My Favorite SEO Tools to use for Lead Magnet Research. Ep. 147

If you've been doing SEO for a while, you're hopefully starting to be more visible online and getting more traffic to your site. The next step in your online marketing journey is to start building an email list, and to do that, you need to find the right lead magnet, opt-in, valuable freebie, whatever you want to call it; they're all the same thing. 

Often students tell me they're not sure what type of lead magnet to create and want ideas or guidance. I thought you might like that too. So, this week, I'm sharing some of my favorite SEO tools I use to come up with lead magnet ideas. 

Transcript

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Hi, and welcome back to the podcast. Today's episode, we are blending, SEO, our search engine optimization and our content optimization or content conversion. By talking about SEO tools you can use. To help you research ideas for your lead magnet. So this is kind of pulling all the things we've been talking about recently together, really thinking about our ideal customer. Who are they? What information do they need? How could we help them? Our website, what content should we have on it? How do we make sure that we're bringing the right people into it? How do we make sure that the right people are converting, they're finding us, they're wanting our information. All of that. So one of the most important things for your website to have on it is a lead magnet, a freebie, an opt-in, a valuable, free offer. It does not matter what you call it. They're all the same thing. What it is is something for free that you offer to your audience. In exchange for their email address. Now this needs to be enticing to them. It needs to be helpful. It needs to be an easy win. You don't want to give them something that is going to take them weeks or months to get through. You really want to give them something that they can use and see results in a few minutes, maybe an hour, something like that. You really don't want it to be super, super involved because. If you give too much in your lead magnet, you're liable to overwhelm your audience and you don't want that. So when you're trying to figure out what to offer as a lead magnet or an opt-in. It can be hard. I'll be honest, when I first went out on my own, I didn't have a good lead magnet because in the corporate world, I had worked in organic marketing. I had worked in SEO and content, as you know, but I had really, really focused on e-commerce. The agency that I worked for, almost everything that we worked on, was e-commerce. And in e-comm, your lead magnet is basically a coupon. Give us your email address and save 10%, 15%, 20% on your first order. So when I first set up my website, I wasn't really sure what to use. Now, I had also worked for the corporate office of a children's birthday party franchise, and there our lead magnet was just a newsletter. And it really wasn't a great lead magnet. It was just what we did and it had tips and sometimes it had coupons and things like that. So my very first lead magnet for etched marketing was a newsletter. Guess what? Nobody wanted it. Nobody signed up for it. It flopped. The reason I knew it flopped was nobody signed up for it. So once I got into this world a little more and started to learn how online marketing really varied from organic SEO, especially for e-commerce, it was very different because this is done more like direct mail where you send out your message to a thousand houses. And one or two or 10 respond. That's more what you're online as you're, you know, you're reaching out. Especially if you're doing ads and things like that. That's more where the response rates are versus when you're only working with organic and people are looking for you and they're coming to your site. Um, especially when you're an e-commerce brand and you offer either free shipping or a coupon code, it's a lot easier to build an email list because people want that. It's something of value. So what you need to think about as a small business owner, as an entrepreneur is what would be valuable to my ideal customer? What would help them, what information do they want? So this is where some of my favorite SEO tools come in to play and can help you. So the first thing that I like to do when I'm trying to decide what kind of lead magnet to develop. Is to go to Google and start typing in keywords related to my business, how to blank guide for blank, things like that. Just to get a feel for what's out there, what are people searching for. And I really wanna hone in and focus on Google suggested search because Google suggested search. So that's where I start typing something and Google gives me options as to what I might be looking for. Google suggested search is really powerful because Google suggested search is based on searches that people are making that Google thinks might be what you're looking for. So if you find something in suggested search, that's a good potential lead magnet topic or lead magnet idea. You already know it has an audience. People are looking for it. Another one that I like to look for or look at is like answer the public. You put in your keyword, it's going to give you a report of all the different kind of queries that are surrounding that. The last thing you could do. Even chat, GPT, Hey, I wanna create a lead magnet for my audience. If you already have gone through and really identified who your ideal customer is, you could even upload that document into your chat session and say, how do I come up with a lead magnet for them? Help me figure out what they might be interested in. So then you've got your brainstorm list. Now you look at. Uh, answer the public. You look at Google suggested search. You look at what chat GPT gave you as far as your ideas, and you compile a list from here. What you wanna do is potentially go ahead and look for the search volume of these different ideas. It's very possible that in your research, you're gonna find words like PDF Guide. Document download. Like you may find that they want a checklist. They want a template. They want a handout. They want a guide, like they're going to tell you what they're looking for in that search volume. The information will be there. Then your job is to create that lead magnet based on what the research is telling you that your ideal customer wants you. Create that. Create a landing page for it. Optimize that landing page so that it has a better chance of being found. Format that one for chat GPT, because I know like my lead magnets are referenced by chat GPT at times. So it's a good idea to make sure that chatty can understand your lead magnet pages. Make sure you've got your email service provider set up, create your lead magnet and go ahead and share it with the world knowing that you took some very strategic steps in the beginning during your research phase. To identify the right topic based on consumer interest, based on search volume, based on what you found when you looked at answer the Public chat, GPT, Google suggested search, and ultimately your keyword research tool to verify what the search volume was for the different words you were considering using, doing. This will hopefully, hopefully give you. A lead magnet that works better for your audience. Remember, we want it to be something that's a quick win. It's easy for them. So for me, my lead magnets are beginner's guides. They're beginner's guides to SEO. How to rank on Google ai, SEO, how to show up in ai. Overviews and chat, GPT. And podcast, SEO, how to increase the downloads on your show. All three of those are available on the website@etchedmarketing.com slash freebies. Each of them addresses a different area, but ties back to the business, and I want you to make sure that you are tying you lead magnet ideas back to your business because it's really important to make sure that we're bringing in the right people. We want there to be a good, strong connection between the content we're creating. The lead magnet that we're using. So the leads that we're generating and the products or services that we sell so that we are bringing the right people to our website. That's the only way that our traffic is going to turn into leads and sales. We need to be very strategic in what we're doing. If you wanna learn more about this, you wanna really understand or have somebody guide you through how to do this, answer questions, et cetera, um, join me in simple SEO content or reach out about. You know, consulting or one-on-one coaching. I'm doing just a little bit of it, not a lot, but reach out. We can help you figure that out and get you started. But really the best bet is to start with the free class, which you'll find at the freebies tab, etch marketing.com/freebies. Take that free class, learn a little more about how all of this is working together, and then get signed up for the course, and I will see you in there and we can work on putting your strategy together too. All right. That's it for today. I'll see you back here next week.