Each SaaS owner or marketer strives for growth. Various metrics, including organic traffic and the number of qualified leads, can measure this growth. SEO can be used to increase those metrics.
With a solid SaaS SEO plan, you can increase brand awareness and generate qualified leads. SEO is one of the most effective marketing strategies for software companies.
SaaS SEO is a process that increases organic traffic on your SaaS site through on-page and off-page enhancements, as well as technical improvements. Each process is described below:
- On-page SEO: Optimizing keywords, content, internal links images, and HTML tags
- Off-page SEO: Building links, posting guest posts, promoting social media, and listing relevant platforms (e.g., Google Places).
- Technical SEO: Optimizing site structure, indexation, and structured data
This article will summarize SaaS SEO in three pillars to help you rank better.
Keyword Research
The keyword research process is an important part of any SEO campaign. This does not only apply to SaaS companies. A successful campaign is built on a good keyword research process.
This process will help you identify keywords that your target audience searches for when researching topics related to your software.
SaaS SEO requires more keyword research than other industries. Consider e-commerce as an example. Most online shops will only target keywords that have the highest buyer intention. These stores also add keywords to the product description. E-commerce shops don’t have blogs very often.
A SaaS business needs a comprehensive keyword list to cover the entire customer journey. Content marketing and blogging, in particular, are crucial for SaaS. To rank higher and attract more qualified traffic, you’ll want to optimize your blog post for the right keywords.
SEO tools make keyword research easy. Ahrefs, Moz, SEMrush, and Ubbersuggest can all help you find target keywords.
Keyword research can be done in many different ways. You can start by searching for keywords related to your target keyword and then finding their search volume. You can also reverse-engineer your competitors’ SEO.
You can use the tools to find out what keywords your competitors are ranking for by pasting their URLs in the search box. The dashboard will show you your competitor’s featured keywords and snippets, as well as the keywords that they are bidding for in their paid search campaigns.
The first step of your keyword research is to create a list. Next, you need to determine the intent of those keywords.
When you launch a business, it’s important to understand what factors influence organic searches. Once you have identified the search intent, you can only create content that is relevant to it.
Search intent can be classified into four main categories:
- Navigational. A user searches for a website, such as “HubSpot” or “Slack Login.”
- Transactional. The user wants to buy something. Search terms may include “buy,” coupons, and discounts. For example, you can search for “HubSpot discount codes” or “Slack coupons.”
- Informational. A user searches for specific information on a particular subject, such as “how to increase remote team productivity” or “how improve customer interaction and relations.” Informational keywords can be a great way to attract organic leads into your marketing funnel.
- Commercial. Search query indicates an intent to purchase, but the user has not made a decision. You can search for “best CRM software” or “HubSpot against Zoho CRM.”
How can you determine the intent of a search? Search for the keyword in Google and look at the organic content that ranks.
If you search for “best CRM software,” you will notice that the majority of the pages in the rankings are product comparisons. This is because the keyword has a commercial intent. You’ll have to create a product comparison guide to target this keyword.
Blog Posts that are SEO Friendly
Every SaaS company should have an SEO-friendly blog. This is the best way to introduce prospects to your sales funnel and nurture them beyond their first subscription or trial. You’re not only trying to secure the first subscription. To get a positive return on investment, you need to keep users subscribed and minimize the churn.
SEO-friendly blog posts must demonstrate Authority, Expertise, and Trustworthiness. Google’s algorithm includes EAT among its many criteria for determining whether a website or piece of content is valuable enough to appear in the top search results.
Create high-quality, helpful content for your readers to ensure that your content meets this demand. It must also include links to credible and useful resources. It should also be regularly updated.
Invite authority figures to write guest posts on your site. This will help to boost the reputation of your site.
SEO-friendly Blog Posts also mean optimizing your content for search engines. Here are some tips that will help.
- Include your main keyword in titles, meta description, and headers.
- Include your keyword in the introduction and conclusion.
- Use headings (H1,H2,H3).
- Make sure that your blog posts don’t compete with each other to get the same keywords.
- Your blog post should include both internal and external hyperlinks.
In addition to these tactics, you must include visuals such as videos and images in your blog posts. Rich text is a way to stand out on your blog and engage users.
While optimizing your posts for search engines is important, humans are the final consumers of content. Don’t write an SEO-friendly blog post at the expense of making it human-readable. This is bad for the user experience. Use rephrasing software instead to ensure that you are publishing content that is readable for your intended audience.
High-Quality Links
SaaS SEO is not complete without link-building. You want backlinks coming from websites with high authority. This tells Google your content is reliable. SEO tools such as Moz or Ahrefs can be used to check the domain authority for a website you wish to link from.
Link-building is easier for SaaS than e-commerce or other industries. This is mainly because SaaS companies invest in quality blogging. Other sites are more likely to link to valuable content than online stores without any blog content. Of course, you need to produce quality content in order to get those links.
These SEO tools can help you determine which websites to target when building links. For example, you can analyze the URLs of competitors’ websites to see which ones link to them.
How do you create backlinks? Link-building is one of the most powerful link-building strategies.
- Guest high-quality content for authority websites in exchange for backlinks to your website.
- Publication of credible research and case studies that other websites will want to link and reference.
- Create and offer free tools. You will earn a backlink when other websites link to your tools.
- Create local citations to promote your business.
- Ask your target website to replace broken links on their site with yours.