At Interact many of our customers are creative writers. For us, search can be a huge boon to growth. We create great written content and search (plus ChatGPT), index our content and send traffic. In this article I want to detail how great writers are creating quizzes and using them for search discovery.
Quizzes, tests, personality quizzes, assessments, all have really high search volume. Do a quick search in your industry and you’ll see several terms with hundreds or thousands of monthly searches. People have an appetite to take quizzes.
In this article I want to showcase three quizzes that earn traffic from search. I say earn because it’s not easy to create a great quiz experience. You have to do a lot of work to create the quiz concept, questions, and results. But when done right, it can lead to a steady stream of earned traffic from Google and other search engines over time worth thousands or tens of thousands of dollars.
1. Gretchen Rubin’s Habits Quiz
The quiz ranks #1 on Google for the search “Habits Quiz.” It’s ahead of The New York Times. Search is a function of authority and time on page, and Gretchen’s quiz is really engaging. That’s probably why it ranks as #1.
If we check the traffic on the term “Habits Quiz” it’s not astronomical. But the crazy thing is the organic click through rate. It’s 97% which is almost unheard of these days. Usually it’s 60% or less because rich snippets or Ai overview takes a lot of the space. But search engines and Ai bots don’t have a great solution for quizzes. Even if they print out the quiz in text, that’s not what people want. People want to take the quiz and see their results. Not tally up their score manually like it’s a magazine.
So if we click through on Gretchen’s quiz we can see why it ranks well. The landing page has good content on it to be indexed by search. And then you can start taking the quiz right away after reading the instructions.
The top of the page features instructions and details about the quiz. Then you scroll down and the first question of the quiz is right there on the same page.
The quiz experience here is unique and thoughtful. Gretchen has decades of research in habit formation and happiness and it’s infused in the quiz. It makes the quiz a highly helpful tool for quiz takers. Far superior to anything an Ai could generate on the fly. You can read more about the full quiz strategy here.
For this article, the key takeaway here is a quiz can be a great discovery tool. Anne, CEO at Gretchen Rubin Media, said that quizzes are one of their top discovery features. Every quiz they create is based on existing research and content, so it’s an excellent way to repurpose and reformat already great content.
2. Common Era Jewelry’s Goddess Quiz
Next one is from Common Era Jewelry. They have a line of jewelry that is created around Goddesses. So they made a quiz to determine which Goddess you are. It ranks #2 for the search term “Goddess Quiz.”
That term has 169 direct monthly searches. The organic lick through rate is 100%. You can generally infer the traffic is higher than 169 because of related search terms. The difficulty is also very low at 24.
Here’s the quiz experience for Common Era. Right to the point, highly visually appealing. It features the Jewelry right away so you know what the quiz is about. But maintains the sense of curiosity to determine which Goddess you are.
The Common Era quiz is a great example of out-of-the-box thinking for E-commerce SEO optimization. Typically what I’ve seen is E-commerce limit itself to product page optimization. But by introducing a quiz that links to products at the end it’s a novel way of approaching the problem.
3. Julie Bjelland Female Autism Quiz
This quiz is from Julie Bjelland who is a psychotherapist, author, and founder. It ranks #5 for the search term “Female Autism Quiz.” Anything in the health space is hard to rank for. So it’s quite impressive.
The direct search volume for that term is 41, the organic click through is once again 100%, and the competition for this one is a little higher at 36. Again I would venture to say that overall volume is much higher with many similar terms being used.
What sets Julie’s quiz experience apart is the resonance and interactivity. Resonance in the sense that she is a psychotherapist and actually has direct experience working with people. Her voice and tone will naturally be more in-tune with the quiz taker than someone who is a writer or researcher creating a similar quiz. Which is probably why it ranks so well amongst brands with big budgets.
Rarely if ever do Interact customers start by thinking about SEO when creating their quizzes. The people who tend to have a lot of success on our platform are thinking about what their audience needs. They create quiz experiences to help guide people towards solutions and answers that benefit them. But, the SEO component that can kick in over time is really nice. It brings in a “floor” of traffic that’s continuous. It helps with discovery as new people take your quiz every day from search. A quiz can be a great introduction to your brand. Since it’s an extended conversation you can get to know people a little bit. If you’re not using quizzes for discoverability, I would recommend thinking about how you might use quizzes to the benefit of your customer base first. Then after you have some ideas in mind, work backwards to see if there are SEO opportunities.