Getting started with quizzes, surveys and calculators
Welcome to another episode of The Recipe for SEO Success, where we whisk together strategies for search engine glory.
Today we’re sharing a little-known secret ingredient for capturing leads and boosting engagement on your website, calculators and quizzes.
These interactive tools can be your golden ticket to increasing your audience and gaining more insights. We’re joined by the brilliant Steven Schneider, who will dig into the magic of these interactive tools in SEO.
So if you’re sick of average lead magnets and looking for something a little more special, get your ears ready to hear why calculators and quizzes are your new SEO BFFs.
Tune in to learn:
- How interactive tools and calculators can help SEO
- How to decide what kind of interactive tool is relevant to your audience
- How you can draw people to your site with keywords leading to an interactive tool
- How quizzes can lead to PR and backlink opportunities
- How to get started setting up surveys and quizzes to put on your site
- How to promote your new interactive tool once it’s live
- Why you should follow up with an email flow
- What to put in the email flow to keep customers in your funnel
- Why rushing the process is a common mistake people make when setting up an interactive tool or quiz
- Steven’s favourite tools to make online surveys, quizzes and tools
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And big thanks to AnastasiaGen from Australia for their lovely review:
“Educational and Entertaining. SEO, the black magic of small business digital marketing. Kate demystifies SEO and makes it easy to understand for us minions, keeping it fun as well as informative.”
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Connect with Steven Schneider
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About Steven Schneider
Steven is co-founder and CEO at TrioSEO, an agency that helps B2B brands design and implement ROI-focused SEO strategies. Before TrioSEO, he co-owned a portfolio of 40 blogs, managed 400 articles monthly, and scaled to 7 figures via SEO – no paid ads, social media, or other strategies.
Today, TrioSEO creates content that converts browsers into buyers. Their team manages everything – the process is 100% hands-off for founders and CMOs.
Fun fact: Steven is a non-competitive endurance runner, completing 9 Tough Mudders and now switching gears to half-marathons, and more.
Transcript
Kate Toon: Welcome to another episode of the Recipe for SEO Success, where we whisk together strategies for search engine glory. Today we’re sharing a little-known secret ingredient for capturing leads and boosting engagement on your website, calculators and quizzes. These interactive tools can be your golden ticket to increasing your audience and gaining more insight.
And we’re joined by the brilliant Steven Schneider, who will dig into the magic of these interactive tools in SEO. So if you’re sick of average lead magnets and looking for something a little more special, get your ears ready to hear why calculators and quizzes are your new SEO BFFs.
Hello, my name is Kate Toon, and I’m the head chef at the Recipe for SEO Success, an online teaching hub for all things related to search engine optimisation and digital marketing. Today I’m talking with Steven Schneider. Good morning, Steven. How are you?
Steven Schneider: Hello, Kate. Thanks for having me.
Kate Toon: Well, it’s good evening for you. Where are you located in the world right now, Steven?
Steven Schneider: I am just north of Seattle, Washington, West Coast of United States.
Kate Toon: There you go. Well, let’s dig into you and who you are. For everyone who doesn’t know who you are, Steven is the co-founder and CEO at TrioSEO, an agency that helps B2B brands design and implement ROI-focused SEO strategies. Before TrioSEO, he co-owned a portfolio of 40 blogs, managed 400 articles monthly and scaled seven figures via SEO, no paid ads, social media, or other strategies. Today, TrioSEO creates and content that converts browses into buyers. Their team manages everything. The process is a hundred percent hands off for founders and CMOs.
Fun fact: Steven is a non-competitive endurance runner, completing nine tough Mudders, and now switching gears to half marathons and more. How hideous. You do realize you don’t have to run marathons, you know. That’s – it’s not something you have to do.
Steven Schneider: I remind myself every single time I’m running that it’s so voluntarily dumb, I-
Kate Toon: Yes.
Steven Schneider: I understand.
Kate Toon: It’s all a mindset game though, isn’t it? I, when my son was about four, so quite a long time ago, I ran a half-marathon, and obviously, you know, to do that you have to run a lot of runs before that to get to that point. I actually enjoy the half marathon. I didn’t enjoy all the other runs.
There’s a great run in Australia, Steven, that you’ll have to do. It’s called the Cities of Surf, and you run from Sydney Central to Bondi Beach. And-
Steven Schneider: Oh, wow.
Kate Toon: The last bit of it is, is a sheer hill. It’s called Heartbreak Hill.
Steven Schneider: Oh.
Kate Toon: And you see people collapsing on that bit because I think running
Steven Schneider: Wow.
Kate Toon: The flat, but when you start, oh, brutal.
Steven Schneider: Yeah. Well, you really sold that one. I can’t wait.
Kate Toon: When you get to Bondi at the end, it’s beautiful. And the satisfaction and the smugness, that’s, that’s something you can be deeply smart after you run a marathon. And that feels-
Steven Schneider: That’s true.
Kate Toon: Awesome. Well look for many people, good segue here, SEO is a marathon. It’s definitely not a sprint. It’s a long game, and today we’re gonna be talking about that first step of, you know, and where SEO fits in the funnel. So you are big into, I mean, I’m a big lead magnet person. I’ve got checklists and mini courses, deal of a quiz. Uh, but you’ll use these as a ways to draw people into sites, gather leads, and qualify leads. So talk us through how interactive tools and calculators can help SEO?
Steven Schneider: Yeah, so surprisingly, there’s a bunch of keyword research and, you know, search volume behind calculators and terms, so you know when people are actually looking for these tools, they’re usually closely aligned to your ideal customer.
Not always, but some cases. And so the kind of idea behind it is if you can find these keywords and phrases that are a little bit easier to go after, maybe a little bit less competitive, there’s a lot of potential upside in how you can create them. You know, even set up a, a nurture sequence on the backend to kind of work with them or introduce you to the brand of the ecosystem once they’ve kind of worked and found you. So a lot of beauty behind it and just a lot of potential opportunities that can unfold.
Kate Toon: So if I’m sitting here now thinking, well, it sounds great to have some kind of quiz or interactive survey, what are some of the first steps that I need to think about? I mean, obviously one of them possibly would be thinking about who your audience is and what you wanna ask them, right?
Steven Schneider: Yeah. I think the main thing is just trying to figure out what’s currently out there. You know, looking at the tools others are offering and seeing what’s currently ranking, and then trying differentiate yourself and seeing how can you offer one thing better? Like what’s one unique advantage that maybe someone’s missing or.
Maybe it’s a little hole or a gap in the market not currently being filled. And what do you know about your customers that would allow you to give them something better and more valuable so that when they are kind of searching for that tool, you can kind of meet them on the other side of that discussion?
Kate Toon: So let’s. You know, use some examples to make this kind of understandable by the lay person. I’m an accountant, I’m thinking, you know, it’s really hard to rank for accountant location in my area. I don’t, haven’t built up enough brand equity for people to be searching for my actual business name, so I’m thinking I’d like to do some kind of quiz or survey.
What kind of, how would you approach that from a keyword perspective? How would you, what would, what terms would they go after?
Steven Schneider: So one of our clients is a book online bookkeeper, focused on general business bookkeeping and then a sub development and e-commerce bookkeeping. And there’s a, surprisingly, there’s a bookkeeping calculator services keyword.
So these are people that are looking for an estimate of a quote or trying to figure out how much it would cost for an online bookkeeper to tackle their business and p and l. So. That’s kind of the opportunity where you can usually always find some little kind of nook or cranny that allows you to create a tool or an asset that gives people the opportunity to engage with your brand and kind of help solve that need, and then kind of take it from there and run with it.
Kate Toon: Yeah, and I guess. You know, quizzes are great because they will obviously give the user data about themselves. Are you X, Y, and Z? You’re gonna get some results at the end. Surveys are great because you can also use the results of those for digital pr. So, you know, I remember when I was running my copywriting business, I ran a copywriting survey, you know, and ask people about their wages and what kind of projects they did, and that then created data that I could turn into a press release, send out to publications and get those backlinks as well. So is, is that strategy that you use with your surveys?
Steven Schneider: That is not something I’m currently doing, but I know a ton of people that are. That’s such a great way to tap into PR and especially with, you know, ChatGPT visibility and LLMs and how that’s kind of evolving.
I think that anybody who has the bandwidth and resources to explore that, especially with others in your space, I think it’s, it’s a huge advantage. Any unique data is always gonna be appreciated by people.
Kate Toon: So there are lots of platforms out there that allow you to run surveys. Let’s talk about surveys first. So, if I was gonna start a survey tomorrow of my users, what tools would you be recommending?
Steven Schneider: I really like lovable. I think it’s a really easy tool to create,you know, anything you need nowadays, it’s. The best way to think about it is it’s pretty much a no code option with a ChatGPT front end.
So you can talk to it as if you’re interfacing with a ChatGPT model, and then it just spits out all the code and creates the app and you can pretty much take it and plug in the code to your website and have this survey, quiz, whatever you want to build. It’s kind of like the world is your oyster from that point on.
Kate Toon: Wow, okay. And with quizzes, same thing?
Steven Schneider: Same thing. It’s kind of like a one-stop shop that’s like what we’ve been using for everything. So.
Kate Toon: Lovable. Lovable. I’ve never heard.
Steven Schneider: Yeah. Lovable.dev. It’s your everything in one tool for if you don’t know how to code, that’s the perfect tool for you.
Kate Toon: So let’s talk about the flow, just to make it really clear to people. I’m gonna use a different example now. I’m gonna use a bookshop in a, in a coastal town and wanna do a quiz to find out what kind of reader you are. So first of all, you know, I’ve decided that I wanna focus on different readers. I wanna maybe have three different outcomes at the end. You know, how do I even go about, like, what would I even put into Lovable to get started? Like make me a quiz that has three different, how would I, what would I do?
Steven Schneider: Yeah, I think you’d wanna work backwards and try and figure out, well, what would be the books? So what books are being tied to what audience and how do you kind of, create these buckets on the backend, and then just talk to it like you’re talking to a friend, you know, talk to it like, you know, hey, I’m working on trying to create this survey or quiz and tool and I have this information, and I think that these books would be tailored really well to these audiences. Can we start by just walking through some initial questions that you think that would be useful so that we can really work on this? And then. It’s gonna respond to you and kind of build you an initial MVP style and you can kind of use ChatGPT on the side in addition to this and kind of use the two together, and just kinda let them talk to each other and kind just be the, the middleman. But yeah, it’s a very-
Kate Toon: Terrifying.
Steven Schneider: Interesting. Yeah, exactly. It’s crazy, but the beauty of it is that it saves so much time and energy.
Kate Toon: And then you would, you know, it’s put together like, you know, eight questions and worked out the variables of like what grade people would have to get, to get the different outcomes.
Then how you said, oh, you can just pull the code out and put it on your site. What? How do we then go from that to having-
Steven Schneider: That easy, right.
Kate Toon: Code that we can put on a WordPress site? Would you literally just put it into ChatGPT and say, write me a plugin that does this, or how would you move forward from that?
Steven Schneider: Yeah, so typically you can just get any sort of code HTML version and just even take it one step further and say, hey, I have a WordPress site, or I have a web flow site. Tell it what CMS you have. And then say, can you give me the exact output that I would need in order to add this to my site? And then it will just give you that as a chunk of code.
And then I would just take that to ChatGPT and say, Hey, I just built this tool in Lovable. This is my ideal outcome. Can you give me the next steps so that I can create a email sequence on the backend? And it will tell you exactly what to do.
Kate Toon: Great. We all need to get off this podcast immediately and, and, and start doing it. So, you know, let’s talk about that next step. I’ve got my quiz, I’ve put it on my site. I’m feeling very proud of myself. Um, and people are, now I need to get people to fill in the quiz. What are some ways that you build awareness? And you mentioned, you know, people typing into Google, which would be fantastic, but you also using, you said you didn’t use social media to build your empire. Do you use social media to promote this quiz and word of mouth? How’d you get the quiz out there?
Steven Schneider: Yeah, so you obviously always need some sort of traffic in order to kickstart those sort of lead magnets or whatever it may be. You can highlight it on the banner of your site. Maybe it’s an accident temp popup that say, Hey, take our free quiz and get 25% off your next book.
Give them some sort of added value. Maybe you have a newsletter. So trying to kind of get some initial runway is always gonna be good to start. But ideally, you’d wanna find some sort of keyword driven- keyword that aligns with the tool itself. Yeah. And just making sure that there’s actual demand to begin with.
Kate Toon: Yeah. And then once we’ve got these people in our funnel, we would just obviously then create some kind of opt-in sequence that shows our authority, our expertise, our experience, builds up trust until we ultimately try and sell them something. The whole jab, jab, punch approach. Talk us, you know, how do your opt-in flows work, you know?
Do you think there’s an ideal amount of emails, an ideal sort of duration or gap between the emails? You know, you Americans tend to market quite hard compared to us-
Steven Schneider: Yeah.
Kate Toon: Europeans and Australians. What would you, how would your opt-in flow work?
Steven Schneider: I think that there’s a, I’m more on the less aggressive side, I would say, you know, maybe every couple of days. No, not a daily, I, nobody wants a daily email from you that’s just gonna lead to an unsubscribe. I would say maybe, you know, every two or three days. It really depends. I think that different audiences are, have different understandings of things. So like if it’s a reading demographic, like they’re probably gonna be okay with reading an email from you.
If it’s a bookkeeping client, they probably don’t really care, and once a week could be justified. So I think it’s more about knowing your audience and trying to decide what is the sweet spot and then what you think they’d want.
Kate Toon: And then what kind of emails would you include in the flow?
Steven Schneider: Definitely some sort of welcome offer with whatever information they’re expecting to get. So that’s a really big point, is that if you don’t give them exactly what they are asking for what they intended to get on the other side of going through that sequence, you’re gonna lose them immediately. So give them the thing, give them some sort of immediate upsell of value, something they never even expected to get that’s always nice to get. And then from there on out, maybe it’s a little bit about, you know, book clubs or other books they might be interested, like, if you like this, you might also like this. Like, you know, they’re kind of a natural segue into other things that would align with the personality of their avatar.
Kate Toon: Yeah. And then after that you can, you know, once you’ve maybe got them through the flow, and that’s kind of often when I’m doing flows, I’ll either do five emails or seven emails, you know, and then at that point-
Steven Schneider: Yeah.
Kate Toon: Hopefully they’ve made some kind of purchase. And if not, then I’ll move them onto my generic monthly newsletter list. So they can say in contacts and blah, blah, blah. Fantastic. So, you know, this is a strategy you use. You know, you find that this is a powerful strategy to get leads when you compare it to like Facebook ads or Google ads. Obviously such an expensive medium to work in. And this is kind of free. I mean, I guess you could use ads to promote the quiz in the first place, but do you, do you find that this is a strong way to build leads?
Steven Schneider: I think that they can each live kind of in their own little buckets and kind of have like PPC and Meta ads, et cetera. They’re more expensive, but they definitely deliver way quicker results. So that’s kind of one thing to consider. I think that SEO is a good long-term play in creating these sort of digital assets is going to add not only to your authority in the space, but just your general visibility and how you connect with top of funnel customers.
General awareness, visibility within places like ChatGPT or LLMs and other sort of large language models. And so I think that it’s how you accomplish a broad spectrum of strategies rather than just an isolated one to kind of corner yourself.
Kate Toon: And I think it’s also the quality of the leads. You know, I’m, I’m actually in the process of writing my next book, which is Six Figures in Sales: How to Win Customers Without Spending a Cent on Ads. Cause I’m quite anti-ads just because I don’t like giving money to Meta. And they’re probably listening to this and I’ll have something bad happen now. But you know, the quality of the leads that you get when you build a relationship with them, rather than just flashing up an ad with a price is slightly different.
It doesn’t depend on what you’re selling, but you know, if you’re trying to build a long-term relationship with a customer, ads can kind of get you those quick results. But I’d. In my experience, often those people don’t hang around and, and be, stay for the long term. But relationship marketing does that better, I guess.
And I would class this as relationship marketing. So do you think that this works for any industry? Any industry could launch a quiz?
Steven Schneider: I don’t think that there’s SEO-keyword driven tools at every niche. I think that you can probably find some if you look hard enough, but I think that the opportunity is going to always be there to create a quiz or a survey or some other sort of tool that allows users to stay on your site longer than they initially planned and get some value that they probably didn’t know you had to offer.
I think it’s really about asking questions that they have and you know, trying to get in touch with them at the end of the day. Everyone thinks that they know their clients and customers much better than they do, which they don’t. So you just have to talk to more people and see what they need in their life, and then how can you bridge that gap.
Kate Toon: And what do you think are some common mistakes people make when they’re trying to do this kind of exercise?
Steven Schneider: I think that they don’t – they’re so eager to get to market and rush to get through the process that they kind of forget why they started it to begin with. And so if you’re going through it and you want to only do it once, you might as well do it to the best of your abilities.
And if you think it’s gonna take you two weeks to deploy, imagine what you could achieve if you put a month timeline on it. And I think that it’s always better to go slow and methodical through it than to rush it and then have people just do the stiff test and immediately see that it’s BS, so.
Kate Toon: It’s funny ’cause as soon as you’ve mentioned this, I’m like, oh, after this I’m gonna have a little look on Lovable and I’m gonna knock something together and I’m like, calm down.
Steven Schneider: Yeah.
Kate Toon: You already have 20 things on your to-do list that are more important, but this is an idea now that can sit there and now you’ve given us that tool, that’s a great way to go. Again, like, you know, this is just a random thought for me selfishly. Do you think there’s an optimum amount of questions that you should ask people in a quiz before it becomes too much? ‘Cause I’ve been on some quizzes and you’re like, seriously, I’ve answered like 26 questions. Can you piss off?
Steven Schneider: That’s so true. I agree. I think that there is a sweet spot. I don’t have an answer, but I’m sure that there have been plenty of studies out there from places like SurveyMonkey or you know, whatever that have that sweet spot of answers. And I think that it’s, it’s probably worth a two second search to,
Kate Toon: Yeah.
Steven Schneider: Think about that.
Kate Toon: I’m just gonna randomly say eight.
Steven Schneider: That’s what I was gonna say. Yeah.
Kate Toon: Yeah. There you you go. I think you know, it’s also about how qualified you want your leads to be, because it’s something I talk about contact form optimisation, you know?
Yes. You can ask people their budget, their timeline. Who’s gonna be the main contact, yada, yada, yada. But every field you add will reduce the chances of that contact form being filled in by made up percentage, you know? And so it’s like ask, it’s like when people say to me, how long does the copy need to be? And you’re like, as long as it needs to be. It’s really helpful answer, you know?
Steven Schneider: Yeah.
Kate Toon: You have to, it has to be long enough to be useful, but not so long as people get pissed off. And I guess that’s something you can test. You could have a eight question quiz and a 16 question quiz and look at the quality of the results and, and the leads that you’re getting.
Steven Schneider: Yeah, and I also think it’s really important too that if you are gonna go on a longer side, so maybe you go with 12 questions, which could be long to some. Maybe at question eight you put in like a blank space that just says, don’t worry, we’re almost there.
Kate Toon: Yeah.
Steven Schneider: And it kind of like buys you a little time with people and it kind of like reels them back in and kind of gets them back on track.
Kate Toon: Yeah. And also set those expectations up front. Like this is gonna take you three minutes or something.
Steven Schneider: Yeah,.
Kate Toon: Because, and it also be realistic about that. I was in doing a survey the other day and I was like, this is not taking me three minutes. Um,
Steven Schneider: Oh my gosh, brutal.
Kate Toon: And you know the questions, Yes, no questions I think can be a lot easier. A lot of the ones I’m seeing, it’s like, you know, gimme a text answer and I’m like, how are you gonna use this data?
Steven Schneider: No.
Kate Toon: You can end up with lots of unusable data. So multiple choice and straightforward rather than making people think too hard. Because I guess the whole thing is it’s meant to be fun, right?
Steven Schneider: Right.
Kate Toon: You’re meant to be engaged and enjoying this. They get excited about the outcome. Now, one little question. There’s sort of different schools on thought on whether you should deliver the results of a quiz on the final page or whether you should put it behind an email flow. So they don’t get the results unless they, you know, they’re obviously putting their email in to get it. But would you give them the results there and send it in an email or would you make them wait for the email?
Steven Schneider: This is something that. Actually a client of ours is currently AB testing and trying to figure out, because it is so niche dependent too, I think that going back to the, the reader or the book owner, you know, kind of what that would look like, I think you can probably give them some information like, Hey, we learned that you’d be matched with this author.
Like, fill out this email and we’ll give you the exact list of the top 10 books by this author.
Kate Toon: Yeah, okay.
Steven Schneider: And so it kind of like gives them a little bit of information. Give them a taste, but not the entire bit.
Kate Toon: Yeah. Show them a bit of ankle, not the whole leg or something.
Steven Schneider: Exactly.
Kate Toon: So, we like to keep these episodes short and sweet and I think you’ve really covered off this well, you’ve only given us one tool. What if we don’t like Lovable? Have you got any other tools?
Steven Schneider: That’s the best one I’ve found so far. Like, I just, I think that it’s great. It’s so easy to use. It’s cheap. It’s like $20 a month. For a decent amount of credits. So, if you don’t like that, I would say ask ChatGPT what else is out there? But I don’t know, it’s like one of the up and coming booming tools. So go try it.
Kate Toon: Alright, I’ll let you off. I’ll let you off. Alright, one final tip for our listeners who are sitting here thinking, I wanna go and do this, you know, what would your best advice be for them at the end of the episode?
Steven Schneider: I think you should clearly define what success looks like in your own thoughts, and I think that it’s really important to give yourself the decency to see that through, because if you don’t, then you’ll never truly have a successful outcome or you’ll never really know what could have been done or achieved.
Kate Toon: I like that. Yeah. Like what, you know, what are you hoping to get out of this?
Steven Schneider: Yeah.
Kate Toon: Just as a bit of fun doesn’t mean you should do it. I think this is true, so true of so much marketing. And also keep that front and centre as you said, because often we start these marketing ideas and halfway through we’ve forgotten why we even began to do it in the first place, or we get all excited about it and then we don’t promote it. And all that effort was for naught.
Well look, thank you so much Steven, for coming on the show. Where can people find out more about you?
Steven Schneider: Yeah, I’m very active on LinkedIn. I post daily content. You can search for TrioSEO or Steven Schneider, one of the two. I always joke that if you can’t find me, I’m doing my job wrong, so.
Kate Toon: Exactly. Well that’s where I found you and that’s where we connected. I’m not a big fan of LinkedIn, but you do meet some good people on there. So, I’ll include links to your website and to Steven’s LinkedIn on the show notes to make sure you go and check them out. Steven, thank you so much for joining me today.
Steven Schneider: Thank you, Kate. It’s so fun.
Kate Toon: I see now I just wanna drop everything I was planning to do today and go and make a little quiz, but I shall take as advice and I shall think about what Steven said about thinking about my success, outcomes, and work it out, but very excited and the tool Lovable makes it sound like it’s all.
Straightforward and good old ChatGPT. Alright, that’s the end of this week’s show. If you have questions about digital tools, feel free to head to my I LOVE SEO group on Facebook. If you haven’t already grabbed my free SEO checklist or my SEO nibbles course, there’s so much you can do on my site. Go check it out.
And also if you haven’t, go and check out my other site, kate toon.com for lots of other cool freebies. Our review today comes from AnastasiaGen from Australia, and she writes, Educational and entertaining SEO, the black magic of Small Business digital marketing. Kate demystifies it and makes it easy to understand for us minions, keeping it fun as well as informative.
Thank you so much, Anastasia, and thanks to you for listening. If you get time to leave us a review, we’d be very grateful. So until next time, happy SEOing.
