This makes it one of the best resources for driving clicks, building awareness, and generating sales.
Here are some other impressive email marketing statistics and data points:
- 4 out of 5 marketers say they’d rather give up social media than email marketing.
- 78 percent of marketers say email is important to their overall company success.
- 78 percent of marketers have seen an increase in email engagement over the past year.
- 31 percent of B2B marketers say email newsletters are the best way to nurture leads.
- 23 percent of brands are experimenting with interactive elements in email.
As you can see, email is far from the archaic marketing medium that some of today’s so-called digital marketing “gurus” try to make it out to be. Even in an era of flashy social media platforms like TikTok, email is king.
Ways Email Boosts Your SEO
Email marketing affords businesses a number of distinct benefits. This includes brand awareness, sales, and other perks. But did you know that it can also boost your SEO? Yes, seriously. One of the hidden benefits of effective email marketing is improved SEO rankings and metrics.
Personalized Email Content
Let’s start with what should be the word of the year for the marketing industry in 2022: personalization. With email, you get the opportunity to personalize content much more effectively and accurately than with your website alone. Depending on the extent of the data you keep on subscribers, you may know their name, location, past purchases, employer, etc. All of these insights can be used to help you tailor your messaging in a way that’s more likely to resonate with individual users.
For example, you can use someone’s name to personalize the subject line or even something like a video. Tools like Viewed make it possible to include embedded autoplay videos with each individual subscriber’s information. It doesn’t matter if you have 150 people on your list or 150,000 – each subscriber gets a personalized video. This leads to an increase of up to 200% in CTR.
Keyword Research
You can think of email as a marketing laboratory where you’re able to go out and test different ideas and approaches before making significant changes to your website. It’s especially effective when used as a keyword research tool.
For example, you can track email open rates, clicks, and other analytics over time to see which topics and keywords resonate the most with your target market. A/B split tests are especially powerful in this way.
You can split test both subject lines and body copy. A simple subject line split test would look like this:
- Subject Line A: Make more money online
- Subject Line B: Make passive income online
If Subject Line A gets a 24 percent open rate, while Subject Line B gets a 16 percent open rate, this tells you something. It doesn’t guarantee that the first keyword is better for an SEO strategy, but it does tell you that it’s more attractive to your target audience. You can use this intel to write focused content that converts.
Lower Bounce Rates
With interactive content such as autoplay video within the email, produces better quality traffic than search engines or even social media. That’s because the visitors are usually pre-indoctrinated with a relevant email. In other words, they know exactly what they’re going to get when they click. This makes them less likely to bounce and more likely to convert.
Cutting your bounce rate sends a positive signal to Google that your content resonates with people. It also makes Google more likely to refer traffic to your pages, since there’s analytical proof that your content is powerful.
More Targeted Traffic
The more targeted your traffic is, the more targeted your website content strategy can be (which bodes well for your overall SEO rankings). Rather than feeling like you have to write content for everyone, you can zero in on a very specific niche and develop micro content that helps you win with very specific keywords.
Another interesting benefit of using email to drive traffic to your site is that email makes it easy to segment your list. In other words, you can send one piece of content or URL to a portion of your list and another URL to another (based on their interests and past purchase behaviors). This gives you an immediate advantage over cold traffic.
Aids Retargeting
Studies show that email-based retargeting strategies have a positive impact on website click-through rates and engagement. In turn, this improves onsite SEO factors and leads to better rankings.
When you combine email with ad retargeting within the Google Ad network, you can turn your traffic into laser-focused visitors who already know your brand. This leads to lower bounce rates and much higher conversion rates (assuming your website content is aligned well with your email and ad strategies).
Use Viewed to Accelerate Your SEO
If you really want to win with email (and SEO), you must look for ways to automate the mundane, time-consuming tasks and scale your reach and engagement. With Viewed, we make it easy to leverage personalized videos in your email.
Want to learn how to get started? Sign up now and we’ll give you a free 30-day trial of our powerful software that brings video, email, and personalization together in one frictionless platform.
