Email marketing has often been thought of as a completely separate discipline to SEO. In many ways this is true. The water lines of division are now however much more murky than they once were. I see even greater crossovers with newer ‘social’ styles of marketing which have made an incursion into the arena of SEO. SEO as it was once known is now completely different due to its ever evolving nature. For this reason the best SEO’s will seek to use every tool available to them in order to gain an advantage, which really revolves around one thing, improving the user experience and as a result subsequent search engine rankings.

You are able to use email marketing platforms in many ways that can be used to aid your Search Engine Optimisation efforts. Below are a few of the different methods that I have found really worked from long term experience in both sectors.

The Sticky Strategy – Building your database through SEO

This phrase has been used to describe how users interact with Facebook. One of Facebook’s main aims is to influence every part of the internet experience and have users ‘stuck’ to their services. This should be the aim of all good webmasters, SEO and Email Marketing are able to feed into this strategy and keeps the conversion cycle going, while drastically improving the life time value of what could be one off customers. Your site should be set up in such a way that individuals are unobtrusively added to your database. This makes full use of all SEO traffic well beyond the original one off conversions you may receive through SEO. Any site that does not have this system set up is never going to make the most of traffic from all forms that come onto your website.

Offer value to other websites

We have all received the generic link building emails… “Dear webmaster…” and so on. Pushing delete has become a daily part of the routine with these emails. Some people may want generic content on their site with outbound links but this strategy on the whole tends not to be successful. The key is offering real value to other webmasters. If you have a database of webmasters that are already connected to you in some way then the sky really is the limit.

• Offer products for review to other webmaster using your vast email contacts. This will tend to have a higher success rate as you are offering something of real value to webmasters. Reviews tend to include natural backlinks to your site something which comes into line with Google’s Penguin update.
• Offer the badge for the winning of a competition to the top sites/ blogs in your database. These can contain a link back to the site explaining why it is there, e.g ‘dotMailers top blog award’ while also improving the quality and prestige of the site you are contacting.

There are many other ideas you can use, the most important thing to bear in mind is to be targeted in reaching out to other users and do not start sending the bulk spam style emails which will have an adverse effect on your email marketing and tend to get you nowhere in SEO.

Conversion Rate Optimisation

The way in which users interact with your website is incredibly important and comes under the ‘quality signals’ area of the Google algorithm. Split testing is one way of finding out what page layouts, content; etc receives the highest conversion rate and best user interaction. You are also able to set up targeted email marketing campaigns where depending on the detail of your email marketing campaign database you can send spate pages as test in order to gauge engagement. This can ensure that there is no drop in conversions from the current level in SEO traffic while gauging the effect of different pages on your email audience.

Remember Quality!

The one great constant through all forms of internet marketing be it PPC, SEO, Email Marketing etc is the quality of the website. This directly effects conversions, click through rates, and rankings. If you want to improve in all these areas, improving the conversion rate optimisation and making your site as user friendly as possible will always be the place to begin.