On paper, search engine optimization (SEO) and email marketing can seem like two completely different worlds.
With one, you are trying to improve website visibility and Google ranking through organic methods, while with the other, you are trying to promote content and drive engagement through targeted digital messaging.
However, having hopped between the two worlds over the last 15 years of my career, I can tell you that SEO and email marketing have much more in common than you might initially think. In fact, they have the same foundational goal: to build brand awareness and customer engagement.
While the links in your emails won’t boost your Google rankings and your email campaigns won’t show up in search results, SEO and email marketing are intrinsically connected; together with social media, they are part of a powerful omnichannel strategy where marketers share relevant content with target audiences, delivering an impactful ROI for any business.
According to Hubspot’s State of Marketing and Trends Report, email marketing was the most leveraged channel among marketers (33%) in 2024, followed closely by website/blog/SEO (32%). Additionally, 48% of marketers said they would increase their investments in SEO in the upcoming year, and 49% said they would continue investing the same amount in email marketing.
With numbers like these, it’s impossible to ignore the power that SEO and email marketing can have when combined and used strategically together. To get the best of both worlds, it’s important to understand how SEO can help email marketing and vice versa, and what strategies you, as a content marketer, can put in place to bridge the gap between the two.
How SEO Helps Email Marketing
Email marketing cannot exist in a vacuum. It needs subscribers, content, and strategy to be executed to its fullest potential. Luckily, SEO can assist with all three aspects, helping build email lists organically, providing data-driven content ideas, and setting up lead nurture series for subscriber acquisition and retention via content-focused landing pages.
- Building Healthy Email Lists: All good email marketers know that high engagement rates come from highly engaged subscribers, and highly engaged subscribers come from organically grown lists. This is where SEO comes in. Building your email list via carefully crafted SEO content pages with on-page sign-up forms yields a much healthier email marketing program than one built from purchased or rented email lists.
- Lead Nurturing and Segmentation: Email marketers looking to nurture new leads and segment emails based on area of interest can utilize SEO to create focused landing pages. For example, subscribers acquired via a landing page for ‘best outdoor camping gear’ might then be sent on a specific email welcome journey highlighting products for camping, whereas subscribers brought in via other methods or pages might receive different welcome messaging.
- Subject Line and Content Creation: SEO is a data-driven practice; there are plenty of tools — like Google Keyword Planner and Semrush — that can tell us how many people are searching for a term in a given month and how exactly people are phrasing their searches. Email marketers can take advantage of this data by utilizing keywords to inform subject lines, preheaders, and email copy. Looking at the anatomy of an SEO article, a title tag is much like a subject line, and a meta description is much like a preheader, so successful metadata can easily be repurposed for email marketing.
How Email Marketing Helps SEO
Email marketing is more than just “blasting” out content (in fact, email marketers hate that word). A study by eMarketer found that email marketing boasts a 122% ROI, making it perhaps the number one content marketing tool. Email marketing offers an invitation into customers’ inboxes and the opportunity to foster a one-to-one, personalized, long-term relationship with customers. SEO specialists can utilize this unique advantage to help boost traffic, engagement, and brand awareness, as well as to learn more about their audience.
- Boosting Website Traffic and Onsite Engagement: Email marketing can help SEO by sending increased quality traffic to targeted content pages. This, in turn, helps with engagement signals that Google receives through its Chrome browser, including bounce rate, time on site, and pages per session. While Google asserts that these signals do not impact rankings, last year’s Google API leaks (especially around Navboost) hint at the possibility. Your efforts can be even more powerful if you use segmented email lists, which are categories of subscribers created based on interest, age, gender, location, purchasing habits, etc. Using audience segmentation, you can tailor email content specifically to these groups to achieve higher open, click-through, and conversion rates.
- Spreading the Word: Email subscribers are a hotbed for social sharing. Not only have they actively signed up for your content and are likely to click, but they are also more primed to share, comment, like, and link to the content you send than your average consumer. These positive engagement signals are gold. Once shared, this content may also be linked to within blog posts or on Reddit or other sites that Google can crawl and index, which Google can use algorithmically to improve your rankings. A great way to encourage sharing from email content is to create infographics and other unique visuals that readers would want to pass along. Then, craft a segmented email campaign to subscribers interested in that topic to encourage the growth in natural backlinks.
- Establishing E-E-A-T: One of Google’s important ranking factors is E-E-A-T, or Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness, which evaluates the quality and credibility of a site’s content. Email can aid SEO specialists in achieving this by helping earn positive and authentic online reviews and authoritative backlinks. Send an email to current customers asking for reviews and testimonials and ask for permission to share them on your website or blog to further build your authority and trustworthiness.
- Content Ideation and Audience Feedback: When developing a content strategy, email can be a powerful tool. A company’s best-performing emails for click-to-open rate (CTO) can be a great indicator of audience interest in a particular topic, and subject lines with high open rates can help inform future meta tags. Marketers can also get insights directly from customers or potential customers by sending email surveys. These questionnaires can shed light on content gaps and new keyword opportunities that might not previously have been considered.
- Brand Building and Brand Awareness: Email marketing is a great way to reinforce brand identity and awareness. This, in turn, increases search volume. As people become more familiar with your brand via their inbox, they will likely start Googling you directly when it comes time to make a purchase. Additionally, having regular, positive touchpoints with your brand helps to build trust and loyalty. Email marketing allows you to stay top-of-mind with customers and is a perfect addition to your content creation and optimization efforts.
How SEO and Email Marketing Can Work Together: 5 Tips
- Use data to inform both content plans:
- Use SEO tools such as Google Search Console to find out what you’re ranking for (or need to rank for and aren’t) and use that data to inform your upcoming email editorial calendar.
- Use email analytics to find your highest CTO campaigns, or use Google Analytics to determine which campaigns have the highest conversion rates, and use this information to inform your SEO content strategy.
- Optimize subject lines and meta tags: Use subject lines with high open rates to inform meta tag creation, and add keyword phrases with high search volume to subject lines to increase email open rates.
- Promote your email signup form: Identify your top-performing pages for SEO and add a clear call to action for your newsletter signup. It’s best to include a valuable incentive such as a discount code or a downloadable PDF to further encourage signups.
- Post newsletter content on your website: Create a newsletter archive of previously sent emails on your website. This content then becomes crawlable by search engines. Before posting, you will need to optimize the emails for keywords and make other SEO adjustments, but a newsletter archive can be a valuable resource for attracting subscribers and increasing your brand awareness.
- Create relevant, shareable content and deliver to segmented lists: Don’t forget that your audience can be your best asset. Create optimized content specific to your audience’s interests and send it out via targeted, personalized emails. When the content includes easily shareable visuals like infographics, memes, and marketing promos, it’s even more likely to gain traction, drive engagement, and increase your overall return on investment.
It is said that no one operates in a silo, and that has never been more true than in content marketing. Marketers looking to increase brand awareness, audience engagement, and website traffic in 2025 can look at their SEO and email marketing strategies for opportunities for the two to support each other and reach their fullest potential.
