Spotlight: Turning Forms into SEO-boosting Tools with Advanced Calculations

Here’s a fun little marketing fact. If you’re trying to improve your website’s SEO, one very effective way to do so is through building tools. Simple, free, shareable web-based tools that help your target market achieve a specific goal. There are many examples out there (check out Hubspot’s AI Search Grader, or Ahrefs’ Free Keyword Generator), but one of the more common examples is a cost calculator.

And what’s a great platform to build these tools on? You guessed it: Gravity Forms. Express Legal Funding is a customer of ours who built a cost calculator for their niche — pre-settlement funding — and tapped in GP Advanced Calculations for support. 

Let’s explore.

The Pitch

If you are unfortunate enough to find yourself in the middle of a lawsuit — maybe because of a personal injury or other life-changing event resulting in significant loss — what happens when you need financial help to bring your case to justice? Plaintiffs often turn to lawsuit loans to cover personal expenses and daily living costs while they wait for their case to resolve.

The problem is that the world of lawsuit funding can be… murky. Figuring out the true cost of your legal loans (i.e. with interest) has, historically, been a bit opaque. Imagine a worst-case-scenario like this: you’ve won your case, after months (or years) of work, and then half your settlement proceeds go straight to paying back the funding company. 

Express Legal Funding saw an opportunity to boost their SEO by building a calculator that provides transparent funding costs for both plaintiffs and attorneys — and then host it on their website.

Loan Calculators, Gravity-Forms-style

Aaron Winston, Strategy Director at Express Legal Funding, envisioned a lawsuit loan calculator that would guide people through the process, explain the variables, and present costs in a way even those not proficient in legalese could understand.

To handle the required real-time arithmetic that comes with such a calculator, they used Gravity Forms Advanced Calculations.

The calculator collects three main inputs:

• Advance amount – the funding the user is requesting.
• Interest type – simple or compound.
• Case duration – estimated in months.

How it works

1. Enter Your Advance Amount – for example, $3000. 
2. Choose an Interest Type – simple or compound.
3. Set Monthly Interest Rate – typically 2-4%.
4. Estimate case duration – how many months until settlement (ask your attorney!).
5. Add Any Additional Fees – if known, include origination or processing fees.
6. View Your Results – see estimated total repayment amount and cost breakdown.

Advanced Calculations runs the formulas in the browser and displays the total payoff amount immediately, without a page reload.

Under the Hood

The calculator uses Advanced Calculations to figure out the cost of a lawsuit loan by applying either simple interest or compound interest, depending on what the user selects.

• If the user chooses simple interest, the formula multiplies the loan amount by the interest rate and the number of months, then adds fees.
• If they choose compound interest, the formula compounds the interest month by month before adding fees.

In short: the formula automatically switches between simple and compound interest calculations so users can see exactly how their loan will grow over time.

Here’s the formula:

if( F10 == "Simple" ):
    F3 + ((F3 * (F4 / 100) * F14)) + F6
elseif( F10 == "Compound" )
    round((F3 * (1 + (F4 / 100)) ^ F14) + F6)
else:
    0
endif;

Where:

• Loan Amount (F3) is the starting point.
• Monthly Interest Rate (F4) and Loan Duration (F14) determine how much interest accrues.
• Additional Fees (F6) are added on top.

As Aaron told us, “My original lawsuit loan calculator concept was less functional and required multiple formulas, but I was able to simplify it into one formula.”

Why It Works for SEO

By providing a useful tool in their niche, Express Legal Funding can attract natural backlinks, strengthen topical authority, and boost user engagement and dwell time on-site, which are all factors Google uses when ranking pages.

Aaron also provides educational content on the same page to help. Things like…

• The difference between lawsuit loans and traditional loans
• Why non-recourse funding matters
• Potential red flags in funding agreements

Notably, by using Gravity Perks, he’s able to host this tool’s code on his own website, as opposed to a 3rd party link, which makes a huge difference for SEO as Aaron mentions below.

The Gravity Wiz Advanced Calculations perk was exactly what we needed to implement Express Legal Funding’s lawsuit loan calculator for maximum impact. From an SEO perspective, it’s ideal.

It allows us to keep all of the calculator’s code and content on our site, so Google can index it and attribute the relevance to us. That’s a huge advantage over embedding a third-party widget in an iframe, which often hides key content from search engines and passes the benefit to another domain.

The setup was seamless, the documentation clear and easy to follow, and the support outstanding, giving us the ability to deliver a tool that’s both accurate and client-friendly for people researching and evaluating the cost of pre-settlement funding.

Thanks for sharing, Aaron. Check out the loan calculator here and drop any questions you have in the comments!