SEO Strategies for SaaS Companies

SEO strategies for SaaS companies are the best marketing trend in the digital world today.

With consumers and businesses shifting more towards the online space, the focus is now on achieving the right business growth.

In this emerging economic and social landscape, Software as a Solution or SaaS is flourishing as a business model.

However, with the increasing growth of the SaaS sector comes intense competition.

If you own or run a SaaS company, you may wonder how to make it stand out. This big question can be answered in three words: search engine optimization or SEO.

By implementing the right SEO strategies, you can increase your visibility to search engines like Google and Bing, making it easier for your target audience to find you online.

Before we discuss the current best practices, it is essential to understand what SaaS SEO entails.”

According to a report by a global PR agency, 89% of consumers turn to search engines for information on products or services.

(Source – https://www.brafton.com/news/89-percent-of-consumers-use-search-engines-for-purchase-decisions/)

It is the first step that they take before making a decision about a purchase or hire.

Things are not so different when it comes to businesses. Many companies use B2B research to find products, services, and other companies.

In fact, 77% of B2B buyers do not approach a potential provider without looking it up online using a search engine.

(Source – https://blog.hubspot.com/sales/sales-managers-guide-to-social-selling)

In other words, for a business to reach as many potential customers or clients as possible, it must have a strong online presence. The best way to do it is by implementing a robust SEO strategy.

The same is true even for SaaS companies.

SaaS SEO can give your website higher search rankings.

So, when someone looks online for your type of business, you will come out in the top search engine results pages. It means that people will have more opportunities to interact with your brand.

While SEO for SaaS is different from SEO for other verticals, it still uses the same core principles:

• Creating relevant content
• Getting high-quality backlinks
• Understanding the search algorithms

The key is to post helpful content that answers search queries, making it a good target for high-quality backlinks.

At this point, you know that SEO marketing for SaaS companies can boost your online visibility.

However, it is a strategy that requires time, effort, and marketing dollars. The question now is, is it worth it?

Here are some of the many reasons why investing in a robust SaaS SEO strategy is a good idea:

It Promotes Scalable and Sustainable Growth

SaaS SEO is mostly content-driven.

It means that the more relevant articles, infographics, and other resources you post, the more visitors you draw to your website.

If, you do it right, SEO can bring you consistent growth in traffic from month to month. It is quite predictable, and you can count on it to deliver positive results.

Another thing that you have to understand about this strategy is;

That, it also has compounding effects. Everything that you do builds on what you have already done before.

So, you reap the benefits even as your business expands.

In other words, once your SEO strategy is up and running, you can expect scalable and exponential growth.

Reduce the Cost of Acquiring New Customers or Clients

If, you integrate paid ads into your marketing efforts, every single click that leads to your website will cost you.

The more clicks you get, the more you pay, and that is just how this channel works.

While paid media is a good tool to add to your marketing strategy, it is not sustainable.

Instead, it will drive your cost-per-acquisition, and it is something that will only get worse over time.

In addition, paid ads won’t be as effective once you have reached audiences who are likely to make a purchase.

There is a saturation point beyond which any amount of money you spend on ads will not generate enough results to justify the cost.

SaaS SEO will succeed where paid ads fail.

SEO might require a lot of investment up front, but once it is in place, it will continue to reduce your cost-per-acquisition over time.

Reach Potential Customers in Other Channels

As mentioned above, posting high-quality content consistently is the cornerstone of a good SaaS SEO strategy.

Of course, this approach demands a lot of time and energy, but it is something that is worth investing in for many reasons.

One of the many ways that you can use your content to drum up business is to reach potential customers in other channels with it.

For instance, you can promote a very informative article as a part of your social media marketing strategy. You can do the same for email marketing or backlink building.

By reaching a broader audience, you can generate more leads, have more opportunities to convert, and boost your sales.

Build Stronger Customer Relationships

A big part of SaaS SEO is optimizing your content.

So, it is not only more informative but also easier to find. This strategy is helpful in a number of ways.

First, it increases your website’s search rankings, which puts your brand in front of your target audience ahead of the competition.

Second, people will find your content more helpful, which enhances user experience and encourages brand loyalty.

As a result, your website becomes an effective marketing material on its own.

It is like an online billboard that draws more visitors in and converts them into paying customers.

Now that you understand the importance of SEO, it’s time to discuss the more exciting part of this article: the strategies.

No two businesses are the same, even if they are both in the SaaS niche. That being said, a good SEO strategy can be outlined in ten steps.

One of the first steps that you need to take as you start your SEO journey is to set your goals.

Doing this will point you in the right direction and send you on the right trajectory moving forward.

It’s essential to be specific as much as possible while setting your goals.

If you want to increase sales, by how much and by when?

By being clear on what you want to achieve, you will have a better idea of what you need to do to make it happen.

Another thing you need to remember is to set the appropriate metrics for success.

These metrics or KPIs will tell you how you measure up against your goals as you create and execute your SEO strategy.

Once you have identified your goals, it’s time to set your sights on your target audience.

You need to have a clear picture of what your ideal buyer is like so you would know how best to meet their needs.

There are two ways that you can create your buyer persona.

One is to start from scratch and gradually build a profile of your ideal target by doing market research.

And, the other is to use existing data from your current customers.

Either way, you need a lot of information so you can build a more accurate picture of who your buyers are.

While it is important to look inwards when coming up with a SaaS SEO strategy, looking at your competitors also helps.

To be more specific, you should find out what your direct and indirect competitors are doing. These are businesses that offer the same things that you do.

Why should you do this?

Knowing the competition gives you valuable insight into what strategies work and what don’t.

Try looking at their top pages and find out what their top-performing keywords are. You can use this information to strengthen your own SEO strategy.

At this point, you are about to start building a list of keywords that you are going to use for your SEO strategy.

Much of it involves reaching people who currently have a need or a problem but are still trying to find out what the solution is.

Known as top-of-the-funnel keywords, these keywords have little to do with your conversion rate.

However, they will let people know that your platform exists and put the word out about your company.

As more and more people learn about your business, you will have more potential customers down the road.

A good way to find these keywords is to identify your customers’ pain points.

What problems are they trying to solve? What queries are they asking?

Once you have the answers to these questions, you can start forming your keywords using an SEO tool.

After building your discovery-phase keywords, you must now focus your attention further down the sales funnel.

In this stage, you need to come up with another set of keywords for your landing pages.

These are your commercial pages, product pages, or feature pages – website pages that provide more in-depth information about your products and services.

The goal here is to guide your readers closer to conversion.

Remember that, in this part of the funnel, the audience is actively looking for a solution. This should be fairly easy to do, especially if you use the right keyword research tool.

In the previous section, you have given your readers all the essential information about your products.

They should be at the bottom of the sales funnel at this point, which means that they are closer to making a purchasing decision.

In this situation, you should be more focused on highlighting your unique selling point.

Why should the buyer choose you over the other potential providers? If you answer this question well enough, they will sign up with you.

The keywords at this stage of the buyer journey are low search volume, but they have a lot of impact on conversion.

So, make sure that your pages are better when it comes to these queries.

Now that you know all the keywords to target, it’s time to create your content.

The success or failure of your SaaS SEO will depend largely on the quality of your blogs or product pages.

To capture the attention of your audience, you must make sure that your content is outstanding.

There are many ways to define what is “better” content. It should talk about a certain topic in greater detail, so it might have to be longer.

It should be easy to read and formatted to suit different devices. Most importantly, it must be able to satisfy buyer intent.

So far, most of your efforts have been focused on your target audience.

It makes your pages more attractive to readers, and in turn, search engines will reward you with higher rankings.

Nevertheless, there are a few more ways that you can make your website even more visible to portals like Google and Bing.

For instance, you can do on-page and technical SEO.

On-page SEO is the process of optimizing the elements within the website, including your content, meta description, and title tags.

On the other hand, technical SEO makes your pages easier to crawl and index, load faster, respond better and offer a more enhanced user experience.

You are closer to the finish line at this stage of the process, but your job is far from done.

After optimizing your pages and all their content, you should promote them on other channels to gain high-quality backlinks.

Backlinks are like votes of confidence from other sites. In a nutshell, they are linking their website page to yours because they trust what’s in it.

As a result, you appear like an industry expert to the readers, which will go a long way in earning their confidence.

Well, stuck to the few numbers of SEO strategies for SaaS companies is not the progressive way to grow your business.

So, you need to keep try and find the new SEO strategies for your SaaS companies to get your job done.

All businesses nowadays need a solid online presence, and SaaS companies are not immune to this marketing trend.

The sooner you incorporate it into your marketing strategy, the sooner you see the results like;

more traffic, higher-quality leads, better conversion rates, and bigger sales.