SaaS SEO: The Definitive Guide For 2024

Introduction

Even for skilled entrepreneurs, starting a SaaS business is a constant uphill battle. Any software as a service (SaaS) business relies on organic traffic, which passively brings in quality inbound prospects at no expense. Potential SaaS entrepreneurs use paid search ads and social media marketing to promote their goods.

Rising paid advertising costs hurt SaaS startups. Investing heavily in client acquisition is wasteful. Your organic search engine traffic has plateaued since companies, enterprise websites, and competing SaaS startups have been continuously generating new blog content and building authoritative backlink profiles for years.

SEO changes frequently, making it hard to start. Your SaaS business needs a creative, well-planned SEO approach to surpass the competition. 68% of SaaS leads come from organic search, and 92% of marketers think content marketing is valuable.

That’s why you need SEO to increase your SaaS company’s online presence and attract more consumers. Here’s how to develop an effective SaaS SEO strategy for your company.

What is Saas SEO?

Software as a service (SaaS) websites can be optimised using search engine optimization (SEO). The purpose of search engine optimization for software as a service (SaaS) is to increase the volume of targeted visitors to a website and, hopefully, the number of paying customers.

The following are some examples of tactics that can be used for SaaS SEO:

Finding the right terms and phrases that potential consumers are using to look for SaaS solutions is the first step in identifying and targeting those keywords.

Optimizations made directly to the page itself (known as “on-page optimization”) enhance the page’s value and relevance in relation to the selected keywords.

Off-page SEO is the process of boosting a website’s authority and position in search engine results pages (SERPs) by increasing the number of high-quality backlinks pointing to it from other sites.

Making sure the SaaS website is technically optimised for search engines, like making it mobile-friendly and making sure it loads quickly, is an example of technical SEO.

The more visible and accessible a SaaS business is in search engine results, the more likely it is to receive clicks from interested customers, ultimately leading to more conversions and more money in the bank.

Who can you attract with your SEO strategy?

An effective SEO strategy can attract a variety of potential customers to a website, including:

Customers who are actively searching for a particular product or service: By ranking highly in the search results for relevant keywords, a website can attract customers who are specifically looking for the products or services that the website offers.

Customers who may not have been specifically searching for the website’s products or services, but are interested in learning more: By ranking highly for broader, informational keywords, a website can attract customers who are in the early stages of the buying process and may not have a specific product or service in mind yet.

Customers who may not have been searching for the website’s products or services at all: By ranking highly for a variety of keywords, a website can attract customers who are simply browsing the web and come across the website while searching for something else.

Overall, an effective SEO strategy can help a website attract a wider range of potential customers, including those who are actively searching for the website’s products or services and those who may not have been specifically looking for them.

SaaS SEO: Stepwise Strategy

1.   Keyword Research

SEO relies mainly on optimised content. Even organisations that write loads of unoptimized content over the years rank for some valuable keywords.

Keywords for SaaS: Your business determines keyword research difficulty. Despite the availability of the best keyword research tools, I recommend Ahrefs again for their easy keyword research and $7 free trial.

Competitor Keywords: First, find out what keywords your top competitors are ranking for. The handful invested in SEO may rank for thousands or tens of thousands of keywords.

Your SEO strategy can start here. Find 5–6 competitors’ top keywords. Shorter keywords are tougher to rank for “cybersecurity” than “cybersecurity HIPAA compliance”.

Know Your Audience: SaaS firms vary. High-intent keywords can sell subscriptions for low-priced products like employee productivity tools.

Other tools and items have month-to-year purchase cycles. SEO for these companies will focus on brand awareness, MQLs, and trust as well as SQLs.

Understand how your target audience buys things in your space and use keywords to aid them through the buying process. If your sales cycle is long it makes more sense to educate and provide value to prospects through SEO rather than try to rank for extremely high-intent keywords to directly generate business.

Sort Your Keywords: Once you have a long list of keywords, sort your keywords into “informational/educational” and “high-intent”. 

High-intent keywords include: “SaaS SEO agencies”

While an informational keyword might be something like: “How does SEO benefit SaaS companies”

Then develop a plan to create content and rank for both types of keywords. Informational keywords are almost always best tackled through developing comprehensive blog content. High-intent keywords will typically be product or benefit pages on your website. Create a content calendar outlining the content you plan to publish around both types of keywords.

2.   Technical SEO

It’s important to remember the technical details while tending to the nuances of SaaS SEO. You can’t act like that around me! And c’mon, if your site isn’t optimised, doing everything right won’t bring you any closer to your goals. To put it plainly, if you don’t prioritise technical SEO, your site will suffer.

Make sure the technical aspects of your SaaS website are up to par with all the major search engines. In particular, all that can be done with regard to indexing, crawling, ranking, and website architecture. Some crucial parts of Technical SEO are as follows:

Core Web Vitals: The official Google ranking criteria for measuring page experience is called Core Web Vitals. Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), First Input Delay (FID), and Cumulative Layout Shifts are its three performance measurements (CLS). It’s explained in greater detail here if you’re interested.

Schema Markup: Schema markups are the coding that guarantees Google can decipher your site’s hierarchy. In order to get useful data for your company, you’ll need to customise these codes.

Sitemap: Sitemaps are similar to files in that they detail all of the pages and other components of a website. Pages, photos, movies, and any other files can be found in its database. With a neat sitemap and structure, your visitors, as well as Google can more easily understand you.

Characteristics of Meta-Elements: Meta Elements are particular tags that provide structured metadata about your webpage. Give Google searchers what they’re looking for by making use of meta tags, titles, and descriptions.

3.   User Experience (UX) Design

The quality of the user experience provided by your website is equally as vital to its success as its design and its technical SEO health.

Your users shouldn’t have to go through a tangled web of web pages in order to locate what they’re looking for on your website; they should be able to find it quickly and efficiently.

In addition, the information on your website should be well-written and interesting, and navigation should not be difficult. If you want users to remain on your website for an extended period of time, you will need to develop pages that provide compelling reasons for them to do so.

To provide solutions that benefit the user is central to Google’s goal. Google will take notice if you provide your users with excellent material and a positive user experience, and they will reward you for it.

4.   Content Strategy

Content that establishes you as a thought leader in your industry is content that addresses the needs of a specific audience. You can present your knowledge, expertise, and insight on future developments in your field.

If your SaaS website has this kind of material, it will become a trusted resource for many visitors. You may get users to return to your site on a regular basis by publishing weekly blogs or newscasts.

Furthermore, it is not essential to make content that is specifically about your product. Whatever you feel might be of service to users in your sector is fair game for sharing. Useful content is that which your users won’t find elsewhere, whether it be facts or opinions.

The creation of thought-leadership content is expected to continue growing in popularity. This would be a huge boost for your SaaS platform. It’s a marketing objective to get visitors to your site, bookmark it, join your email list, and promote it to their friends.

4.   Measuring Results

A positive return on investment has always been hard to link to SEO.

However, just like any other advertising effort, you need metrics to assess your success. Quality, effective content doesn’t just appear, and it certainly doesn’t be promoted on its own.

What you get out of your material is proportional to the effort you put into it, just like anything else in life. When it comes to SaaS, SEO is a long-term bet. There is a good chance that your SaaS SEO effort will not yield any tangible results for at least a few months.

But if you’re persistent and know what you’re doing, you can increase your organic traffic and return on investment (ROI) over time.

If you want to push your SEO strategy to new heights, try new things, double down on what’s already working, keep generating high-quality content, and optimise high-quality material.

5.   Competitor Analysis

There is no such thing as a level playing field in the world of SEO for SaaS. In SEO, you will always have to deal with competitors who are ahead of you.

The best way to catch up is to watch how they do and figure out what they did wrong.

Here are some things you should keep in mind:

• What sites link to them, and why?

• What kind of content do they make and why it works

• Any keyword gaps between your site and theirs, how often they add new content, and whether they use Google Ads to boost their SEO.

• If you keep an eye on how well your competitors do with SEO, you’ll know where you need to improve and how to make content that’s better than theirs.

Search engine optimization is never a one-time thing. Even after you start getting organic traffic, you still need to do regular website audits, keyword research, and content optimization to make sure that your website is optimised for both search engines and people.

How Do I Do SEO for Saas?

The following is a brief explanation of how search engine optimization (SEO) works for SaaS.

• Discover keywords to target at the beginning, the middle, and the end of the funnel.

• What exactly are SEO keywords, though? – Keywords or phrases that customers type into search engines to find products similar to yours.

• Research broad categories and categories of themes that are interesting to prospects at each level of the funnel.

• Find out what kinds of content you have to develop in order to fill each of the areas.

• Make a decision on which aspects of your funnel require more of your attention than others.

• Analyse whether there is any existing content that may be repurposed or improved to meet your strategy.

Conclusion

SaaS SEO campaigns are known to be among the most challenging. The SaaS search engine results pages (SERPs) are becoming increasingly competitive as a result of declining search volume, a decrease in the proportion of searches that are product-focused, and rising levels of competition from software aggregators. 

Nevertheless, ranking and organic performance are also things that can most certainly be improved. You should find that your SaaS SEO campaign is more successful if you concentrate your efforts on enhancing the user experience (UX) of the site as a whole and finding areas in which you can compete with other businesses.