SEO and email deliverability ... same battle?

If you had to name two online marketing disciplines about which everyone has an opinion ... without being a specialist! Two disciplines that considerably influence your web marketing strategy ... but around which many tales and legends circulate ... Too easy, you saw in the title that it was about SEO and email deliverability.

The interest of the Internet user comes first!

For search engines, the main objective is to offer a relevant result to the users of their services. For email services ... it's the same thing ... but in the other direction. The objective is to discard the least relevant or unwanted emails by automatically classifying them in the spam folder. Or more recently, at Gmail and Outlook.com, in folders dedicated to notifications, promotions, ...

A question of satisfaction ... therefore of audience ... therefore of publicity

We agree, it is not for the benefit of Internet users. If in the world of search the landscape is largely dominated by a single player ... in the world of email competition is much tougher. Between the big webmails and ISPs, there are about ten players with a significant market share. The one who will manage to attract the most audience will also generate the most revenue from advertising.

As we can see, economically, being the most efficient in the search results ranking and in the email ranking is very important for the operators.

And in practice?

What does Matt Cutts (Head of the webspam team at Google) repeat almost every time he speaks? Do not think about search engines, but create interesting content for visitors! And in deliverability? What is the main advice? Be relevant and create content to engage the subscriber!

Generate interactions!

One of the main objectives of any SEO or deliverability strategy is to generate as many interactions as possible. As part ofan SEO strategyFor example, this means generating as many discussions as possible on social networks, comments on a blog post, shares, link distributions, etc. In terms of deliverability, this means as many positive interactions as possible, opening and clicking on emails. But also as few negative interactions as possible: deletion before opening, classification as spam, etc.

Common ... reputation scores?

For some time now, email deliverability has been moving towards a reputation that is no longer based solely on the IP address, but also on the domain name. And not only the domain name of the sender (the FROM field), but also the domain name of the links in the email. Therefore, it is only one step for operators combining both activities to share the reputation of a domain name between the search engine activity and the email activity. There have already been many indications at Gmail of the interaction between spam filters and the algorithms used for the search engine ... the other players have inevitably started to do so as well.

The parallel does not end there!

Many other points could be compared: the way robots analyze the content of an email or a web page, the quality of the html code, the ratio text/image, the identification, the keywords, the headers, ...

So, same fight? The two disciplines are necessarily very different, but there are two aspects that largely overlap:

• The need to generate interactions;
• The need to create relevant and quality content.

As usual, surround yourself with competent specialists! And beware of the unrealizable promises that some may offer you. A guarantee of first position or 100% of deliverability is not a good sign!

Some good reading on both subjects

The Word to the Wise blog (in English) is a must read when you want to follow the evolution of email deliverability. In French, you can also follow the DeliverNow blog. Regarding SEO, the Abundance blog is a French reference not to be missed. Following the evolution of both disciplines at the same time can only be enriching!