Interesting post on SearchEngineWatch yesterday, which got me thinking.

Dave Davis writes an insightful post about Email marketing and SEO, in view of a patent Google has  around ‘Email spam and junk mail as a vendor reliability signal’.

In principle what this means, is that using Gmail, Google can detect which emails from vendors gets marked as spam, which content gets clicks and unsubscribes.  This data could then be fed into the SEO rankings algorithms.

This snippet is the crux of the article – as it shows that the reliability of the vendor depends on signals that Google receives about the quality of their email campaign.

 

What are the implications?

It means that Google is looking at how it can use wider signals from vendors which can influence their online search engine rankings. It’s joining the real world with the online world and looking at touch points with customers as using these signals to impact rankings.

What is means for email marketing is

• People need to think about the quality of the content. Writing content that doesn’t appeal to customers isn’t going to get the click throughs. Here’s an informative blog post from MOZ on what an optimised, quality blog post looks like
• Think about your audience and what their requirements are. What information do they need to make a decision to purchase your service or product? Here’a blog post from Professional Academy talking about how to write for your audience
• It also means that you need to be clear about handling customers data. Looking at how you get customer data and how you handle it is going to be crucial in terms of ensuring that you get low spam alerts and unsubscribes. If you buy data for instance you need to think about the quality of the data, as that could lead to a high level of spam emails
• Think about the design of the email and the layout. Flyer style emails or content that looks spammy or low quality, will lead more unsubscribes and spam alerts
• Overall what it means, is that there are no shortcuts to achieving rankings in search engines. Delivering high quality content to a engaged audience whatever the channel is key, no black hat technique is going help boost those signals overall