When you want to introduce your ecommerce business to your target audience, you can combine two powerful strategies into one: email SEO. Search engine optimization (SEO) helps improve search engine rankings, and email marketing helps you connect with a curated digital mailing list. Together, they can work wonders.
While email marketing efforts don’t directly impact your SEO performance, the two involve creating compelling content that resonates with the type of people who’d buy your products and services. Here are tips for combining these two digital marketing strategies to boost your online presence.
How do email and SEO work together?
Many businesses use both search engine optimization and email marketing. Both tactics are alternatives to paid advertising, and both rely on creating content that engages readers, builds brand authority, and encourages conversion. As a digital marketer, you may find that some of the same content that grabs your email subscribers’ attention can also improve your standing on search engine results pages (SERPs).
For example, say your ecommerce store sells cooking spices, and you send out a marketing email to subscribers. The body of the email connects to landing pages on your website using three different hyperlinks: one for celery salt, another for BBQ rub, and another for mustard powder. After analyzing your email performance, you notice that 73% of recipients clicked on BBQ rub, indicating that it’s a popular item and the phrase may be useful for driving targeted traffic to your web pages. You create an SEO campaign anchored around the keyword “BBQ rub” to capture organic traffic from people searching that term.
3 ways email marketing impacts SEO
Even though email marketing doesn’t directly impact search algorithms, it offers downstream benefits that can improve your website rankings. Email performance can indirectly boost your organic search performance in the following ways:
1. Drives high-intent traffic
Email campaigns are great for driving quality traffic. Ethan Smith, an SEO expert and CEO of growth agency Graphite, says Google’s algorithm is selective about what sites rank. “Google doesn’t want you to be just an SEO site, and they want you to be a credible domain before they rank you,” Ethan explains on an episode of Lenny’s Podcast. “Your non-SEO traffic is actually an authority signal.”
How much non-SEO traffic is enough to get Google’s attention? “One thousand visits a day, roughly,” Ethan says. “You could grow with less than 1,000 visits, but it’s much harder.” He lists direct links, paid advertising, and email as ways to boost non-SEO website visitors.
Of these options, email offers unique benefits. Because mailing list subscribers have already expressed interest in your brand, marketing emails can attract site visitors who engage more deeply, stay longer, and convert at higher rates. They’re helping you build domain authority with Google and bringing in the audience you want on your site.
2. Boosts backlink potential
Promoting content via email increases the chances that readers discover and share your content. They may link to it on social media, in other blogs or articles, or in other online forums. This encourages backlinks, which algorithms such as Google’s use as a positive ranking factor.
3. Strengthens brand awareness
Consistent email communication builds brand recall, making consumers more likely to search for your business specifically when they’re ready to buy. These are known as branded searches. They signal credibility and demand to search engines like Google, which can strengthen your domain authority and, in turn, overall SERP performance.
For example, when leadership development company Coaching Right Now enlisted the Blacksmith agency to run an SEO campaign based on branded search, they saw a 20.9% boost in return traffic and a 16.7% boost in name-brand traffic. While email isn’t the only way to build brand awareness, it plays a role in a multipronged marketing strategy.
How to use email and SEO for mutual benefit
- Repurpose high-performing content across channels
- Use email subject lines to improve your meta titles
- Apply mobile optimization to your emails and website
- Personalize emails to drive deeper engagement
- Use SEO content to build your email list
Your email and SEO marketing efforts can both drive more traffic to your website. They work best when they inform each other. Email reveals what resonates with your audience, and SEO brings in new subscribers to nurture. Here are strategies to help you realize the mutual benefits:
Repurpose high-performing content across channels
Your goal is to attract engaged website visitors who are more likely to scroll, click, and convert. This improves behavioral signals, reduces bounce rates, and helps build your site’s authority over time.
Use tools like Google Analytics and your email software to identify top-performing blog posts and email content. You can also attach UTM parameters—web page URL components that help you track marketing campaign activity—to all of your email campaign links to keep track of where your traffic is coming from.
Observe the traffic patterns, then share winning blog posts with your newsletter readers and optimize your best newsletters for search. This feedback loop creates a virtuous cycle of engagement and improvement to your content.
Use email subject lines to improve your meta titles
Subject lines and email calls to action (CTAs) act as rapid A/B testing environments. Winning phrases in an email campaign often translate into better title tags, meta descriptions, and on-page copy that improve click-through rates (CTR) in search results.
This relationship also works in the opposite direction. If your SEO campaigns help you identify particularly relevant keywords, you can optimize email CTAs, subject lines, and content by including them. You can also reuse those keywords on landing pages that you link to in your emails. This two-way approach unifies two prongs of a broader content strategy.
Apply mobile optimization to your emails and website
Mobile optimization is essential for SEO because Google uses mobile-first indexing, meaning it ranks sites based on their mobile version. A strong mobile user experience (UX) performance increases the likelihood that users stay longer and explore other pages. If you’re optimizing your site for mobile, it’s also the perfect time to optimize your emails for mobile.
You can also use an email service provider like Shopify Email with built-in mobile optimization to make the job easier.
Personalize emails to drive deeper engagement
Use segmentation tools like Shopify Segmentation to divide customers based on specific criteria such as purchase history, behavior, and customer lifetime value (CLV). Send tailored content to segments that align with their customer profiles.
While this approach requires sending multiple emails instead of just one general dispatch, segmented personalization often delivers higher CTRs and more traffic, which is great for SEO. For example, British airline EasyJet experienced a 25% lift in CTR and a 100% lift in its overall open rate after personalizing its emails.
Use SEO content to build your email list
Search engine-optimized pages can be a great tool for building your email list. If you’re able to create a page that ranks well in organic search results, greet website visitors with a splash page that captures email addresses or add a box for email sign-ups in a side rail.
For example, you can greet site visitors with a pop-up that offers 15% off their first purchase in exchange for an email address. You now have a way to funnel new customers to your email list, with the hope that they’ll become repeat customers. Studies show that email campaigns can deliver a great return on investment (ROI) as far as marketing strategies go ($36 to $45 for every $1 spent), so you stand to gain from adding organic search visitors to your email list.
Email SEO FAQ
What is email SEO?
Email SEO is the strategic practice of optimizing email marketing content, list segmentation, and delivery timing to improve email performance. Observe metrics like open rates and click-through rates to improve SEO content and use email to drive traffic to SEO-optimized website pages.
Does SEO apply to emails?
Traditional SEO does not directly apply to emails because search engines do not crawl and index the content within private email inboxes. However, SEO principles apply indirectly because well-crafted emails can drive high-quality traffic and positive user signals to your website. These signals support your overall SEO ambitions.
Does SEO matter in email marketing?
Traditional SEO doesn’t index email content. However, SEO principles, such as optimizing subject lines and driving traffic to search-optimized pages, do significantly impact the success and effectiveness of email marketing.
