Email Marketing & SEO – Part III

Email Marketing: Personalized Value, Delivered Right to the Customer’s Door

Now, let’s move on to email marketing. This is the marketing channel that typically is said to have the highest ROI for companies, but don’t let that push you into running out and spending a lot of cash on it.

First, there are a lot of benefits to email marketing. You can use it to bring in new customers, of course, but you can also use it to create referrals, engage your customers, upsell, and even retain customers.

Since messages from your company are mixed up among emails from family and friends, this means that it is a personal connection. However, if done incorrectly, it can also cause anger, bring damage to your brand, and even decrease deliverability rates for future emails.

You also want to keep in mind that it can be difficult to get an email list that is large enough to bring in new customers. Alone, email marketing won’t help you grow unless you have another type of mechanism in place.

It is possible, of course, to start by emailing a couple of friends. Well-known newsletters, such as Startup Digest, Product Hunt, and The Hustle, all started by using this method. Now, they all have thousands, perhaps millions, of people reading these.

Generally, marketers will pair their email marketing efforts with content marketing or SEO in order to build up their lists.

Here are some strategies that you can use if you want to start using email marketing:

1. An email will tell your customers about the value that they will get when they purchase your product or service. Can you make an estimation on the time saved or money earned by using your service or product?
2. Consider building your list by creating a giveaway. To do this, all you have to do is choose a product or service to give away, make sure people know about the giveaway, and then ask for their email address. You can get hundreds or thousands of email addresses if you use this method.
3. Advertise on similar newsletters that compliment your service or product. Chances are that if a person subscribes to one newsletter, they would like to subscribe to a similar one. Alternatively, you can shout out another newsletter in your own newsletter, and they can do the same for you.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO): Ranking Higher to Gain Visibility

When you have a question about something, what do you do? How do you find the answer?

If you are like most people, you will turn to a search engine like Google:

• Are you looking for help to change the oil in your car? You might search YouTube for a video.
• Do you want to know how much it costs to get SEO services? You probably will go directly to Google and type that into the search bar.
• Searching for a book on a certain topic or from a certain author? You might go right to Amazon to find it.

This marketing channel also includes search engines like Yahoo and Bing, but most SEO consultants and agencies generally focus on Google just because it brings in the most traffic. Of course, it also includes niche search engines like YouTube and Amazon.

Though you have probably heard great things about SEO, you should keep in mind that it can take time before you see results.

3 Actionable Tactics to Quickly Optimize SEO

• Do research on keywords in order to find those that are high volume and low difficulty
• Create content on that topic which will both benefit Google and your customers
• Get links from authoritative sites to create an authoritative article on the chosen topic

Doing research on keywords can help you learn how often people are searching for a specific phrase. It also will tell you how competitive that keyword is. Fortunately, there is an easy way to find keywords that are low difficulty and high volume. Here’s a summary of what you should do:

1. Search for your keyword or topic on Google
2. Take the first three to five articles that you find
3. Put these articles into an SEO tool that allows you to find which keywords the page is ranking with.
4. Sort your keywords by volume
5. Take out any keywords that are not in the top 20 spots. Also, you should take out any keyword that has a high difficulty score.

When you do keyword research, it’s important to understand the intent of the person when searching for a specific phrase. This can tell you how long it could take in order to make a sale.

Let’s look at this: If a person is searching Google for “What is copywriting,” it is probably just because they want some basic information on it. However, if a person looks up the term “copywriting services in Los Angeles,” they are likely looking for a specific agency that they can work with.

Once you do this, you can then create content that is in-depth and able to answer questions about the topic that people might have. To do this, you often need to source your ideas from other content. For example, you might do this:

1. Go to your customer list and see what questions are popping up.
2. Go to Quora and search your topic for questions
3. Go to Reddit and do the same but look for articles that have a lot of comments and upvotes
4. Go to Facebook, look at groups, and see what questions are being posted
5. Go to Slack and Discord groups, and again, see what questions people have

When this is done, you should share everything you have learned on this topic in an article ranging from 1500 to 3000 words.

Now that you have some content, you must add some authoritative links.

Why is this so important? It’s because it will help you improve your SEO. Why is this important? Let’s look at it like this:

When you write a paper, like a research paper, how are you sure that the information is actually correct? You know because you cite sources. People do this on the internet, too, by linking to different pages.

Google, for example, puts pages with the most relevant information to a search high on the results page. This is why it’s important for you to have good content. You always want to aim to have your pages high on the results list because that’s how you will get traffic.

Here are some SEO strategies that you should consider when using this marketing channel:

1. After you do some research, you can create landing pages that will compare your page to your competitor’s pages. Your potential customers will certainly want to know how your products are different from others. In fact, this is one of the most common questions a consumer will ask before they buy a product. A page like this will allow you to fully educate your customers and then add your voice to the existing conversation.
2. Create a survey using an online tool. Then, write an article that promotes this with your research. It is well-known that articles backed by research get more links and traffic than those that don’t.
3. You can easily find keywords that are easy-to-rank by taking a look at the content of your competitors. Put your competitor’s pages into an SEO tool, which are available online, and then filter out any that have a low score. You can also search for a broader keyword, too. Then, organize your list by traffic. This will give you quick and fast ranking results.

Next week- Community Marketing and Social Media!