Why you should archive your emails on your site and how to do it

By Lucas Pillman, Technical Implementation Consultant at GovDelivery

Are you reposting the content of the emails you send to stakeholders on your website? If not, you are missing out on two important benefits that can easily upgrade your current communications: increased SEO and outreach. 

Increased SEO

 Search engines love to see original and new content on websites. Sites with regularly updated, original content  consistently show up higher in the results of search engines like Google. By pulling the content of your email messages onto your website, you can easily increase the search engine optimization, or SEO, of your website. Your emails are excellent original content to improve the ability for search engines to find your site. Additionally, by pulling in an archive of the emails you send, you can improve your SEO easily without any additional effort to create original web content.

Increased Outreach

 Another benefit of an email archive is that it provides motivation for visitors to your site to subscribe to your emails, moving them into your subscriber list, which  you can easily use to reach and engage stakeholders at a moment’s notice. When Web visitors find valuable information (by that web search I just talked about) and then discover that they can subscribe to this information to receive it on a regular basis, they become eager subscribers who will engage with your communications.

So how do you set up an email archive?

 There are a few simple methods that you can use to set up an archive of your emails on your website. The simplest is to just link to the landing pages of your emails from your site to an archive page. For GovDelivery clients, you can also automatically list these links by embedding a widget on any Web page, and it will display a list of links to all your email landing pages.

An even better option for archiving emails is to leverage an RSS feed of your sent emails and then use your website to parse and display the sent messages. Content management systems like Drupal or WordPress can do this fairly easily. For example, in WordPress you can use a plugin like FeedWordPress to display sent emails as new posts on your site and even add categories or tags to these posts to help sort and display them.

With your website now set up to show archived emails, every email you send will be driving new visitors to your site through improved SEO, while driving additional people to subscribe to your communications with very little effort on your part.

Have any questions about setting up an email archive in your GovDelivery account? Email support@govdelivery.com.