SaaS Technical SEO: A Bull%^*!-Free Guide From the Experts
SaaS technical SEO is the process of optimising a software-as-a-service website for maximum search engine visibility. Its main purpose is to make sure that search engines have no issues crawling and indexing your site.
Without proper technical optimisation, your website’s pages can easily be outranked by your SaaS competitors who have leveraged Google’s ranking factors to reach more targeted traffic.
If you’re worried your SaaS company’s web pages aren’t ranking properly because you don’t know how to maximise your settings, keep reading. We’ve created a bullshit-free technical SEO guide for SaaS (and other) sites.
What Is SaaS Technical SEO?
SaaS technical SEO is the process of optimising a software-as-a-service website to ensure it is crawlable, indexable, and visible in search engines.
Technical SEO is one of the fundamental elements that make up search engine optimisation, alongside keyword research, on-page optimisation, and off-page optimisation.
The main objective of technical SEO for SaaS companies is to help Google and other search engines find your pages.
Technical enterprise SaaS SEO may sound intimidating, but the hardest part about knowing if your pages are sound is understanding what all those technical terms mean and why they’re important. If you’re interested in performing your own technical SEO audit, this guide will help.
How Often Should You Perform a SaaS SEO Audit?
It depends on how competitive your keyword is. If it’s a high-volume search term, you’ll have to keep an eye on your page’s performance and check your rankings frequently.
Other than keeping tabs on new competing pages, you’ll probably also need to make slight adjustments as Google’s algorithms change. The beauty of SEO is that if a page is well-written and correctly optimised, it requires very little maintenance.
What to Include in Your SaaS Technical SEO Checklist
We recommend doing a technical SEO audit if you notice some site-wide issues and not just problems on a particular page. If, on your journey, you come across settings that you think you need to change but the very idea of it gives you the same heart palpitations as a Starfleet redshirt being asked to flip a dubious switch, then maybe it’s best to leave it for your agency to fix.
Alternatively, if you’re the kinda person who follows the philosophy of f**k around and find out, why not change the setting and see what happens in the next few weeks?
If you fall into the latter category, carry on, brave soldier!
Tracking and Analytics
Your first order of business is to check your tracking.
Why go through all this effort to improve your results if you don’t have a reliable way of monitoring your progress? You can’t fix what you haven’t measured, so proper tracking setup on Google Analytics, Google Search Console, Tag Manager, etc. will ensure that you know your site’s…
- Traffic volume and sources
- User behaviour
- Conversion metrics
- Indexing and crawl errors
When you start tracking this data, you can prioritise the most essential issues first and then monitor these changes over time to see how they’ve impacted your results. All that to say, making sure you don’t have any tracking issues should be step numero uno.
Crawling and Indexing
For your web pages to appear in the SERPs, two things need to happen: crawling and indexing.
Crawling is when search engine crawlers (also known as spiders) discover new and refreshed content across the internet. If SEO crawlers like Googlebot can read and parse your pages, then the extracted information will be stored in the search engine’s index to be later retrieved whenever its content best matches that query. This is the top-level gist of how search engines work.
But if, for whatever reason, SEO spiders cannot crawl your website, then every other SEO effort won’t matter because your page doesn’t exist yet in Google’s library.
That’s why using tools like Screaming Frog or Ahrefs to crawl your site is the very next step in your technical audit. This helps simulate how search engines see your site and reveals any structural or on-page SEO issues that might prevent content from being found or understood.
There are several things to check if you want to make it easy for pages to be crawled and indexed:
- Orphaned pages: this is content without any internal links pointing to them, which makes it easy for crawlers to overlook them altogether. A good rule of thumb (although it’s not always possible) is to make every page two clicks away from the home page. If you find orphaned pages, be sure to link them!
- 301 (redirects) and 404 (broken links) status codes, and inconsistent or complicated URL formats (like spaces or capital letters) can create roadblocks for both search engines and users.
- Pages without self-referencing canonical tags, meta tags, and H1s are harder to index.
- Only pages that you want to rank should be indexed. Thank-you pages, test environments, or thin content should be flagged or removed from the sitemap.
- On the flip side, you want to make sure valuable content isn’t accidentally noindexed or blocked via the robots.txt file.
While we’re at it, you should check that there’s an updated XML sitemap on Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools, as it helps crawlers understand the structure and hierarchy of your most updated web pages.
If you run these checks and make your changes, re-run the crawl to confirm that the fixes have taken effect and that the SaaS website is now in a better position to be indexed properly.
Core Web Vitals
Core Web Vitals (CWV) is easy to understand once you know what the terms mean, but if they require fixing, you may have to rely on your web designers and developers for help. CWV is a set of three metrics that Google uses to determine user experience. CWV is a ranking factor, so it’s important to check and fix these issues right away.
CWV covers the following three elements:
- Loading performance
- Interactivity
- Visual stability
Loading speed, or largest contentful paint (LCP) as it’s officially known, measures how long it takes for the largest element on the webpage to appear on your screen. The ideal time for elements like the hero image or heading to appear is 2.5 seconds or less.
Interactivity, aka interaction to next paint (INP), looks at how responsive your webpages are when your users interact with the page. Whenever there’s a click, tap, or swipe how quickly does your page update the interface?
Visual stability, also called cumulative layout shift (CLS) , looks at how much the page layout shifts unexpectedly while the page is loading. If you’ve ever tapped the screen only to have the layout move a half-second before you touch it, which makes you tap on the wrong button, then you know how important a low CLS score is.
Core Web Vitals matter not only because they’re a ranking factor but because users are more likely to convert when they can engage with your content without getting frustrated.
To measure your CWV in your audit, you can use tools like Google PageSpeed Insights, Google Search Console, and Lighthouse.
Improve your CWV by:
- Making use of CDNs (content delivery networks)
- Compressing rich media and scripts
- Optimising server speed
- Caching
Duplicate Content
Does content belong on the technical side of an SEO audit? In certain ways yes. For example, duplicate content that’s trying to rank for the same keyword can cause technical issues like cannibalisation, which is when you have two or more pages serving the same search term.
When this happens, Google may struggle to decide which page deserves to rank higher. This state of confusion can actually lower the rankings for both pages, which is why we use the term keyword cannibalisation.
If you’re finding duplicate content, there are a few things you can do to fix it. Look at all the pages that are cannibalising and choose the best one. This usually means the one with the most traffic. You can then…
- Redirect (301) those pages to the preferred page
- Use canonical tags so that Google knows which page you want indexed
- Take the bits you like from the other lower-ranking pages and merge them with the main page. If there’s no traffic or backlinks to speak of, you can remove the pages.
Duplicate URLs may also cause technical SEO issues. That’s when different versions of the same page are being indexed, i.e.:
- http://www.supercoolsaas.com
- http://supercoolsaas.com
- https://www.supercoolsaas.com
- https://supercoolsaas.com
Your preferred domain should always be one of the secure versions, so always make sure the other three are redirecting to the main one.
Language and Internationalisation
SaaS businesses with websites in multiple languages need to make sure the right pages are being indexed and shown to the right people. Fortunately, hreflang tags can do that. These are bits of HTML or HTTP headers that tell search engines if the page has another version in a different language or region.
For example, when you go to IKEA’s website in the UK, you’re opening an English page with the GBP as the default currency. But if you’re on vacation in Italy and you want to take another look at the BILLY bookshelf, that same page will open in Italian, and the default currency will be set to EUR.
Why do you need to check the hreflang tag in your audit? Besides the fact that it increases user engagement, you don’t necessarily want both of these pages to be fighting for spots in the SERPs.
If your SaaS company serves an international audience, chances are you have different page versions. You’ll want to use bi-directional hreflang tags to tell Google that all these pages are valid language alternates of one another.
- Verify that the HTML lang attribute is present on each page.
- If your SaaS website is multilingual, check that the bi-directional hreflang tags are present in the XML sitemap or the head section of the page’s HTML.
- Make sure that the relevant countries are being served the correct URLs.
SSL Certificate
Your SSL certificate is a trust signal and tells search engines that your site is secure, which therefore provides SEO value. If you’re collecting user information, you’ll need to make sure that your site has an SSL certificate. If there’s a valid certificate, check all top-level pages for the padlock symbol.
Policies and Compliance
If your site serves clients in the EU or anywhere that’s governed by data privacy regulations like the GDPR, you’ll need to check that you’re compliant. That means, at the very least, that your site must display a cookie opt-in/out notification, and that your company’s privacy policy is available on all pages of the site.
If your site has e-commerce functionality, your terms and conditions and/or terms of service pages should also be present on every page.
While we’re no privacy compliance experts, we know that violating privacy laws can lead to very expensive fines, not to mention an erosion of customer trust.
Schema
Schema markup is code that’s added to a site to give Google more information about what it is and the type of content it has. The purpose of Schema is to give search engines more context and to help them “understand” a site better.
Aside from giving your site a competitive advantage, Schema markup optimizes your site in the following ways:
- Improved Search Engine Understanding: Schema markup has basically standardised the language used to describe the content of your pages. Using this structured data is like giving Google, Bing, and Yahoo! a phrasebook.
- Rich Results: When you add Schema markup to your web pages, search engines can use this data to generate visual changes to the SERP listing, including review stars, FAQs, etc. which makes it more eye-catching for the user.
- Voice Search Optimisation: Voice assistants like Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant use structured data to give detailed and accurate answers to voice queries.
- Local SEO: Schema markup can provide essential information about brick-and-mortar businesses, like NAP (name, address, phone number), opening hours, and even customer reviews.
- Knowledge Graph Integration: Marking up your content increases the chances of your information appearing in Knowledge Graph panels (those boxes of information that sometimes appear on the right-hand side of a SERP).
UX/Accessibility & CRO
Poor accessibility can seriously hurt your SaaS site’s technical SEO for a few reasons. First, and most importantly, if visually impaired people find your site hard to navigate, they’re just going to leave (and so they should).
Secondly, poor accessibility means bad user experience. When your site has problems like images without descriptions, content that’s all over the place, or issues with navigation, it will pretty much repel people away. High bounce rates will affect your site’s rankings, so it’s important to take UX seriously during your audit.
Lastly, your site is a reflection of your business and/or product. If there’s an issue with accessibility, users might start to think that your SaaS product is just as bad.
Here’s how you can make your site just a little bit better:
Accessibility
- Set the main font size to 16px or above.
- Make sure the headings and text are sufficiently visible against the website background.
- Make hyperlinks clearly contrasted with the main text.
- Make sure website navigation and menu are clear and user-friendly.
UX
- Check your website in several browsers for consistency.
- Make the logo clickable to the homepage.
- Ensure sitewide content is visually inviting with whitespace, short paragraphs, bullet points, and padding around headers.
- Include a favicon.
- For businesses with physical shopfronts, include a Google map on your Contact page.
- Include contact details throughout the site (email and phone) and display them as clickable links.
- Add a user-friendly 404 page (include helpful links for the user)
- Display breadcrumb trail marks.
- Check that all pages feature sensible CTAs with contrasting colours and buttons.
- Make blog content shareable across social media channels.
- Remove any instances of inconsistent branding (e.g., logo, colour scheme, messaging).
What About Open Graph Settings?
Web pages that are more accessible are more likely to receive a backlink or be shared on social media. With that in mind, don’t forget to check your Open Graph settings. These are meta tags that control how each page looks when it’s shared on social media.
Open Graph settings lets you control the page title, type (e.g., product, article, etc.), description, image, and URL, like so:
Benefits of Technical SEO for SaaS Companies
From duplicate content to canonical tags to XML sitemap optimisation, we’ve just covered everything you need to perform a comprehensive audit. So what’s the point of conducting a technical SEO audit?
What’s in it for you?
Better UX
User experience isn’t just about having the prettiest website. It’s also about functionality and trust. If you want potential clients to take your SaaS seriously, you need to make sure your site offers users a seamless and intuitive experience that doesn’t leave them suspecting you of being slow on the technological uptake.
A Competitive Edge
B2B software is the industrial farming industry of the 20th century; the quest for innovation has led to cutthroat competition and nothing but buying power for the end user.
Your competitors will take every opportunity to outrank you, so don’t expect to rest on the strength of your product alone. A technically optimised site brings you that much closer to dominating search engines.
Higher Rankings
What are we here for? Everything boils down to making your website more visible to your target audience. Moving up on SERPs and fine-tuning your content to ensure that the right people are finding you is why we do this. Your site’s technical settings do affect its rankings in the SERPs, so it should always be included in your SaaS SEO strategy.
Best Tools for Technical Optimisation
Google Search Console
Without Google Search Console (GSC), your technical SEO audit is going to be very difficult. GSC gives you direct insight into what Google has done to crawl and index your website. It offers first-party data, which is crucial for helping you address technical issues affecting your site’s search visibility. Besides crawling and monitoring, GSC helps you monitor your site’s overall site health.
You can also use it to:
- Spot issues like canonical tag conflicts, or disallowed paths in robots.txt.
- Submit your XML sitemap(s) and verify that Google is reading and indexing the correct URLs.
- Track how many URLs were discovered vs indexed.
- Identify which pages need speed improvements.
- Check if your pages are mobile-friendly.
- Find issues like clickable elements being too close, etc.
- Check if there are any pages accidentally set to noindex.
Screaming Frog
Most SEO agencies we know use Screaming Frog because of its comprehensive crawling capabilities. This indispensable technical SEO tool allows SaaS companies to find common SEO issues that could be affecting their indexing, rankings, and user experience.
Because Screaming Frog can crawl a website as thoroughly as a real bot, it will flag critical issues like:
- Broken links
- Non-indexable or blocked pages
- Redirect chains
- Missing or duplicate title tags, meta descriptions, and H1s
- Issues with canonical tags
- Orphaned pages
- Slow-loading pages
- Missing structured data
- Insecure content (i.e., HTTP instead of HTTPS)
Screaming Frog does offer a free version if you want to test it out before you invest.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics (GA4) gives you insights into metrics like bounce rate, average session duration, and pages per session. If you notice those numbers aren’t where they should be, GA can help you identify points of friction, which likely indicate technical issues.
For example, if one of your pages has a high bounce rate, you might discover (through GSC) that the page speed is quite slow. And then GA4 can help you monitor your page after you’ve made improvements to see how its traffic, engagement, and conversions have been impacted.
Get Started Now With Optimising Technical SEO Elements
Without technical SEO, even the best content will be ignored by search engines. Whether you’re scaling a high-growth SaaS brand or just trying to outrank a few pesky competitors, making sure your site is crawlable, indexable, and user-friendly gives you a serious edge.
