When you look at the growth of various SaaS companies, the reason behind their success seems to be very clear. In most of those companies, search engine optimization (SEO) is one of the essential factors that drive their success. However, not just any SEO strategy will produce the desired output.
To make a perfect SEO strategy for the SaaS domain, how SEO is useful for SaaS, which key areas you need to focus on, and, more importantly, how to appear in front of your target audience more frequently.
In this article, we are going to understand what SaaS SEO is, its importance, and some tips that can help you create an effective SEO strategy for a SaaS company. Without further ado, let’s jump right into it.
Understanding SaaS SEO
When you use SEO to increase the organic traffic for a SaaS company’s website, the process is called SaaS SEO. The aim here is to make the page appear as high as possible on the search engine result page (SERP) for a list of keywords relevant to the company.
There are a lot of SaaS companies in the market that turn to performance marketing (PPC, affiliate marketing, social ads, etc.) to scale new customer acquisition rapidly. However, these companies now realize that the cost of performance marketing is increasing with every passing day. And also, relying solely on these paid acquisitions can turn out to be disadvantageous in the long run because when you reduce or turn off paid advertising, the traffic associated with it also stops.
This makes it crucial for SaaS companies to have robust SEO strategies. The SEO-driven traffic is consistent and grows exponentially. SaaS businesses want to diversify their traffic sources and keep the cost per acquisition sustainable which is why they are open to investing more in the SEO channel.
SaaS SEO is mainly about increasing the visibility of the platform and putting it in front of:
- Searchers who already know who you are but want to know more about your company and products
- People who know that software like yours exit, and who want to know if that software fits their needs.
- People who are ready to purchase software like yours and are searching for pricing and deals.
- Visitors who are looking for content related to your software. They might need your software in the future.
While there are many differences between SEO for other businesses and SaaS SEO, it is essential to understand that the main ranking factors of Google remain the same for all types of businesses. These factors are- content, backlinks, and RankBrain.
The SaaS SEO strategy must have these factors based on the creation of great content that answers the queries of visitors and earns backlinks naturally.
Importance Of SEO for SaaS Companies
As we mentioned above, SEO companies are quick to turn to paid advertising and performance marketing to drive their success. However, many of those companies have started to focus and shift more toward SEO.
But what does SEO do to be such a crucial part of the business strategy of SaaS companies, and more importantly, why should your company invest in a strong SEO strategy?
Helps in scaling the growth exponentially
Incorporate content-led SEO in your SaaS SEO strategy correctly, and this will bring exponential growth to your business. Look at the graphic below that shows the compounding effect that evergreen content can have on your growth.
The moment you start creating best-in-class content, Google starts to take notice and drives more traffic toward your website.
The right content strategy looks something like this:
- Create content based on topically connected keywords
- Promote these pieces of content to earn links
- Witness the increase in organic traffic, and eventually, rankings
- Utilize the data from the first launch to further optimize and improve the content
- Get consistent traffic and achieve top rankings
- Repeat the same process for more sets of keywords
Reduces cost per acquisition
You are supposed to pay for every single click on your website when you’re using paid ads and marketing. Whenever you drive traffic through these channels, you have to pay. With time, what happens is that the cost-per-acquisition increases after you exhaust the set of audiences that are most likely to convert. In simple terms, as the ratio of converting customers to the total visitors’ decreases, the price you pay per acquisition increases.
On the other hand, SEO does the complete opposite of this as it decreases the cost per acquisition over time. Yes, SEO also needs ongoing investments, but it does not increase with every click.
Convert customers from other channels
The reality of SaaS SEO is that it requires a decent amount of investment in content creation. But this content that you create not only helps in ranking your website higher on the SERP, it can also be used for email marketing, social media strategy, or even driving some amount of paid traffic.
The perfect SaaS SEO strategy can ensure that customers from other channels are also converted. And now that we’re clear on why SaaS companies should focus more on SEO, let’s jump into some tips you can use to create an effective SaaS SEO strategy.
How To Create An Effective SaaS SEO Strategy
Based on the factors that are discussed above, here are four tips to have a successful SEO strategy as a SaaS business:
Optimize Your Content
Content, as we have discussed above, plays a major role in the success of SaaS SEO – both in quantity and quality. When you are optimizing your content for SaaS companies, focus on:
1. Optimizing content for the interested audience by delivering relevance and value. Your focus should not only be on pleasing the algorithms of search engines.
2. The keyword research should be up to the mark. You should generally aim for three things:
- Relevant keywords for both- your SaaS business and your audience
- Keywords with decent search volume
- Keywords whose competition is manageable
3. Try to use the topic cluster approach as much as you can. Here, the longer pillar page targets the main keyword, and the short content pieces cover the topics related to the keyword.
4. It is essential to include your keywords naturally for the human audience when approaching keyword density. This will help your business develop more natural content using semantically related keywords LSI keywords).
Technical SEO For SaaS
The second aspect that is essential to focus on your site is technical optimization. When it comes to auditing and improving the technical SEO elements of your SaaS website, there are two major goals:
- Optimizing your site in such a way so that it can be easily crawled and indexed by Google and other popular search engines.
- Optimize your site for the user experience which includes mobile responsiveness, fast loading speed, and various other factors to keep the audience hooked to the site.
Technical SEO is a broad concept, and it can overwhelm you at times. This is why there are so many tools that not only help you check website ranking but also help in making the changes in SEO that can help your rankings improve at a good rate.
Optimize For Rich Snippet
The rich snippet feature that appears for some queries is relatively new for Google. These snippets are positioned above the top ranking position and steal a heavy amount of traffic. There are three main factors that can help you in getting featured as a rich snippet. They are:
1. The keyword that you are targeting must have a featured snippet. There are various tools available in the market that can show which keywords have an opportunity for rich snippets.
2. More than 99% of the featured snippets come from pages that already appear on the first page.
3. Your page should be properly formatted with structured data markups which essentially assign properties and attributes to all the elements that exist on your page.
You should put effort into finding keywords that have a featured snippet opportunity to rank even on the top-ranking page.
Optimize for Voice
With each passing day, more and more people are searching on Google using the voice search option. A stat by Google shows that more than 40% of adults perform more than one voice search every day.
The best way for SaaS to target voice SEO is by focusing on conversation search queries. The three essential factors that can help you with this are:
1. Google tends to show the result for voice search from the top three ranking pages. So it is best to stick with a good and usual SEO strategy.
2. Google gives the results from rich snippets if they are available for the searched keyword.
3. Your focus should be on the questions that are generally asked in your niche, and, more importantly, you should include this question as either a subheading or as a FAQ. The better you answer this question than your competition, the more likely you are to get featured.
End Words
For any SaaS company, growth in traffic is an elementary need. Because the more people who are aware of you and your product, the more sales you can make. If you can get your SaaS SEO correct, your acquisitions will improve by a decent margin. This article was about SaaS SEO, how it could help SaaS companies, and some tips that lead you in the right direction, i.e., towards success.
About the Author
Vibhu Dhariwal is Co-Founder & Director of Marketing at Digital Gratified, a Digital Marketing & Web Development company. He likes sharing his experience in outreach marketing, link building, content marketing, and SEO with readers. To know more about him, you can connect with him on LinkedIn.
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