Simply put, SaaS SEO is a marketing strategy used to attract visitors, i.e., potential users or customers, to a SaaS website. This is achieved by using SEO or Search Engine Optimization to get the site to rank higher in search engines like Google, Bing, etc.
Looking at some of the most successful SaaS companies and their growth, it is easy to see that a large part of their success is due to their SEO strategy. Naturally, this means that you, too, need to focus on SEO if you want your SaaS company to succeed.
The first step in doing so is understanding how to create a good SaaS SEO strategy, i.e., pinpointing the aspects you need to focus on and discovering opportunities to put your company in front of your objective audience.
Use this guide to find some of the best tips and strategies to bring organic traffic to your SaaS website. Feel free to skip ahead to the ones that interest you the most.
What’s included in this guide?
- Perform an SEO Audit: Find Technical Issues
- Keyword Research
- Define Your Content Strategy
- In-depth Articles for Off-Page SEO
Perform an SEO Audit: Find Technical Issues
Technical SEO refers to the practice of using different tactics in creating and optimizing the infrastructure of a website to facilitate crawling and indexing by search engines.
This SEO subcategory deals with the technical aspects of the website, such as:
- Sitemaps
- Page speed
- URL structure
- Schema
- Site navigation, etc.
Why is technical SEO important?
While the quality of the content on your website is essential to attract visitors, it is worth little if search engines cannot browse and index your website correctly. Optimizing the technical aspects of your website is crucial to attracting organic traffic from search engines because it makes it possible for users to access and navigate your website easily.
You can use tools like Google Search Console to pinpoint your SaaS website’s technical SEO issues:
- Log in to your Google Search Console account
- Go to “Overview” then “Security and Manual Actions” to check for serious issues, i.e., manual penalty, security issues, etc.
- Check “Crawl Stats”
- See the “Coverage” report to check the number of pages your website has indexed in Google
- See “Mobile Usability” to check if your website is mobile-friendly
- Check the “Details” section to see the errors Google has run into, etc.
If you want to conduct a more in-depth analysis of your website’s technical SEO issues, you can use the audit tool in Semrush.
Keyword Research
Keyword research for SaaS companies refers to discovering the keywords customers use in search engines like Google to find SaaS products or services.
If done correctly, keyword research can help you with the following:
- A better understanding of your niche and target audience
- Tailoring your content strategy per your audience’s needs
- Getting more relevant organic traffic for your website
The three steps of properly conducting keyword research are:
1. Finding keywords by using keyword research tools like:
- Semrush’s Keyword Magic Tool to get keyword ideas from a seed keyword
- Semrush’s Organic Research Tool to find out what keywords your competitors rank for
- Keyword Gap to find the keywords you don’t rank for, etc.
2. Analyzing keywords using key metrics and criteria like:
- Search Volume: This tells you how many times per month a keyword is used in Google on average.
- Keyword Difficulty (KD): This shows how difficult it is to rank using a particular keyword in the top 10 organic search results.
3. Targeting keywords you want to rank for:
- A primary keyword best represents your topic, has a high search volume, and is used in the key elements of your page, i.e., URL, title tag, heading, etc.
- A secondary keyword also represents your topic but has a lower search volume.
You can determine whether a keyword is primary or secondary using the Keyword Overview Tool and the Organic Research Tool.
Lastly, it is essential to determine the searcher’s intent when using a particular keyword before competing for any keyword. The searcher’s intent falls into one of these four categories:
- Navigational, i.e., searching for a specific page
- Informational, i.e., searching for general information on a topic
- Commercial, i.e., researching different options before a purchase
- Transactional, i.e., searching for a specific product or brand to purchase from
By determining the searcher’s intent, you can use the right keyword for your content. You can use the “Intent” filter in any of the keyword-related tools in Semrush.
Define Your Content Strategy
After you’ve taken care of the technical aspects of your SaaS website, it is time to think about the site’s actual content. To get more organic traffic on your site, you need to define your content strategy, i.e., thinking about your target audience or customers you are trying to reach and their search intent, and the keywords they are using.
In order to build a good content strategy, you need to:
- Objectively look at your website and determine the target keywords that fit best
- Create new pages to target keywords with no related content on your site
- Organize and structure your content to increase engagement
Another essential aspect to consider when defining your content strategy is the longer-term production cycle of your content, i.e., longtail topics. This is a good, long-term strategy because you will have covered all bases regarding the keywords related to your industry, thus establishing your website as an authority on said industry and ranking better over time.
However, targeting longtail topics can be time-consuming; thus, most content writers will wind up producing content without an objective. To avoid this, try devising a content production strategy that takes into account data and trends in your target market to determine the ongoing content needs.
In-Depth Articles for Off-Page SEO
Last but not least, the quality of the content you provide for the customers remains one of the most critical aspects of SaaS SEO. High-quality content is a must for attracting visitors to your website as well as attracting links.
Some great link-building strategies for websites include:
- The Skyscraper Technique
- The Moving Man Strategy
- Guest Posting/ Blogging
- Unlinked Brand Mentions
- Digital PR
- Reclaiming Lost and Broken Backlinks
- Attending interviews and podcasts
- Offering link for link, etc.
Link building as a strategy can be time-consuming and requires a lot of effort, but it can help you build a good link profile which in turn will aid you in:
- Growing traffic for your website
- Boosting your credibility
- Improving your rankings
- Enhancing your SEO score and Site Metrics
- Increasing visibility and exposure
- Building relationships with other businesses in your industry
- Establishing yourself as an authority
- Reducing the bounce rate of your visitors, etc.
While some may be tempted to produce as much content as possible, quality content is much more critical when it comes to SaaS SEO. To grow traffic on your website, try writing high-quality, comprehensive pieces or pillar content that customers will simply not find on other websites.
Some examples of pillar content pages include:
Conclusion
SaaS SEO is crucial for bringing organic traffic to service pages and achieving higher rankings in search engines.
To optimize a website for search engines, you need to:
- Perform an SEO audit to find out and fix technical issues
- Conduct keyword research to understand the searcher’s intent
- Produce optimized blog posts
- Develop a good content strategy
- Build a strong link profile through in-depth (pillar) articles
Following this guide can help you establish yourself as an authority in your industry and improve your website’s visibility in search results.
