7 Ways to Make Your Newsletters SEO-Friendly
According to MailManager, 91% of the users check their mail on a daily basis and 74% of them feel positive about receiving promotional content. Does this mean that such campaigns are used solely for lead generation? Yes, but not only. While emails get opened, links get clicked.
Let’s have an insight into how you can benefit from making your emails more SEO-friendly.
How email marketing improves SEO
Surely, this channel doesn’t affect the rankings directly. However, it is a great way to:
- increase the number of external links,
- build a website’s credibility before Google,
- trigger the users’ engagement with your site, and social media sharings.
How can you make your emails more SEO-friendly?
#1. Use keywords-rich content
Commonly, emails are full of images, gifs, and video content. Let me correct myself. Commonly, ineffective ones are.
Believe me or not, plain text is often more than enough to get the message across your subscribers.
Keywords are critical, especially if you don’t want your letters to be viewed just once, closed and forgotten.
With a plethora of keywords tools available today — such as Google Keywords tool, Wordtracker, or Serpstat — keywords research becomes much easier.
Serpstat is probably the most time-saving and intuitive tool I’ve dealt with so far. To start using it, you’d only need to enter the main keyword in the search box, and click ‘Search.’
After the stats is loaded, you’ll see organic and ads keywords variants, keywords trends, and data on how difficult it’ll be to reach the top when using them, as well as the competitors’ data in the organic search, and more:
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Additionally, you can go to the Content Marketing tab, and click on Search questions to research what questions the users frequently ask, and how they actually do that.
Advice: Don’t underestimate the value of the plain but well-optimized text. Use visual components appropriately and only when they add value.
#2 Miss a newsletter? — Archive your newsletters to make them accessible
Make sure to consider newsletter archiving as it’s a great way to increase the chances of repeat interaction with the content. Besides, this is one of the ways to add more indexed pages to your site (just thinking out loud).
Archiving allows reaching that part of the customer base that uses the keywords search to find your content. Additionally, you can add links from the archive pages to your other site pages. This positively affects inbound link building and drives more traffic to the targeted site pages.
Thus, the users both get access to the past newsletters and get offered to subscribe to your emails (if they haven’t done that so far).
#3 Don’t be afraid to include more links
I won’t reinvent the wheel by saying that you should include links in your emails. Don’t be afraid to use as many relevant links as possible!
#4 Improve headlines and text
It takes time to generate catchy content for your newsletters. Use test emails to analyze how motivating they are. Would you personally click on such an email?
Additionally, make sure to apply on-page SEO techniques:
- use keywords in your headlines and content,
- set H1 and H2 tags that include keywords,
- optimize anchor text,
- use the alt attribute for images.
#5 Include links to your social media channels
Don’t try to use email marketing to dry traffic solely to your website. You can effectively use CTA buttons to offer the users to share content in social media, visit your Instagram accountant to get to know your company closer, etc.
The SEO world has been disputing about the influence of social media on site rankings. Nevertheless, if there is no direct influence, social attention to your brand will anyways result in more links and traffic.
#6 Create landing pages for your email campaigns
This is surely a must for those who create product/service email marketing campaigns. Instead of adding links to such product pages, it’s highly recommended to create unique landing pages for each of such campaigns.
What about time-limited offers? The more quality landing pages you’ve got, the more chances you have to build quality links, keywords optimization and higher rankings in the SERP.
#7 Make sure your emails are mobile-friendly
We are living in a mobile-first world. Let’s face it. The Web has been flooded with data on how critical it is to make content look nice on the hand-held devices. So, if you don’t want every second user to close and delete your emails with disappointment, create your letters for different devices and email clients.
With a plethora of online services to choose from, Mailchimp remains on the frontline in email marketing. Besides the ability to create unique campaigns and intuitive UX, the platform offers the ability to easily edit and test mobile tyles. Thus, to preview how your emails will look like on hand-held devices and make the necessary changes, go to Content > Edit Design > Design and select the Mobile Styles tab. You’ll see a drop-down menu. Use its options adjust the mobile styles according to your needs:
Wrap up
Email marketing remains the channel that both shows high ROI rates and resonates well with the potential user. With that in mind, this channel can become not only a great way of lead generation but also have a positive effect on your website SEO and rankings.