How to Generate Demand with SEO (Incl. 5 Case Studies)

How to win beyond your in-market buyers and build a compounding powerhouse of content.

At any given time, most product groups have 1-3% of their target customer currently “in-market” for a solution.

There’s no doubt that SEO is brilliant at capturing this audience segment—we can funnel them to blog posts and landing pages optimized for keywords like “best CRM software”.

But is this now highly competitive “demand capture” arena where the value of SEO ends?

Or can SEO instead help reach the 99% of your target audience not currently looking for a solution? 

Can SEO make you memorable enough so your ideal customers think of you when they are ready to buy?

HELL YES.

In this article:

1. I’ll explain why SEO is one of the best distribution channels for audience development and demand generation.
2. I’ll also share case studies and examples of SEO-driven demand generation in action.

Let's dive in.

What is Demand Creation?

You’ve likely built a product or service around a need in the market.

Now, as a marketing team, your job is:

1. To establish trust and rapport with your audience
2. To make people aware of your product and how it works
3. To make people aware of the benefits and pain points you solve
4. To highlight what they are missing out on by not solving those pain points

This is demand creation. 

Demand creation is not about instant conversions. The core objective is instead to educate your audience so that when they’re ready to shop for a solution (be that in a month or a year), you are top of mind and the first company they vet as a vendor.

Typically this is achieved via:

• Advertising (be it paid or OOH)
• Content marketing
• Events and talks

While big, splashy brand campaigns and expensive paid advertising are scalable and effective, we’ll be focusing on the content marketing bucket in this article.

There is a significant overlap in SEO and Content Marketing

I feel like I’m preaching to the choir a little here. But it’s worth discussing this because this is how people are talking about this topic on social media

Often in the same breath as “SEO isn’t a demand generation channel” naysayers will argue “but content marketing is”. 

Huh?

Yes, you can create a social post, newsletter, podcast, or blog post that isn’t for “SEO” as part of your content marketing efforts.

But for me, search is a distribution channel. 

I create awesome content and optimize it for Google. Their algorithm discovers it, understands it, and shares it with the relevant audience.

This mechanism is no different to writing a social media post—which I also design for an algorithm to distribute.

This mechanism is no different to writing a newsletter, which I optimize for open rates and readability. 

This mechanism is no different to creating a podcast—which has various ways to build an audience.

Demand creation comes from content consumption. Which means your content must valuable enough to be consumed and enjoyed (where SEO content so often fails).

If we start seeing SEO as a way to deliver our demand-creating content to our audience it’s actually one of the most effective demand-creation channels available to us.

Where else but search can you find someone actively researching a topic and serve them up your relevant content? 

On repeat for months and months?

Most content, especially on social, has a lifespan of 24 hours. 

Not with SEO, my friends.

5 Examples of SEO-Led Demand Generation

Let’s look at ways to generate demand via SEO and some evidence of it working.

Amplitude - $1.6M to $17M growth in 16 months

Over 2015 and 2016, Aditya Vempaty designed an SEO-led content strategy for Amplitude that helped them grow from $1.6M to $17M ARR in less than 16 months.

There’s a ton of nuance in the story (you can get that nuance in this week’s HTF podcast episode), but let me boil it down to its core.

Amplitude saw an unmet need in their market and pivoted their positioning to create a new category (“product analytics”).

Being a new category, it had zero search volume. Nobody searching for “product analytics tools”. A difficult spot to be in—no demand to “capture”.

Instead, they built content around adjacent category keywords like “user acquisition” and “customer retention”. These are core challenges their audience faces and both pain points Amplitude’s product solves.

Their articles covered the full funnel of keywords (e.g. “what is customer retention?” and “how to improve customer retention”).

Within the content, they evangelized the new category, Product Analytics, and drove intrigued users to download their playbook.

This tactic captures a percentage of the audience that is relevant to Amplitude, educates and evangelizes them, positions Amplitude as a thought leader, and starts the demand creation journey.

The articles also weaved relevant case studies into them—building trust and demonstrating the value.

For those getting started with SEO content, I wouldn't recommend targeting tons of top-of-funnel content.

Instead, prioritize ruthlessly and move steadily up the funnel to see the best results. Be profit-focused.

And when you do get to top-of-funnel content, it should either be designed to capture (via an email list or downloadable) or be so damn magical they bookmark and keep coming back.

They love you on social. They love you search. They remember you.

SentiSum - $0 to +$1M generated in 2 years (and Hotjar to back it up)

This is one of my own experiences generating demand via SEO while working at SentiSum.

Two types of content helped us create fresh demand:

1. Pain point content

Pain points are specific problems or challenges your audience faces in their day-to-day work life.

A portion of your target audience heads to Google to solve them, typing how-to-esque keywords like “how to improve efficiency in customer service” or “how to improve customer sentiment”.

Pain point content is designed to help solve those challenges. If you genuinely help your target audience solve the problem in a unique and actionable way (with free methods) you position yourself as an expert on the topic.

This content type, in turn, makes it easy to authentically bring up your product as a potential solution.

For example, in this guide “How To Do a Root Cause Analysis in Customer Service” I was able to share how others are doing it, give a step-by-step guide, but also discuss our tool.

Hotjar also does this well. Their guide to Heatmaps clearly shows their products in action while still being helpful to the reader.

This helps generate demand by reaching a pain-aware audience and elevating their awareness of your product. This is one of the highest-converting SEO opportunities out there after bottom-of-funnel keywords.

Read more:

• Hotjar’s SEO strategy in this case study.
• Learn about pain point content in my case study with Grow & Convert.

2. Trends & fun content for demand generation

Other areas we generated demand via SEO at SentiSum include:

• Trends. I wrote an article targeting the keyword “future of customer service” and made the argument that artificial intelligence was the future (e.g. where our product could help).

• Best Apps. I wrote an article targeting the keyword “best zendesk apps”. Zendesk was a key partner and these searchers are probably just having a browse. But this article allowed us to explain what our product does for them—generating demand.

CustomerGauge - From 100 to 1,000 eBook downloads per month

Demand generation rarely happens at one touchpoint. It’s usually a series of positive experiences with your brand that makes you memorable.

You can do that by writing tons of SEO content—Ahrefs and Semrush are great examples of this, they rank top for almost every SEO-related query and so you can’t help but bang into their brands again and again.

However, another way to increase the number of touchpoints is to create a downloadable offer that requires an email to access. You can then nurture anyone who downloads through other content marketing efforts (like a newsletter, webinar invites, etc.).

As an example of this, at CustomerGauge, we had a strong annual report that our target audience loved. Through PPC and SEO, we drove our audience to download it:

We followed it up with a 10+ email series that shared relevant educational tips & tricks on the topic.

The flow looked something like this:

1. SEO blog posts on “benchmarks” - which drove 10,000+ organic search visitors per month.
2. 10% of those downloaded the report - 1,000 downloads per month.
3. They each got 10+ emails - 10,000 emails sent per month.
4. The most interested ones (measured by engagement, clicks lots, etc) were passed to the sales team to start a conversation.

Our search-first content strategy primed the audience and built some affinity. Our sales team did their best to build it further and capitalize on the priming.

Four Tips For Generating More Demand Via SEO

1. Invest in content quality. Consumed content generates demand and only valuable content gets consumed. Yours should NOT be commodity content. It should deliver your message and thought leadership to your reader and do something uniquely helpful, non-obvious, and intimate (that ChatGPT will struggle to replace for time to come).
2. Repurpose content on other channels. When your search content is high quality, you can repurpose it. Cut it up into insights and quotes for social media. Put paid ad spend behind it to drive more readership.
3. Worry less about attribution tools. When someone reads a blog post, remembers your product, and then comes back 3 months later to become a customer…your attribution will not be correct. It might be attributed to branded search (as they Google your company name) or they might search you on LinkedIn and then click through. Care less about all this—instead, ask your customers directly where they heard about you.
4. See your demand generation content as another touchpoint in a holistic marketing strategy. People don't remember adverts the first 5-10 times they see them. But when they also see you in search, on social, and in a Slack group—they'll remember you forever.

Bringing it all together

I’ve shared several examples of how to generate demand via SEO in this article.

Some techniques will convert higher (like pain point SEO). However, all of them help to generate relevant awareness for your brand and product. 

The power of SEO as a channel is its ability to distribute content forever to an engaged audience. 

Search-first content is a core part of a holistic demand-generation effort. And when done right, it pays back dividends for years to come. I worked with SentiSum years ago, and despite very little continued SEO effort—much of that traffic still holds strong.

So, don’t get put off by the naysayers. SEO is here to stay ✊