How to Make Maximum Use of SEO to Grow Your SaaS Business

It’s challenging to start a SaaS company and keep it growing. One effective way to increase your business is through Search Engine Optimization (SEO), but many companies don’t want to invest in SEO. 

As a business owner, you only want the most effective SEO strategies for your SaaS company. SEO for SaaS companies is very different from SEO for other companies.  SEO for SaaS business goes beyond focusing on specific keywords. You will use marketing content to expand topics on your website. The goal is to capture searchers who are clueless about what they are looking for. Your solution will be the answer to their problems. SaaS solves issues with no solutions.

SaaS is a developing kind of business, unknown to many. Intelligently leveraging SEO will make your company grow. But the market is flooded with many self-proclaimed SEO “experts” who want to help your company. How do you determine the effectiveness of their different SEO strategies? 

Our goal is to equip you with SEO knowledge to grow your company. With our guide, you can achieve the growth you want for your SaaS company using SEO. If you want to work with an SEO agency, you can reach us. Keep reading and have a deep dive into every component of effective SEO SaaS strategy.

What is SaaS SEO?

SaaS SEO refers to search engine optimization used by SaaS companies. In recent years, the prices of Facebook and Instagram ads have increased. With this in mind, software companies are now diversifying their current and future marketing channels, using SEO to increase their online presence.

The idea is to invest in long-lasting assets even when you don’t spend money on them. Hiring an SEO agency for your SaaS company is the preferred choice for many. Of course, you can always try to learn all about SEO and use the skills yourself. But hiring an expert comes with more advantages and might be the better option for you. 

5 Pillars of Effective SaaS SEO

The five pillars to an effective SaaS SEO plan are:

• Strategy
• Conversion
• Content
• Optimization
• Authority

Let’s take a closer look at each of them:

SaaS SEO Strategy

Choosing a SaaS SEO strategy ain’t easy. It’s not like picking a set of keywords for your content. With more competition online, SEO has become more complicated. 

SaaS is a very competitive industry, and it gets extra challenging. Your SEO SaaS strategy needs to be solid. Your approach must be thoughtful and multifaceted to cover every aspect of your site’s infrastructure. 

The best SEO strategy outlines your goals as well as your basic marketing plan. It should include detailed profiling of your target audience to help you gain a competitive advantage over your competitors. The best approach leaves room for adjusting to any unforeseen changes in the market. 

The first step is to collect as much data as possible before you make any decision. The following factors will guide you when you are collecting data.

• What are your goals? Be as specific as you can.
• What is your objective as a business? 
• What is your current performance, and which benchmarks do you want to attain? 
• Who are you trying to reach? As a company, you must understand your buyer’s pain points. 
• Are your customers happy? Come up with a simple and effective way of measuring customer satisfaction.
• Who are your competitors? Research what the best performers in the market are doing. 
• Is your SaaS offering industry-focused or addressing a particular need? Understand who you will be playing against.

To effectively determine these three factors, you need to do some work:

Keyword Research

You have to pick the best keywords for your online content. Analyzing the search volume and searcher intent is crucial when selecting keywords. What is the level of competition and the stage of your marketing funnel? SaaS companies that have a buyer’s journey will benefit significantly by mapping specific keywords to every step.

SEO Audit

Performing an SEO audit of your online presence is essential. It shows the strengths and weaknesses of your current SEO strategy. How well is your website developed? Is the web traffic affected by any infrastructural issues? What is your current rating on popular search engines? An audit will help answer all of these questions.

Backlink Audit

Links greatly determine your online ranking. Links also determine how liable you are when it comes to getting a penalty. Look at the existing links on your website. What are the anchor texts used on the links? Where do these links come from or direct users to? The main objective of using links is to boost your online presence.

Current Content and Conversion Rate Audit

The first step to any SEO strategy is driving traffic to your website. You need to nurture the traffic with compelling and engaging content at all times. And you must set up your pages to facilitate an easy conversion. How effective is your existing content and calls to action? An audit will show any gaps, Including what’s preventing users from converting. A conversion rate audit will give you a performance score to see how well you are converting.

Assessment of Business Goals and Performance

Every business needs a clear set of goals. Determine how your SEO strategies are helping you achieve these goals. Have clear and well-defined online metrics for this assessment. Also, take into consideration business metrics when assessing your business goals and performance. Expenses and generated revenue determine the performance of a business.

Keep Track of Everything 

While following the above steps, you need to document everything.  Document your research, findings, and overall process. Documentations make it easy for you to track the progress of your SEO strategy. It also makes it easy to update new members when you document everything. Don’t forget to document even the KPIs in your strategy.

Conversion for SaaS

Getting traffic isn’t the end game in SEO. When laying out your SEO strategy, you need to have a conversion rate optimization strategy, too. 

In this stage, you will analyze the critical web page on your site. Where do people visit first? What is the holistic user experience of your website? What should you do to transform leads into successful conversions?

There are plenty of user experience (UX) improvement opportunities in the SaaS industry. A/B testing, drop-off triggers, and dynamic pricing are some of the main options. These enhancement opportunities can help streamline your site’s performance. 

Every SaaS customer looks for assurance and evidence showing the effectiveness and reliability of your software. How does your software work? How friendly is it to use and navigate? Your website creates the first impression before customers can experience your software’s usability. 

To have a reliable conversion optimization program, consider the following key elements:

Conversion Audits

Undertake frequent audits to see how well your web pages are performing. Use key metrics like bounce rates, traffic, micro-conversion, time on site, and active call to action.

Content Strategy

Map out all of your content across your marketing funnel. Look at the personas and their buying journey. Mapping will help you identify the gaps and areas of improvement. After doing this, you can come up with a prioritized strategy and create content that is relevant to your clients.

Split-Testing and Content Optimization

Your online content must be optimized for great SEO and to facilitate successful conversions. Split testing will help you discover the best variants. Pick the key elements and test these elements against each other based on their practices. In SaaS, the most popular testing is A/B testing. If you are performing more sophisticated evaluations, consider performing multivariate testing on the key elements.

Optimizing the Landing Pages

Just like optimizing content, you need to optimize your landing pages. Analyze your landing pages, focusing on opportunities and elements of improvement. Look at the calls to action, layout, design, and content.

Wireframing

After collecting all this information, create a mock-up for the proposed changes. Take every stakeholder through the proposed changes. Let them be on the same page with you regarding having a good SEO conversion strategy. You can pick loyal clients and use your suggested wireframes to validate your decisions and proposals. It’s essential to do a test run before making any official and permanent changes.

SaaS Content Marketing

Most people think content is more about keywords and conversions. Content is defined as anything that nurtures the buyer into the marketing funnel. It sparks the interest of every person who visits your website. Content will help you rank highly in search engines and communicate your brand to the online community. Basically, the content will be your voice for what your SaaS has to offer.

Content can include words, pictures, audios, and even videos. In content marketing, your pillar should be having engaging content on your website. Create and optimize content that will keep your customers glued to your website and bring you an impressive ranking on search engines. 

Good content needs consistency. Your content should represent your brand and tone in all online channels.  Channel content-specific strategies that will increase conversions and boost engagement.

SaaS content is very different since it focuses on the features and benefits of a product. Every SaaS company claims to have the best product for a problem. The trick is to identify specific pain points and address them. Clearly state how your offering will alleviate the pain points of the customers. With ideal content opportunities, you will deliver clear and compelling messages to your clients. The content message should go beyond promoting the product’s features and focus more on problem-solving.

When it comes to SaaS content marketing, you should consider the following channels:

• Landing pages
• Blog content
• Slideshares and webinars
• Social media content
• Sales pages
• Whitepapers, educational resources, e-books, and guides
• Visual content like infographics and photos
• Podcasts
• Text and display advertisements
• Product copy
• Video content like explainer videos and demos
• Press prints and media releases

SaaS Optimization

When optimizing your SaaS, your end goal is to have a high-ranking website on search engines. Optimization involves heavy data and analytics. You will spend plenty of time testing, fine-tuning, and updating everything in line with the search engine’s recommendations. And because they are the industry leader, you must be up to date with Google’s recommendations for webmasters. 

You want a website that is fresh, well-built, and filled with relevant content. Your website should also load quickly, be user-friendly, and be easy to crawl and index by search engines.

When optimizing your SaaS, you need to focus on the following key elements:

• On-page SEO: Optimize every piece of content on the web page; this includes internal links, metadata, and title tags.
• Content optimization: Content is optimized to improve ranking and facilitate a successful conversion. Content must improve conversion in all the marketing channels. If your SaaS has a long sales process, then multiple touchpoints are needed for the buyer. Optimize content to help clients along the buying journey.
• App optimization: All interactive features and onsite apps need to be optimized to offer the best user experience. App optimization should also achieve critical data collection.
• Profile Optimization and Paid Social Management: Social media fuels your marketing efforts. It ties back into your website and the created content. As part of SaaS optimization, you need to optimize your profile. Have clear guidelines of interactions on your profile. Be consistent, active, and consistent in your business profile.
• Penalty Removal: Does your website have a penalty? If so, your main priority will be recovery. When you remove any penalty on your website, you level the ground. You focus more on restoring your lost glory while being open to new opportunities in growth.
• Backlink Disavow and removal: While removing the penalty, you should also remove any hazardous and toxic links present in your content. Removal of these links is vital if you want to perform well in search.
• Mobile optimization: Google is now giving mobile experience more priority. B2B SaaS conversions aren’t similar to the usual B2C retail conversions or traditional traffic. Your mobile experience is equally important as your web experience for your users. Mobile optimization and responsiveness affect your site’s loading speed. Website loading is one of the significant ranking factors used by Google.

Authority and Trust

Search engines need to identify your site as trustworthy and authoritative, and Google uses various metrics to determine these two factors. With this in mind, you can take the necessary steps to improve how Google and other search engines rank your site.

But your audience doesn’t use these metrics in determining your trustworthiness and authority. Your customers will need a more structured convincing. You will need an interactive strategy that includes:

• Content marketing
• Thoughtful link building
• Public relations
• Publisher outreach
• Social promotion

It’s not easy to raise your company’s profile in the industry as you build the trust and authority you seek to rank well. How can you achieve authority and trust online from both search engines and your target audience?

Authority Strategy Development

Analyze your marketing efforts and website as a whole. How do the two work together in building authority? Lay out a detailed guideline on becoming a trusted player in your industry and not just have a good ranking. SaaS companies need to have both authority and trust to utilize SEO fully. With SaaS companies, prospects need to feel comfortable enough to trust your technical expertise.

Link Acquisition

Relevant and trusted websites will help you in building authoritative links. Authoritative links go a long way in improving ranking, increasing visibility, and driving referral traffic. Get links that Google approves. These links need to be relevant and from trusted websites.

Guest Posting

You can use guest posting to acquire trusted and relevant links. Guest posting requires you to tap into the broader market, increasing your brand awareness in the whole market. Your potential websites for guest posting purposes need to be leaders in your industry and worthy targets. Covering relevant topics and content is significant when it comes to guest posting.

Your goal when using guest posting is to get a placement in the target market where you can potentially get successful conversions. Your guest posting needs to be closely tied to your niche, focusing on targets in the SaaS industry. But remember — competitors are not worthy targets as it will confuse the potential target market.

Digital Media Relations

We are in the era of digitalization, and digital media has great influence in the market. Everything online is fueled by relationships. Online activities like building links and attracting traffic depend on your relationships with other stakeholders. Establish partnerships that are mutually beneficial to you and the other parties.

Look for individuals and businesses who share the same overall goals and objectives. Open channels of communication with them and find ways you can benefit from them professionally. Look for leaders in the SaaS industry who are already established and are producing valuable content. Make a point of connecting with these industry giants at conferences and through social media. Think of various ways of building successful relationships with them.

Social Promotion

Digitization has influenced more online social interactions, and these are intertwined with business promotion. Use the various social media channels to connect with your audience while expanding your market reach, too. 

The challenge with social media promotion is consistency and relevance. Social media content changes frequently depending on the current events and style. Also, you need to understand the content preference of your audience and tailor your SaaS content to meet their needs.

Use methodical targeting in your strategy to establish your brand as a trusted and reliable service provider. Social promotion is effective for brand awareness, but it also gives your target more power over your online brand. Disappointed customers can easily sway existing clients and discourage potential clients from using your services. Look at all the essential metrics of social promotion and pick the best.

Measuring Your SEO SaaS Strategies

If you want effective strategies, then you need to measure your strategy. If you lack a plan for measuring your project, then they can quickly fail. A critical aspect of having a good SEO strategy is coming up with a measuring tool. A measuring instrument will determine the effectiveness of the process. 

Remember, you can only upgrade something if it’s measurable. Set up key performance indicators (KPIs) that reflect your success in relation to your business goals. How far are you from achieving your goals? What is being done that isn’t aligned with the business goals of your company?

In all the above pillars, there are specific KPIs that need to be addressed. These success indicators need to be defined before you launch anything.

Who Should Implement the SaaS SEO Strategy?

The big question is, whose responsibility is it to facilitate the implementation of the company’s strategy? While you might consider doing it yourself, hiring an experienced SEO agency will be the best option for you. 

When looking for professional SEO services or opting for in-house facilitation, consider the following factors:

Time

Developing and implementing an SEO strategy can be very time-consuming. Does your team have that amount of time to handle every aspect of SEO marketing? Or will it be just extra duties being added to an already-busy staff? SEO is a long-game strategy that needs individuals to continue with the ongoing work.

Expertise

When looking for an implementation team, you want the best in the field. Is your in-house staff fully equipped and experienced when it comes to handling SEO? Implementing SEO strategies goes beyond improving the functionality of a website; it also includes plenty of data and analytics used to determine successful conversions. An in-house team can’t implement something if they were not part of the team that came up with the strategies. They will not know how to execute most things, especially the technical aspects of the whole process.

Budget

When thinking about a good strategy for your SEO, you must be willing to spend some money. What’s your budget for outsourcing an SEO agency? Many people opt for in-house implementation because it’s cheaper if you have the expertise and time. Such a scenario is rare, and if that isn’t the case, your staff will be struggling between their current duties and the new duties. The implementation process will become tedious and frustrating and can be more costly than hiring an SEO agency to handle the implementation process in the long run. Remember, it might be expensive, but at least hired professionals know what they are doing.

Conclusion

The end game in creating SEO strategies for your company is systematic, comprehensive, and practical. The best strategies go beyond just keyword-based or focusing on your website while neglecting the other aspects of content marketing. SEO has so many angles that all need to be addressed and fully covered. The competition is very stiff in the ever-growing SaaS industry, and the best way to survive is by having a solid SEO strategy.

Like a compass, your strategy will guide you through and past the business goals and objectives you have set.