How Storylane Grew From 25k to 150k+ Visitors/Mo in 3 Months with Demo-Led SEO

hi everybody thank you for joining our session about like how we grew uh from 25,000 to 150k plus actually we at 200k a month in uh traffic right now uh using uh you know our demoed SE strategy so I'm going to talk a little bit around that so just a quick background about how this strategy came to be um so you know we we're a PG product story line is an interactive demo tool and uh we have a plg motion and you know

we need to increase our signups for our you know plg product uh but you know and you know the conversion rates and all you know sort of great um I think it's just the you need a certain amount of website traffic to sort of grow your plg revenue and going the traditional SE route would you know is sort of slow and demanding it takes years maybe two three uh years and the scale that we needed was was a lot right so we turned to interactive demos uh you know as an Su

engine and really it started out as a goal uh to get to 100K a month in traffic by the end of 2024 we actually smashed this Target in like maybe two months uh so it was a little humbling at that time so over the next 20 minutes I'm going to uh split this session to three parts the first is going to be you know uh demoed SEO our results with it and you know why it works in SEO right now uh then the second part is going to be how we applied it you know choosing

the keyword words how we pick the pages how we kind of manag the Ops and how we executed it and then last is how can you apply it in your uh you know uh SEO strategy all right so I just want to give you a preview this is what our demoed page uh sort of looks like so it was basically uh just a blank page with a headline and then uh sort of like a demo and then just maybe 20 30 words of text and just to give you a preview what the demo looks like it's sort of like

these beacons that are moving step by step guiding them into this and we targeted like these terms like how to create a view uh in Google analytics or how to sort of create a custom field in Salesforce and I'll get to why we did that and the results were absolutely insane um so we had an atex growth in traffic from 25,000 a month uh to about 200k a month in September we've actually crossed that um and this uh graph is actually old now um I think what really surprised us was we outranked the top domains even the really really

authoritative ones think about Slack notion HubSpot Salesforce everybody and just to give you some data more than half the pages uh rank in the top 10 you know are demoed pages and one out of five of these Pages ranks in the number one position uh so you know like just to sort of show you the power of demoed SEO um and this is just a snapshot from our Google analytics and you can see we've had like a really drastic increase in terms of

traffic and before you ask okay traffic and all's great you know how did that impact our Revenue uh so here's an interesting data point so our plg doubled after we you know went with the experiment but these two graphs is where I want you to sort of think a little bit okay on the left uh is sort of the signups growth that we've had from the demoed pages and on the right is uh sort of the signups we used to get from the blog the traditional SE strategy and I wanted to highlight that because on the

right is three years of hard work right uh and it was three years it's sort of flat up and down and all of that right and on the left uh you can see it's sort of like a hockey stack uh uh growth curve you know we're generating about 100 um you know doubling month-on-month growth in terms of signups um obviously we doubled up plg a but I think what surprised us was we actually ended up closing a lot of Enterprise deals as well so like think about more than 10K plus uh ACV deals and what is even more

interesting is is not the direct attribution but the indirect attribution of this so we have 50% jump in brand searches for the keyword story Lan pre you know for compared to the pre-demo Leed sua and I do want to highlight a lot of the result results just came in in just one quarter okay so it's not something where you're spending a year onto it um and there's there's one more data point I want you to perhaps think about on the right you can see that the conversion rate is sort of like the industry Benchmark of a traditional

topof the funnel blog which is about 8% and um you know currently with the tutorial pages and these demoed pages these are at about 1.2% it might not feel significant enough but when you actually look at the volume in the last 30 days our blog generated about 12,000 visitors in the last 30 days uh We've generated about 200,000 uh so you can see how that sort of starts gaining a momentum in terms of signups so why did demoed SEO work I'll just share some data right so I mean

there are four learnings that we had one was that the demoed SEO thing you know it it helps you differentiate with better wi experience uh you know we sort of live in a world where you know AI uh is sort of there everybody's create and create content and all of that but demoed SEO sort of helps you differentiate inv visitor experience right so you can't you know maybe perhaps compete on content with a sales for HubSpot but you can definitely compete in terms of a better more faster to Value uh sort of experience the

second is um there's an active versus passive uh you know learning argument here but demoed uh you know the the visitors have to sort of uncover The Next Step by clicking on a beacon so they're actively engaged into the particular page right versus a traditional blog where you're sort of skimming through the blog you know it's more of a passive Journey um there's also reduced time to Value I I do want to sort of highlight uh you know what uh ainaa from hoot said right like when

you're going for the b2z right uh uh we live in an era of snack content everybody wants to just you know everyone has a short attention span they want to learn quickly right and these interactive demos help users quickly learn uh what what they need um so yeah and that that definitely helps in terms of SEO and the last is demos give you a real look at the product uh you know it's not like a product screenshot it's not just an assumption it's it's actually giving you an insight into the product uh which you know helps you get

better quality leads you know once you're into the sales conversations and you know you generally get better signups so I want to just give you a quick data point on how these compare the demol demol pages compare versus our traditional blogs so we've seen a bounce rate of around 28% versus a traditional blog which is around 70% that's the industry average uh the engagement rate is three times more so traditional blog is about 29% demol pages are about 71% and the page views are from 2 to 2.15

now all of these things factor into so you know like you know why they start ranking better and why they sort of start converting uh better so I'm how did we execute demoed SEO I'll just give you so one was we had to find keyword so when you're looking at such a large traffic or a volume opportunity we you know we had to you know look for keywords that could support like you know more than 10,000 pages and you know reach our icps uh so we analyze like the fastest growing plg

companies you know and their SF strategy for ideas um and you know we landed on like you know could we use sort of like these tutorials for other apps that our icps use so in our case we sell to sales and marketing folks and you know we we focused on the sales force and the HubSpot and the Google analytics and the mix panel and created these tutorial Pages you know like how to create a custom field in Salesforce or you know how to merge you know or like how to create a view in Google analytics and you know when you uncover such a large

opportunity right it can also be a little bit like oh my God there's so many pages and so many keywords how do I cover that so we went to the simple 8020 rule about 20% of your keywords you know Drive about 80% of the volume so just focus on that um and then the last thing we did was for the pages particularly we templatized the page for scaling so uh it was you know the design was conversion optimized with a very formic metadata um and you know eural structure and each page roughly took about 30 minutes to build which allowed us to

sort of scale to you know more than 1500 pages with this how do we scale the operations um you know for this so there was no chance in hell we were going to do it with with with our team because it's it's a lot of work so we brought in external contractors to handle this demo creation uh to scale our capacity and uh we uh created like these 10minute tutorial videos just to sort of train them and make them demo creators of the best practices uh on how to create these demos and shared example posts and then

we set weekly targets of about 10 to 25 Pages uh based on demo comp complexity right a tutorial about Salesforce would be a lot more complex than a tutorial about let's say slack um and each demo was internally reviewed uh for content and accuracy before publishing um and the the the reason why I like this system is because it you know it's very scalable so what we used to do was like okay you know we had to get maybe let's say 500 pages so 100 Pages a week you could work with one or two contractors

right if you want to scale this to 400 Pages you could work with five contractors so you know it helps us scale to you know no matter what we want um now I think the largest question is how can you apply demoed SEO so I'm going to take a couple of examples but just remember this rule that any content where a product screenshot exists or can can be added is great for demed SEO I'll share a couple of examples so let's take the first one uh chili Piper they were here right uh and I'm going to take a

bottom of the final example for them they have this post about calendly Alternatives and you can see a lot of these alternatives are in there and right there for chili Piper they have like this screenshot of their homepage uh now idly you should have added a chili Piper interactive demo in there and you know all of these folks can sort of learn about the product without you know actually needing to sign up and actually take that decision beforehand and that would likely you know lead to better rankings and better conversions and there's a second benefit to it that if you create an interactive demos of

your competitors in here you won't have to send them to the you know their your competitor's website they can actually do all of the analysis on your page which is a huge Advantage uh if you want to sort of retain these folks the second is uh you can use this for like uh any step by step tutorial so I'm going to take an example of Zap here and they have this blog post about how to use Gemini and it's it's it's like these 20 steps you know screenshots and then like you know each screenshot has like a instruction onto it now this is a 10-minute read you could have you you

could easily create an interact demo and just make it a one minute read and I can guarantee you because you know we tested this out um an interactive demo with the faster sort of time to value is going to rank better the next example is any sort of visual content example so I'm going to take atf's example um they have this blog post about content strategy examples and they've mentioned about how let's say for example zapier's organic search strategy works with like five six screenshots now instead of having like

this long piece of text and screenshots to read you could really just have you know like uh just a small interact demo so the content will be shorter and you can quickly learned faster so you can use it for any sort of like website examples or email tear Downs or strategy analysis there's lots of things where you can do this um and last example I'm going to take for HootSuite uh so they have this top of the fun blog around um you know image size guides and in there you know it's it's like you know you might you know have an article about

what is revenue attribution or something you know uh and right towards the end they have like a product plug where that you know they have like these different ways like how hot Suite can kind of help with the image sizing guide and this particular section could have been a lot more interactive a lot more active learning if they would have just added a demo in there and it would definitely you know help you rank better um and you know I just want to highlight that all of these examples are sort of different ways you could use it but I think one thing I would also highlight is for you

to look at a very large oportunity if you want to get to 150,000 so what we did particularly was uh like I said we looked at our icps and we looked at what tools they use and uh through that you know we started creating these tutorials like you about like how to create a view in mix panel as well or like different different things right and the and really the goal is that when these folks are coming to your website and you have 200,000 of these folks coming there is some math there where you will eventually get the signups and you know

like in our case like some Enterprise deals as well so I'm happy to talk about that uh later we have a you know uh table I think table number 34 at 3 p.m. so we can we'll do a workshop there um I just want to sort of highlight some best practices with demoed SEO um the first is keep your demos to 10 steps you think of it like a Us phone number uh if your product requires more steps you break it into product tours with multiple micro demos the reason is if you have a demo with like 5050 steps it's like you're

doing the same mistake like people are going to just go through 10 15 Steps and they're going to get bored and move out the second is each step should be super short so don't have two paragraphs in a particular uh you know step you should just maybe have one or two sentences maximum or you could have like an optional audio voice over or video to make it more engaging um I think the next thing I want to highlight is you should add the demo at the beginning not the end and there's a reason for that when you have somebody sort of coming to your page and actually engaging with your demo right that's right immediately

theer sort of engaging with your page and that you know obviously helps them spend more time on your page versus you know adding this towards the end and they go sort of go through 30% of the text and then bounce off um I think another thing we did was highlight the interactive nature in your meta title and description so what we did was we added the meta title that okay how to let's say create a view in Google analytics and we added like one minute guide and you know use our interactive guide to find it that helps you

differentiate in search um if your page just has an interact demo and no text we recommend adding all steps as blet points as well just so Google can find it more like a best uh practice there and last is you can use story line to create demos in 10 minutes that's bit of a product blog but I'll tell you another reason why when you're creating like 1500 demos you need something that's super scalable and that's super fast to create so you know like with story line you can create demos in 10 minutes so uh with a lot of contractors you can create

lots of demos and get a lot of traffic um there are other ways where you can use interact demos uh you know you can use it across the GTM M So within marketing you can use it for website conversions uh you can add it to your homepage replace it from the product tutorial videos you can use it for product feature launches that's a great way to sort of give you know access to the product before actually you know like you you enter a wait list and then you have to wait two weeks to get access to the product why not just given a demo about it you could also use it at conferences and trade shows uh it's a

great way to sort of of uh explain the product you know without having any of the attendees sort of interact with somebody in sales um within sales you could use it for your outborn campaigns and we uh collect all the data for anybody who sort of viewing your demo and demo viewed is a very strong intent signal so somebody spending a lot of time on your demos that's a great way perhaps for you to make a intent based sort of selling approach uh you could use it as a sales s behind more like an enablement uh sort of document for your

Champion if they want to sell to other uh stakeholders um you could use it for your live demos or PC's uh you can have like a bug free sort of uh demo that can be given um and then you can also use it for customer success you know whether that's for customer support documentation or account expansions or new user onboarding so in the last 20 minutes you know we talked about the results with demoed SEO how we executed it and how you can apply it and yeah I just just

want to say that we're doing a workshop at 3 p.m. and we're going to just work one-on-one with all of you how you can Implement demoed SEO and uh briya thank you so much for joining [Applause]