If you operate a SaaS company and are considering incorporating SEO as a growth strategy, you might initially assume that SaaS SEO is similar to any other business’s SEO strategy. However, there are distinct differences due to the subscription-based nature of SaaS business models.
Unlike traditional businesses, SaaS customers typically remain subscribed for extended periods, spanning months or even years. Consequently, it becomes crucial to give special attention to the buyer’s journey and understand what your ideal customers expect from your service over time.
To cater to these unique requirements, your SaaS strategy should prioritize a targeted content strategy that supports customers at every stage, especially as you enhance and introduce changes to your product.
In this guide, I will outline the concept of SaaS SEO and the essential components of your strategy. Additionally, I will present some approaches for leveraging SEO to foster the growth of your SaaS business.
What Is SaaS SEO?
SaaS SEO is a form of online marketing that aims to enhance the visibility of software-as-a-service (SaaS) company websites, enabling more users to discover them and ultimately convert them into customers.
Unsurprisingly, SaaS SEO heavily relies on organic search to attract attention. By optimizing the pages of a SaaS website for relevant keywords, these pages ideally appear on Google’s search engine results pages (SERPs) when users search for those specific keywords.
When keyword targeting is accurate, visitors who find their way to your website are more likely to engage with your content, explore free trials, and potentially become clients. Similar to SEO for other business types, a SaaS company’s SEO strategy must focus on differentiating itself from competitors in the industry.
Given that you offer software as a service and aim to achieve organic visibility on Google, it’s highly likely that your competitors are pursuing the same goal. Outperforming the competition in Google’s SERPs boils down to a few key factors, including:
- Being more relevant for your target keywords than any competing websites.
- Creating exceptionally valuable and authoritative content compared to other sites.
- Earning a greater number of natural backlinks from relevant websites to your most important webpages.
What sets SaaS SEO apart from other forms of SEO?
As mentioned earlier, the majority of the SaaS SEO strategy aligns with SEO practices for any other industry, constituting about 90% of the overall approach. However, the remaining 10% of your strategy needs to focus on promoting the unique aspect of SaaS businesses: the combination of offering a product and an ongoing service to users at various stages of the sales funnel.
The SaaS business model entails not only acquiring customers and getting them to pay for your product but also providing continuous 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.
This is precisely what sets SaaS SEO apart. It places the responsibility on you to consistently attract new customers, facilitate conversions, and ensure the ongoing satisfaction of existing subscribers.
The Significance of SEO in the SaaS Industry
To effectively allocate your SEO efforts, it is crucial to prioritize the traditional SEO approach of nurturing leads throughout the entire sales funnel. Additionally, your content strategy should encompass a combination of evergreen content that focuses on your product, service, and industry, as well as timely updates and support.
Essentially, create content that provides value to both the leads you aim to capture and the existing customers who are already paying for your service.
Evergreen content is an investment in your future, as it continues to perform and deliver results over time when it remains relevant. On the other hand, timely and updated content caters to your current subscriber base, establishing you as their primary 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.
This highlights the significance of SaaS SEO. Furthermore, while your SEO strategy primarily revolves around website content, it is beneficial to expand your reach by promoting that content through social media and email marketing.
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You can refer to this approach as content stacking or content repurposing, as it helps you establish a presence across multiple platforms where leads and current subscribers spend their time, thus increasing your chances of finding and engaging with them.
Steps in SaaS SEO Strategy
To achieve cost-effective and sustainable growth for your SaaS business through SEO, you require a well-defined approach that considers your specific goals and identifies areas where your competition outperforms you.
Outlined below is our step strategy for driving SaaS SEO growth:
Define Your Goals
Begin by clearly defining your objectives. Identify the key performance indicators (KPIs) that align with your business goals, such as increasing website traffic, improving conversion rates, or boosting subscription sign-ups. By understanding your goals, you can tailor your SEO efforts accordingly.
Regardless of the market niche, it is essential to understand your underlying objectives. Without a clear understanding of what you aim to achieve, it becomes challenging to effectively direct and implement a strategy. While SaaS companies generally pursue common goals such as growing subscriber bases, increasing revenues, and gaining social media mentions, these objectives represent the broader picture.
To provide a more focused direction for your SEO strategy, it is crucial to set specific and measurable goals. For instance, instead of solely focusing on acquiring new subscribers, set a yearly goal to increase your monthly revenue by a specific percentage. This approach provides a tangible target for the year and guides your SEO efforts with a clear sense of purpose.
Avoid approaching your SEO efforts with vague notions or general aspirations. For example, simply stating that you want to “increase website visibility” lacks specificity. It is more effective to specify a goal, such as increasing the clickthrough rate (CTR) of your primary software sales pages by 5% within a given timeframe.
By setting a specific metric to improve, such as CTR, you can concentrate on implementing strategies known to enhance CTR on webpages. This targeted approach allows you to focus your efforts and optimize the aspects that directly impact your defined goal.
Conduct Competitor Analysis
Perform a comprehensive analysis of your competitor’s SEO strategies. Identify the keywords they are targeting, the content they produce, and the backlinks they have acquired. This analysis will help you identify opportunities for differentiation and discover areas where you can outperform your competition.
Optimize On-Page and Technical SEO
Enhance your website’s on-page and technical SEO elements. Conduct thorough keyword research and optimize your website’s pages for relevant and high-intent keywords. Ensure your website has a user-friendly structure, fast loading times, and mobile responsiveness. Implement proper meta tags, headers, and internal linking strategies. These optimizations will improve your website’s visibility in search engine results.
It’s important to emphasize that the fundamental principles of on-page and off-page SEO apply to SaaS websites, just like any other type of website. Regardless of your website type, technical SEO elements play a crucial role in optimization. Pay attention to meta tags, H1 headings, sitemaps, image compression, and page load times. Issues in any of these areas can negatively impact your rankings and potentially give your competitors an advantage.
Off-page SEO, specifically link-building, is another crucial aspect to consider. Since content is essential for SaaS companies, you need a strong link-building strategy to provide social proof and surpass your competition in Google’s rankings.
Focus on acquiring links from relevant and authoritative domains, prioritizing quality over quantity. It’s important to note that building natural backlinks to your content requires significant resources. However, backlinks have long been one of Google’s primary ranking factors, so it’s crucial not to neglect this aspect of your SEO strategy.
Develop a Targeted Content Strategy
Craft a content strategy that caters to your target audience’s needs at different stages of the buyer’s journey. Create informative and engaging content that aligns with your users’ interests, addresses their pain points, and showcases your expertise. Incorporate evergreen content that provides long-term value and timely updates to keep your audience engaged. Additionally, focus on acquiring high-quality backlinks from authoritative websites to boost your SEO efforts.
After conducting keyword research and identifying the target audience for each keyword, it’s time to create the actual content that will propel your SaaS webpages forward. As you likely discovered during SERP analysis, competition in the SaaS industry can be fierce, regardless of your specific offering.
However, this competitive landscape can work to your advantage. Existing content ranking for your target keywords on the SERPs was created by competitors who have already made their mark. When creating new content or optimizing existing content, it’s beneficial to draw insights from your competitors’ content.
Before embarking on your own content creation journey, it’s essential to examine the existing content. This allows you to understand the user needs that are already being addressed. Remember, just because your competitors have produced content around certain keywords doesn’t necessarily mean it’s the best content available.
Your goal is to create content that comprehensively addresses the intent of the 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. Analyze competitor content pages to identify areas where they may have missed out on providing comprehensive information.
Alternatively, you might discover relevant keywords that your competitors aren’t targeting, providing an opportunity for you to capitalize on those keywords. In your content, prioritize user experience, as it is a significant factor in Google’s rankings today. If your competitors are not incorporating images, graphics, jump links, or interactive elements, you can surpass them by leveraging these elements in your work.
When planning your content, consider creating silos for different areas of your SaaS business. For example, you can develop topic clusters focusing on SaaS product details, customer support, and 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.
Start by creating a list of key phrases that are relevant to your business and then test them by searching them on Google to analyze the search engine results pages (SERPs) that appear. This process is known as mining the SERPs.
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.
Initiate Your SaaS SEO Strategy Today
By following these SaaS SEO growth strategies, you can establish a solid foundation for long-term success and achieve sustainable growth for your business.
The SaaS market will continue to thrive, and as more companies enter the space, the importance of SEO will only grow. To stay ahead of the competition and secure your position at the top, it’s crucial to follow the SaaS SEO strategy outlined above. By implementing this strategy, you can establish a strong advantage and maintain your position as a leader in the industry. Hire a SaaS SEO professional to fix all SEO issues on your website and grow your SaaS company revenue.
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