Should I use ads & SEO both for my lead magnet?

What’s the best strategy for growing your email list? Should you run ads to the landing page, optimize it for SEO, or do both? Do SEO and paid search or social ads work together? If so, how? If you want to grow your email list, keep reading because I'm going to break down my favorite strategies for growing mine so you can use them, too. 

Ultimate list-building strategy

If you want to grow your email list faster, you will want to use both ads & SEO together. Why do we use both? Ads can give us a quick boost of traffic, while SEO takes longer to take hold. But SEO can continue long-term, whereas ads stop sending traffic as soon as you turn them off. 

Why do you want to use both SEO and Ads?

Ads can help send traffic to your landing page while your SEO work takes hold and your landing page moves up in the Google search results and begins to generate more traffic for your website. Sometimes, businesses will spend more on ads initially and then reduce their ad budget as their SEO program starts sending more traffic. 

A multi-channel approach is best for your business

From a business perspective, you want to have more than one marketing channel. For example, you should have an SEO strategy, social media, and ads for your business. Having more than one channel you focus on helps drive more traffic to your website. It also allows you to protect yourself from algorithm changes or increased ad costs.

It’s important not to be too dependent upon one marketing channel because one change can throw your business into turmoil. Use several marketing channels to protect yourself.

Marketing Pro Tips

Track your results

So you can determine which ones are the most profitable for your business. If you’re using ads and SEO to drive traffic to your lead magnet, watch each month to see how many new sign-ups you get from each channel.

If you’re familiar with Google Analytics, set up a goal for your opt-in landing page and track to see where you get the most leads from each month. 

Determine the ROI of your paid ads & SEO effort

For simplicity’s sake, let’s say you spent $100 and got ten leads from paid ads and five from SEO for the month.

To determine which channel is the most profitable

Divide the amount of money you spent on ads by the number of leads you got from them, and that will give you a Cost Per Lead.

$100/10 leads = $10 Cost Per Lead for your paid ads

To determine the approximate savings from SEO

Take the cost per lead of your paid ads and multiply it by the number of leads you got from SEO.

$10 cost per lead from paid ads X 5 leads = $50 value for your SEO efforts this month. Essentially, your SEO work saved you $50 in ads because you got those five leads for free. 

There’s a powerful ROI – you spent $0 on SEO and still got five leads, which would have cost you $50 in paid ads. And that, my friends, is part of why I love SEO.

Bottom Line

Use both ads and SEO to drive traffic to your lead magnet landing page until you generate enough traffic each month through SEO that you don’t feel that you need to pay for traffic to the page.