You have probably heard people saying recently – that SEO is dead.
And, to be honest, they aren’t entirely wrong. The primitive way of doing SEO – like stuffing keywords doesn’t make sense anymore, especially for SaaS companies.
Unlike other businesses, the SaaS industry has an entirely different challenge with SEO. While other brands aim to rank higher and reach more audiences, SaaS companies’ SEO focuses more on attracting a convertible audience.
Maybe that’s why it has been seen that 0.63% of users clicked on a result from the second page of a search query – because it’s not “just” about ranking higher. It’s more about being found by the target audience.
Fortunately, a tactical SEO method still reaps the rewards for those who know how to execute it.
Check out how you can do that in our blog.
Source: Growfusely
How Is SaaS SEO Different From Other Industries’ SEO?
If you have been involved in SEO practices for a long time – you know that SaaS SEO differs from the generic SEO we know.
- It’s not just about stuffing keywords
What’s the first thing that comes to mind when you hear SEO? Keyword stuffing, right? It’s different for SaaS SEO as it prioritizes customers’ personas and problems over anything else. Randomly stuffing keywords wouldn’t make sense if you need to learn who your target audience is and which problem you are trying to solve.
- It’s more about conversions than traffic
Unlike any other B2C products, you are not selling a one-time solution to your customers – you’re selling a solution they will use long-term. So, your ultimate goal will be to get more actions from your prospects, like a signup or a login, instead of a passive action like reading a blog or visiting a website.
Benefits of SEO for SaaS Companies
- Reduces your customer acquisition costs
Okay, first things first – so CAC or Customer Acquisition Costs is the money you spend as a business to acquire a new customer. CLV or Customer Lifetime Value is the money that you, as a business, can earn from a customer over their entire lifetime in your company.
SEO is one of the most cost-effective strategies to reduce customer acquisition costs and increase lifetime value.
For example, let’s say you are running a PPC Search Campaign where you are paying for every single click on your website. You need to spend more money to drive more clicks – which can considerably increase your costs.
In SEO, however, your initial cost per acquisition tends to be relatively higher. However, the costs tend to drop consistently as the growth increases over a certain period. Compared to PPC campaigns, even though SEO requires gradual investments, it only increases with some clicks.
- Helps to increase visibility on other marketing channels
You probably use multiple channels to target and convert your customers as a marketer – correct?
SEO can help you get additional visibility from other marketing channels by offering interaction opportunities to potential customers who already interact with your brand.
For example, if you already have a customer base that interacts with you, you can use your high-converting pages, targeted with keywords, to convince and convert them. The best part? You will have the shortest sales cycle.
- Drive consistent organic traffic to your website
Organic traffic is valuable for every brand – no matter what your brand or industry is because it doesn’t involve any financial investments from the business. It has been observed that companies generate two times more revenue from organic search traffic than other sources.
Authentic traffic comes in when your audience actively engages with your business. The traffic generated organically is wholly based on the content you create and the keywords you use in your content – only at a scale.
Questions to Ask Yourself Before Creating a SaaS SEO Strategy
Before you go ahead and create a SaaS SEO strategy, ask yourself these questions to get clarity:
- Why would someone search for your product on your website?
- What are the immediate problems that your ideal customers are trying to solve?
- Who are your direct and indirect competitors in the industry?
- Which category does your product belong to?
- What are the products you integrate with?
How to Create an SEO Strategy for Your SaaS Company?
- Know what your goals and KPIs are
Irrespective of the industry your brand belongs to, it is essential to clearly understand your goals and how you want to measure progress in the future.
For example, your goals can be like:
- Attracting warm leads
- Lowering customer acquisition costs
- Get 10k Sign-ups
Now comes the KPIs. Once you know your goals, it’s time to figure out your KPIs – without which you wouldn’t know if your goals bring results.
For example, based on your goals, your KPIs can be like:
- CTR, or Click Through Rate, shows the percentage of people who clicked on your site in the SERPs.
- Organic traffic informs you about how many people have visited your website from the search engines.
You get the gist. There are several KPIs that you can go for based on your goals.
- Create customer personas for a better understanding
As the most evident next step, it’s time to create your ideal customer personas. The first step is to do your research.
FYI, customers are real, but customer personas are entirely fictional and only have your ideal customers’ characteristics and behavior patterns.
Their personas have specific details like age, location, gender, hobbies, interests, search patterns, use of social media, challenges, desires – and more.
You’re probably wondering – “Now, what does that have to do with SaaS SEO?” right? Well, it’s one of the most important assets because it helps you identify your target audience and understand what problems they are facing and what solutions they are looking for.
There are a range of tools and templates available online that you can use to create customer personas for your own SaaS business.
- Get to know what your competitors are doing
Be it any SEO, knowing what your competitors are up to and tracking their activities remains the key to improving your performance. You are probably wondering why it’s so important.
Analyzing your competitors (those with similar products to yours) allows you to understand what will work in the industry and what won’t. This gives you the scope to capitalize on the strengths and avoid the problems your competitors have faced.
Let’s say you are writing a blog on “X Tips for Social Media Marketing,” and you want to outrank your competitors. Well – but how do you do that?
- Go to any keyword research tool you have.
- Pick the top two to three ranking content for your primary keyword.
- In your tool, find “Content Gap.”
- Paste those links on the page and start comparing.
- It will give you a list of keywords you aren’t ranking – but your competitors are.
This will give you a direction for creating an SEO strategy that will drive growth and conversions for your website.
- Understand user intent and perform keyword research
Did you know that – in just six months, Shane Barker ranked with 1800+ words on Google’s page 1? Guess what – he didn’t just stuff in keywords – instead, he aligned the target keywords with his ideal user intent.
First, use a keyword research tool to list down your seed keywords. If you aren’t using any paid tool, you can use Q&A sites, forums, or Google’s auto-suggest queries.
Source: Ahrefs
Now that you have all the keywords, it’s time to work on the search intent. Try to group all your keywords and categorize them into multiple search intents. It is usually done to figure out why your users are searching for a specific keyword and what problems they are facing that result in the search – and you will have to offer the exact solution to that particular problem.
- Create optimized and targeted content
Now that all the significant blockers are out of the way – it’s time to create keyword-optimized content that’s ideally targeted for your audience.
First, your primary focus should always be on the user’s query. Look for what your ideal audience generally searches for, when they do that, their journey, and so on.
While creating content, ensure that:
- You are exploring content domains your competitors still need to do, mainly focusing on interactive content that attracts and engages the audience.
- Structure your content so that it becomes easy for your audience to glance through and engage – even though they need more time to read it thoroughly.
- Make sure you can leave an impression with the headlines you choose. Optimized keywords won’t cut – because the headlines ultimately hook your readers.
- Structure it better using bullet points, more white spaces, and shorter paragraphs – making it easier for your audience to read through.
Now that you know how to create great content, it’s time to introduce you to one of the most popular content planning tools of almost every industry – the content calendar.
Maintaining a content calendar manually and on spreadsheets is excellent, but you only deprive yourself of some of the best features by not automating the whole process.
Instead of manual options, you can use an automated content planner that lets you schedule content for different channels from a single dashboard and get insights and suggestions regarding the best times to post your content for every channel.
- Stay in sync with your on-page and technical SEO
Source: MADX
By now, you probably have it – that SEO is more than researching new keywords and inserting them throughout the content – which is a significant part of off-page SEO.
Technical SEO has a huge role- optimizing elements on your website, like site speed, schema markup, and more, for improved visibility and rankings.
Similarly, there’s on-page SEO, which refers to the non-technical optimizations of your website, such as determining content quality, metadata, alt tags, internal links, and more.
- Build links to establish yourself as an authority
With good-quality backlinks, it’s possible to increase your rankings in the SERP results and gain visibility from your audience. Moreover, to ensure that you are perceived as an authority in your domain, you must have quality backlinks to your website.
But would the websites struggle so much if it was so easy to secure quality backlinks?
Here are some of the best strategies for you to build links:
- Find unlinked mentions
Several times, other websites can use your media files, charts, graphs, quotes, etc, in their content – but might need to add links to your website. All you need to do is find such unlined mentions using Google Alerts and ask them to add the necessary link to your website.
- Outreach via email
It is one of the most proven methods to secure backlinks to your website. Just write a short message and a quick note explaining how they can benefit and get value by sharing a backlink. The best way to do it is by reaching out to the websites already linking back to your competitor’s websites, as they are more likely to link to similar domains.
- Fix broken links
Broken links can be very harmful to your website and affect your site’s rankings. However, most top websites in the industry might ignore such links. You can use this opportunity to reach out to those websites and offer your website link as an alternative to replace them – obviously, backed by a good reason.
Take the Next Step!
While most SaaS businesses think that there’s no way out than paid campaigns, there’s a massive difference that you can make by investing in effective SaaS SEO strategies. We have given you a probable roadmap and plan of what to do and how to execute – but as your goals change, so will the strategy. The key is to evolve and eventually come up with better strategies!
