It might be easy to think that a financial firm’s SEO and email marketing strategy are entirely separate things. However, they are certainly connected and the latter does impact the performance of the former.
Financial advisers and similar businesses need to go beyond simply making sure all of their digital communications have the same tone and branding. You also need to consider how you can use email marketing to improve your website’s rankings in Google and other search engines.
Here are just four ways you can leverage the power of email to improve your SEO performance…
#1 Drive more qualified website traffic
Small financial firms like financial planners usually intuitively know the power contained within a strong email list of current and potential clients. One huge advantage you have with this asset is the ability to funnel more visitors to your website from your emails.
Google considers how users engage with your website when deciding how to rank it in the search results. So, if people are highly engaged with your content and spend a lot of time looking through your web pages, this is a positive ranking signal. Your email list can therefore indirectly facilitate this as you link to your articles and landing pages in your newsletter mail-outs and other email campaigns.
This, of course, assumes that you have an opted-in email list of interested, targeted subscribers. If you have bought an email list and are spamming the recipients, then you are far less likely to see positive engagement on your financial website from these visitors. In fact, you could end up getting a lot of spam reports and, in the worst case scenario, having your domain blacklisted…
#2 Hone your content marketing strategy
Consider for a moment that the people on your email list likely comprise the kinds of people who are most likely to perform a conversion action on your website (e.g. booking a financial consultation with one of your firm’s advisers).
In light of this, monitoring their behaviour on your website after you have directed them there is a great way to see which kinds of content these highly-qualified visitors engage with the most.
For instance, perhaps these people like to watch your educational, branded videos about financial planning more than they like to consume your short company news updates. Or, perhaps they are drawn to certain topics more than others. For example, perhaps they find your thoughts on investments in light of Brexit more compelling than your articles on inheritance tax.
Once you have more insights on the above from your Google Analytics data, you can then craft a more focused content marketing strategy which is more likely to attract and engage with your target market.
This has a massive impact on your SEO, because one of the top three ranking factors Google uses to determine your search engine ranking position is that volume, originality and quality of your content.
#3 Re-purpose email marketing content
There are some clever ways financial advisers can use emails to enrich the potency of their digital marketing. One great tactic is to create original, tailored content based on newsletter/email campaigns which performed well with your email subscribers.
An example from a financial planning business might help illustrate this point. This particular business recently launched a series of monthly newsletters, with each newsletter containing bespoke, branded content on a range of financial topics they believed their subscribers might find interesting.
Notably, some of the highest-performing articles, in this case, concerned women and financial planning. This was a welcome insight, since this particular financial planning business makes a particular point of focusing on providing financial advisory services to women.
Armed with this insight, they decided to produce a series of original content to put on their financial website which was based on these topics. One of these was a great infographic about “Financial Planning Tips for Women of any age”, which provided some great illustrations and short bullet points suggesting some practical steps women could take to optimise their finances at various stages of their life.
With this kind of content, you often see a much higher level of engagement from both your newsletter recipients and your website visitors. Again, this is always a positive signal to Google, which sees users showing an active interest in what you have to say. Therefore, they are more likely to show it to similar people in Google search who are also likely to find it interesting.
#4 Social sharing
When you distribute your content to a qualified, targeted audience you increase the chances of it being shared by these people on their various social media profiles.
Google likes to factor in social media engagement with your financial website when determining your search engine rankings, although the direct link between social media and SEO is admittedly not as important as it once was.
However, you certainly should look to increase these social sharing opportunities as much as possible given the potential SEO boost it can still provide. For instance, social media sharing is a great way to increase link-building opportunities from other websites to your content. Backlinks like these (assuming they are relevant and from authoritative websites) certainly are a direct, positive SEO ranking factor.
Your email list is naturally a great place to share your branded, original content and encourage subscribers to share it on their social media. Obviously, to elicit this kind of action from your subscribers you need to directly invite them to share your content through an effective call to action in your email template. You also need to provide content at a sufficiently high quality and usefulness if they are going to want to do it, as well.
