How Storylane Grew Organic Traffic 10x Through SEO in 6 Months

Like you had tens of thousands of keywords with absolutely no competition.

SEO doesn't work anymore. Right? I've said it. But this guy proved me wrong.

When we implemented this demo LED SEO, I think we smashed that goal in like a month and a half.

Madhav Bandari runs marketing at a B2B SaaS company called Storylane. Their software helps users create interactive product demos and they have customers like NASDAQ, rippling Microsoft and Gong. When Madav joined to run marketing, Storylane was getting 25,000 visitors to their website each month. Today they get 225,000 visitors a month. And they've done it entirely through SEO. The thing that I said doesn't work anymore.

Traditional SEO is going to take too long.

Madhav will tell you exactly how he did it on this episode.

You know, that allows you to just capture majority of the traffic with the least amount of effort.

Plus we talk about a bunch of the other tactics that are working right now, including webinars and LinkedIn.

I don't care if, you know, if SEO is not going to work in like two, three years, it's working right now. 1, 2, 3, 4.

Exit. Madav, good to see you. Thanks for coming on this podcast. You've been doing some exciting stuff and I think you're a smart marketer and I'm excited to get to chat with you on the, on the podcast here. How are you doing?

Yeah, I'm doing great and happy to be here. We've been listening to your podcast for a while now, so just excited to be on the other side now.

Thank you. Well, you've earned it. You've done some cool stuff and you've been an active member in our community, which is something that I, I love to see. And it's funny, I just talking with Matt the other day about, I got a message from somebody and they were like, hey, I want to post about my company and Exit 5. I'm like, well, don't do that. The way to, the way to like get attention to your company is by adding value and writing posts and comments. And that's how I've gotten to see your stuff. And I wrote this post about how Pranav, who's the founder of this company called Paramark, I just happened to use him as an example and I'm like, I looked at his profile and he's posted 153 comments in the community. He's never wrote, written like a post that's like, here's why you should learn about my company. But he's always in the comments, like helping people out. And I'm like, that's, that's how you do community marketing. Like if you want to get in there, it's like talk about your, like people have questions that are related to your subject, write a comment, then people are going to find you. And I think you've, you've done a similar job. So we're going to talk about, we're going to try something different today, which is we're going to talk about more specific marketing tactics. You sent me over an awesome list of five things that you've done and tried at Storylane and we're going to talk about those, maybe riff on some new ideas. But before we get into that, will you just briefly introduce yourself who you are, what's your role at Storylane and what is Storylane?

Yeah, so, you know, I'm Madhav. I've been like a B2B SaaS marketer for almost 12 years now. I've led marketing teams at a bunch of companies like Hubstaff, Bonsai, Close, and now I lead all marketing at this company called Storylane, which is an interactive demo software. And it's sort of like all the rage these days. You know, everybody's talking about how you can sort of make you know, like your buying processes a little bit more buyer friendly. Right. So an interactive demo software is basically just, it helps sort of create like this, you know, this almost like a product replica that you can, you know, get your buyers to just interact with and self educate about the product. And then it's basically leads to better conversions, better sales conversations and all of that.

What's the state like give people a rough sense of like how big is the company and what does the marketing team look like?

Yeah, absolutely. So we are, we are a team of, we are still small, so we are about 40 people overall and the marketing team is about 10 people right now. And, and yeah, I mean like as a company we're sort of, we have about 2500 customers. It's, it's sort of like a 1, you know, like 1/3 split, like 1/3 SMBs, 1/3 mid market, 1/3 enterprise. But yeah, like some of the biggest sort of companies use Storylane. You can think about Gong Clari, Outreach, you know, Nutanix, you know, Silicon Valley bank, nasdaq, Dow Jones Index, all of these are customers.

And you, you've been there for about a year.

That is correct. Yeah. I'm about to celebrate my one year anniversary. Yeah.

With the late night podcast recording with me thank you. What is, what's the makeup of the marketing team today?

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So I've got a brand team, you know, so I've got a head of brand, I've got a head of partnerships, I've got a head of product marketing. And basically under these three are sort of the other team members. And that's sort of what basically reflects our investments as well.

Why invest in brand so early?

That's interesting because I think one is that we operate in a category which does not have a lot of awareness yet. So, like Roughly it's about 5% of the market knows about demo software. Or most of the, you know, people, if you ask them, they're like, oh, I know about demo software. I'm just like, I'm not sure if I should use it or not. You know, like they're at that sort of education level, right. So there's not a lot of existing demand to be captured. So you need to sort of create a lot of new demand. But, you know, when you're sort of creating new demand, you also want to make sure that you sort of are coming across as this software which is in a league of its own. That's sort of like how we sort of play it. We try to stay away a little bit from like, hey, here's how we are better than our competitors and all of that. Try to sort of build a league of your own. And that's what we do. Right? And what we've seen when somebody sort of comes from any sort of a brand search, right, they're usually sort of coming into the buyer conversations is like, either we are the first tool in the buying cycle, which is a huge advantage because then you have a very likely chance that you'll close that deal, or it's going to be like, you know, somebody just sort of coming in, they've already done the research and then, you know, the sales team has it easy sort of closing it. Right. And I think lastly, it's just like, I think with brand, it's also like you sort of, you know, you become channel agnostic. You're not sort of reliant a LinkedIn algorithm or an ad spend or SEO changes things always, constantly changing.

I did an interview with this guy yesterday and he was asking me about, about Drift and he was like, how did you, like, you all built such a brand? And he was like, you know, I built, I, I bought Drift. And I'm not even sure that the product was better than the. I didn't even evaluate the others. It was because you had this brand, and I love this topic of brand because I think when people initially hear brand, they think of like your design, your logo, your colors. And he wasn't talking about that at all. He was talking about like our content, our point of view, the relationship that he felt like we, he had with us as a company. Like, I'm following this company as a resource or for me, you know, maybe you were the same. Coming up in my career in marketing, like, I would religiously follow HubSpot content. Like, I always tell this example of like, the very first time I had to create a marketing plan as a young marketer, I had no idea what to do, right? And so what did I do? I like treated, you know, I used the HubSpot blog and they had this amazing resource on like, here's how to build a marketing plan. And I used that. I wasn't even a HubSpot customer, but I used that content. I built a plan. My boss was like, wow, this is amazing. And I was like, yeah, I, my secret was hub. I'm not going to tell her that. But I used, I used this great template from HubSpot and that, that made me a fan, right? You build affinity for that brand that way. And I think that people get caught up in the brand being the visual design. I think that identity is really important too. But I think to me the brand is like the reput that you can build for your customers. And so the point of that story is David, who is the founder and CEO of Drift, was like, when they started the company, he was like, look, there's already 15,000, literally 15,000 other sales and marketing tools. Everybody's seen like the Scott Brinker Martech landscape slide. So his bet in starting the company was fundamentally like, we have to build a brand because there's just so much noise that everyone's going to want to know, how are we different? And we don't want to compete on the feature battle. Like, you have competitors in this, like, product, in the demo, in the demo software space. I never, like when I, when the sales team is like, hey, do we have this one feature? You know, we have this one feature. And they, they don't. And so how are we different? I'm like, no, I don't want to compete on that. I want to compete on brand. And I want you to be like, oh, I love the brand. The product features are kind of the same. And so who am I going to buy? I'm going to buy the company that I have a. I feel like I have a relationship with 100%.

Very true. Because it's sort of like, I think if you look at any software category, right. Like everyone has like these table sticks features, right. And ultimately you're just sort of selling that point of view and trying to, you know, find that drive. So. 100%. Yeah, I agree on that. Like, because, you know, it's sort of a losing battle after a while. It's sort of like you come up with this feature, the competitor will come up with it, and it's just like, it's just a competition of like, who's sort of going that way. So the brand 100%, like, tilts that favor on your end. For sure.

I want to get into the tactics a little bit. You've done some pretty crazy stuff already at storylane. One of the things that stood out to me is you wrote about this in exit 5 is using demo led SEO to grow traffic from 25k a month. Is that visitors a month views a month?

Yeah. 25k visitors a month.

Yeah. Okay, so if you had 25,000 visitors a month, which is pretty dang good on its own, I'd be happy with that. We don't have that. We have like 10k visitors a month to. To 220,000 visitors a month in six months. That's nuts. Your traffic is now. Is now a quarter million visitors a month coming to the storyline site.

Yeah, yeah. It's sort of like those wild stories where it's like, try 50 things. One of the things sort of work out. And you know, the funny thing is that the original goal when we actually started with this experiment was that how about we get to 100k a month in traffic by the end of this year? That was my conversation with the CEO and we were like, let's figure out a way to get to 100k a month. And I think when we implemented this demo LED SEO, I think we smashed that goal in like a month and a half.

Okay, let's, let's, let's dive into a bunch of things there. So first of all, why traffic as the goal? Is it. I go to your, you know, I go to the story lane site and you have a free plan, a starter plan. You know, it's free, $40, $500, 1,200. You. It seems like you have a freemium, like a business where high volume of traffic is going to grow more signups. Was that the hypothesis, like, get more traffic, more people are going to sign up for our product?

Yeah. So we basically have two sales motions. Right. One is a product led, the other is a sales led motion. Right? So, and then there's like this mixed motion where it's like some product led folks come in and then, you know, our sales sort of takes those folks and then builds them into like these big accounts. So, I mean, but this was primarily for plg, primarily because it was like we had sort of refined the PLG product over like a year, year and a half. Like, the conversion points were great. Everything was sort of like at the standard. I think where we were lacking with PLG was just, you just need more visitors on the website. You just need more qualified visitors on that. That's the PLG play. You need to drive that. And that was when that conversation happened. Right? Like, the only way that we'll be able to convert is we first need to get a lot of traffic on our website and obviously a lot of relevant traffic. But that was the starting point of discussion. And traditional SEO is going to take too long. You know, like everybody says you invest like a year onto it, two years, three years. And we didn't have that sort of time. We wanted to just sort of figure out a way and how we could do this faster.

I mean, that's always been my biggest challenge with SEO. It's like, I get it, I believe that it works. But so many marketers that we talk to, it's like, it's about now, it's about doing things, you know, how do we decide to spend that money on budget and time and resources when, like, we need to hit, we need to get closer to the goal this quarter. I hate to say it, but I don't really care so much what's going to happen next year, two years? Because I don't even know. I don't even know. You need to be doing short term and long term things. So the fact that you were able to crack this SEO thing in a short period of time is amazing. Tell me about the approach. Because we're in 2024, the game has changed for SEO because there's so much competition, right? There's so much content out there. It's very hard. It's. If you started a SaaS company in like 2010, you could basically be the only company doing product demos and just like create blog posts and magically rank. You clearly had to take a different approach. So how did you crack how, how did you get after this from a challenge perspective, like, how do you, how do you do this? In a way, is that a false belief that I have that SEO is too hard to to work in a competitive industry.

So I think that, I mean, it's funny because it's like there's all of these conversations that are happening around SEO that is changing. SEO is dying, this and that. And some are true, some maybe not so. Right. But I heard this on some other podcast. I think this guy called Amir and he mentioned it's like, I don't care if SEO is not going to work in two, three years. It's working right now. And I just care about this year. Right. And that's sort of like what we were like, hey, yes, things are going to change in a couple of years, but it is working right now for many, many companies. So we wanted to take that approach. And then the, the other thing I also want to highlight is that, you know what, I mentioned that the demo software category is there's no existing demand to capture. Like, there's very little there. So in order for us to create demand, one of the ways I look at it is like, I look at adjacent categories and try to see if I can sort of find people that are in the same state of mind as what we want in our existing category and try to convert them, you know, in that. Right. So that was the other sort of approach. Like, what are those adjacent categories that we could truly sort of get a shit ton of traffic from?

Well, so you said something interesting there. From a strategy standpoint, it's like before deciding if we're going to go, okay, so we're, we want to test SEO. Okay, great. One layer down from that, like, what is our approach going to be? Is it going to be, is there lots of existing traffic that we're going to try to capture that demand, or do we need to go and create a different strategy? And it seems like that's what you did with creating these, these different, you know, demo pages. Right? You're gonna, you're gonna try to talk about a related topic that the people who might buy your product are interested in, but it's not specific related to storyline. I think, I think in the example that I saw from you, you, you talked about Canva, maybe let's give me like one or two specific examples so we can paint this picture for people. So where did you, where did you start? Give me like a couple examples of creating this playbook.

Yeah, absolutely. So I think we started with. So I actually took inspiration from a couple of these PLG companies that did really well. Zapier, Scribehow, bunch of these others. Right. And so Zapier, there's like this popular experiment you know, they Talked about maybe 10 years ago, which is about the integration keywords, right? How they sort of grew from there, right.

And so, and just, just for context for people. So Zapier, basically they have this tool that I think of it as like the glue for all of your systems, right? It connects everything. And so they integrated, they can integrate with HubSpot, with Google Sheets, with, with Mailchimp, with Slack, with all these things. And so their whole content strategy was basically to create use case pages for all those things, like how to, how to automate this task with these two tools. And so if somebody's searching for something related to how to do some automation with Google Sheets, the article that's going to show up is a, is a page from Zapier that's going to show you how to do that, right?

Yeah, yeah, 100% exactly. And you know, like, I think what was interesting about that strategy was that it was just so massively scalable. Like you had tens of thousands of keywords with absolutely no competition, right? And that's what you see with most PLG companies which have sort of cracked SEO. Our thinking around that was if we could find a cluster where, you know, where the people that we sell to, so we sell to, you know, sales folks, we sell to marketing folks, demand gen product marketing. And then you know, like we sell to a bunch of Personas, right? And if we could, you know, expose them to the interactive demo tech in a scalable way, right? Like we could see like a PLG conversion metric sort of making sense. And so the canva, I can take another example of, let's say Google Analytics. We created a tutorial about Google Analytics. So what I did was we started looking at tools which, let's say product marketers use. So you think about Webflow, HubSpot, you know, ActiveCampaign, you know, all of these different, different tools, right? And we started looking at clusters where, you know, we had the opportunity to create like 10,000 pages with, you know, driving something like 100,000 volume, right? And, and you know, we started looking at these how to tutorials, you know, and the base of the idea was that what if we tried to just, we just removed all the text from the pages and just added an interactive demo to explain this because, you know, our product would work really well to explain these sort of topics. So that was the initial sort of seed which we went with and that's how we found the initial set, like Canva, basically, the Canva cluster basically came from the fact that, you know, there are These adjacent marketing roles that sort of the product marketer interacts with, whether that's the social media.

So product marketing was your like core customer and we're going to just focus on creating helpful content for them. You mentioned 10,000 pages. How did you come up with these traffic estimates? Were you doing keyword research? Like, you know, were you plugging in like Google Analytics tutorial and seeing what the keyword, like what the volume is for that? Where did you come up with how many pages you would need and how much search volume you could get?

Yeah, so I mean we use the, like the standard SEO tool, href SEMrush. Right. Looked at the volume and you know, just like did a rough estimate on that. Right? Like, so for example, if a keyword has, let's say 250 volume or something, right? And knowing that a particular keyword can have multiple variations, we just sort of assume that, okay, let's say we, we drive maybe 200 traffic out of it, right? And if you multiply that with, let's say, you know, I don't know, a hundred keywords, that's 20,000 in traffic monthly, right?

Was that a hundred? Would that be 100 keyword variations of Google Analytics tutorial? You, you'd, you'd generate a hundred variations of that search phrase.

Basically, I wouldn't generate it. We would just sort of assume it. Like if, if a particular keyword volume has like 200, 250, you would at least have 10, 20 variations of that. And you can assume that there'd be about that much traffic you'd get. It's, it's, honestly, it's not granular and very mathematical in a way that it's like exactly how you can get it. It's more like an estimate that, okay, we'll get somewhere between 200 to 400 if we rank number one.