A recent report by Demand Gen highlights this trend, revealing that a whopping 47% of B2B buyers consume 3-5 pieces of content before ever engaging with a sales representative. This statistic underscores the critical role that content plays in the modern B2B sales funnel.
Think about it: software purchases, particularly those involving significant investment, can have a lasting impact on a business. It's not surprising that decision-makers (and let's face it, everyone on the buying committee) would prioritize thorough research before making a choice that could potentially impact their jobs or the company's bottom line. Just like you wouldn't want a pushy salesperson following you around the store, B2B buyers appreciate the space to conduct their due diligence without feeling pressured.
This is where strategic keyword research and high-quality content come into play. By understanding the information your target audience is actively seeking, you can create content that addresses their pain points, showcases your expertise, and positions your brand as a trusted resource.
Throughout this guide, we'll delve into the world of SaaS keyword research in 2024, equipping you with the tools and techniques to craft content that attracts, informs, and converts.
Keyword research is the foundation of a successful content marketing strategy. It's identifying the specific terms and phrases your target audience uses on search engines to find products and services that address their needs. In the context of SaaS (Software-as-a-Service), keyword research becomes even more crucial due to the unique characteristics of this industry.
Unlike other verticals where purchases might be driven by impulse or emotional connection, SaaS solutions cater to a more deliberate and information-driven buying process. Sales cycles for SaaS products tend to be longer, with buyers conducting extensive research before committing. One of the primary sources of this research is search engines. This is why you require content that resonates with each stage of the buyer's funnel, helping them make the final call:
While driving traffic to your website is important, the true power of SaaS keyword research lies in its ability to generate qualified leads and ultimately, conversions. Content at various stages of the buyer's funnel serves distinct purposes, and keyword research allows you to tailor your content to achieve those goals.
In the past, many companies adopted the "HubSpot playbook," focusing on broad, top-of-the-funnel topics and crafting lengthy content pieces (think 4,000+ words) to dominate search results with sheer volume. However, the SEO landscape has evolved significantly in recent years. While HubSpot's success is undeniable, the playing field has shifted. Established companies with significant resources can readily maintain that top-of-funnel dominance. For newer SaaS businesses, such an approach can be resource-intensive and slow to yield results. Remember, you need revenue to keep the lights on, and top-of-funnel content might take months or even years to translate into sales.
This is where targeted keyword research comes in. By understanding the specific terms your ideal customers are searching for at different stages of the buying journey, you can create content that speaks directly to their needs and search intent.
Here's the key difference:
Marketing leaders and teams always face increased scrutiny, especially when it comes to ROI. This targeted approach allows you to make the most of your resources and see a faster payoff from your content marketing efforts.
While keyword research is a powerful tool, there are pitfalls to avoid for optimal results. Here are some common mistakes SaaS companies make, along with tips to get you on the right track:
Mistake #1: Chasing Broad, Top-of-Funnel Keywords
It's tempting to focus on high-volume, top-of-the-funnel (TOTF) keywords like "sales management software" or "customer relationship management." While these terms have high search volume, they might not translate into immediate conversions as they have low search intent. Searchers using such broad terms are likely in the early research stages and may not be ready to buy.
Mistake #2: Prioritizing Volume Over Intent
Don't get caught up in just chasing high search volume. Focus on high-intent keywords. These keywords indicate the user is actively looking for a solution, making them more valuable for lead generation. For example, "[Your CRM tool] pricing" or "[Your CRM tool] free trial" are high-intent keywords that signal purchase readiness.
Mistake #3: Blindly Following Competitor Strategies
While competitor analysis is valuable, it shouldn't be your sole strategy. Just because a competitor ranks for a particular keyword doesn't guarantee it's the best option for your business. Consider your unique value proposition and target audience when conducting keyword research.
While solid keyword research tools are valuable, the best SaaS keyword strategies are built on a deep understanding of your customers. Here's where good keyword research separates itself from the truly exceptional:
A Well-Defined Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)
Everything starts with a clear picture of your ideal customer. This Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) is a detailed description of the company or individual who would benefit most from your SaaS solution. It goes beyond demographics to encompass firmographics (company size, industry), technographics (existing software used), and psychographics (goals, challenges, pain points).
By creating a well-defined ICP, you can tailor your keyword research to target the specific language and search terms your ideal customer uses.
Beyond understanding your ideal customer, you need to delve into their motivations. What problems are they trying to solve? What tasks are they trying to accomplish? This concept is often referred to as "Jobs to be Done" (JTBD). By understanding your customer's JTBD, you can identify the keywords they use to search for solutions that will help them achieve their desired outcomes.
The buyer's journey for SaaS products typically involves several stages: awareness, consideration, decision, and retention. Developing a customer journey map helps visualize this process. By mapping out the touchpoints and information needs at each stage, you can identify relevant keywords that resonate with your ideal customer at every point in their journey.
Don't operate in silos! Collaborate with your sales team to gain valuable insights into the language and keywords your ideal customer uses during the sales process. These real-world interactions can provide gold nuggets for your keyword research- whether it is pointing out what features attract most prospects, what difference do they see between your solution and their current one or simply why they switched from your competitors. this information helps you identify search terms with high conversion potential.
As we've pointed out before, target keywords (especially in the SaaS domain) shouldn't be a list of high volume, low difficulty keywords or even the ones that your competitors are targeting. Finding the right keywords requires accurate data, critical thinking and
While a keyword tool is fantastic for discovering high-volume keywords, they can have a limited view of user intent and the specific language your ideal customer uses. Hence, the keyword ideas generated by these tools can fall short in many ways:
This is why, you should rely on other sources for a more accurate representation of your ideal customer and their vocabulary:
Example: Let's say you offer a marketing automation SaaS product. A keyword research tool might suggest "marketing automation software" as a primary keyword. But by analyzing customer reviews, you discover they frequently use the term "marketing campaign management tool." This helps you target a more specific keyword with higher conversion potential.
While we acknowledged the limitations of keyword research tools in uncovering user intent and hidden gems, they still play a crucial role in validating your findings and prioritize keywords that are most profitable. Let's delve deeper:
Traditionally, competitor analysis involved simple copy-paste tactics and keyword targets. This often led to search results overflowing with redundant write-ups optimized for search engines but failing to engage human readers. The result? Low traffic, low conversions, and a frustrated audience.
Example: You discover a competitor focuses on broad informational content for "marketing automation software." This reveals a gap for more specific, long-tail keywords with higher conversion intent, like "marketing automation for e-commerce businesses." By creating targeted content for this gap, you can attract a highly relevant audience with a stronger purchase intent.
Using these tactics, TripleDart was able to help our client Databrain build its content repository from scratch to rival the presence of competitors like Tableau and Power BI. They recorded a 2X increase in traffic and a 16x increase in rankings with this strategy:
Identified intent keywords: We focused on discovering bottom-of-the-funnel and high-traffic intent keywords that assist the client in increasing website traffic steadily.
Solution pages: We identified and created industry-specific solutions that address user pain points. This practice helped us boost the existing conversion rate.
Comparison pages: We also identified the top industry players and created comparison pages to pitch the product to gain the right attraction from the target audiences.
Cluster pages: We even developed cluster pages for target themes like embedded analytics, customer-facing analytics, and others to gain topical authority and boost the website's credibility.
Website performance: Our SEO team conducted in-depth tech audits to identify persistent issues with the website and resolved them to improve website performance.
On-page optimization: We even conducted the on-page optimization practice to boost low-performing pages' performance. The optimization process involved improving keyword density, using keyword variations, completing interlinking on pages, improving metatags, using keyword-oriented blogs, and more.
The results:
Google's algorithm prioritizes Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness (EAT) when ranking content. Content clusters excel at establishing EAT by demonstrating depth of knowledge in a specific topic area.
The traditional way to look at this would be to categorize keywords for the subtopics and aim to satiate the search engines with a "keyword hierarchy". But the best way to look at categorization is to understand the SaaS buying journey. It often involves multiple decision-makers with varying priorities:
By creating content clusters, you can cater to the specific needs and priorities of each decision-maker within the buying journey:
By using content clusters that address the JTBDs of different personas within the buying committee, you create a comprehensive and informative resource. TripleDart implemented a similar strategy for our Client Phyllo. Phyllo helps marketing agencies gather social media data from influencer profiles, such as profile details, engagement metrics, and much more-
Pillar Page: We created a comprehensive pillar page titled "The Ultimate Guide to Social Media API Integration for SaaS Businesses." This page served as the central hub for all social media API-related content.
The strategy garnered Phyllo: A 573% increase in blog-only organic traffic - 1500 to 11k
and a whopping 1,850% surge in total events (leads, opportunities, MQLs, SQLs, and customers) - from 2 leads per month to 39 leads per month
Strategic interlinking is the art of connecting your content pieces within clusters and to your pillar page. This seemingly simple practice offers significant benefits:
Backlinking:
Backlinks are essentially links from other websites pointing back to your content. These act like votes of confidence, indicating your website is a valuable source of information. Here's how backlinks contribute to your success:
Building a backlink strategy:
While acquiring backlinks can feel daunting, there are proactive strategies to consider:
Within the buyer's journey, there are crucial decision points where users might stray from your content funnel and consider alternative solutions or even your competitors. These are your Key Switch Points. Identifying and addressing them strategically is vital to convert users into loyal customers.
There are several ways to pinpoint these critical decision points:
Once you've identified your key switch points, it's time to address them proactively within your content strategy:
Content Formats to address key switch points:
Various content formats excel at capturing users at these critical decision points:
Here's how a similar strategy implemented by TripleDart helped Spenflo double their lead conversion from their blog.
TripleDart crafted a comprehensive strategy to boost impressions and clicks and achieve this result:
BOFU content creation: Next, we created high-converting BOFU content like landing pages and listicles that answer the target audience’s most pressing questions and provide valuable insights.
Site audit: We performed a technical site audit to uncover technical issues, if any, and implemented SEO best practices to optimize the website.
Lead magnets: The published articles were drawing in a good volume of traffic. Therefore, we set up lead magnets such as banner implementations and CTA placements within these articles to capture potential leads.
On-page optimization: Further, we optimized website pages with on-page elements like meta title, meta description, headers, image alt text, and so on.
Analytics and monitoring: Finally, we used Google Analytics to track various aspects of website performance and analyze how effective the SEO strategies that have been implemented have been.
At TripleDart, our approach to SaaS keyword research and content calendar creation is both systematic and collaborative.
We start by identifying the critical and relevant themes for the business, utilizing tools like Ahrefs and SEMrush for comprehensive keyword research. By engaging with team members such as product marketers, CEOs, etc.we gain a deep understanding of the product, which helps us create a framework that addresses the difficulties and pain points of our ideal customers. This ensures that the content we develop resonates with our target audience, offering solutions to their specific challenges.
Once we have a list of keywords, we sort them into relevant themes, following a topic and cluster approach. Our content calendar template is detailed and structured, including columns for themes, keywords, search volume, keyword difficulty, and intent. This helps us decide on the type of content needed, such as blogs, listicles, template articles, landing pages, calculators, tools, or content-heavy landing pages. We classify keywords by their intent (bottom, middle, or top of the funnel) and schedule content creation accordingly.
The content calendar provides comprehensive visibility, detailing the theme, timeline, page type, cluster, keywords, search volume, content type, intent, delivery date, document link, status, published date, and live link for each piece of content. This structured approach ensures everyone involved understands the focus, topics, and funnel stages for the upcoming months, helping us maintain consistency and transparency in our content creation process. This method allows us to build a clear direction for our content strategy, gain confidence from our stakeholders, and effectively address the needs of our clients.
By implementing the tactics explored in this blog, you can create a keyword strategy that attracts, educates, and converts high-value customers.
However, building and maintaining a successful SaaS SEO strategy requires ongoing effort and expertise. This is where TripleDart comes in.
TripleDart is a leading SaaS SEO agency with a proven track record of helping businesses like yours achieve remarkable results. We take the guesswork out of SEO strategy, leveraging our in-depth knowledge and experience to craft data-driven strategies that propel your SaaS product to the top of search results.
Our client Rentmojo can attest to this, as they've experienced a boost in monthly traffic from 110k to 240k in just 8 months. Or take it from our other client Phyllo, where the Tripledart team implemented a topic cluster model to increase leads from 2 to 39 a months.
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