SEO
What Is Growth Hacking? Is It Still Worth It?
Growth hacking has long been touted as a “unicorn” marketing strategy that rapidly grows a company’s sales through the roof.
But does growth hacking still work after a decade since the term “growth hacker” was coined?
In this guide, you will learn what growth hacking is, where it originated, and whether or not it still works today. Then I’ll share five marketing channels every company should be focusing on regardless of the “growth hacking” label.
Growth hacking (aka growth marketing) is a marketing approach that involves scrappy, low-cost tactics to rapidly grow a company’s revenue.
Sean Ellis coined the term “growth hacker” in 2010 as “a person whose true north is growth.” They are someone who uses creative means to figure out unique ways of driving growth for a company, as well as A/B tests and scales what has been proven to work by competitors.
Example of growth hacking
One of the most famous examples of growth hacking is Airbnb’s use of Craigslist to advertise its services in the early days of its business.
It built in the ability for its users to easily post their Airbnb listing on Craigslist to get more eyeballs on it, as Craigslist already had a massive user base.
This was the kind of creative, scrappy thinking that made growth hacking so popular in the 2010s. It didn’t cost anything but had a massive boost on the bottom line.
Short answer: sort of.
Longer answer: If you are creative, you can absolutely come up with unique ways of marketing your business for little-to-no cost.
It’s similar to old-school guerrilla marketing—doing things in a creative way to draw attention to your business. Like this marketing hack the team behind the movie “IT” used for the premiere:
Growth hacking is nothing new; sure, the term was coined just over a decade ago. But you can see examples of these guerrilla marketing–style tactics as early as humans started creating and growing businesses.
The known strategies of “growth hacking” may be outdated, but creative and growth-minded individuals can always find ways to succeed on a budget.
The problem is that any growth hacks you find on the internet probably won’t work that well anymore. This is because they have already been done and have, thus, lost their effectiveness as other companies caught on and used the tactics themselves.
Instead, allow yourself to think in terms of a scrappy startup and come up with creative ways to market your business at a low cost… but don’t try to copy growth hacks that have already been overdone.
So what else can you do?
The biggest issue with growth hacking is that it’s focused on quick wins that don’t often have long-term viability.
Sure, you may get a quick influx of sales from a growth hacking tactic. But if you want your business to survive and thrive in the long term, you also need to focus on building and growing a reputable brand as well.
One way of doing this is by creating an integrated marketing communications (IMC) strategy. IMC is the process of unifying a brand’s messaging to make it consistent across all media that the brand uses to reach its target audience.
In today’s world of digital marketing, it’s crucial for brands to market across all the channels available to them in order to reach the largest possible audience.
With an IMC strategy, you can utilize all these channels while keeping your messaging consistent throughout the entire customer journey. This includes both growth hacking tactics and long-term, brand-focused marketing.
The best approach we’ve seen is the 60/40 split that Les Binet and Peter Field came up with. Their research found that you should generally spend 60% of your advertising budget on brand-building and the remaining 40% on uplifting sales.
The 40% spent on short-term sales growth will obviously increase your revenue in the short term more than your brand-building spend. However, over time, you will see a greater lift in sales from the branding efforts than any short-term marketing strategy.
For simplicity’s sake, let’s say you have a $1,000 marketing budget. In this case, you could spend 40% ($400) on paid advertising for short-term sales and the remaining 60% ($600) on brand-building activities like sponsorships, growing a YouTube channel, or becoming a guest on well-known blogs and podcasts in your space.
But how do you know which activities to put that money into? That’s where your marketing funnel comes in.
A quick overview of the marketing funnel
Your marketing funnel shows the four stages of your target audience as they go from being strangers to being customers. These stages are:
- Awareness
- Interest
- Consideration
- Conversion
Here’s a visual of how this works:
In the next section, I will talk about five marketing channels you can use instead of growth hacking and which stages each of those channels encompasses.
If you’re ready to build a brand that can last a lifetime, the following five marketing channels are something you need to focus on—that can also give you rapid growth if implemented well.
For each channel, I’ll discuss what part of the marketing funnel it is in, link off to guides on how to do it, and share a “quick win” growth hacking tactic you can try.
1. Paid search marketing
The first and most obvious marketing channel for rapid growth is running Google Ads. Like all PPC advertising, however, this advertising platform may not yield the highest ROI due to the high costs of ads.
But it is an almost guaranteed way to bring in sales quickly, as it focuses on the last two stages of the marketing funnel: Consideration and Conversion.
You run ads to keywords people are most likely to buy from when they search them.
Growth hacking PPC: One of the best ways to find instant-win PPC keywords to target is with competitive analysis, i.e., looking at the keywords your competitors are spending money on and piggybacking off them.
The easiest way to see what keywords a competitor is bidding on is by plugging its site into Ahrefs’ Site Explorer and clicking the “Paid keywords” tool.
Here, you’ll see all the keywords it’s bidding on, as well as the estimated traffic it receives from that keyword and the URL of its landing pages.
You can then just reverse engineer the keywords and landing pages to create your own campaigns. While this doesn’t guarantee you’ll be successful, it does increase your chances and makes it so you can jump into PPC without a ton of research.
2. Search engine optimization
Search engine optimization (SEO) is not usually about rapid growth. It takes at least 12 months, on average, for a new website to start ranking on the front page of Google. For more established websites, it’s usually three to six months.
However, it is a great way to acquire organic, recurring, and free customers once you have it set up. It is a crucial piece of every good marketing strategy.
You can also target keywords for every part of the funnel, making it a very diverse channel.
Growth hacking SEO: While SEO may take time to get going, there are some things you can do to make it work faster. One way of growth hacking SEO is to focus on your internal link structure.
Link building is known to be one of the most important ranking signals to show up on Google’s first page. However, many people don’t realize just how important their own internal links are as well. It’s almost like link building that you have direct control over.
You can do an internal link audit easily by plugging your site into Ahrefs’ Site Audit. From there, you can see broken internal links, internal links that point to redirects, or opportunities where you may add relevant links between your pages, as shown in the screenshot below.
You can learn exactly how to do each of these (and how to fix them) by heading over to our guide to internal linking for SEO.
3. Email marketing
Email is one of the last online marketing channels left that you have full control over.
Unlike paid ads (which require a constant ad budget) or social media and SEO (which are out of your control and can change at any time), you are always able to send emails to your list.
Depending on how you build and segment your list, email can be used at every stage of the marketing funnel.
For example, you can capture emails by offering discounts, which can get people in the Conversion stage to buy.
Or you can get people on your list by offering a guide on how to solve the problem they came to your website to solve, which can be from the Awareness through the Consideration stages, depending on how you set it up.
Growth hacking email: One of the quickest ways to grow your email list is with targeted content upgrades. A content upgrade is a resource—and a direct upgrade to the content a reader is consuming—you offer in exchange for their email.
For example, Sumo has an article about how to write a newsletter. In that article, it offers an “email swipe file” with templates to send to your list—in exchange for your email address.
Ready to try this tactic? Here’s our guide.
4. Paid social media marketing
Let’s face it—organic social media reach is dead. Getting organic views on anything besides TikTok and LinkedIn right now is a constant uphill battle.
However, paid social media advertising still works. No wonder—it’s how they make their money.
These ads can be used for any part of the funnel, but they will be most effective in the Consideration and Conversion portion due to the high costs of ads.
Growth hacking social media ads: Right now, video is the most effective marketing tool on social media. Short, highly engaging videos are getting more engagement and reach than any other type of content.
This is equally true for paid ads. Having paid ads to a short video is one of the best ways to improve your ROI.
Hunch Ads has a great guide to paid social media advertising if you want to add this channel to your marketing repertoire.
5. Conversion rate optimization
Finally, one of the most immediately effective methods to quickly increase your sales is through conversion rate optimization (CRO).
CRO is the practice of testing variations on your landing pages—such as call to actions (CTAs), colors, order of content, etc.—in order to increase the percentage of conversions from that page.
If you already have a decent amount of traffic (at least a few thousand per month to start, typically), you can use CRO to improve your sales with minimal effort.
Growth hacking CRO: The best way to quickly find opportunities to improve conversions is by looking at your top landing pages in Google Analytics, then tweaking the offers on those pages.
For example, I changed a CTA box on one of my clients’ websites and was able to achieve a 31.76% increase in the conversion rate on their site—all from about 10 minutes of work!
All I did was swap their original CTA box for one that looked more professional and inviting (using Canva to create it).
Ready to try CRO for yourself? I recommend checking out Hotjar’s guide.
Final thoughts
Growth hacking is an outdated term, but the concept still remains useful. Using creativity to quickly grow your company with a small budget is never a bad idea.
However, to stay relevant in the long term, you should mix your quick-growth efforts with brand-building and longer-term marketing channels like SEO.
Itching to learn more? Check out these other guides:
SEO
Why Building a Brand is Key to SEO
For better or worse, brands dominate Google search results. As more results are generated by AI and machines start to understand the offline and online world, big brands are only going to get more powerful.
Watch on-demand as we tackle the challenge of competing with dominant brands in Google search results. We explained why big brands lead the rankings and how to measure your own brand’s impact against these competitors.
We even shared actionable strategies for improving your visibility by weaving your brand into your SEO.
You’ll learn:
- Why brands dominate Google (and will continue to do so).
- How to measure your brand’s impact on search, and what you should focus on.
- Ways to weave your brand’s identity into your content.
With Dr. Pete Meyers, we explored why brand marketing is vital to search marketing, and how to incorporate your brand into your everyday content and SEO efforts.
If you’re looking to have your brand stand out in a sea of competition, you won’t want to miss this.
View the slides below, or check out the full presentation for all the details.
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Optimizing For Google’s New Landscape And The Future Of Search
Join us as we dive deep into the evolution reshaping Google’s search rankings in 2024 and beyond. We’ll show you actionable insights to help you navigate the disruption and emerge with a winning SEO strategy.
SEO
How SEO Can Capture Demand You Create Elsewhere
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.
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
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.
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.
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
A natural byproduct of demand generation activities is that people search more for your brand (or they should if you’re doing it right).
Tracking if your branded keywords improve over time can help you gauge how your demand generation efforts are going.
In Ahrefs, you can use Rank Tracker to monitor how many people discover your website from your branded searches and whether these are trending up:
If your brand is big enough and gets hundreds of searches a month, you can also check out this nifty graph that forecasts search potential in Keywords Explorer:
Discover and track new keywords about your products, services or innovations
If, as part of your demand generation strategy, you’re encouraging people to search for new keywords relating to your product, service, or innovation, set up alerts to monitor your presence for those terms.
This method will also help you uncover the keywords your audience naturally uses anyway.
Start by going to Ahrefs Alerts and setting up a new keyword alert.
Add your website.
Leave the volume setting untouched (you want to include low search volume keywords so you discover the new searches people make).
Set your preferred email frequency, and voila, you’re done.
Monitor visibility against competitors
If you’re worried other brands may steal your spotlight in Google’s search results, you can also use Ahrefs to monitor your share of the traffic compared to them.
I like to use the Share of Voice graph in Site Explorer to do this. It looks like this:
This graph is a great bird’s eye view of how you stack up against competitors and if you’re at risk of losing visibility to any of them.
Final thoughts
As SEO professionals, it’s easy to forget how hard some businesses work to generate demand for their products or services.
Demand always comes first, and it’s our job to capture it.
It’s not a chicken or egg scenario. The savviest marketers use this to their advantage by creating their own SEO opportunities long before competitors figure out what they’re doing.
If you’ve seen other great examples of how SEO and demand generation work together, share them with me on LinkedIn anytime.
SEO
Google Explains How Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) Is Measured
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
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