SEO for SaaS: No-Nonsense SEO Strategies for Sustainable Growth
The impact of SEO for SaaS companies cannot be overstated. As the software-as-a-service landscape grows increasingly competitive, organic search engine optimisation can push your solutions into the spotlight to draw potential clients directly to your product.
How Our Clients Did Last Month
Month-over-month traffic trends. Source: Google Search Console
If you want to unleash the full potential of strategic and no-nonsense Saas SEO strategies to reach the audience that matters most, keep reading.
What we’ll cover in this behemoth of a post:
B2B SaaS SEO Fundamentals
We’re not saying the person reading this doesn’t know what SaaS SEO is, but you’d be surprised how often marketing managers conflate SEO with advertising and social media, and other marketing channels. So, to make ourselves as clear as a new pane of glass, this is what we’re talking about when we say SaaS SEO:
The basics: Search engine optimisation is a set of techniques aimed at increasing your software website’s visibility in search engine results—without paying for placement. The big goal of SEO is to push your web pages as close as possible to the top of the search results. All SEO techniques generally fall into three categories: keywords, on-page SEO, and off-page SEO. When your target customer types a search term into Google et. al, a well-researched SEO strategy can help your site compete for the top spot. The more visible your site is, the more likely it is to attract clicks, and ultimately, drive more revenue.
Ta-dah!
But wait, there’s more!
Of course, we just described SEO in a perfect world. But unfortunately for your SaaS company, you’re not the only game in town, which means that all SEO activities are competitive. When you publish an optimised SEO page, you can’t expect to rank overnight. In fact, software as a service is such a highly competitive industry, that you need to be regularly monitoring and updating your pages to prevent other competitors from bumping you to page two, or otherwise known as that space beyond page one that only 1% of people go to.
Benefits of SEO for SaaS Businesses
Enhanced visibility and increased organic traffic is what (good) SEO is all about, and you’ll soon discover that SaaS SEO strategies offer added benefits to your marketing efforts and your bottom line:
Lead Generation and Customer Acquisition
When people actively search for SaaS solutions, appearing prominently in search results increases the likelihood of attracting qualified leads. By regularly publishing valuable landing pages using on-page best practices and relevant keywords, your SaaS company can drive targeted traffic to your website and convert those visitors into leads. Ensuring your pages are also fast, accessible, and easy to navigate will encourage your site visitors to spend time on each page, giving your brand more time to make an impact.
Long-term Cost Efficiency
Compared to other digital marketing channels like paid advertising, SEO can provide long-term cost savings. While it requires an upfront investment, the benefits of SEO can continue to yield results over time and with little ongoing maintenance. Once a SaaS company’s website and content are optimised, they can generate organic traffic and leads for months and even years before having to refresh their content. And all of this without having to spend a penny on advertising costs.
Plus, SEO can also reduce the cost of advertising by helping you leverage user data to make better ads.
Sooooo many wins.
Brand Authority and Credibility
E-E-A-T, which stands for expertise, experience, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness is the standard against which all content is measured by Google’s human content evaluators. Google doesn’t exactly admit to EEAT being a ranking factor, but as long as we’re splitting hairs, let’s just say that E-E-A-T is a ranking factor.
Pages that rank high in Google demonstrate E-E-A-T and boost the brand’s credibility. When a SaaS company consistently appears in top search results for relevant keywords, it signals to potential buyers that the company is reputable, trustworthy, and a leader in its industry. This can positively influence the decision-making process and increase the likelihood of conversions.
Competitive Advantage
The B2B software subscription model is made up of a million small fish and a few big sharks in a relatively small pond. In the competitive SaaS market, investing in SEO can provide a significant competitive advantage to give you a chance to stand out.
SEO isn’t a mindless exercise so much as a game of strategy and skill. It requires an understanding of how potential buyers search the internet and what keywords are most likely to help companies build momentum and divert traffic from the biggest names in the biz.
For example, we helped a cybersecurity SaaS company (whose name we’ve been asked not to disclose) understand that a target keyword like ‘penetration testing’ was simply too difficult of a keyword to compete for with the budget they provided.
That’s the same kind of energy as a new pizzeria in New York City trying to compete for the keyword ‘pizzeria New York’ and expecting to rank anywhere close to page one.
So, to help our cybersecurity friends achieve visibility as soon as possible, we started competing for lower-competition keywords that we knew they had a chance of ranking for: instead of creating content for the keyword ‘penetration testing’ we instead focused on words like ‘red team as a service’. Then, when we ranked for that word and established a steady stream of traffic, we moved on to a slightly more competitive term like ‘phishing assessments’. And then, they ranked high for that word, we moved on to something even harder. This strategy of becoming big sharks in small ponds rather than small fish in big ponds (excuse the fishy metaphors) was the fastest, most cost-effective, and most straightforward path to outranking the big sharks and increasing traffic at the same time.
We helped a top cybersecurity team achieve a 491% ROI in just 10 months.
How SaaS SEO Is Different from Traditional SEO
B2B SaaS SEO presents its own unique challenges that require careful consideration and a strategic approach. Yes, both generic and specific SEO techniques start off the same, but here are some niche-specific considerations to keep in mind when thinking about how to optimise your website:
You're Not Selling Solutions to the General Public
Unlike B2C apps that appeal to just about everyone, your SaaS product is most likely catering to a very narrow segment of the population. With such a small target audience, your SEO strategy for SaaS needs to be highly attuned to the wants and needs of your customers.
In SEO speak, that means your marketing team needs to spend as much time as possible ironing out the customer persona. Before you can even think about the search terms they use to find your software on Google, you have to get inside their head to understand their pain points, their roles within the companies they serve, and the potential biases they’re already going to have regarding SaaS products.
As we just mentioned, B2B SaaS is about as niche as it gets. If your solution is technically complex requiring integrations, APIs, or other setup dynamics, your content may need to focus more on offering free trials or demos before the potential customer fully understands the product features, functionalities, and integration capabilities.
You've Got a Long Buyer’s Journey Ahead of You
The buying journey of your target customer is neither short nor straightforward. The decision-making process can be long and complex, and you’re usually not only trying to convince one person, but several levels of executives.
It may take months of back and forth. Your potential client might be sitting on the fence for a while waiting for their director to make a decision and compare trials, features, prices.
The B2C SaaS buyer will use emotions and desires to justify their purchase, whereas your leads will spend an extensive amount of time researching, comparing, and trialling. The buyer may not be the person who ultimately ends up using the product, so the decision to purchase is often supported by a committee.
And what is your company doing while all this back and forth is happening? Providing full-funnel and high-value content that speaks to buyers at every stage of their journey.
You Don't Write Off Keywords With Limited Search Volume
Not many people on this planet are searching for ‘underwater temperature monitoring software’ but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. B2B SaaS keywords typically have very low search volume but high intent, which means that your strategy team should be laser focused on creating highly specific content.
When it comes to content for the SaaS buyer, quality and relevance is even more important.
Now that we’ve looked at how SaaS SEO efforts vary from generalised SEO, let’s take a look at some no-nonsense strategies that cut through the marketing fluff and tell you exactly what you need to do to make your site more visible.
No-Nonsense SEO Strategies for Your SaaS Website
There’s a lot of crap advice out there. Some SaaS SEO agencies will tell you how to do things just to confuse you on purpose.
Enough with the nonsense. Here’s how to do it:
Build Your Repertoire of SEO Tools
SEO specialists aren’t sitting in a lab surrounded by abacuses, sextants, and counting machines to develop their strategies. Sure, we use our heads. Yes, we have skills and experience to help contextualise the data.
But 👏 we 👏 use 👏 technology 👏 too 👏
We’re talking about analytics tools, AI, automation, machine learning. Anyone who tries to tell you they’re too old school to be using SEO tools is really just making more work for themselves and billing you for it.
SEO companies use tech for keyword research, for building content, for monitoring site performance, for everything. We use tools like Google Analytics, Semrush, SE Ranking, Screaming Frog, Neuron, and Ahrefs.
But it’s not the tools that make us an agency. It’s not even understanding how to use them that makes us good at what we do (although obviously that helps). It’s knowing how to leverage the data. It’s knowing what the data actually means and understanding which buttons to press because of it.
So what does all this mean for you? First things first, build your SEO tech stack and start with Google Analytics. You will never get the insights you need to build a strong strategy without knowing where your traffic is coming from and which pages are working.
You’ll see as we keep moving through this post how tech is essential to SEO.
Define Your Business Goals and KPIs
What are you looking for? More awareness of your products or services? More qualified leads? Lower acquisition costs? Understanding what your ultimate goals are will help shape your SEO strategy and also determine how you’ll interpret your data.
For example, if you want your site to start generating more revenue, you’ll look at the number of users requesting free trials, demos, and comparison charts. If your business goal is more awareness of a certain product or service, you’ll want to look at the number of informational pages around that topic and develop a full-funnel content strategy with backlinks from relevant sites.
A customer sign-up isn’t the only key performance indicator. By understanding your goals, your marketing team knows which stakes to put in the ground.
Know Your Customer
Now that you know what you want, it’s time to understand what your target audience wants. To do that, you need to know who they are first. Trust us when we tell you that not understanding who your target audience is and how they search the internet is probably the best way to waste your marketing doubloons.
Now, we usually expect marketing teams to already have their customer avatars locked down before they get started on SEO strategies.
Companies usually have their Finance Frasers and Techie Tinas and Creative Carls. But that’s not always the case. And even if they do, they may not understand how Creative Carl uses Bing and Google.
To build a customer persona that will serve your SEO activities, you’ll need to know their…
- Online Behaviours: Where they spend their digital time, how they search the internet to find products and services, how they use the internet at work, etc.
- Demographics: A client's age, gender, location, education, income, etc. is helpful to know for targeting.
- Psychographics: What are their hobbies? Do they all share similar values and interests?
- Needs: What challenges do they face? What do they need? What do they want, etc.
The closer you can get to knowing your target customer, the more likely you’ll create content that matches their search intent at every stage of their journey.
Develop Your Skills at Keyword Research & Strategy
When it comes to SEO for SaaS, a robust keyword strategy reigns supreme. The strategic placement of relevant keywords and phrases on your webpages serves a multitude of purposes.
These keywords…
- Guide Google’s understanding of user intent, leading to better and more accurate rankings.
- Help users understand that they’re on the right web page.
- Direct relevant traffic away from your competitors and toward your domain.
Now that you have a better understanding of who your customer is and what they’re looking for, you can start to create content that meets their needs. For example, if your clients are looking for informational content, you probably want to focus on keywords with educational intent, e.g., ‘what is…’ or ‘how to….’ or ‘guide to’
Now is the time to acquaint yourself with keyword research tools (Semrush and Ahrefs come to mind) to better understand competitor rankings and keyword search volume and identify potential ranking opportunities. Do you have the resources to compete for keywords with high search volume and high difficulty? Or do you see a gap in content where there are plenty of queries but hardly any relevant pages to serve them, such as keyword variations?
Take a closer look at your competitors. How are they using keywords to attract their (and your) audience? Don’t be shy to model your content off of theirs if you don’t know where to start, but aim to one-up them (we call this skyscraper content).
Perform On-Page Optimisations
In the competitive world of B2B software, you can’t afford to make your target audience work for it. Confusing page layout, buttons leading to nowhere, and sparse page copy are just some of the reasons a potential customer will click out of your site.
Amidst a myriad of options, your customers won’t hesitate to move on to a competitor site if yours is less than perfect.
Some solid on-page SEO advice that we can all agree on?
- Use your main keyword in the H1 and in the first paragraph. As for the rest of the page, a good rule of thumb is that your target keyword should represent no more than 2% of your total word count.
- Include your keyword in your meta title
- Use appropriate headers to organise your content and establish the information hierarchy. There's no reason a single page should have more than one H1.
- Add internal links to related pages on your site.
- Break up your text with relevant images and use descriptive alt text
- Follow content best practices; that is, make sure it demonstrates E-E-A-T, that all AI-assisted content has been thoroughly edited by a human; and that it serves the search query.
Check out our page about on-page and tech SEO.
Apply Technical SEO for SaaS
Keyword placement and density is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to optimising your site. To use a creepy analogy, if SEO were a puppet show, then technical SEO would be the strings—the hidden parts that make the puppets move and without which there’d be nothing but a bunch of weird dolls sprawled across the stage.
Technical factors play a significant role in search engine optimisation and can have a direct impact on the visibility, accessibility, and performance of your SaaS site.
Although technical SEO isn’t always the sexiest part of a website, it still has the power to drive your site’s rankings up to page one, which means the opposite is true. Without the right technical setup, your pages could be literally invisible and you wouldn’t even know it.
Read more about us as a technical SEO agency. or our SaaS Technical SEO guide.
Here are just some examples of how technical factors impact your visibility:
The correct website architecture, XML sitemaps, and robots.txt files help search engines efficiently crawl and index your SaaS site. Ensuring that search engines can access and understand your website’s content is crucial for SEO.
SaaS applications often involve complex functionalities and data processing, which can impact site speed. Optimising your site’s performance, such as minimising code and image file sizes, leveraging caching techniques, and using content delivery networks (CDNs), can improve site speed and provide a better user experience. While page load time is often determined by the user’s internet speed, faster-loading websites are typically likely to rank higher in SERPs.
Search engines rank mobile-friendly websites higher than sites without mobile versions. Responsive web design, mobile-optimised layouts, and fast mobile page load times are crucial technical factors to consider for SaaS SEO.
A clear and logical URL structure helps search engines understand the organisation and hierarchy of your website’s content. Well-structured URLs with descriptive keywords can improve the visibility and click-through rates of your SaaS site in search results.
Proper site hierarchy, including using headings (H1, H2, etc.) and internal linking, helps search engines understand the importance and context of your content.
Schema markup is a structured data format that provides additional context and information about your SaaS product or service to search engines. Implementing schema markup can enhance search engine visibility by enabling rich snippets, which can display additional information in search results, such as star ratings, pricing, and reviews.
Website security is increasingly important for SEO. Implementing SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) encryption and ensuring your SaaS website is secure helps build trust with users and search engines. Secure websites are favoured by search engines and may receive a ranking boost.
SaaS websites might have multiple URLs for the same content, leading to duplicate content issues. Implementing canonical tags helps search engines understand the preferred version of the content and avoid cannibalisation.
Perform Your Own Technical SEO Audit
Usually SaaS SEO agencies have longer checklists, but you can perform your own site-wide technical audit by making these essential checks:
- Crawlability: Simulate a crawl to make sure search engines can access your site
- Indexing: Make sure your pages are indexed by typing site:yourdomain.com/page-name/ in Google to see if your page appears.
- Site speed: Use tools like Google PageSpeed Insights to check. Grain of salt: sometimes page speed is an ISP issue.
- Mobile-friendliness: Ensure your site works on all devices. Check manually or run a test on Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test.
- HTTPS: Check that your SSL certificate is active
- Broken links: Check for 404 errors or dead internal links
- Duplicate content: Use canonicals and avoid repeated pages (especially important for ecomm sites with similar product pages)
- XML sitemap: Submit your XML sitemap to Google and make sure it's clean and accurate.
- Structured data: Add schema markup for rich results
- Core Web Vitals: Ensure good page experience scores. Listen to this podcast episode if you're not sure what a core web
Develop a Strong Off-Page Reputation with Backlinks
Also called your backlink strategy, off-page SEO encompasses all the optimisation techniques that happen outside of your website. A backlink is when another website links to your website. While this might not seem as important because it’s not entirely within our control, off-page authority is actually a huge ranking factor.
Here’s why:
The more high-quality backlinks you have, the more credible your software website appears in the eyes of Google.
Notice we said high-quality backlinks.
When other authoritative sites deign to associate themselves with your brand by linking to one of your pages, Google’s algorithm will most likely consider you authoritative by association. On the flip-side, a sky-high pile of links from shady sites that are rife with ads and spammy content is likely going to have the opposite effect. It’s Google’s way of telling you to choose your friends wisely.
If your first thought is, well, I’ll just buy links instead, consider the fact that buying backlinks is considered a blackhat SEO tactic, which isn’t as cool as it sounds. It’s not illegal, but it is a violation of webmaster guidelines, and that pretty much spells disaster for your SEO strategy.
So, you have to earn your backlinks. How do you do that? There’s no single way to earn a link, but here’s how you can start:
- Create high-quality content that other sites will want to link to.
- Reach out to other sites and just ask. You never know.
- If you find a broken link on a related website, why not ask that site to replace it with one of yours?
- You may not get a site to agree to a link, but even mentioning your brand name can make a difference.
- While press releases do contribute to SEO, their effectiveness has been a topic of debate for some time. Still, even if the impact is marginal, we still recommend sending out press releases whenever it makes sense to do so.
Build Your Brand With a Fluff-Free Content Marketing Strategy
As an SEO agency, the one thing that surprises our clients is how much content we tell them they need if they want to rank. And here we go again with another analogy: if keywords are your ingredients then content is the main meal. And just like a poorly prepared meal can spoil the taste of the ingredients, badly written content can kill your chances of ranking for search queries.
Good content plays a vital role in SaaS SEO for a number of reasons:
As one of Google’s many ranking factors, creating well-crafted content that aligns with your audience’s pain points and interests will increase the likelihood of ranking higher in SERPs.
Valuable content that follows on-page SEO best practices and appeals to your target audience has a higher chance of receiving a better rank. It also encourages visitors to share and link to your content, which can further boost your search engine rankings and drive more organic traffic to your SaaS website.
Content that’s informative, engaging, and well-structured keeps visitors on your SaaS website for longer. This positive user experience signals to search engines that your website provides value, potentially leading to better rankings (it’s all about the rankings, baby!)
Creating high-quality content allows you to showcase your expertise and position your SaaS company as an authority in your niche. By consistently delivering valuable and insightful content, your content will go a long way in building trust and credibility, which can result in increased brand recognition and a competitive edge over other SaaS companies.
You can use resources such as e-books, white papers, case studies, or webinars to capture leads and collect valuable contact information from potential customers. Well-crafted content that educates and informs prospects about your SaaS solution can also influence their decision-making process and increase the likelihood of conversions and sales.
Keep these things in mind when planning out your content calendar. Content shouldn’t be rushed, nor should it be treated as a keyword-delivery system. It’s your content that’s going to keep users on the page, click on other pages, engage longer with your site, and keep your brand in mind when it’s time to make a purchasing decision.
All SEO content shall following these commandments:
1
It shall be well-written and free from error
2
It shall follow on-page SEO principles
3
If it is ‘helped’ by AI, it shall be heavily edited and reworked by a human
4
It shall be linked to an author bio page
5
It shall serve the keyword intent
6
It shall be interesting and keep the reader engaged
7
The information written on the page shall be correct
8
It shall not be a dead end; all SEO content should encourage the reader to continue their journey on another page.
9
It shall be regularly monitored and updated to stay competitive and accurate
What Does the Future of SaaS SEO Hold?
SaaS SEO strategies will need to evolve if they want to keep up with emerging trends and technologies. For example, we’re still in the early stages of generative AI, so who knows where SEO will be in a year or five years from now (does GEO ring any bells).
If you’re already working with a reputable agency, your site should be poised to weather any major changes that come your way. In fact, any agency worth its salt will be monitoring and re-optimising your pages as these changes happen.
If you’re not working with an agency, follow the steps and strategies outlined in this post to stay ahead of your competitors and boost your relevant traffic.
