Many SaaS business owners wonder if SEO would be a fruitful investment to help their SaaS product reach new customers. They also wish to know if SEO efforts will lower their overall Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC). Those who are convinced of the usefulness of SEO often do not know when is the right time to start the process.
It takes time for SEO efforts to show results, which makes it difficult to justify the investment. But SaaS companies can use organic search as a sustainable long-term channel to reach new target audiences at each stage of the marketing funnel. These are some of the benefits of using SEO techniques for a SaaS business.
- Predictability and reduction of marketing costs
- Optimize your visibility to outplay the competitors
- Tailored content for paying customers
- Make the SaaS website experience better for users
Steps to Create a Successful SaaS SEO Strategy
The main purpose of a SaaS website is usually to generate leads. Most of them aim for conversions, like requests for product/service demo and trial subscriptions. That is why SEO for SaaS tends to be different from online stores or other websites.
SaaS websites are usually smaller, with fewer pages, which makes it easy for search engine bots to crawl and index them. It is also easier to create a simple SEO-friendly structure for these websites and place optimized content on the pages.
A lot of SaaS websites are built on SEO-friendly CMS platforms like WordPress. It makes it easy for developers or SaaS SEO consultants to edit the meta-tags, XML site map, and other technical SEO aspects. But a SaaS platform cannot become efficient without an ideal development team.
Technical SEO aspects are often handled by in-house developers for a SaaS website. However, if a business does not have the right workforce, it is best to outsource the job to a professional SaaS SEO consultant. We believe these are some of the crucial steps to build a successful Seo strategy for a SaaS business.
Technical Optimization
As mentioned before, the technical SEO aspects of a small SaaS website are much easier than for larger online stores or e-commerce platforms. However, developers often tend to overlook certain aspects of technical SEO, such as broken URLs (404 errors), redirects, and improper XML sitemaps.
A SaaS website must be free of errors and should contain proper long redirect chains for crawling optimization. Similarly, if the website is large enough, it should have the required dynamic XML sitemap submitted to Google Search Console. It should also get updated regularly as there is new content added to the website.
Business owners should ensure that there is a monthly crawl check for the website. It allows the development team to find any technical SEO shortcomings and fix them early for maximum optimization. Some of the other technical aspects that need to get checked often are as follows.
- The webpage speed and user experience should be optimal. Google already considers page loading speed as a determining factor to rank a website and search results. There has been an announcement about the Core Web Vitals becoming an official part of Google’s ranking algorithm from May 2021.
- SaaS companies should take advantage of the Software App structured data specifically. They can also use generic types of structured data, such as CreativeWork or Breadcrumbs. Specific structure data is crucial to make website content easier to understand for search engines and add rich snippets in search results.
- SaaS products often need to be marketed globally. Business owners can translate their English websites and use SEO markups like Hreflang tags to target specific countries using the Google Search Console.
Keyword-Optimized Content
Keyword research and clustering can reveal what the target audience is looking for on search engines. Therefore, SaaS businesses should combine keyword data with click-through rates and user intent for website structure.
Most SaaS companies make the mistake of using generic product descriptions like “innovative solution” or “cutting edge platform” etc. Although they may sound good for product branding, they fail to differentiate the brand from the competitors. But the worst thing is that these generic descriptions do not give the target users specific answers to their problems.
The content should use keywords that can be a clear message to the target market. Optimizing internal links is another way to favor search engines and users. Business owners may feel alarmed by lower search volumes for explicit keywords. However, sometimes low-volume specific keywords can generate more conversions than generic ones.
Expertise and Authority Oriented Content
Expertise, authority, and trust (EAT) can help SaaS websites establish confidence in their target market. Therefore, they should ensure that the content authors are clear about the organizational goals and achievements. The website should be able to portray deep industry knowledge and technical prowess.
Authority can also contribute to building links and the brand. Internal databases and reports are generally used for email marketing campaigns and to answer consumer issues. However, this data can also be repurposed for authoritative content on the website.
Link Building
It has often been noted that organic growth strategies that begin with off-site SEO techniques prove expensive and discouraging. Backlinks are a crucial ranking factor, but it needs optimum content and technical on-page foundations for maximum effectiveness.
Therefore, SaaS businesses should concentrate on their content optimization first. Later, they can also align their branding and PR efforts with the link-building strategy, which can prove to be more useful than paying directly for backlinks. It also saves the website from violating Google’s policies and risking penalization.
SaaS business owners should realize that SEO is merely one of the marketing channels. Successful SaaS companies often use a combination of up to seven channels to drive their website traffic and generate leads. However, these channels need to work together for optimum results.
SEO is the most critical tool to scale targeted inbound traffic throughout the marketing funnel. It can generate a constant stream of website traffic from search engines and produce exponential results for SaaS companies.
