👋 Welcome to our first installment of the This is how series, where you get a look at how your peers achieved epic wins.

About today’s author:

Madhav leads marketing at Storylane, an interactive demo tool for sales and marketing teams to create demos in 10 minutes. With 12+ years in B2B SaaS, he’s previously led marketing at Hubstaff, Bonsai, and Close.

Traditional SEO is crowded, competitive, and slow. Even if you’re publishing high-quality blogs, you’ll often find yourself competing against giants like HubSpot, Salesforce, or Canva. With countless search competitors and the cost to create content down to nearly zero, it’s hard to imagine breaking through the noise without years of effort.

But what if I told you there’s a way to scale your traffic faster in this new SEO era?

At Storylane, we stumbled upon a strategy that changed everything for us: Demo-Led SEO.

In just 6 months, we grew from 25,000 to 200,000+ monthly visitors and doubled our PLG (Product-Led Growth) revenue. This wasn’t some viral one-hit wonder. It was a carefully planned experiment that allowed us to compete against the biggest brands in the space by doing something radically different.

Here’s proof from our Google Analytics dashboard:

Here’s the full breakdown of what Demo-Led SEO is, why it works, and how you can replicate our results.

Storylane is an interactive demo software. Our mission is to help companies make it easier for buyers to experience their products before they buy. We have a PLG motion and a sales-led motion. In order for the PLG product to grow, we needed a lot of traffic.

In January 20242, my CEO asked me:

How can we significantly grow organic traffic and signups without waiting years for traditional SEO efforts to pay off?

We knew traditional SEO was slow. Our blog was steady but stagnant—years of effort yielded limited growth. Even with good content, ranking against authoritative domains like HubSpot or Salesforce felt impossible. We needed to scale faster, and waiting for traditional SEO wasn’t an option.

So, we decided to try an experiment: build a set of pages powered by interactive demos instead of long-form static text.

We started small, publishing 100 demo-led pages. Our goal was to grow our traffic from 25k/mo to 100k/mo by END OF 2024. The results blew our expectations out of the water.

We reached that goal in a month and a half!

Here’s a snapshot of the impact:

• Traffic Growth: From 25,000 to 200,000 monthly visitors in SIX months..

• Signups: Demo-led pages drove 1.2% conversion rates — outperforming our traditional blogs at 0.8%.

• Revenue: PLG ARR doubled in less than six months. We even closed multiple enterprise deals (>$10k) directly attributable to demo-led SEO.

• Brand Awareness: Brand searches for "Storylane" grew by 50%, indicating a significant uplift in overall visibility.

Search engines clearly love demo-led content. We’ve now scaled this strategy to 2700 pages.

Why Demo-Led SEO Works

Here are some learnings:

1. It Differentiates You From Competitors
   The SEO landscape is oversaturated. AI-generated content has made it easy to churn out similar blogs. By embedding interactive demos, we created a unique user experience that helped us outrank major players like Notion and Canva.

2. Active Engagement Over Passive Consumption
   Traditional blog content is static. People skim, bounce, or leave halfway through. With interactive demos, users actively engage with your content, clicking through steps and staying longer on your page.

3. Reduced Time to Value
   A 1,000-word blog might take 10 minutes to read. A demo-based page conveys the same value in 1-2 minutes. Faster value delivery equals happier users and higher rankings.

4. Better Alignment with User Intent
   Demo pages aren’t just content — they’re mini-experiences. Users get a real look at the product or solution they’re searching for, increasing the likelihood of conversions.

Here’s the step-by-step playbook we used:

1. Finding the Right Keywords

We targeted high-volume, low-competition keywords aligned with our ICP (ideal customer profile). For example:

• "How to merge custom fields in Salesforce"

• "How to create a filter in Mixpanel"

We chose these tools because we sell to product marketers and solution engineers - both of whom use these tools in their own capacity.

Our rule: Look for keyword opportunities where you can create 10,000+ pages over time. We focused 20% of our effort on high-impact keywords that drove 80% of the results. Here’s how I built our keywords list using SEMRush (click here to get it in Storylane demo-form):

Step by step, it looks like:

• Step 1: type the tool you’re looking to market for (or a related one) in the Keyword Overview tool

• Step 2: In the results, open all related Keyword Ideas

• Step 3: Filter keywords by “how”

That’s it! 

2. Building Demo Pages

We designed each page around interactive demos, supported by minimal text for SEO:

• Template Standardization: A consistent design reduced production time to under 30 minutes per page.

• CTAs: Clear, strategic CTAs (e.g., "Try this demo yourself") ensured visitors took action.

• Simplicity: Each demo had no more than 10 steps, making them quick and easy to follow.

This is what the pages looked like:

3. Scaling with Contractors

With over 1,500 pages to build, we brought in contractors to help:

• Created training videos and sample posts for guidance.

• Set targets (10-25 pages per contractor per week, depending on complexity).

• Reviewed every demo internally for quality before publishing.

This allowed us to scale our capacity to produce more demo-led pages.

We compared demo-led pages to traditional blogs:

• Bounce Rate: Blogs averaged 70%; demo pages dropped to 28%.

• Engagement Rate: Blogs saw 29%; demo pages soared to 71%.

• Page Views/User: Blogs hovered at 2; demo pages climbed to 2.15.

These improvements came down to one factor: time to value. Demo-led pages answered user questions faster, keeping them engaged longer.

Even when comparing page rankings, 1 in 5 demo-led SEO pages ranks #1, and more than half rank in the top 10. These numbers are rare in SEO.  

Here’s a snapshot of our rank tracker in SEMrush (I absolutely love SEMrush’s Position Tracking tool - this dashboard view is so helpful):

Here’s how you can get started:

1. Identify the Right Content

Demo-led SEO works best for content with product screenshots or tutorials. Examples:

• Bottom-of-Funnel Content: Software comparisons, best alternatives, or feature reviews.

• Step-by-Step Tutorials: “How to create a custom dashboard in Google Analytics.”

• Visual Content: Website tear-downs, strategy analysis, or creative examples.

2. Optimize Your Demo-Led SEO Pages

• Keep demos under 10 steps (or split into multiple micro-demos).

• Two sentences max per demo step. Add optional voiceovers or videos for clarity.

• Highlight the interactive nature of your content in meta title / description.

• Add text-based summaries on the page for the sake of SEO crawlability.

• Get a demo platform that’s fast and scalable. We used Storylane to create each demo in <10 minutes

3. Build A Scalable Process

Once we had a clear template to create a good demo-led SEO page, we trained contractors to scale our capacity to create more demo-led pages. We hired them through Upwork and referrals, ensuring they understood tools like Salesforce, Canva, and Webflow.

To streamline the process:

• Test Assignments: Contractors were evaluated on their ability to create demos using Storylane before hiring.

• Predefined Templates: Each page followed a strict layout with pre-written CTAs and meta descriptions. There was no room for deviation.

• Output Goals: Contractors produced 10–25 pages per week, depending on the complexity of the tool.

Demo-Led SEO has redefined how we think about SEO. By focusing on user engagement and reducing time to value, we’ve created a scalable SEO strategy that drives traffic, signups, and revenue (in an increasingly crowded SEO landscape).

We’re just scratching the surface. If you want to see real examples, visit Storylane’s tutorials to explore our live demo pages.

Try it. Start small. You’ll be amazed at how quickly you see results. If you have questions or need help getting started, reach out — we’d love to hear your thoughts.