Anyone who's been here before knows a bit about content marketing. Essentially, it's about making your brand valuable to a consumer. Becoming valuable is all about being the answer to a problem that someone out there is having. SEO (or Search Engine Optimization) is all about connecting that person with your solution (more about that here). The problem, or more precisely, the difficulty, with SEO is that the Internet is a vast place. Even when you have just the thing to help consumers out, it's a rough job trying to fight for space out there.

This is where email marketing comes in. Off the bat, email seems to be unrelated to SEO. After all, search engines aren't picking anything up from your emails, right? Even though that is correct, it doesn't mean that there is nothing you can do off of your website to help improve your SEO. The beauty of email is that, once you have a lead's contact information that they willingly gave over, you know that they're interested in what you have to offer. The whole issue of fighting for space has now virtually disappeared! Your job now, with email, is to make sure you're being helpful and remaining relevant.

Here's an example to help with that. You may know that we're currently running a campaign to increase authority for Baltimore SEO. We've created what is called a pillar page, which is almost like a homepage for the topic, linking to related blog posts and e-books. So let's say someone visits one of our blog posts on the topics. The visitor clicks on the call-to-action on the bottom of the page, signing up for our monthly marketing breakfast, or downloading an e-book. Score! Now we have his or her contact info, as well as the knowledge that the consumer is interested in content related to Baltimore SEO. Now, we can craft an email promoting our other pillar Baltimore SEO content. This isn't just a spammy promotional email, because we're pushing content that the receiver is actually interested in.

Other Advantages of Email Marketing for SEO

• High-quality links help drive SEO. Send out links that will add value for email readers, which they may end up sharing, thereby increasing inward links to your website.
• Email can be used to promote content in general (remembering to make it relevant, and only with permission, so it doesn't come across as pushy), like a weekly or monthly blog digest. Increased traffic equals higher domain authority.
• Good email marketing increases trust and builds relationships with contacts. This makes them more likely to visit your website in future, and recommend it to friends.
• You can also use your emails as a way to remind leads to connect with you on social media, like subscribing on Youtube or following on Twitter.
• If you send out email newsletters, think about posting them as blog posts. If they are too short to make up a whole post, you can use them as inspiration to build upon, or just combine a few newsletters into one post. And boom! One piece of content, double the exposure. (Word to the wise: if you do this, don't send it out again to the same contacts who received the original newsletter.)