I hope everyone had a wonderful Memorial Day!  If you’re a car dealer, I hope you had a really great Memorial Day Blowout Sale this weekend.  If you’re not a car dealer, I hope you got a really great deal on a new or used car.  At the very least, I hope everyone had some delicious hot dogs.

Speaking of links…

Someone recently asked me, “If I send an email with a link to my website, does that help my SEO?”

The answer is no.  Not directly, anyway.  However, when you think about the Butterfly Effect and how effects become causes which have effects ad infinitum, and when you consider that a link is a link, after all, then the answer becomes maybe.  Possibly.  If you do it right.

And when I say “it,” I mean the email itself.  Automotive emailers are nothing new.  They are quite possibly the oldest form of modern digital marketing – the oldest form, of course, being product integration in TV’s The Jetsons.  Emailers are an essential part of most business’ new lead & customer retention strategies, and they are the closest we have to bridging the gap between outbound and inbound automotive marketing.

But emails are also really easy to ignore, so content matters greatly here – it’s both a fine art and a hard science.  The art is a topic for another day, and you can read about the science of emails here, or get the most up-to-date data from Dan Zarrella’s next webinar in June.

Now, provided your email has great content, the links therein will serve the same purpose as search engine results – they will get interested eyeballs onto your website.  So, in this medium, links in your email don’t exactly improve your SEO, they sort of replace it.

In my fantasy world, I run a successful Buick dealership.

Some indirect benefits can also be for dealer reviews.  One handy tip is to keep a spreadsheet readily accessible to copy different URLs for different situations.  If a sales lead came in via a lead provider like Cars.com, have a link to the Cars.com reviews section ready to copy and paste into any emails to the customer after they visit the store.  DealerRater would also be a handy one to keep nearby.  We all know about the importance of dealer reviews…right?

The same goes for social media.  We here at Intrapromote can go on and on about how social and SEO go hand in hand. Links to social media platforms like Facebook, Pinterest, or, if you’ve got videos, your YouTube channel should come at the end of all emails. I recommend setting up a signature in your email settings that contains all your active platforms to avoid constantly putting them in manually.

What this all boils down to is this: links in your emails won’t directly affect your Google rankings, but they can still bring you good traffic. Automotive email marketing is highly effective, it’s fast, and it can bring in great results. So be savvy about email links, just as you would with your actual website. Emailers can take you far.

Bil Gaines is a member of our Search team and his highly versatile talents in the online marketing world have thrust him into internet fame and fortune. Ok, maybe not fame and fortune, but he’s well on his way.

Bil, a published author who was once so thrilled to meet Tracy Letts he admittedly acted “totally weird in front of him”, knows the ins and outs of search engine optimization as only our team can. Surrounded by cacti and couple of crazy felines in his home, Bil enjoys spending time with his wife and daughter and marveling at his collection of piles of books just waiting to be read.

When he’s not enjoying indie music, eating cajun food or riding around in four door sedans, you can find him blogging here about the automotive industry and general SEO topics. If you ever met him in person, he’d likely buy you a cup of coffee and tell you about his adventures moonlighting as a mad scientist.

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Bil Gaines

Specialist, Organic Search at Intrapromote

Bil Gaines is a member of our SEO team and his highly versatile talents in the online marketing world have thrust him into internet fame and fortune. Ok, maybe not fame and fortune, but he's well on his way. Bil, a published author who was once so thrilled to meet Tracy Letts he admittedly acted "totally weird in front of him", knows the ins and outs of search engine optimization as only our team can. Surrounded by cacti and couple of crazy felines in his home, Bil enjoys spending time with his wife and daughter and marveling at his collection of piles of books just waiting to be read. When he's not enjoying indie music, eating cajun food or riding around in four door sedans, you can find him blogging here about the automotive industry and general SEO topics. If you ever met him in person, he'd likely buy you a cup of coffee and tell you about his adventures moonlighting as a mad scientist.

@bilgaines

Writer. Philosopher. Bland car enthusiast.

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Latest posts by Bil Gaines (see all)

• Car Dealers: Get Yourself An Internet Department - March 26, 2013
• Automotive SEO vs. Automotive SEM - March 11, 2013
• Schema.org Microdata Markup for the Automotive Industry - March 4, 2013
• Google+ For Auto Dealers, Mechanics, and Auto Parts Stores - February 25, 2013
• Automotive Website Architecture And User Experience: Why It Matters More - February 11, 2013