4 Surprising Ways Email Marketing Can Improve Your SEO

If you were asked what email marketing and SEO have in common, you’d likely answer that both are outdated marketing strategies. After all, hasn’t ChatGPT replaced Google, and aren’t direct messages preferred over email?

Yet, HubSpot’s The State of Marketing 2025 report reveals that for B2B brands, SEO, websites and blogs were the top marketing channels in 2024. For B2C businesses, email marketing generated the best return on investment.

As a founder of an email marketing platform, I’ve seen the type of results that email can deliver. Based on Selzy’s research, which looked at more than 40 billion marketing emails sent, email is the top choice for outbound messaging, boasting a dominance rate of 80%. Drawing from the success stories of our users, marketing best practices and my own experience, here are four ways that I would integrate email marketing into SEO strategies.

Related: Don’t Sleep on Email Marketing — Here’s Why It’s Still Your Business’s Most Powerful Tool

Drive email sign-ups via web pages

You need engaged subscribers for email marketing to be effective. Who better than your website visitors?

Your website content essentially advertises your email newsletter. It shows potential email subscribers the type of value they can expect. It’s like offering website visitors the chance to enjoy a second serving of helpful content.
A lead magnet, like a downloadable checklist or guide, is the cherry on top. This can also be repurposed as blog content later, which, of course, will help your SEO efforts again.

In addition to growing your subscriber list, this approach can also improve your email segmentation. For instance, subscribers who signed up via product pages can receive emails related to that specific product category.

Use email as a keyword research tool

While SEO’s focus shifted to creating content that shows experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness (E-E-A-T), keywords still play a key role. Make no mistake, keyword research tools like Semrush, Ahrefs and Surfer have a place in your martech stack. However, your emails can also double up as a keyword tool.

To turn your emails into an SEO tool, study the subject lines that generate the highest open rates. The words and phrases used will give you a good indication of the topics that your target audience members find more relevant.

Alternatively, you can take a more direct approach and ask your subscribers via a poll which topics they want to learn more about. Polls are also great for engagement, making it a double win.

As mentioned, keyword research tools remain valuable, and you can use the keywords identified by these tools as inspiration for your next email campaign. The benefit of this approach is that you can ignore keyword difficulty and solely look at search volume, as the goal isn’t to outrank your competitors, but rather to create content that your target audience members want to read about.

Related: How to Write Emails That Stick and Get Action

Gather user-generated content

In addition to keywords, email marketing can also help with E-E-A-T. Since it’s a two-way communication channel (a feature that’s easy to forget if you’re zoomed in on using it as a marketing tool), it’s great for gathering social proof that can act as trust signals.

In practice, this can take the shape of a follow-up email asking customers to review a recent purchase, while SaaS companies can ask users to rate their recent interaction.

Before you publish any feedback, though, remember to get their permission first. Once again, this can easily be done with email.

While a review is typically limited to two to three sentences, it can also serve as extra content. Customers often include the same search terms that other potential customers will use, turning a review from a trust signal into a keyword-rich paragraph.

You can also extend your focus beyond your own subscriber list and customer base and target influencers. For example, when you add a new product to your range, you can send a personalized email to influencers in this niche. This way, you can potentially secure a backlink, too.

Related: How User-Generated Content Helps You Build Trust and Credibility

Repurpose top-performing content

Whether you’re launching an email marketing campaign or trying to improve your visibility in search, you need content. While the format of an email message and a long-form blog post is different, the message will remain relatable to both audiences.

You can, for example, summarize the key takeaways of a recent blog post or the results of a case study in a newsletter. Then, you can include a link to the full article to drive traffic back to your website.

You can apply the same approach to your emails. Instead of summarizing, you’ll flesh out a top-performing email so that it can be published as an article on your website or function as a landing page.

If that sounds like too much effort, simply share them as they are in an online newsletter archive. Aside from helping your website rank for certain keywords, it can also grow your email list as website visitors can see what type of content you share, convincing them to sign up.

Effective marketing is a continuous balance between acquisition and retention. While SEO is great for attracting business and email for keeping your new leads engaged, they can also work together to grow brand awareness and trust. After all, it’s about creating consistent messaging. If your SEO content and email campaigns discuss the same themes and topics, it will be easy for your target audience members to associate your brand with specific expertise.

If you were asked what email marketing and SEO have in common, you’d likely answer that both are outdated marketing strategies. After all, hasn’t ChatGPT replaced Google, and aren’t direct messages preferred over email?

Yet, HubSpot’s The State of Marketing 2025 report reveals that for B2B brands, SEO, websites and blogs were the top marketing channels in 2024. For B2C businesses, email marketing generated the best return on investment.