SaaS SEO: A Scalable Process You Can Use To Rank Faster
As a software-as-a-service (SaaS) owner or marketer, you want to generate as many loyal customers as possible, right?
And to do that, you want to build awareness of your product by getting more website visitors, yes?
Cold traffic isn’t good enough. You need buyer-intent traffic.
So, what’s the solution?
Search engine optimization (SEO) is what you’re looking for!
Let’s get straight to the point: this guide explains how to develop an effective SaaS SEO strategy to improve your search engine rankings and generate more subscribers.
Determine your software’s unique selling proposition
You may have this part covered already. I hope you do but we’re going to cover it anyway because it’s essential for any SaaS SEO strategy.
If you’re working in a competitive industry, you’ve got your work cut out for you.
But there is a way to cut through the noise, drum up interest in your software, and generate loyal customers that’ll be unlikely to churn. And that is by knowing what makes your product different from everyone else’s.
You have to put yourself in the shoes of your target customers and ask this question:
“Why should I buy your product instead of [leading competitor]?”
There are steps to take to help you devise a plan and win over new customers, starting with competitor research.
Read and use constructive feedback on sites like G2, Capterra, etc., to help fuel your business.
For example, if most of the reviews of a competitor are unhappy about its software’s speed, make sure that yours loads much faster. Or, if it has an unfriendly interface, design yours so that users can easily access the features they need to complete their tasks.
Next, you must properly communicate the benefits your customers will get using your SaaS.
Sure, you’ll probably have similar features to that of your leading competitors. They’re probably your organic search competitors too.
But what’s important is to show your target audience tangible advantages they can achieve with your product.
Examples include the ability to collect more accurate data in less time, produce more actionable business insights that result in increased revenue, and more.
To better illustrate this, publish case studies on how your SaaS helped people achieve a specific result. Create a page that shares their problems and how your product is the solution to all of it, enabling their brands to grow and become more efficient.
If your SaaS is fairly new in the industry, invite handpicked business owners (or social media influencers) to use your tool for free in exchange for an honest review. You can showcase their positive feedback on your site to convince people of the value of your products.
Now, if they share negative reviews of your product, consider this a blessing in disguise – use the criticism to improve your product and win over more people!
Finally, talk about your “why.” You want people to resonate with your journey, starting with why you created this product in the first place and what problems you’re trying to solve with it. Then publish this story on your site’s About Us page for everyone to see.
This helps you align with people who share the same pain points and values as you.
This isn’t new or groundbreaking but it’s essential. It allows you to find insights you weren’t aware of before that make your SaaS stand out from the rest. By looking outward – comparing your SaaS with others and getting feedback from your target audience – you’ll learn more about what your product can do, allowing it to carve a niche in the industry.
Develop your customer personas
The next logical step is to develop and refine customer personas for your SaaS.
Check your data from Google Analytics to find out more information about who your visitors are. In particular, it can tell you which region most of your visitors come from.
Google Analytics can also tell you which sites drive the most referral traffic to your site (organic, social media, email, etc.). This helps you determine which channels to focus on when developing your marketing strategy.
It can also give you insights into their buying journey by identifying which part of the sales funnel the majority of users leave your site. This is vital because you want to bring in as many customers as possible, and you can only do that if
For other information pertaining to the psychographics and firmographics of your personas, you will have to send your current customers a survey form to fill out using Survey Monkey. The form should ask for their age, pain points, goals, company size, industry, and other details to help give you a full picture of who uses your SaaS.
Regarding how they interact with your website, you can use UserPilot to monitor their engagement. The tool collects product analytics to help you better understand how they use the different software features.
Once you’ve gathered all this data, use it to come up with different personas to cater for your SEO campaign. You can feed all the information to ChatGPT to help brainstorm for persona ideas.
The number of personas you’ll create depends on the gathered data. If people from different industries use your software, you may want to create a persona for each industry so you can properly target them in your campaign. The same goes for users in different age groups, income brackets, job titles, and other variables.
Perform in-depth keyword research for the different customer journey stages
Now that we’re done with the initial research phase, it’s time for the actual SEO tasks, starting with keyword research.
However, instead of just finding keywords with high search volume and low competition, we must take a more calculated approach to finding which search queries to optimize for your SaaS website.
The goal of all the keywords you’ll research and create content for is to generate visitors into long-time subscribers of your software. And to do that, you need to be aware of the customer journey:
- ToFu (top of the funnel) – People that are unfamiliar with your SaaS but are willing to learn more.
- MoFu (middle of the funnel) – People that are familiar with your product and highly consider subscribing to it.
- BoFu (bottom of the funnel) – People that want to know how to subscribe to your SaaS.
With these three stages in the customer journey, you want to find the best keywords that help bring people down the BoFu from MoFu.
You can do this by assigning keywords relevant to your SaaS with informational intent to the ToFu, commercial intent to the MoFu, and transactional intent to the BoFu.
SEO tools like SE Ranking show the intent of each keyword idea when you type your topic or seed keyword in the search bar. This is similar to Semrush’s Keyword Magic Tool.
Informational keywords provide comprehensive details about the topic. Most long-tail keywords and question keywords (search queries that begin with “what,” “why,” “when,” “where,” and “how”) are informational in nature.
Optimizing for these keywords also helps you showcase your expertise and knowledge in the niche. By creating helpful content for these terms and eventually showing up on Google searches for them, you generate more traffic to your SaaS website and spread the word about your product.
Next, commercial keywords are terms people type into search when they want to learn more about the product. Most search queries with this intent start with “best,” “top,” and “cheapest”, followed by the product or tool type to help find pages that list software that meets these qualifiers and describe each in detail to help users make an informed decision.
From SE Ranking, you can filter the results to only search terms with a certain intent. In this case, you will see these terms with commercial intent for “project management tool.”
There are also commercial keywords that enable you to piggyback off more popular tools in the market. For instance, if you’re an email marketing provider in the ecommerce space, one of your main competitors is MailChimp. From here, search for “mailchimp alternatives” and “mailchimp vs” and show suggestions with high search volume and low difficulty to find branded commercial keyword opportunities.
Finally, transactional keywords help users find specific pages where they can sign up for your site. These keywords usually involve including your brand name followed by phrases such as “pricing,” “free trial,” “plans,” and “discount,” among others.
Unless you have a well-known brand online, the search volume of these keywords is very low. However, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t optimize for them, as they are integral to your customer journey.
Eventually, once your site gains traction, you can get more people to search for these terms in Google search. More importantly, setting up these pages on your website allows you to convert visitors into customers successfully!
An extra step you want to take in your keyword research is to cluster similar search terms to avoid keyword cannibalization. SE Ranking has a feature where you paste all the keywords you’ve researched thus far and group them according to their relevance and similarity.
Once they’re grouped, you can create content optimized for that specific group. This enables you to target multiple keywords from a single page simultaneously!
Develop topical maps
To take your keyword research to the next level, you must organize them into their respective clusters. For instance, if you have social media marketing software, pages optimized for keywords about social media content planning belong to a separate cluster, those about community management belong to another one, and so on.
The pages in each cluster link to each other exclusively; they don’t link to pages outside of their respective cluster.
This is a topical map at play. By exclusively linking to relevant pages together, you help strengthen your website’s relationship with your main topic, allowing you to rank higher for your target keywords.
And you can further improve your keyword rankings and organic search traffic by creating more clusters with pages optimized for relevant keywords to your main topic!
A topical map is composed of a pillar page (a related keyword of your main topic) and supporting articles (long-tail keywords of your pillar page’s keyword).
You can have as many supporting articles as you like for your pillar pages. A supporting article can even become a pillar page with supporting articles linking to it!
There are many ways you can develop a topic cluster and how they link to each other. For example, Kyle Roof’s reverse silo structure requires that all supporting articles link to the pillar page while each article links to the one beside it. This allows the link juice to circulate all over the cluster while prioritizing the pillar page.
With this information, you can fill in the gaps with your researched keywords. Optimize your pillar pages with the commercial and transactional keywords and create supporting articles under each that target informational keywords.
Your topical map can be expanded to a point where you can have multiple clusters, each with lots of pages under it. To help you visualize your topical map and to know which pages link to which, use a mind-mapping tool like Coggle to plan out your map in advance.
Content product-led content optimized for your keywords
Once you have your map ready, it’s time to create optimized content for your SaaS website.
Since you want people to view your software as a solution to their problems, you want to mention your brand as much as possible in the content.
Even if the page’s search intent is to inform people about the topic, you want to include your tool to enrich the content with value, making it more useful not only for your audience but also for search engines.
This is what makes product-led content different from, say, a blog post or regular content writing. By making the software an integral part of the content regardless of keyword intent, you feature it as the best solution to their problems.
Of course, you can’t just mention your product’s name in the content and expect people to subscribe to it immediately.
Instead of saying what your product is about, show it in the content. Post screenshots of the tool in action as it addresses a specific pain point readers experience about the topic and how your tool can alleviate it. Even better, embed professionally made how-to video guides in the content so readers know how to use the tool for their purpose and leave nothing to the imagination.
An example of a SaaS company with excellent product-led content is Userpilot. It constantly discusses its software on its informational content so people can develop a strategy using Userpilot as the driving force behind it.
Another company to emulate with your product-led content is Visme. In addition to suggesting its software for creating documents using its templates, the site creates visual content on the page using its photo editing tool!
Of course, aside from prominently featuring your SaaS in the content, you also want to optimize it for search engines. You can do this by incorporating natural language processing (NLP) keywords throughout the content.
This achieves two things: avoid keyword stuffing so you don’t have to mention your keyword repeatedly and help search engines better understand your content by using related words and phrases.
To find out NLP keywords to include in your content, which is critical in semantic SEO, use Frase.
Click here to sign up for a free trial of Frase.
Enter the keyword in the text bar and initiate the tool to research the top-ranking pages for the same search phrase.
Enter as many keywords in the content naturally as possible to increase your content score. The goal is to at least meet the average content score of the top-ranking pages on SERPs, but if you can create content with even higher scores, the better!
The tool also tells you how many images to include in the post and how long the content should be to match the top-ranking pages for your keyword, increasing its chances of ranking on SERPs!
Observe best on-page SEO practices
Before publishing the content, you need to review to see if it checks all the boxes required in on-page optimization.
Is the keyword included in the title, meta description, and the first 50 words of the content?
Does it have outbound and internal links?
Did you include original images in it? And does each image have an alt text that mentions the keyword?
There are many things to consider, which is why it’s best to have a tool to monitor them.
If you have a WordPress site, we recommend using the SEOPress plugin to help you.
Once activated, go to the post or page editor and scroll down the page to see the Content Analysis section.
Enter the keyword in the text bar to see which page factors you must work on to make the content more optimized.
Click on the drop-down button to see exactly what the issue is and how you can resolve it.
Remember that you don’t have to follow all the advice in this section. You still need to use your critical thinking and determine whether implementing these suggestions will make sense for your content.
Regardless, having a tool that analyzes your content removes the guesswork and makes the process much easier.
Optimize for user experience
Here’s the hard, cold, truth about SEO: ranking is just half the battle.
Your page appearing at the top of the search results on organic search doesn’t automatically make it a great thing.
Generating thousands of visitors a month sounds good on paper, but it’s just a vanity metric at the end of the day.
What’s even more important is what visitors do once they arrive at your page.
Do they look at other pages on your site, especially your pricing page? Do they sign up for a free trial or go straight to purchasing a paid subscription?
These are things that matter even more, and it’s part of an SEO’s job to at least provide suggestions on how to get visitors to enjoy your website even more by worrying about the site’s user experience (UX).
A factor that affects UX is loading speed. A slow-loading website prevents people from accessing your website properly, leading them to go to your competitors instead.
This is the last thing you need so you want to figure out a way to load your pages faster than before. So, the first thing you must do is to know the exact issues that are slowing your website down.
Use Google PageSpeed Insights to quickly scan a page on your site and see its Core Web Vitals (CWV) scores. These scores indicate the page’s efficiency and speed of loading the various elements.
If your page received a low score, scroll down to the Diagnostics area to determine the exact issues.
Some of the suggestions here might be too technical for you to implement yourself, so you may need to pass them onto a developer.
But for the rest, you can solve them by installing caching and image optimization plugins.
The former creates a static version of a web page the user visited. This way, whenever they revisit the page, it’ll load the static version saved in the browser, loading the page much faster.
Plugins like WP Rocket can do this on your site plus a lot more like GZIP compression (compresses web pages in server and decompresses them on browser), lazy loading (only load elements that show up on screen), and more.
NitroPack is another good option as well. It works with WordPress and custom websites.
This cloud-based performance optimization tool works the same way as WP Rocket, but it has its own image optimization features and CDN capabilities.
Speaking of image optimization, you can download the ShortPixel WordPress plugin if you want a separate plugin for compressing image file sizes without compromising quality.
It optimizes images you’ll upload to your site and the existing ones saved in your library. This ensures that all images will be optimized to improve your page’s loading speed and efficiency.
Develop an effective link building strategy
Like it or not, link building is one of the most important ranking factors despite being the most difficult.
Think of backlinks as a form of recommendation in the eyes of search engines. Sort of like votes.
The goal is to have as many authoritative websites linking to your website as possible. The more high-quality backlinks your site has, the higher your keyword rankings should be.
At the same time, a single backlink from a trustworthy site is worth more than a thousand links from low-quality sites. So, it’s about balancing the quality and quantity.
That said, building sustainable backlinks is all about connections and relationships. The more you foster these connections with website owners, the more links you can build in the long run.
But first, you need to identify which domains you’d like to get links from. To do this, look at domains that link to your competitors, not to your website.
SE Ranking’s Backlink Gap Analysis can help you with this. Enter your domain and a competitor (5 max) on the text bar.
Click here to get a free trial of SE Ranking.
Note: To know who your search engine competitors are, run your domain URL using the tool’s Competitive Research feature and find the Organic Competitors section to see the top six sites ranking for the same keywords as your site. Click on the detailed report to see more domains to choose from.
Once you’ve entered the domains, you will see a table of the domains with the highest Domain Trust (DR) where your competitors have backlinks from. Click on the drop-down button to show which page on the domain your competitor has a link from and which page it links to.
The goal here is to find low-hanging fruit links first that you can do on your own without little to no resistance.
For example, creating a profile on Pinterest and linking to your site from the profile only takes a few minutes. While this wouldn’t be as valuable as, say, a link within the content body of a page that ranks on Google, there’s no harm in picking these low hanging fruits first.
Next, prioritize publication sites from the lists, as they are most likely to accept a guest post from you. Check how your competitors build links from these domains and replicate their technique.
Now, the benefit of SaaS businesses like yours is that you can use your software as link bait to get site owners to agree to publish your guest or insert your links into their existing content.
In fact, this is the exact strategy that big brands like Canva use to generate more high-quality links!
Keep in mind that Canva’s outreach manager didn’t use the words “link” in the email. Instead, he said to “[add] Canva as a resource,” to the page. He also mentioned “[exploring] the option of offering you something,” which hints at an incentive but is not clear as to what it is in this email.
This is a smart play by Canva, as its carefully worded email makes it open to interpretation while being coy about their real intentions, which is to get a backlink from your site page to theirs.
In this case, leverage your software to secure backlinks that you normally wouldn’t close without a tool. Take inspiration from Canva’s email by stating the product’s benefits to encourage people to link to your site and claim their “reward!”
Monitor SaaS SEO results and performance
From the steps above, you should have developed an SEO strategy for your SaaS business designed to help increase your search engine ranking, ready for implementation.
Once the campaign is underway, you’ll need to track its progress using Google Search Console (GSC) and Google Analytics (GA).
GSC allows you to examine its Search Performance by examining the number of clicks the site received over time after launching your campaign.
Monitor the pages that have increased their traffic since then by comparing them to the previous period.
The data here gives you an idea of underperforming pages that you need to optimize in your next campaign.
It should also tell if the pages you just worked on are now generating search traffic.
Google Analytics can also monitor your search traffic, but its main purpose here is to help you understand your site’s customer journey.
Go to Reports and click Monetization > Purchase Journey. The page shows you the conversion rate for each step and the abandonment rate for each page.
Your goal is to decrease the abandonment rate so you can maximize your conversions and attract more subscribers to your software.
In this case, ensure an efficient and fast-loading website to retain visitors and prevent them from leaving.
Of course, speed is just one of the many factors that affect conversions. Others include design, layout, content, and CTA placement.
To determine which of these factors is impacting the abandonment rate, use heat mapping tools like Hotjar to monitor user behavior and see which elements on the page they interact with the most.
The data gathered by this tool is important because it helps you optimize the layout of your product and landing pages to help people engage with them and move to the next step of the customer journey.
For example, if you see that more than half of your visitors leave before they see your CTA, then consider moving the CTA higher on the page to improve its visibility and get more people to perform your desired action.
Conduct an SEO audit
You want Google to index and crawl your pages properly, but it won’t be able to do that if your site has technical SEO issues.
Similar to on-page SEO, technical SEO has so many moving parts that it’s hard to keep up with each one.
To make matters worse, a certain level of SEO knowledge and experience is required to resolve them appropriately. This is especially true for SaaS websites because they have page setups that are much more complex than that of a regular site.
Regardless of your SEO proficiency, you should start analyzing your site to uncover potential SEO issues preventing Google from properly indexing your site pages.
Use SE Ranking’s Site Audit feature to identify problems organized by severity and take action on the most problematic issues on your site first.
Click the drop-down button to learn more about the issue, the affected pages, and how to fix them.
Keep in mind that not all issues need to be resolved immediately. You don’t have to create meta descriptions for all your pages and add alt text to all images right now since they have a minimal impact on your site’s ranking.
Nonetheless, you can start implementing the changes based on the audit report. Or you can defer to your SEO specialist and get them to implement the suggestions.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is SEO in SaaS?
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of making SaaS websites appear at the top of search results for their target keywords. This involves finding the best keywords to optimize, observing the best on-page SEO practices, and building high-quality backlinks.
How is SaaS SEO different from traditional SEO?
SaaS SEO differs from traditional SEO because it focuses not necessarily on generating lots of traffic but on attracting highly qualified traffic that converts into customers and paying subscribers.
What is a SaaS SEO agency?
A SaaS SEO agency helps businesses with their SEO efforts by researching, developing, and implementing robust strategies to help them rank on search engines to generate traffic and conversions with their software.
What are SaaS keywords?
SaaS keywords are search queries specific to a SaaS website. They help visitors find its site pages on search results, learn more about its software, and convert them into paying customers.
Conclusion
Creating a solid SEO strategy for your SaaS business is crucial to your marketing strategy. Nailing it from the beginning to the end helps your software build online visibility and generate interest from highly qualified customers.
Following the steps outlined in this guide, from initial research to observing the campaign results, will give you a repeatable SEO strategy for your site, leading to greater traffic and conversion. Best of luck!
Just remember that getting results from SEO takes time, effort, and budget. You can’t publish a few articles, build a few links and expect results.