Do you wish to witness magical overnight growth in your SaaS business?
Then, SEO is not for you!
SaaS SEO isn’t short-lived. Instead, it is a long-term strategy that drives sustainable success.
The secret behind the growth of some of the most successful SaaS companies is a solid SaaS SEO strategy. In fact, the fastest-growing SaaS companies rely heavily on SEO to drive organic traffic. Numbers suggest that 53.3% of the total website traffic comes from organic search and the SEO ROI for B2B SaaS is around 702%, given you do it right consistently.
So, these are pretty strong reasons to invest in a B2B SEO plan. Isn’t it?
In this comprehensive guide, I’ll walk you through everything about SaaS SEO – what it is, the importance of SEO in SaaS companies, and the steps to build a robust SEO strategy for SaaS.
So, let’s get right into it!
SaaS SEO is a process or marketing strategy to increase website traffic of SaaS companies by reaching the top rankings on the SERPs for specific relevant keywords. A simple SaaS SEO strategy can help companies increase visibility and draw consistent traffic.
In short, SEO for B2B SaaS can boost your organic growth exponentially. Numbers say that an SEO strategy can generate leads holding a 14.6% close rate, making SEO leads 8x more feasible to close than outbound leads. That’s why it is pretty essential to have a SaaS SEO strategy in place.
SEO statistics say that 93% of online experiences begin with a search engine. Isn’t that enough to invest in a B2B SEO plan?!
Investing in SaaS SEO can help you build long-term solid traffic while leading the competition in the SaaS space. Other than generating consistent long-term traffic, B2B SaaS SEO has different facets that make it super important. Let’s explore!
In most cases, SEO for SaaS companies is content-led and can drive rapid growth. Evergreen content (that stays relevant and useful over time for readers) on your website can draw views even after a long period. Let me give you an example based on Tomasz Tunguz’s (Former Google Product Manager and current RedPoint Ventures Partner) concept.
Say, an evergreen blog post generates 150 views (approx.) on the day it is published and around 20 views the next day. Based on the post-view decay rate calculated by Tomasz, the evergreen blog can still earn about 18 views per day after a whole year.
This graph shows the compounding effects of content marketing. Talking of the evergreen blog post, it would bring over 250k readers per month. What makes content marketing different from traditional marketing tactics is that the value of quality content compounds over time.
The lesson learned is that once you put up a strong portfolio of timeless content, the rest falls into place. A content-led SEO strategy for SaaS can attract readers even when you’re peacefully asleep.
So, having a content-based SaaS SEO strategy definitely makes sense, right? Here are a few actionable points of a typical SaaS content strategy.
When you get new customers via PPC ads or paid social, you pay for every click to your website. The higher the clicks, the more your ad spends.
Though PPC pricing depends on factors like a preferred ad network, company size, etc., businesses spend anywhere between $300 to $100 million (even more) monthly on PPC management with average PPC costs of $2.59 per click and $3.12 per 1000 impressions.
Coming to Google Ads CPC for the SaaS industry, it is $3.33 per click. Take a look at this CPC chart by sector.
Now, as you know the numbers, you can do the mathematics as to how much your cost-per-acquisition would be for paid ads. Mostly, your cost-per-acquisition through PPC and paid ads increase over time as the ‘most-likely-to-convert’ audiences cease to exist.
You can maintain a consistent cost-per-acquisition if you’re lucky enough to find the right SEO agency. However, when running optimized campaigns, you’ll reach a point where you cannot possibly reduce costs.
Talking of SEO, it’s precisely the opposite. SEO can help you reduce the cost per acquisition over time. Even if the cost per acquisition is high, with the compounding effects of growth, the cost per acquisition reduces over time.
Essentially, while the cost per acquisition through paid channels increases over time, in SEO, it remains flat, and SEO traffic balances this out well. The result? An overall lower cost per acquisition.
SEO isn’t a stand-alone strategy. It plays a massive role in omnichannel marketing strategy for SaaS companies. A B2B SEO strategy is mostly content-led. Hence, content creation plays a massive role in SaaS SEO.
This SEO content helps you rank for targeted keywords and can be used in your email marketing, social media strategy, or even to attract paid traffic. Further, promoting your SaaS content can earn backlinks and drive referral traffic.
The bottom line is that the right SaaS SEO strategy can help you drive leads from other marketing channels and convert them. Hence, you have another solid reason to invest in an SEO strategy for SaaS.
This is inarguably the best reason why you should invest in SEO for B2B SaaS. SEO can provide and boost the long-term success of your business. Unlike paid campaigns and traditional marketing methods, SEO is an ongoing and long-term strategy.
With the right SaaS SEO strategy and the perfect B2B SEO agency, you can stay updated with search engines, optimize your website, and consistently drive traffic. In other words, you can see the results of your SaaS SEO strategy years after your investment.
Further, your B2B SEO tactics can
Overall, SEO helps your business reach the next-level growth by targeting and reaching out to new audiences and boosting revenue.
Finally, here are the detailed steps to building a solid SEO strategy for your SaaS company. Keep reading!
Start your SEO strategy with goal setting. It is one of the B2B SEO best practices.
If you aren’t aware of what you want to achieve, you’ll not have a direction. Eventually, you won’t have the visibility of your growth and whether you are on the right path.
When setting SaaS SEO strategy goals, ensure to use specifics. That means don’t set a goal like ‘increase as many conversions as possible’. Instead, set something specific like ‘increase monthly conversions by 15’ or ‘increase monthly recurring revenue by $50,000 in 6 months’.
Alongside SaaS SEO goals, set KPIs (like organic traffic, search rankings, bounce rate, average session duration, etc.). The SEO KPIs help you track the progress of your SEO campaigns. Identify the metrics that provide the true picture of your efforts and track them to improve your strategy further.
A successful SEO strategy for SaaS requires defining your customer personas and identifying who you are targeting as your buyers. Once you know your target audience, you can address their pain points and position your SaaS product as the ideal solution.
The better you understand your target audience and their needs, the more relevant you can be to them. You can create content that answers their queries, provides insights and pushes them down the sales funnel. But, for that, you must start with defining your customer personas. There are two options:
For the second option, work closely with internal teams (customer success, social teams, sales teams) and gather as much data as possible about your existing users. Build categories of different customers who use your platform, identify the most engaged ones, and also determine the missing ones.
Keep your friends close and your enemies closer.
I mean, keep an eye on your competitors’ moves when it comes to achieving success in SaaS SEO. Track their SaaS SEO strategy, B2B SEO tips, and how they drive organic traffic.
In the SaaS space, you must not only track your direct competitors but also the indirect ones. Dig deeper into the industry, identify the indirect competition to your business, and follow what strategies they use to level up their business growth.
If you aren’t clear about direct and indirect competitors, here’s what they mean.
Take, for example; you are a scheduling software company. Your direct competitors would be Calendly, Google Calendar, and Doodle. Your indirect competitors would be Pipedrive, Zendesk, HubSpot, and Salesforce, as these platforms offer several other primary features besides scheduling.
Stack up on insights and information about your competitors – what tools they use, their approach, latest updates, mistakes, what’s working for them, and what’s not to create a wider picture of their performance.
After identifying your fierce competitors, get down to analyzing their content strategy. That’s what a trustworthy SaaS SEO company like TripleDart does.
Start with your competitor’s website traffic, authority, backlinks, target market information, and most importantly, their content type and topics.
For example, your competitor may focus on comprehensive blogs with a strategic mix of ToFU, MoFU, and BoFU (the three sales funnel stages – top-of-the-funnel, middle-of-the-funnel, and bottom-of-the-funnel) topics. Further, look at their eBook or white paper content, webinars, podcasts, infographics, videos, etc. Once you dig deeper into the different content types, you can clearly picture your competitor’s content strategy.
After analyzing and understanding the competitor’s content strategy, you can use the inputs to create your SaaS SEO strategy. This will ensure that you stay ahead of the competition.
Being a content marketing agency, TripleDart has a complete process of searching the right keywords and arriving at the final content topics of a specific period. I’ll tell you more about this process in the next point.
For now, take a look at how your content strategy and your final themes and content topics might look as a result of the competitor analysis.
Targeting the right keywords is important in your SaaS SEO strategy. So, an in-depth keyword research is mandatory. Let’s take an example to understand how important it is to target the right keywords.
Suppose you own a fasting application. An SEO newbie might say that your home page should rank for the keyword ‘fasting app’. Now, that may sound easy and nice. But in practice, it is a recipe for disaster. Here’s why:
Firstly, only a handful of people search for your exact software product. For instance, 6.7k people search for ‘fasting app’ monthly. On the other hand, over 58k people search for the informational term ‘what is intermittent fasting’ every month. That’s around 12x more searches.
So, even if your home page ranks at #1 for ‘fasting app’, it wouldn’t bring as much search traffic as desired.
Secondly, informational searches are slightly less competitive than product searches. To find out, you can check the ‘keyword difficulty’ metric when performing keyword research.
The keyword universe with theme clusters, keyword intent, search volume, and more information looks like this.
For further understanding, take a quick look at our keyword research process.
The first step in the keyword research process in your B2B SEO strategy is to learn more about the product – its USP, features, and other benefits that you want to highlight.
Further, identify your search competitors (the companies competing with your target page to rank in the SERPs) to make your platform stand out from the rest.
Now, to identify the themes related to your keywords, there are a few steps to follow:
Once you have identified the broad themes, figure out all the possible keywords for different broad theme variations. Make a list of the keywords, check, remove duplicates, and eliminate the irrelevant ones.
In this stage of your keyword research process, combine the synonymous and misspelled keywords and create a keyword group. Now, go on to analyze the SERP for each keyword group and find out the actual pages splitting and combining the keyword group.
Once you have identified the number of pages in your target country, look at your search competitors at the page level. Analyze their keyword data to determine the long-tail and missing keywords.
When mapping the buying intent of each page ensure that one page has one intent. Then identify your page type as ‘pillar’, ‘child’, or ‘solution article’.
The final phase of the keyword research process involves building the content skeleton. Firstly, choose a content skeleton strategy based on the page type (like a go-to guidebook, trademark technique, or expanded list post).
Then, consider the top-ranking pages for your targeted keywords and identify the topics covered. Further, choose topics that match your target keywords and are aligned with the content strategy. Lastly, identify interlinking opportunities on all pages and repeat the process for all possible pages.
Sometimes less is more. And this applies perfectly to content audits.
So, what exactly is a content audit?
A content audit is a way to boost the overall health of your website by getting rid of the low-quality, underperforming pages. It is undeniably one of the B2B SEO best practices you must follow.
Content pruning in a SaaS SEO strategy ensures that your website has quality pages that capture the visitors’ attention and engages them. If a page has a high bounce rate, it’s time to get rid of it.
The content pruning process helps you to increase your SEO organic traffic and there’s proof of it.
According to Kaylee Pope, Prime Publishing ran a content audit on 3000+ pages, and it resulted in organic traffic improvements. The outdated and underperforming pages were removed, which was equal to around 15% of the entire site. This resulted in a 50% increase in traffic.
So, if your blog has become an attic, cluttered and dusty, perhaps it’s time for some cleaning. Here’s how to pull off a content audit on your website.
Before getting started, determine the scope of your content audit – meaning, do you want to run the audit for a few specific pages or do you want to go for the whole cake at once?
A quick piece of advice will be to consider a few subsections if it’s your first-time auditing. The process will get easier and less overwhelming.
The second thing you must do is pull some data. Use a website crawler and enter the root domain and subdomain to check the URLs. Once your website crawler has done its job, save the indexed data. You will now have the raw data that you can freely edit without worrying about something important getting deleted.
Consider redirect audits and 404 error audits at this stage of your audit. In the redirect audit, identify the number of redirects you have, the redirect chains, internal links to 301 pages, and more.
On the other hand, in the 404 error audit, find out if you have internal links to 404 error pages, whether or not you redirect broken links to relevant pages, and any 404 errors caused by backlinks. If you find 404 errors from backlinks, contact the site owner and ask them to fix the link.
After standardizing the URLs and eliminating all broken and redirected links, pull in the traffic and backlink data. Using appropriate tools, you can, then, have your content pruning master sheet covering the live backlinks, URL rating, and referring domain information.
Finally, you can assess each of your web pages or your content. As you go on with the content audit process, you’ll have four options for every page left:
The topic cluster model in your SaaS SEO strategy calls for grouping blog posts around specific topics. When implementing the topic cluster model, you can create and group related blogs related to certain topics or themes instead of creating blogs to rank for different long-tail keywords.
Now, let’s see the before topic clusters and after-topic clusters picture.
Though your blogs rank even without a topic cluster strategy, searchers may find it slightly difficult to find your blogs. The infrastructure may become a little messy or unorganized as you’re too dedicated to trying to rank for varied keywords that people search for.
So, without creating topic clusters, your blog infrastructure looks something like this:
Here, blog posts about everything under the sun, are in one place – definitely not organized. Some blogs may even compete with one another because they are extremely similar. Imagine 6 different blogs on ‘Instagram marketing best practices’ with a few of them having overlapping content and similar URL structures. This results in both blogs competing in the SERP rankings.
The scenario after creating topic clusters isn’t messy anymore. The goal of creating clusters is to organize your blog infrastructure. This is what your blog infrastructure looks like after creating clusters.
This structure can be built by using pillar pages and internal links to create topic clusters. Instead of creating blogs to rank for specific keywords, the blogs are organized into specific topic areas and anchored together by a single webpage providing an overview of the topic. Further, the page is hyperlinked to more in-depth blog posts that make a topic cluster. Here’s an example.
Such a blog structure helps to share domain authority so that every blog post within the cluster rank for specific keywords. As a result, the entire cluster succeeds in making a place in the SERPs.
Like a content audit, a technical audit of your website is equally important in SEO for SaaS companies. Running a technical audit makes your website flawless and promotes its overall health. The result? A more search engine-friendly website.
Here are a few technical audit requirements that you must look into before running a technical audit of your website.
Access Google Search Console to evaluate and maintain your website’s presence in Google’s search results. The tool can also help you with easy monitoring and spam issues. Google Analytics is the best for monitoring your website traffic, optimizing rankings, and making better decisions. Screaming Frog, Majestic, or Ahrefs can help you check for broken links on your website.
The website information that you must know before performing a technical audit includes your domain history, internationalization information, and in-depth research on your major competitors. Further, you must take care of certain technical information like crawling permission, user agent to whitelist, and specific pain points.
This technical SEO audit requirement helps you see how your users visit your website, their interaction, engagement, and more.
Keep your business information ready, like your target market, target country, currently running marketing campaigns, previous campaigns, and past SaaS SEO activities.
Besides the above-mentioned requirements, here’s a technical audit checklist. Follow the checklist and find out what the issues are and how to resolve them.
✅ Robot.txt
✅ Sitemaps
✅ HTML basic check
✅ Site Speed
✅ Mobile-First Indexing
✅ HTTPS Status code
✅ 3XX Chain - Legacy URL
✅ 4XX links
✅ Canonical tags
✅ Pagination
✅ Crawl budget
✅ JavaScript
✅ Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)
✅ Manual Action check
✅ Index Coverage Check
Talking of voice SEO for SaaS companies, let’s look into a few statistics first.
As voice search gets more popular, it is necessary to ensure that your website is optimized for this type of search. So, what can you do to ensure a more voice search-friendly website? Here are a few voice search optimization tips.
The last step of a B2B SEO strategy is to promote your content and earn backlinks. Without backlinks, your content may struggle to achieve ranking in the SERPs for competitive keywords.
Build a robust link-building strategy that can help you earn relevant backlinks to your content. Backlinks will help your content rank and drive referral traffic, increase visibility, and position you as a specialist in your industry.
A few effective B2B SEO tactics for content promotion and link building are:
You are highly mistaken if you think there’s a standard SEO strategy for B2B SaaS. The one-size-fits-all approach never works in SEO. Even if you create a simple SaaS SEO strategy, it will be different from an eCommerce SEO strategy.
So, before building a SaaS SEO strategy, let’s find out the factors you must consider to determine your SEO strategy.
The strength of your website is a critical factor you must consider when identifying your SEO strategy.
If you have a strong brand reputation and website authority, the possibility of your website ranking on search engines is high. Hence, you can target high-difficulty keywords when creating your SEO strategy.
On the contrary, new websites with low authority must target low-difficulty keywords to increase their chances of ranking on search engines.
As mentioned above, your industry influences your SEO strategy.
SEO for SaaS companies is different than SEO in a retail company. So, consider the industry and its scenario when building your SEO strategy.
For instance, if you are in an industry with high searchers, you must have a strategy that captures demand and drives the right prospects to your business.
On the other hand, if the number of searchers is low, your SEO strategy must strive to create brand and product awareness.
Progressing without the knowledge of the prevailing industry competition is crazy. So, before you determine your SEO strategy, measure the market competition.
If the industry has high competition, build an aggressive SEO strategy. Monitor your competitors’ moves and understand their strategies to stay ahead. Follow their content strategy and the keywords they target, and create a strong SEO strategy accordingly.
Your target market can be the local market, any specific region, or even international markets. Regardless of the market you choose, ensure to research it thoroughly to build your SEO strategy.
If you plan to target the local market, focus on the ‘near me’ searches. Create an SEO strategy that helps your business rank as a nearby business on search engines.
Further, if you target the US, the UK, or any other international market, assess your foreign market first. Know the technical requirements, perform a keyword search for the market, know the laws that influence websites, the right URL structure, and so on to build the right SEO strategy.
One of the most crucial determinants of an SEO strategy is your website type.
Before you wrack your brains around your website type, here are the four types of websites and their SEO strategy focus points.
Generally, new websites have low visibility, which is why companies with new websites must choose an SEO strategy that,
Your website may have decent traffic but aggressive industry competition. It may be difficult for your business to grow reach. Hence, you must choose an SEO strategy that;
Earning backlinks to a website increases traffic, improves SEO optimization, and help to build authority for several search engines. So, if your website lacks a strong backlink profile, choose an SEO strategy that;
Tech issues (like navigating issues, high page loading time, etc.) can result in high bounce rates and low conversions. So, first and foremost, you must identify the tech errors, prioritize, and fix them. For this,
What do you want to achieve through SEO? That’s a big question you must answer before creating your SEO strategy.
Do you want to boost brand awareness, increase traffic, generate more leads, or boost sales?
For each of these goals, your SEO strategy will differ in terms of the keywords to target, content type, resources, content promotion, and more.
This factor is simple to understand. The SEO strategy of a small business with a tight budget and low resources will be different than that of a larger enterprise.
For instance, for a small business with limited resources, it would be tough to churn content that satisfies both quantity and quality aspects. Hence, it would be significant for the business to focus on quality content. Besides, the business must create an SEO strategy that targets priority or low-difficulty keywords to attract more website traffic.
This Reddit discussion highlighted key strategies for optimizing SaaS landing pages with limited content. Emphasis was placed on clearly conveying the product's unique value, optimizing meta tags, ensuring mobile-friendliness and fast loading times, and creating a smooth user experience. Building quality backlinks, using schema markup, and optimizing images were also discussed. Continuous testing and improvements through A/B testing, local SEO, social proof, and regular performance monitoring were recommended for ongoing success.
Another reddit discussion provided tips for SaaS content marketing, focusing on understanding the product space and competitors. Using tools like SEMRush or Ahrefs to create a unique value proposition and identify key keywords was emphasized. While off-page and technical SEO are important, high-quality content is crucial. Producing in-depth guides and detailed comparisons can significantly enhance on-page SEO, addressing customer queries and providing value. Investing in quality writers and content creation pays off in the long run, as high-quality content continues to attract and convert visitors over time.
SEO strategies for SaaS companies is very different from that of other companies. SaaS SEO extends beyond focusing on specific keywords.
SEO for B2B SaaS uses marketing content to talk about relevant topics on your website. The end goal of SaaS content is to capture the attention of people looking for a solution to their problems. And your SaaS product will be the solution that addresses their pain points.
A full-blown SaaS SEO strategy has content at its core. Interestingly, a whopping 92% of marketers admit that their SaaS organizations consider content as one of the most important business assets. Why? Because content can deliver incredible business growth opportunities for SaaS.
SaaS content marketing helps you rank highly in search engines. Besides, the content also serves as a voice for your SaaS brand. It communicates with your target market about your product.
Further, content in SEO SaaS strategy focuses on highlighting your product features and benefits. The trick here is to identify customer pain points and address them through your SaaS solution. However, remember to offer valuable information to the audience through your SaaS content other than promoting your product.
SaaS SEO strategy covers different types of content, like;
According to the GrowthBar State of Content Marketing Survey, 60% of marketers say long-form content is the most impactful SaaS content, 13% suggest videos, and 7% social media.
Besides content, other elements of a SaaS SEO make it different from other companies.
Your SEO strategy is the key driver of growth - the sooner you realize it, the better!
A solid B2B SEO strategy can do wonders for your business – decreasing cost-per-acquisition, increasing ROI, high organic traffic, a boost in sign-ups, and so much more.
In fact, your SEO approach feeds into so many other stuff – your paid search, SaaS content marketing, and overall company direction. So, building your SaaS SEO strategy the right way is crucial.
That’s exactly what TripleDart is here for – to assist you with all your SaaS SEO needs!
SEO for B2B SaaS is a very competitive space, and TripleDart can help you stay ahead in this competition by driving high-quality results every time.
So, why wait? Book a call with us right away and get all the information you need!
Join 70+ successful B2B SaaS companies on the path to achieving T2D3 with our SaaS marketing services.