Generating demand is about making people want stuff they had no desire to buy before encountering your marketing. 

Sometimes, it’s a short-term play, like an ecommerce store creating buzz before launching a new product. Other times, like with B2B marketing, it’s a long-term play to engage out-of-market audiences.

In either situation, demand generation can quickly become an expensive marketing activity.

Here are some ways SEO can help you capture and retain the demand you’re generating so your marketing budget goes further.

How is demand typically generated? 

There’s no right or wrong way to generate demand. Any marketing activity that generates a desire to buy something (where there wasn’t such a desire before) can be considered demand generation.

Common examples include using:

• Paid ads
• Word of mouth
• Social media
• Video marketing
• Email newsletters
• Content marketing
• Community marketing

For example, Pryshan is a small local brand in Australia that has created a new type of exfoliating stone from clay. They’ve been selling it offline since 2018, if not earlier.

It’s not a groundbreaking innovation, but it’s also not been done before.

To launch their product online, they started running a bunch of Facebook ads:

Because of their ads, this company is in the early stages of generating demand for its product. Sure, it’s not the type of marketing that will go viral, but it’s still a great example of demand gen.

Looking at search volume data, there are 40 searches per month for the keyword “clay stone exfoliator” in Australia and a handful of other related searches:

However, these same keywords get hardly any searches in the US:

This never happens.

Australia has a much smaller population than the US. For non-localized searches, Australian search volume is usually about 6-10% of US search volume for the same keywords.

Take a look at the most popular searches as an example:

Pryshan’s advertising efforts on other platforms directly create the search demand for exfoliating clay stones.

It doesn’t matter where or how you educate people about the product you sell. What matters is shifting their perceptions from cognitive awareness to emotional desire.

Emotions trigger actions, and usually, the first action people take once they become aware of a cool new thing is to Google it.

If you’re not including SEO as part of your marketing efforts, here are three things you can do to:

• minimize budget wastage
• capture interest when people search
• convert the audiences you’re already reaching

1. Make your product, service, or innovation searchable 

If you’re working hard to create demand for your product, make sure it’s easy for people to discover it when they search Google.

• Give it a simple name that’s easy to remember
• Label it according to how people naturally search
• Avoid any terms that create ambiguities with an existing thing

For example, the concept of a clay exfoliating stone is easy for people to remember.

Even if they don’t remember what Pryshan calls their product, they’ll remember the videos and images they saw of the product being used to exfoliate people’s skin. They’ll remember it’s made from clay instead of a more common material like pumice.

It makes sense for Pryshan to call its product something similar to what people will be inclined to search for.

In this example, however, the context of exfoliation is important.

If Pryshan chooses to call its product “clay stones,” it will have a harder time disambiguating itself from gardening products in search results. It’s already the odd one out in SERPs for such keywords:

When you go through your branding exercises to decide what to call your product or innovation, it helps to search your ideas on Google.

This way, you’ll easily see what phrases to avoid so that your product isn’t being grouped with unrelated things.

2. Own as much real estate on search results as you can 

Imagine being part of a company that invested a lot of money in re-branding itself. New logo, new slogan, new marketing materials… the lot.

On the back of their new business cards, the designers thought inviting people to search for the new slogan on Google would be clever.

The only problem was that this company didn’t rank for the slogan.

They weren’t showing up at all! (Yes, it’s a true story, no I can’t share the brand’s name).

This tactic isn’t new. Many businesses leverage the fact that people will Google things to convert offline audiences into online audiences through their printed, radio, and TV ads.

Don’t do this if you don’t already own the search results page.

It’s not only a very expensive mistake to make, but it gives the conversions you’ve worked hard for directly to your competitors.

Instead, use SEO to become the only brand people see when they search for your brand, product, or something that you’ve created.

Let’s use Pryshan as an example.

They’re the first brand to create exfoliating clay stones. Their audience has created a few new keywords to find Pryshan’s products on Google, with “clay stone exfoliator” being the most popular variation.

Yet even though it’s a product they’ve brought to market, competitors and retailers are already encroaching on their SERP real estate for this keyword:

Sure, Pryshan holds four of the organic spots, but it’s not enough.

Many competitors are showing up in the paid product carousel before Pryshan’s website can be seen by searchers:

They’re already paying for Facebook ads, why not consider some paid Google placements too?

Not to mention, stockists and competitors are ranking for three of the other organic positions.

Having stockists show up for your product may not seem so bad, but if you’re not careful, they may undercut your prices or completely edge you out of the SERPs.

This is also a common tactic used by affiliate marketers to earn commissions from brands that are not SEO-savvy.

In short, SEO can help you protect your brand presence on Google.

3. Use search data to measure demand gen success 

If you’re working hard to generate demand for a cool new thing that’s never been done before, it can be hard to know if it’s working.

Sure, you can measure sales. But a lot of the time, demand generation doesn’t turn into immediate sales.

B2B marketing is a prominent example. Educating and converting out-of-market audiences into in-market prospects can take a long time.

That’s where SEO data can help close the gap and give you data to get more buy-in from decision-makers.

Measure increases in branded searches

Discover and track new keywords about your products, services or innovations

Monitor visibility against competitors

Final thoughts

If you’ve seen other great examples of how SEO and demand generation work together, share them with me on LinkedIn anytime.

Google’s Web Performance Developer Advocate, Barry Pollard, has clarified how Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) is measured.

CLS quantifies how much unexpected layout shift occurs when a person browses your site.

This metric matters to SEO as it’s one of Google’s Core Web Vitals. Pages with low CLS scores provide a more stable experience, potentially leading to better search visibility.

How is it measured? Pollard addressed this question in a thread on X.

For Core Web Vitals what is CLS measured in? Why is 0.1 considered not good and 0.25 bad, and what do those numbers represent?

I’ve had 3 separate conversations on this with various people in last 24 hours so figured it’s time for another deep dive thread to explain…

🧵 1/12 pic.twitter.com/zZoTur6Ad4

— Barry Pollard (@tunetheweb) October 10, 2024

Understanding CLS Measurement

Pollard began by explaining the nature of CLS measurement:

“CLS is ‘unitless’ unlike LCP and INP which are measured in seconds/milliseconds.”

He further clarified:

“Each layout shift is calculated by multipyling two percentages or fractions together: What moved (impact fraction) How much it moved (distance fraction).”

This calculation method helps quantify the severity of layout shifts.

As Pollard explained:

“The whole viewport moves all the way down – that’s worse than just half the view port moving all the way down. The whole viewport moving down a little? That’s not as bad as the whole viewport moving down a lot.”

Worse Case Scenario

Pollard described the worst-case scenario for a single layout shift:

“The maximum layout shift is if 100% of the viewport (impact fraction = 1.0) is moved one full viewport down (distance fraction = 1.0).

This gives a layout shift score of 1.0 and is basically the worst type of shift.”

However, he reminds us of the cumulative nature of CLS:

“CLS is Cumulative Layout Shift, and that first word (cumulative) matters. We take all the individual shifts that happen within a short space of time (max 5 seconds) and sum them up to get the CLS score.”

Pollard explained the reasoning behind the 5-second measurement window:

“Originally we cumulated ALL the shifts, but that didn’t really measure the UX—especially for pages opened for a long time (think SPAs or email). Measuring all shifts meant, given enough, time even the best pages would fail!”

He also noted the theoretical maximum CLS score:

“Since each element can only shift when a frame is drawn and we have a 5 second cap and most devices run at 60fps, that gives a theoretical cap on CLS of 5 secs * 60 fps * 1.0 max shift = 300.”

Interpreting CLS Scores

Pollard addressed how to interpret CLS scores:

“… it helps to think of CLS as a percentage of movement. The good threshold of 0.1 means about the page moved 10%—which could mean the whole page moved 10%, or half the page moved 20%, or lots of little movements were equivalent to either of those.”

Regarding the specific threshold values, Pollard explained:

“So why is 0.1 ‘good’ and 0.25 ‘poor’? That’s explained here as was a combination of what we’d want (CLS = 0!) and what is achievable … 0.05 was actually achievable at the median, but for many sites it wouldn’t be, so went slightly higher.”

See also: How You Can Measure Core Web Vitals

Why This Matters

Pollard’s insights provide web developers and SEO professionals with a clearer understanding of measuring and optimizing for CLS.

As you work with CLS, keep these points in mind:

• CLS is unitless and calculated from impact and distance fractions.
• It’s cumulative, measuring shifts over a 5-second window.
• The “good” threshold of 0.1 roughly equates to 10% of viewport movement.
• CLS scores can exceed 1.0 due to multiple shifts adding up.
• The thresholds (0.1 for “good”, 0.25 for “poor”) balance ideal performance with achievable goals.

With this insight, you can make adjustments to achieve Google’s threshold.

Featured Image: Piscine26/Shutterstock

We analyzed the organic growth of 1,600 SaaS companies to discover the SEO strategies that work best in 2024.

In this article, we’re looking at bootstrapped SaaS companies that gained the greatest amount of referring domains in the past year.

Bootstrapped businesses generally don’t have huge budgets to spend on marketing, so any strategy these small-but-mighty companies use to improve their organic growth is something that you can take inspiration from, too.

• We used the Ahrefs API to pull a list of live referring domains for each company in September 2023 and September 2024.
• Companies were ranked by referring domain growth as a percentage of their initial referring domains. We’ve set a minimum starting threshold of 1,000 referring domains.
• We’ve reported on referring domains instead of backlinks, because 1,000 referring domains are much, much harder to get than 1,000 backlinks.

Want to work out how virtually any company builds its best backlinks? Here’s how I do it in Ahrefs.

I usually start with the Overview report in Site Explorer to get a quick overview of the website’s referring domain growth. Here’s the chart for our #1 company, Elfsight: 

Impressive! Next, I use the Anchors report to quickly understand the types of links being built: are they all brand mentions, or links to blog content, or free tools?

In Elfsight’s case, the vast majority of their referring domains (well over 60%) have anchor text containing the word widget:

Looking at some of these links, it’s clear that the company offers free website widgets that also include a link back to Elfsight:

For some websites, anchor text won’t be so revealing. Here’s the Referring Domains report for a SaaS company I excluded from this article. At first glance, they seem to be doing well, with over 100,00 new backlinks acquired in the past year:

But digging into the most common anchor text, it becomes apparent that these are almost all spammy links (advertising Korean business massages).

You can exclude spammy links like these using our Best links filter. By default, the “Best links” filter will only show links that are:

• Dofollow,
• In the page content,
• On a referring domain with a DR of at least 30,
• With estimated organic traffic to the page of at least 500/m.

If you have different criteria for defining a “best” link, you can customize the filter yourself:

With the filter applied, if we run the Anchors report again, we can filter out all of those spam links, and get a clearer picture of the good quality links this website has acquired. Far, far fewer:

Lastly, I like to visit the Best by links report to see the individual pages that have acquired the best links.

Here’s an example from another one of our top 50 websites, Clearscope. Aside from common “utility” pages like their homepage, pricing page, and sign-in page, their most linked-to pages are all thought leadership blog posts—opinions, predictions, and research studies:

Not every company can build links by offering tons of free tools or widgets, but thought leadership content is a link-building strategy that’s much easier for other companies to emulate.

Final thoughts

We’ll share more of these data analyses in the coming weeks. Want us to include your company in the next analysis? Fill out this short Google Form.