If you are running a business in Edmonton, you appreciate how competitive this city can be. Of course this being the famous Canada’s Festival City, every brand wants to cash in on the constant flow of people here. Whether you are running an online store or a brick and mortar store around here, you have to think outside the box for your website to remain relevant. With so many national and international brands represented in the city, consumers are lost for choice and you have to be very innovative to beat competition in your niche. If you are angling for a piece of the local market, you need to think about email marketing to drive traffic to your site.
Why SEO Matters to Your Business
To many marketers, search engine optimization (SEO) is not relevant to small local businesses. Well, if you are running a website, you must be ready to optimize it for search or else, you will soon be closing shop. Take this example; if you own a restaurant in the city and you are competing with a Burger King down the street, how do you stay afloat?
In the internet marketplace, the playing ground is level and you can easily reach your target customers through innovative SEO strategies. For instance, targeting for keywords such as ‘local cuisine by locals in Edmonton’ in this case will see you attract a specific niche and this is all you need to grow your business.
In essence, 93% of all online experiences start with a search engine and if you want target customers to start coming to your local business, you have to be highly visible on search engine results. Rankling highly on search engine result pages (SERPs) is a sure way of getting ahead start over the competition because 75% of users don’t scroll past the first page of SERPs.
How Email Marketing Fits into SEO
Now that you appreciate the importance of SEO for your business, it is time to consider how you can get this done. One of the easiest tools to use in SEO is email marketing. You might have heard that email is dead but anyone telling you this doesn’t know that email has an impressive ROI of 3800% according to DMA.
What’s more, a Pew Research Survey shows that 92% of online adults use email. A similar survey done by Campaign Monitor says 56% of email subscribers use around 10 minutes to 1 hour every week browsing through promotional emails. About 76% of marketers say they are seeing active growth in their email subscriptions, which clearly shows that this is a viable SEO tool.
To appreciate the important role email marketing will play in your SEO efforts, consider the following:
- Content repurposing – Email content can be repurposed into log content, which is great for SEO. This means your non-subscribers will still get to see new content and search engines will boost your ranking on SERPs.
- User engagement – Engagement levels are an important factor in online marketing. While your emails might not directly drive up your ranking on SERPs, sending valuable content to your email subscribers will increase sharing on social media, which in turn leads to more brand mentions. This eventually moves the needle in your ranking on SERPs.
- Linking to RSS and other sources of your regular content – You can link to your blogs in your emails and also request readers to connect via RSSand advise subscribers to subscribe to your YouTube channel for more of your videos among other techniques.
Getting the Best out of Email marketing
These are just a few of the strategies that can help you leverage email marketing for your SEO campaign. To get the best out of your email marketing efforts, consider the following:
- Make sure you select a good ESP who provides a dedicated IP address, reporting and monitoring features for bounce rates, click-through and open rates.
- Avoid spamming by adhering to the CAN-SPAM Law to avoid penalties.
- Always make sure you create a text-only version with HTML email.
- Nurture your leads through initial non-promotional materials.
- Develop landing pages specifically for the content in the email
- Personalize your email content to increase open rates.
- Segment your target audience and create an email marketing list.
- Add social media links to promote your brand.
- Embed video as a call-to-action to drive more traffic to your site.
- Keep tracking the effectiveness of the email campaign.
While email marketing has not been fully exploited in SEO, you now have the techniques you can use to get the best out of your campaign. Always make sure you observe best practices in the industry and stay abreast of other SEO trends to learn how you can adapt your emails to fit these changes.
