Will says: “It's going to be an AI-themed one, which might feel a bit banal at this point, but we are in that age.

I typically work with enterprises on the SEO side of things, and one thing that I’ve found with enterprises (and people who work at enterprises listening to this will probably know what I mean) is that there's often a lot of red tape: ‘We can't change this. We can't add any more content here. We can't do this and that.’

One way to get around this is by just changing the CTAs. We've already got our landing pages for our products, our services, or whatever. One really good way of getting something pushed through (from what I've found anyway, with enterprises) is by optimizing existing traffic coming to the site.

What I find AI is really good for is understanding what would be really useful for your potential customers – so people that are already coming to the site. It understands what your products are and, therefore, what somebody might find really useful.

As an example of this, I've been working with some telecommunications clients recently, and some of the things that they might sell are things like SD-WAN or SASE. Basically, they’re networking frameworks for multi-location businesses. Regardless, there's a product, and at the moment their CTAs are just: ‘Download this PDF.’

I don't know about you, or anybody else that's listening, but ‘Download a PDF’ is not sexy. It just doesn't do anything for me. I'm never downloading PDFs, personally. I know, that's a sample size of one...”

It would be interesting to know a slightly increased sample size, wouldn't it? Just because something is not sexy, of course, doesn't mean that it's not necessarily something that a business should be doing.

I've certainly had a lot of leads in the past through PDF downloads, but I haven't done it a lot recently. It has me contemplating doing it again, and now I’m double-thinking whether it's actually worthwhile.

Is this something that you've talked to other people about and you see a trend of fewer people being willing to share a name and email address for a PDF?

“I mean, we still get conversions through that method of having ‘Download a PDF,’ but I just think the value that somebody gets out of it is just not as high as what you could potentially get.”

Yeah.

“Typically, what you'll get from a PDF is what you'll probably find in a blog. You'll probably find the same information in an article elsewhere online. Even crazier is that most enterprises that have these ‘Download PDF’ lead captures actually have their PDFs indexed on Google as well anyway, so somebody could search for that PDF and just get it that way, instead of actually having to pass over any of their details.

That's a bit of a ‘duh’ moment, where they shouldn't have the PDFs that they're trying to generate leads from indexed on Google. It does work, but I just think that there's better stuff out there, basically.”

You're advocating the creation of tools and more interactivity on a website in order to keep people on the website and drive more user retention, and then create some kind of direct call to action as a result of interacting with that tool, I presume?

“Yeah. Basically, if you can provide somebody with a tool that provides more value, then people are going to use that more.

Let's say you've got a ‘Download PDF’ button which basically gives you the same information you'd get in a blog or article elsewhere on the web. Sometimes you might have some really unique content, but I feel like if you have that really unique content, you can just put it up as an article and get traffic that way.

Anyway, regardless, I don't want to dwell too much on the PDF download, but what I do want to focus on is: if you have a product or service, and then you use AI to understand, for somebody who was coming to a page like this, what would be really valuable for them? You can just ask, ‘I have this page. Look at this page. What would be a better call to action than what we already have on the page?’ It's really good at quickly understanding this, so it will come up with a list of options for you to create.

Usually, I find that the tools and the calculators are the most attractive ones to me, when I'm eyeballing it. For example, say you've got Product X. If you could have a cost savings calculator for Product X, that's much more valuable to someone. Let's say they're on a legacy version of Product X, but if they get Product X, in one year, this is how much they're going to save. In two years, this is how much they're going to save, and in three years, this is how much they're going to save.

You want to make it quite lean, so you don't want to put loads of questions that are just going to increase friction: just five or so questions that would be really valuable to a sales team: ‘This is how many employees we have. This is the products that we're already using. This is how many sites we have.’ Whatever questions are going to be relevant to your business, AI can quite quickly figure that out.

Just having these questions and then being able to understand how much somebody is going to save by getting this product, that's a lot more useful to a potential customer. In this case of a cost-savings calculator, with that information, they know how much they're going to save, and they can also go to the internal stakeholders and say, ‘Look. There's this product that I'm quite keen on getting. We've got an estimate for how much we're going to save,’ and they can actually use that themselves.

You're equipping them with the information that they need, which is way better than having ‘Download PDF’ or ‘Click here to go to the next article.’”

I can certainly understand how that offers an improved user experience.

I guess two follow-up questions are: what are you trying to do here from a measurable SEO perspective? Is this simply having greater user retention on the page, demonstrating better UX to Google?

Also, in relation to what we're talking about, does this result in fewer opt-ins? Do you try to have some kind of opt-in after the tool that you're offering the user?

“The benefits to SEO are just having a calculator or some sort of tool in the first place; having that as an extra landing page. People will be searching for things like that. You'll often find that the calculators or tools that are suggested by AI are pretty keyword-based and keyword-focussed tools or calculators anyway.

They are things that people are genuinely looking for. If you can have a tool created from this process and target that keyword, then you've got a new piece of content there that answers people's questions.”

Is there any particular AI that you're using more than others to generate ideas and perhaps even create the code necessary to add to the website and add this tool?

“Honestly, this tactic is so unbelievably simple – and you want to keep it simple as well, because if you make things too complicated, enterprises are just going to get put off the idea and they're going to think, ‘This is too much, we're going to need to do too many things here.’

It's so simple, you don't need any complicated processes for this. I've done it with ChatGPT. I prefer Claude Code (that is the LLM that I use), but you can do it with ChatGPT in like five minutes. The first step is to plug in the URL or just say what product or service you're trying to sell. Ask what CTAs people would likely look for, or what tools/calculators they would want to build.

Let's say it is a cost savings calculator. Just say, ‘Can you build me a prototype spreadsheet for this, including all the formulas? Given what you know about this product and your general industry knowledge, what would be valuable to calculate this thing? Give me all the formulas.’ You can do that in five minutes. Once you've got that, you approach the client – or if you're working in-house, then you approach somebody else; one of your colleagues. Approach the product expert and say, ‘Can you spend 30 minutes to an hour with me just going through these five calculations and fine-tuning it a bit?’

Once you've got those formulas that people are happy with, you can just plug that back into ChatGPT, Claude Code, or whatever, and just have a working landing page that you can put onto the site super easily.

Then, if you want to tinker around with the design and things like that, you can do whatever you want, but to get a working model, you can do this in half a day easily, and that's with the product expert's time.”

As a starting point, is it worthwhile incorporating keywords that you know you'd like to target for the page or keywords that are important for the business, and perhaps even competitor URLs as well, so that the LLMs have got a little bit more to chew on in terms of relevance, or would you rather just leave it up to the LLM, greenfield, to decide what's best?

“No, it's a good point.

Generally, the more information you give, the better the answer is going to be with these kinds of things. Honestly, I have found that it is pretty good at just coming up with this stuff.

For this specific methodology that I'm talking about – I mean, I use LLMs for other stuff, and my god, I get so frustrated using LLMs, but this is genuinely something that it’s quite good at, and that's why I like I'm a bit of an advocate for this. It's genuinely really easy to do, and you don't have to have much SEO/CRO knowledge. Anybody can do this.

You can plug in some keywords that'll be valuable, but really, the keyword research has already been done when it comes up with the idea of what calculator you should be using, because it's already understood what's important to those people – to those potential customers. So, that part's already done.”

What do you do with the data?

When someone actually fiddles about with the tool, interacts with the tool, and submits whatever details they do, should you be looking to collect that data and further hone the tool from there?

“I almost forgot that part! Absolutely. If you can hook that up into something that feeds into a CRM or directly into the sales teams. However you do it as a business, if you can get that information – number of employees, number of locations, number of websites, or whatever it is that they put into that calculator that's relevant to your product – to the sales team, then the sales team have a more informed basis of who this customer is and what they're actually looking for.

Then, when they do get in touch with them, they can provide a much more comprehensive and tailored solution for them, which is just way better. Obviously, the email or the phone number or whatever they collect should be going to the CRM anyway, but the next step (which is even better) is if you can get the data that they've actually put in into the CRM too.”

The next question was going to be in relation to how you make this different. How do you be more unique than other competitors out there?

If everyone's doing this, if it's so easy to do, I guess the way to do that is to take the data that the tool produces, hone it with your own data, and then enhance the quality of conversations that your salespeople are having with prospects as well.

“I think it is a very easy way to do things, but I just don't see many people doing this at the moment. I'm doing this based on the enterprises that I'm working with, and there's not a lot of competition for these tools and calculators being produced.

Just getting something up there in the first place and hitting that mark, hitting that keyword, and providing that solution, everybody should be doing that. Not everybody is doing that just yet. I think it's one of those things that not everybody realises how easy it is to do.

Then, once you've got that first tool or that first calculator on board, just like with any other piece of content, it's one of those things that you do want it to iterate, and you want to have it change over time and become better. You can do that once it's up.

Your sales team might start to think, ‘Oh, actually, the questions that we're asking on this aren't super relevant. They're not helping us make sales.’ Your sales team might be saying, ‘It would be better if we asked this, because then that would really help us make a sale,’ instead of knowing the number of websites that they have or whatever said calculator had asked them.”

Will, what's the key takeaway from the tip you shared today?

“The key takeaway is that AI is pretty good at understanding what people want quickly, and you can really quickly and easily make prototypes that clients like with an LLM. (I keep on switching between AI and LLM. It's LLMs.)

Just do it in a spreadsheet. It doesn't have to be really complicated. In fact, if you want to get a client – specifically enterprises – interested in doing this stuff, you need to make it as simple as possible. This is one way that I've found really works.

Every client that I've mentioned this kind of thing to has just really bitten onto it. Just make it as easy as possible; it doesn't need to be complicated.”

Will Rice is SEO Director at MeasureMinds Group. Find out more over at MeasureMindsGroup.com.