Search engine optimization (SEO) and email marketing exist at different parts of the marketing funnel.
SEO helps drive organic search traffic from technical optimizations on your website, whereas email marketing drives repeat traffic from an email list.
In other words, SEO brings in high-intent leads whereas email marketing helps retain your current customer segments.
There are two main ways that these two channels work together:
- Using SEO to drive traffic to sign up forms
- Using email marketing to build backlinks
Driving Traffic to Sign-Up Pages
The backbone of great email marketing is a strong opt-in strategy.
Your strategy will define where your sign-up forms are placed on your website, so that you can convert traffic into newsletter subscribers thereby growing your email list.
Some examples of sign-up pages include:
- contact forms
- lead magnets
- giveaways
- surveys
To email marketers, your email list is your lifeline.
But if your sign-up pages don’t receive any traffic, you will not grow your email list a all — regardless of how good your sign-up placements are.
This is where SEO comes in. By applying SEO techniques to your sign-up pages, so that they get more search traffic.
This includes:
- on-page optimization for your sign-up pages
- building backlinks to your sign-up pages
With good SEO practices in place, your sign-up pages will gradually get more traffic,
more traffic means more list growth,
and more list growth, means more revenue.
Organic vs. Paid Traffic
You can also pay for search ads to drive traffic to your website, and this will be a lot quicker and more targeted than using SEO.
However, this comes with some (literal) costs:
- search ads tend to be very competitive, and therefore expensive
- search ads require testing and optimization, adding more to your expenses
- paid traffic is often less intentional than organic traffic
This means that even though paying for search traffic works, it’ll cost you a lot of money for this traffic, and the conversion rate usually isn’t as good as that of organic traffic.
Although paid search traffic is worth the investment for most organizations, organic search traffic is more sustainable for long-term growth.
Building Backlinks with Cold Email Marketing
Backlink building is one of the most important aspects of SEO; without it, you won’t be able to compete for most keywords.
You may not realize it, but the most common method to build backlinks is actually through email marketing, specifically cold email outreach.
Whether you’re building broken backlinks, or guest posting, email is likely your main method of contact.
Depending on the email regulations in your country, you may even be able to automate your cold emails by building email workflows, or flows for short.
Conclusion
Although SEO and email marketing exist at different parts of the marketing spectrum, they actually compliment each other quite well:
- you can use SEO to support your email marketing strategy by driving organic search traffic to your sign up pages
- you can use email marketing to support your SEO by soliciting backlinks through cold email outreach