If your company is a SaaS platform, which is Software As A Service, and you want to add SEO to your growth strategy, one may think it is going to be the same as any other business model in terms of SEO. However, since a subscription-based product has to be sold in a different nature, there are some key differences around the SEO strategy of such a SaaS business model.
Unlike traditional businesses, SaaS customers usually stay subscribed for several months or years. In that respect, it is important to pay much more attention to the buyer’s journey and understand what your ideal customers would expect from your service over time.
To serve these special needs, your SaaS strategy should be set on a managed content strategy that nourishes customers at each stage, especially when you’re iterating and renewing your product.
In this article, I’ll outline what SaaS SEO is and the key elements involved in your strategy. Then I will provide some methods to apply SEO to grow your SaaS business.
What is SaaS SEO?
SaaS SEO is a form of online marketing that gives software-as-a-service company websites the chance to show up in search results so that people can find them and become customers.
Not surprisingly, SaaS SEO relies a great deal on organic search to garner attention. By optimizing the pages of a SaaS website for relevant keywords, those pages would ideally pop up in Google’s search engine results pages every time users search for such specific keywords.
With correct keyword targeting, prospects who make their way to your site are most likely to engage with your content, try free trials, and even become clients. Just like with SEO in other business types, an SEO strategy for a SaaS company has to work to distinguish itself from competitors in the business.
With you selling software as a service, and trying to cut in organic visibility from Google, that is exactly what your competition is trying to do. Beating the competition in terms of Google’s SERPs comes down to just a few things such as the following: More relevant to your target keyword compared to other competing websites; much better, highly valuable content and authoritative content created compared to others. More number of natural backlinks from relevant sites to your most significant web pages.
What sets SaaS SEO apart from other forms of SEO?
Yet again, since about 90% of your SaaS SEO strategy will fall in line with just general SEO best practices for any industry, the remaining 10% of your strategy needs to go to promoting the one thing that truly sets SaaS businesses apart: offering a product and continued service to users at every different stage of the sales funnel.
What this means is that the SaaS business model includes not just acquiring customers and having them pay for your product but also ongoing account management, software support, and customer service.
Consequently, your target audiences encompass new users entering the funnel seeking information, commercial-minded users comparing your product and service with competitors, and existing customers relying on you to maintain product excellence and deliver exceptional technical support. That is where SEO in the SaaS world becomes unique: it puts the onus on you to never stop bringing in new customers, conversions, and subscriber satisfaction.
Importance of SEO for SaaS
First and foremost, you have to divide your SEO efforts by catering for traditional SEO, namely, building leads at every stage in the sales funnel. Your content strategy will also need some evergreen content focused on the product, service, and industry, complemented by timely updates and support.
That is, produce content of value for both the leads that you want to capture and the ones that pay to enjoy your service.
Evergreen content is an investment in your future; when it stays relevant over time, it keeps performing and yielding results. In contrast, timely updated content addresses your subscriber base presently and will position you as the main source of knowledge about the service.
Implementing these efforts as a SaaS company requires a genuine investment, as is the case with all SEO strategies. However, such investments yield compounding returns over time. Eventually, you will accumulate a substantial repository of evergreen content, a vast collection of authoritative backlinks, and a loyal customer base nurtured by your ongoing content resources.
That again is a very important reason for SaaS SEO. The core of your SEO strategy would be the website content, but it’s always good to extend the presence via social media promotion of that content and via email marketing.
Think of this process as stacking or repurposing of content, helping you build a presence across multiple platforms on which leads and current subscribers are spending their time, therefore increasing your chances of finding and engaging with them.
Steps in SaaS SEO Strategy
What you need for effective, continuous SaaS business growth through SEO is a properly channeled approach-one that takes into consideration your very specific goals and points out just how your competition outdoes you.
Below are the steps involved in our strategy to help your SaaS business boom through SEO.
Define Your Goals
First, you should clearly define your objectives. Identify the KPIs that point toward the business goals you want to reach on your site, be it website traffic, conversion rates, subscription sign-ups, or whatever. Understanding your goals may help in setting proper SEO at work.
No matter what particular market niche you fall into, you have to understand what you are trying to achieve. You cannot develop and then properly execute a strategy without knowing exactly what you’re trying to achieve. Although most SaaS companies would say that their goals include growing subscriber bases, increasing revenues, and garnering social media mentions, these are all high-level objectives.
Setting specific and measurable objectives will be really important in giving a more focused direction to your SEO strategy. Instead of just focusing on new subscribers, for example, set a yearly goal of increasing your monthly revenue by a certain percentage. This gives a tangible target for the year and guides your SEO with a sense of purpose.
Never start working with SEO based on some undefined ideas or generic desires. For example, having an objective of “improving website visibility” is too broad a goal. Rather than that, it’s better to clearly state what your goals are, say, for instance: “Increase the CTR of main website pages selling software by 5% over some period.”.
With an exact metric you want to improve, in this case, CTR, you can work on implementing only those strategies that have been proven to improve the CTR on web pages. This kind of focused strategy gives you a slimmed-down approach wherein you’re optimizing elements that have direct effects on what was set out in the defined goal.
Competitor Analysis
Conduct an extensive analysis of your competitor’s SEO strategy; this can help in the identification of the keywords they target, the content created, and the backlinks that they have gained. This can actually help you come up with opportunities for differentiation and find some other areas where you will actually outshine them.
Optimize On-Page and Technical SEO
Improve on-page and technical elements of SEO on your website. Research your keywords extensively; make sure your website pages match relevant and high-intent keywords. Your website should be structured properly, load fast, and be responsive on mobile. Give proper meta tags, header, and internal linking structure. With these implementations, the look of your website within the search engine results pages will go up a notch.
In the first place, on-page and off-page SEO basics are applicable to SaaS websites equally to any other. Whatever type your website is, technical SEO aspects play a key role in optimization. Heed meta tags, H1 headings, sitemaps, image compression, and page load time. Any of these items going wrong might not only hurt your rankings but also give a reason to your competitors to get an advantage over you.
Next, you need to figure out off-page SEO and, more importantly, link building. Especially when it comes to SaaS companies’ content, you really need to have a good link-building strategy in place as some form of social proof that outranks your competition on Google’s search results.
Focus on getting links from relevant and authoritative domains. Remember, quality always beats quantity in this case. Keep in mind that creating natural backlinks to content takes quite a lot of resources. At the same time, backlinks have long been among the major ranking factors for Google, so it’s not good to totally ignore this part of your SEO strategy.
Create a Targeted Content Strategy
Develop a content strategy through the various stages of the buyer’s journey that paves the way for the needs of your target audience. The process of creating compelling and valuable content relies on user interests, pain points, and experience. It is about creating evergreen content to last for more extended periods of time, updating at the right time to keep the audience interested. In addition, link building will be one of the most important factors to receive high-quality relevant backlinks from authoritative websites that boost your SEO efforts.
Now, on to creating actual content that is going to push your SaaS web pages forward once you have done your keyword research and determined who your target audience is for each keyword. You most likely noticed during SERP analysis that no matter your specific offering, competition is normally pretty tight.
On the other hand, the same competitive landscape can actually work in your favor. The existing content ranking in the SERPs using your target keywords was created by competitors marking their presence. Sometimes, it is quite helpful to gain insight from your competitor’s content for creating new or optimizing existing content.
Of course, you will definitely want to look at the content that already exists before you then embark on your content creation journey. This will help you understand the user needs that are being met in that regard. Keep in mind that just because your competitors have produced content around certain keywords, it doesn’t quite mean that it’s the best content available.
You want to create comprehensive content that addresses all the intent of that target keyword. Depending on what’s already out there, this could be either challenging or relatively easy. To approach your SaaS SEO strategy seriously, assume that your most formidable search competitors have a strong content game.
However, even in this scenario, it’s still possible to create outstanding content around your keywords. Go through content pages of competitors to know where they probably missed giving information on.
Or probably you will come across the keywords that your competition is not targeting, whereby you can take advantage of the words. Focus on the user experience in your content, as it’s one of the key features of Google ranking these days. Therefore, if competitors are not embedding images, graphics, jump links, or interactives, you can always outcompete them by using such in your work.
Then, when it comes to planning your content, you might want to create different silos for various parts of your SaaS business. You can create topic clusters that focus on SaaS product details, customer support, and the real-world applications of your software.
Each segment of your business can then receive an ongoing series of posts that cater specifically to that area.
While planning your SEO strategy at the keyword research stage, having these content silos can set your SaaS content strategy apart from your competitors and make a significant difference in attracting and engaging your target audience.
Conduct Keyword Analysis when Exploring the SERPs
A crucial aspect of any effective SEO strategy is conducting thorough keyword research to identify the key terms you need to target across your most important pages. When performing keyword research for your SaaS website, it is essential to consider the intent behind the keywords and understand your target audience.
Whether you’re optimizing your product pages or customer support pages, it’s important to recognize that these pages should have a commercial slant to drive conversions. Therefore, you need to focus on targeting commercial-intent keywords for these main pages.
First of all, you need to create a list of keywords that have something to do with your business. For each of them, you will have to do a test Google search and see what kind of SERPs are returned-that is, the mining of the SERPs in other words.
Ensure that the intent of your selected keywords aligns with the goals you want to achieve on your page. For example, if you want to target the keyword “project-management software,” but discover that most of your competitors are targeting “project management platform” instead, you need to consider whether it makes sense for you to follow suit on your page.
Factors to consider include the search volume of the keyword, how your competitors are using it, and what would be most logical for your target customers. If your competitors are using your target keyword but their content lacks quality, it presents an opportunity for you to outperform them and rank higher by delivering superior content.
This keyword strategy applies to both your commercial sales pages and your informative top-funnel blog posts designed to attract users into the sales funnel.
When conducting keyword research for blog topics, keep in mind that the goal is to build a repository of evergreen content. Therefore, target broader industry-related terms to create valuable content around them.
Follow the same methodology as with your sales pages. Build a keyword list for blog topics, compare metrics such as search volume and difficulty, and analyze how your competitors are utilizing those terms in the SERPs.
If you believe you can create better content, it becomes a suitable keyword target for your blog. Remember that in the SaaS space, you need to perform keyword research for every aspect of your business, including your product, customer support, and technical support.
Understanding the sales funnels and customer journeys associated with these different areas will inform the keyword research process and help you optimize effectively.
Start Your SaaS SEO Strategy Now
By implementing these SaaS SEO growth strategies, you will have set up a very strong foundation for long-term success and reached sustainable growth for your business.
The SaaS market will continue to grow, and with more companies joining the space, its relevance to SEO will only continue to expand. The above SaaS SEO strategy is the one that will help keep one competitive and at the top.
If anyone follows this strategy, he will have a lead advantage and will keep himself ahead in this competitive industry. Find a SaaS SEO expert who can help you fix all the SEO issues on your website and grow the revenue of your SaaS company.
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