Your mission? To dominate those search results and convert high-quality leads into customers. 

Welcome to enterprise SaaS SEO. This isn’t just a pass to more online visibility and generic clicks from everyone and their mother, it’s your golden ticket opportunity to nurture prospective customers seeking the solutions only an enterprise like yours can provide. 

We’ve gathered the great, mixed in some of our own, and have curated your guide to acquiring more organic SQLs for enterprises just like yours. Comfy? Your journey starts here.

How is SEO different for enterprise SaaS brands?

For enterprise SaaS brands, SEO challenges are amplified by the scale of operations, the intensity of the competition, and the complexity of offers and solutions these large SaaS businesses have. This makes enterprise SaaS SEO require a more tactical approach than traditional SEO and calls for a continued holistic overview. 

Jason Wise, Editor at EarthWeb, shared the top three differences that make enterprise SaaS SEO particularly challenging compared to traditional — smaller-scale–SEO:

1. Search engines struggle to crawl and index millions of website pages for a large SaaS company. It’s also difficult for smaller teams to monitor all web pages and optimize them for SEO.

2. The constant change in SaaS solutions can be confusing. Maintaining the company’s website’s keyword alignment and adapting to SEO trends is a continuous cycle.

3. The fierce rivalry from other SaaS providers for keywords complicates matters. Even with significant SEO spending, ranking high in search results is difficult in today’s congested SaaS industry if you’re not going all in.

In smaller-sized companies, SEO decisions can be made much quicker, there are fewer stakeholders at play. This is helpful since Google’s algorithms and audience needs are constantly changing, and smaller teams can be more responsive to a change in the market. 

However, enterprise-level companies can face internal alignment issues and slower decision-making due to their size and product messaging stakeholders: you’ve got product, marketing, communications, sales, customer success, so many teams often needing to have a say in language and strategy. This can negatively affect enterprise SEO agility. 

Although some SEO principles are the same for small and large businesses, the intricacies of enterprises make enterprise SaaS SEO a more lucrative beast to tame. 

The benefits of SEO for enterprise SaaS companies

First off, let’s tackle why investing time, effort, and resources in SEO is worthwhile for your SaaS enterprise:

• Higher conversion rates: SEO isn’t just about attracting traffic — it’s about attracting the right traffic. SEO leads have an impressive 14.6% close rate. This means that out of all the visitors arriving at your website via organic search, a sizeable fraction is likely to turn into paying customers.
• Superior ACV: SEO enables you to generate high-quality leads by reaching out to high-ticket users who are actively searching for the solutions that you offer with their unique pain points and search terms. In fact, 60% of marketers have recognized inbound methodologies like SEO and blog content as their highest-quality source of leads, helping increase your average contract value. 
• Increased website traffic: No surprises here, with proper keyword targeting and high-quality content, SEO can attract a significant number of visitors to your website, that going on whatever conversion rate you’re averaging is sure to keep those SQLs rising. It’s far more potent than organic social media in driving traffic, boasting an ability to pull in over 1,000% more visitors.
• Sustained growth: Unlike paid advertising, which stops bringing in traffic the moment you stop paying, the results of SEO are long-lasting. With timely updates and the right strategy tweaks, your website’s visibility can continue to stay high on search engines, enabling a consistent inflow of organic traffic and potential leads well into the future.

The bottom line? These benefits aren’t just pointers on a presentation slide, they’re the building blocks of more organic SQLs and measurable KPIs. The gold standard of enterprise SEO isn’t just growth — it’s sustained, targeted, and measurable growth. Music to your investors’ ears.

We spoke to Peter Michaels, CEO of Yeespy, who explained every challenge that comes with enterprise SEO can also be turned into an opportunity:

“The main challenges of SEO for enterprise SaaS companies include high keyword competition, complex websites that make technical SEO difficult, content saturation, rapidly changing product features, and a longer sales cycle. 

For example, at Yeespy, we target a global audience, making our SEO strategy more complex However, this challenge is an opportunity for growth and resilience. By understanding the unique aspects of SaaS SEO and focusing on strategies that generate top-quality SQLs, we improve our online reputation and revenue.”

Enterprise SaaS SEO strategies and tactics to generate more SQLs

SEO for larger enterprises requires a herculean effort — given the sheer amount of elements in play. The complexity and scale of operations bring gigantic challenges, but they can also bring gigantic rewards. Here are some of the top strategies we use here at Skale:

1) Perform keyword research for enterprise-level personas

Before diving in, let’s establish your compass — your keywords. They guide your content creation and heavily influence your ranking potential. Keyword research can be broken down into two elements. 

Understanding your audience

Start by understanding who you want to reach. Work closely with sales teams to pinpoint your ideal persona for their contract value or lifetime. From there, you can conduct interviews with these people to identify their jobs-to-be-done, previous ways of doing things, blockers to buying, competitor knowledge, and their thought process for searching for a solution online.

Once you’ve conducted these moderated interviews — as surveys just aren’t going to give you the same level of qualitative insight you need — you’ll be able to do the following: 

• Define your ideal customer personas to map specific pain points, search journeys, buying barriers, and jobs-to-be-done. These personas will be crucial to understand when crafting your content.
• Use keyword research tools such as Google Keyword Planner, Ahrefs, and Answer the Public, to discover commonly used keywords and their siblings. This will help you cluster your new and old content, as well as flesh out content outlines in the future. 
• Delve into the intent behind each keyword to know where you’ll be placing the content within the funnel, essentially understanding how much emphasis you should put on the industry, the problem, or the solution (your product).

Competitor analysis

A thorough competitor analysis is a must for a solid enterprise SEO strategy. Many of our clients in the past have been at a loss on where they should begin with a competitor analysis, so here’s how we run things:

• Use tools like Ahrefs and Semrush to identify competitors’ high-performing keywords. These can be flagged as good opportunities to go for as it signals that competitors are having success from them. However, knowing these can also dictate keywords you assign to on-page optimizations, and how likely you are to actually rank for them giving both parties’ SEO standing. 
• Unpick your competitors’ topic clusters. See how they’re organizing content for your ICPs and assess whether it’s a logical fit, or not. Understanding this can either inspire your clusters or highlight how you can do content better. Remember, just because you consider them competition doesn’t mean their way of doing things is the best way of doing things. 
• Deep dive into content. The best way to truly understand your competitors is a qualitative assessment of their content. Spend time going through their blog, and understand their TOV, product messaging, other types of content, CTAs, secondary keywords, and more. Get the full experience and it will massively help to guide your own: from outlines to onward journeys.  

2) On-page SEO tactics for enterprise SaaS companies

With your keyword research as informed as it can be, it’s time to delve into your content build, which is going to look a little different if you’ve done SEO on a smaller scale before. Here are a few top tips from the Skale team: 

Boost E-E-A-T with expert partners

Identify renowned experts who align with your enterprise’s vision and can contribute valuable insights. Include their input in your blog posts, videos, podcasts, or webinars. 

The association with an industry expert not only strengthens your content’s authority but also creates crossover audience engagement. Ensure that the contribution of these experts is highlighted through various promotional strategies of your content (newsletters, social media, etc) to maximize reach and align your brand with those you want to be aligned with. 

Building content based on real stories is the most sure-fire way you can ensure your articles are wholly unique, and stand out against that 101 content that’s been on top for too long.  

Dominate brand mentions

During each customer journey, potential customers will get to a point where they will start comparing the alternatives on the market. This means they’ll likely be Googling you and other brands, something that’s always going to happen despite AI, as they’ll be looking for real-world opinions and the most recent reviews on all the SaaS available. 

It’s your job to dominate the ranks when it comes to your branded keywords and ensure you’re in control of the narrative around your brand. It’s not uncommon for competitors to do potentially misleading comparison pages, although this is frowned upon by many it still happens. So, you’ll want to be on top of your own brand name, and ensure you’re giving a true account of what your SaaS can achieve. 

Answer multiple decision-makers’ queries

Ensuring you’re optimizing your content to answer all decision-makers’ questions is a big must for enterprise SEO. There’s a high chance you’re not just writing for a founder, which is often the case if you’re targeting SMBs. In this case, you’re writing for a Head of, Director, Manager, the role that’s actually going to use your tool (your in-house ambassador) and potentially someone from the Finance department too. 

Although this doesn’t mean you need to tailor your style and JTBD examples for every persona, you will need to answer each specific role’s questions and overcome their barriers to buy naturally throughout the piece. Many businesses choose to do this with FAQs, but conversion will be more effective if you meet readers sooner and highlight specific pain points in headings. 

3) Off-page & link-building enterprise SaaS SEO strategies

As you probably know, the digital footprint of your SaaS extends beyond the confines of your website. Off-page SEO and link-building strategies hold one of the many keys to bolstering your site’s performance. Here’s what you need to know. 

Claim brand mentions

An oldie, but a goldie, and often forgotten. If you’re at enterprise level then there’s a huge chance your brand is being talked about in the big bad web.  The strategy here is simple but might require some legwork: seek out those brand mentions and convert them into backlinks.

Use tools like Google Alerts or Mention to keep track of when and where your brand is being discussed. When you find brand mentions, reach out to the website owner or author and request a backlink. 

Note: you’ll only want to be doing this where there’s a positive framing around your brand. Unfortunately, there’s also a chance your brand is being mentioned in a negative light. So, get the context of the article before you reach out. 

If you want to take this strategy up a notch, then consider an anchor text framework and a specific page link of a page you’re trying to build. For example, rather than us just asking a brand mention to hyperlink Skale to our homepage, we may ask them to hyperlink Skale’s epic guide to enterprise SaaS SEO and link right here. 

Leverage review sites

Embrace review opportunities on sites like G2, Capterra, and Trustpilot. Any SaaS buying stakeholder is going to do their research before investing in your product, and they’re going to be going to a 3rd party platform to avoid as much bias as possible. 

G2 found that 94% of buyers have used a review site to help them make a SaaS purchasing decision. That is a huge amount of your market share that will be doing their research on your product off of your website. Although these platforms rarely share a “do-follow” link, getting positive reviews on these sites will massively influence your buyers’ purchasing decisions.

Publish press releases

Press releases are a gold mine for SQLs, and can have your brand not only win quality back-links but get in front of new markets under different content angles. They’re great for problem-aware buyers. 

For this one, we’ll give the mic to Riva Jeane May Caburog, PR/Media Coordinator at Nadrich & Cohen:

“Leveraging the power of press releases in your SEO efforts can help you attract high-quality SQLs. That is, if instead of using press releases to deliver bland self-promotion, you use them as a medium to share stories that personally connect with your audience. Share anecdotes of businesses that have benefited from your SaaS solution, and offer insights into industry trends your software addresses. This turns your press releases into useful resources that are relatable to people facing real challenges.

Ensure that your press releases are distributed through trusted, industry-specific platforms. This way, you can reach the right audience who are actively seeking solutions like yours. Once your press releases become an integral part of your SEO strategy, they can eventually increase your brand visibility and attract more potential SQLs as they find relevance and value in your content.”

4) Technical SEO for SaaS enterprises

To bring it all together, we have technical SEO—the foundation of your SEO strategy. There are a few things you need to consider for this one, so now may be the perfect opportunity to top up that cup of coffee. 

Master site structure

Site structure is akin to a blueprint of your enterprise. A well-planned, logical site structure aids search engines in understanding and indexing your website efficiently, and of course, provides for a more logical-feeling UX.

Begin by conducting a comprehensive audit of your current site structure to identify areas that need tweaking. Develop a visual sitemap that portrays your website’s architecture, and run card sorting tests with site users to see if your information structure has the most logical flow for your browsers. This also enables you to spot any inconsistencies, disconnects, or redundancies and get them all sorted to enhance user experience and crawlability. 

Pay special attention to elements like nesting, hierarchy, and website depth while designing your structure. Draven tells us more. 

“​​Your internal linking structure helps Google understand your website’s hierarchy and how the different pages relate to each other. This has made me realize how important it is to link to related pages from within your own material. Using appropriate anchor text for these links is like putting up signs to help people and search engines find their way around your site, making it easier to navigate overall.”

— Draven McConville, CEO & Founder at Klipboard.

Seize automation for smoother technical optimization

SEO automation comes in many forms, including site crawlers, tools for image optimization, and plugins for internal linking. Identify and integrate tools based on your specific requirements. 

Some popular tools include MozPro, Yoast SEO, and Screaming Frog SEO Spider, among others. These tools can automate repetitive tasks and provide insights along the way, giving you more time to focus on other strategic initiatives that need human input. Having an effective and struggle-free process to automate and optimize the many pages that enterprises have is key to success. 

Avoid cannibalization!

Cannibalization is a phenomenon that can happen to all-size websites, but it happens more often in websites with many, many pages — like those from enterprises, that’s you! Keyword cannibalization is when multiple pages on a website compete for the same keyword, leading to a drop in search engine rankings and traffic for those pages. Suraj tells us more. 

“When trying to rank for numerous keywords, some pages may inadvertently target the same terms. This leads to keyword cannibalization, diluting your site’s SEO strength. An example is a SaaS company having multiple product pages with similar content. Streamlining content and strategic interlinking can help mitigate this issue and boost overall SEO effectiveness.”

— Suraj Nair, Marketing Department at SocialPilot

Making sure that this is not happening to your website will give all of your keywords a fighting chance while ensuring they’re not competing against each other. 

Cannibalization happens most with overwhelmed content teams using blog templates and repetitive brand mentions to deliver articles quicker. Although this may save you time in the short term, these strategies can do your website more harm than good in the long term. Put the effort into creating your content, and ensuring every line is unique. 

Make your website mobile-friendly and fast-loading

Mobile-friendliness is a must — with 92.3% of internet users accessing the internet using a mobile device. It’s even more important to be mobile-friendly if you’re an enterprise. Why? We’re busy people! Shopping on-the-go is the norm, and that can be applied to almost every user persona today.

Don’t lose potential customers to a site that’s loading slowly or doesn’t adapt to a smaller screen. Draven shares more:

“As more people use smartphones and tablets to connect to the internet, making sure that your website works well on mobile devices has become very important. When you use responsive design, your site will change automatically based on the size of the screen being used to watch it. This will make the experience smooth for all users.”

How to measure the success of your enterprise SEO campaign: Essential metrics

Successful SEO campaigns revolve around data-driven decision-making. Before you start analyzing, you need to know what KPIs are important and how they align with your business goals. 

Here’s a distilled list of SEO metrics that your enterprise should bookmark:

• Revenue: Track the financial growth that is directly attributed to your SEO strategy
• Conversions: Monitor the rate of visitors converting into users or customers—this indicates how effective your SEO strategy is in drawing the right audience
• Keyword SERP ranking: Indicates how effective your SEO strategy is based on the keyword rankings in SERPs
• Non-branded vs. branded search: An increase in non-branded search traffic signifies successful SEO efforts, while branded search increases suggest an increase in brand awareness growth
• ROI from organic: Measure the returns you’ve gained from SEO by monitoring the growth in your product-specific KPIs, like PQLs or SQLs, conversions, and ACVs from the channel
• Backlinks: The count of external websites that link to your content provides insights into the value your content is providing and where your domain authority is benefiting from the most

These key metrics ultimately help quantify the returns on your SEO efforts and gauge the effectiveness of each SEO-driven action.

However, it’s important to keep in mind that you need to understand your specific goals to know what to measure, as Samantha Savage, Digital Marketer at Lesar, shared with us:

“What you use to measure the success of your SEO campaign depends on your end goal. Before launching your campaign, you should consider what your goals are. Consider why you are creating this campaign and what you hope to achieve. Then, you can decide how to measure your success.

For example, if your enterprise’s end goal is to generate sales, I would recommend measuring the conversions. If your enterprise wants to spread more awareness and increase traffic to your site, then I would recommend measuring the amount of visitors you are getting to your site. 

Compare the chosen measurement to previous weeks (days may not be a reliable measurement of time due to the shortness) and this will show how the campaign has affected your enterprise. However, SEO can take a while, so not seeing an immediate change doesn’t necessarily mean there won’t be any.”

The challenges of SEO for enterprise SaaS companies

Creating the right SEO strategy for SaaS companies, especially those on an enterprise level, can present a host of challenges. Here are some of these challenges and how you can best handle them.

Lack of buy-in from higher-ups

Often, senior executives view SEO as a non-essential spend due to its long-term ROI model. To combat this perception, you need a compelling pitch, we can help with that! 

Get equipped with solid data and analytics that showcase key SEO metrics and their impact on company growth. Demonstrating the potential growth rate or cost per acquisition compared to paid traffic can help.

A concrete roadmap visualizing how SEO will optimize and benefit the SaaS funnel will aid in convincing senior leadership about the necessity of SEO. And, building out a time-to-deliver plan will also help you manage expectations and keep leadership off your back in those first few warm-up months.

Remember, speaking their language — emphasizing the dollar signs, cost savings, and long-term value, is what’s going to win your leaders over.

Explaining complex products in content marketing campaigns

This one’s a biggie! Getting potential customers to understand and see value in your complex product is a real struggle for many enterprise solutions. Think Salesforce as an example, their hub of solutions can be completely overwhelming for first-time site visitors. Here are a few things you can do to improve this:

• Begin by understanding your ICPs and their challenges. Then, break down your product features into bite-sized benefits that solve their problems, and deliver these solutions via multiple different articles, essentially meeting them at every problem-oriented research stage.
• Invest time in creating infographics, videos, or demos to help visual learners understand complexities. Describe your product with everyday life scenarios or use customers’ success stories to prove a point. Live demos are great here for your sales teams to be able to answer customer concerns there and then and convert faster. 
• Build a product glossary. A glossary will not only do wonders for your SEO but it will also serve as a valuable resource in explaining complex terminology for early-stage buyers while onboarding your product messaging for when they eventually dive into your SaaS.

We spoke with Kevin Miller, a digital marketing expert, former Google employee, entrepreneur, and angel investor, and this is what he had to say:

“SaaS products are often complex, with unique features and functionalities or requiring sufficient onboarding. Creating content that effectively communicates the value and functionality of the software in a way that’s both understandable and engaging to the target audience can be challenging or require additional resources to achieve. 

It’s important to keep measuring and analyzing your content and its performance since what worked for yesterday may not work today.”

Too many cooks in the SEO kitchen

With a large team, scattered efforts without clear direction can create confusion and siloed efforts. You can combat this by setting clear roles, responsibilities, and a well-defined workflow. Your joint goals and KPIs will also ensure you’re keeping everyone on the same page. Encourage cross-team collaboration and regular check-ins to measure unified efforts on a shared dash.

When in-house complexities get out-of-hand, outsourcing to a SaaS SEO agency can be a game-changer. We’ve brought a fresh perspective and expertise to accelerate SEO ROI for many of our enterprise partners.

Enterprise SaaS SEO campaign examples [and what you can learn from their tactics]

Ready to explore some examples of successful SEO from enterprise SaaS companies? Let’s explore their tactics, results, and the lessons you can implement within your team.

Hubspot’s inbound marketing strategy

Hubspot needs no introduction, but, just in case: it’s a popular marketing, sales, and customer service platform and has built a stellar presence in SERPs with a resourceful inbound marketing strategy. Their exhaustive content library spans topics covering marketing, sales, and customer service, catering to every stage of the customer journey, and every type of persona likely to have a say in investing in their product or not. 

What’s more, they’ve managed to build such a strong brand affinity that they’re not a trusted source of information and their regular guides provide a useful insight into the industry and aid an organic backlinking strategy. 

“Crucial off-page tactics for SaaS enterprises involve building strong backlinks. HubSpot is a prime example of how to do it right. They garnered high-quality backlinks by offering free tools like the Website Grader. These tools attracted not only traffic but also SQLs interested in marketing and sales solutions.”

— Samantha Odo, Chief Operating Officer at PreCondo

Key takeaways:

• Focus on creating high-quality, comprehensive content that resonates with your audience
• Regularly update content to maintain relevancy and adapt to changes in the industry
• Use SEO and content marketing to establish your brand’s authority and reputation

Slack’s multi-faceted approach

Slack, a widely used team collaboration and communication tool, has adopted a versatile approach —including content marketing, outreach campaigns, and technical aspects — to sustain its SEO channel.

“Slack excels at crafting in-depth, value-driven content by creating comprehensive guides on team collaboration and remote work, targeting specific keywords like “remote team productivity.” They addressed a pressing need [during the pandemic] and attracted SQLs interested in their solutions.”

— Samantha Odo

Key takeaways:

• Diversify your SEO efforts to reach a wider audience
• Combine content marketing with link-building, social media, and other outreach campaigns to amplify your brand’s reach
• Prioritize technical SEO to ensure an optimal user experience and search engine performance

Salesforce’s content ecosystem

Salesforce, a leading CRM platform, has excelled at SEO by creating an extensive content ecosystem. They consistently produce blog posts, whitepapers, webinars, and case studies, positioning themselves as thought leaders in the industry.

Source

Ray Slater Berry, of DSLX, breaks down the brand’s approach to content a little further. 

“Salesforce goes above and beyond with their content strategy. Their Learn hub hosts events as well as blogs. But, what I find really useful is how they break down the accessibility and navigation of their blogs. 

The users can filter content by topic, role, industry, or content type (including articles, digital guides, podcasts, reports, videos, and webinars). It’s a great way of not overwhelming the user, and keeping content buckets digestible at an enterprise level.”

Key takeaways:

• Establish a content ecosystem that connects all different forms of content to cater to various customer needs
• Target keywords and topics strategically to attract high-quality leads and build brand reputation
• Foster collaboration between different departments to maintain consistent messaging and branding across all marketing channels

Can SEO help users understand complex SaaS products?

Absolutely! Pairing thoughtful product-centric content with smart SEO can work wonders in helping users decode the unique features and capabilities of your SaaS product.

Clear, well-crafted content can help break down the ins and outs of your SaaS product’s offerings, making its features, advantages, and uses more comprehensible for users and their buying stakeholders. This clarity allows them to gain a precise understanding of how your solution could address their needs and alleviate any concerns from their buying team.

By using SEO techniques to enhance the visibility of your content, you ensure that your target audience can find the answers they are looking for within your field. By zeroing in on relevant keywords and structuring content to align with user search intents, you curate an immersive user experience for both humans and search engines.

At the same time, keyword research, competitor analysis, and web analytics that are all mapped out to aid your SEO strategy can be hugely eye-opening for buyer’s intents, JTBD, and pain points. This info can guide BOFU content to ensure it delivers exactly what a reader needs to sign up.  

Is SEO a viable channel for growth?

SEO is undeniably valuable for fostering growth, and hopefully, this article has taught you as much. Short-term, it increases your enterprise’s visibility on search engines, driving a surge in organic traffic and translating into more SQLs. 

Long-term, SEO reinforces your brand’s position in the industry, enhancing credibility and encouraging customer loyalty.

The caveat here is that effective SEO demands a calculated, dynamic approach. It’s not a ‘set-and-forget’ strategy, but one that needs diligent application and a deep understanding of the rapidly changing SEO landscape — especially with emerging technologies in AI. 

By prioritizing SEO in your wider marketing strategy, you gain a competitive edge, driving both immediate and long-term growth. 

The proof is in the data: despite SEO demanding continuous investment and time to deliver results, the payoff is substantial, with organic traffic’s ability to constitute more than 40% of a company’s revenue. This illustrates SEO’s formidable strength and importance in driving success for your SaaS enterprise.

Here, a specialized SaaS SEO agency like Skale can make a world of difference. Our expertise and knowledge can help tailor a strategy that ensures your SEO is always on point, maximizing the returns on every campaign and accommodating to the challenges so many other enterprises struggle with when implementing the channel.

It’s time to improve your SQLs with a defined SaaS enterprise SEO strategy

The team at Skale can help you take the guesswork out of SEO for your enterprise. Let us be the resource that will bring you all the benefits SEO has to offer, with none of the headaches, lengthy email chains, or 404 pages. 

With our proven track record and our expert team, you can finally focus on that big business idea while your organic growth is being taken care of. We’re ready whenever you are. 

SEO can sail in as the wind beneath your wings, lifting your startup to unprecedented heights throughout your growth stages.

This guide plunges into the nitty-gritty of SEO, specifically tailored for SaaS startups at distinct funding milestones. It unfolds a roadmap from pre-seed beginnings to all the way through the high-stakes rounds of Series A, B, C, and beyond.

Picture this guide as your trusty navigation partner, steering your SaaS vessel around funding-stage obstacles while illuminating the SEO beacons to catapult your growth and bolster your MRR. Though the voyage might be tough, stay with us — it will prove rewarding.

Ready? Let’s set sail!

What is SaaS SEO, and how does it vary for different startups?

SaaS SEO refers to the specialized optimization strategies used by SaaS companies to improve their online brand presence, attract quality traffic, and stimulate organic growth through search engines. Ahem, Google. 

SaaS SEO poses unique challenges and opportunities, especially for startups. SaaS companies often operate in a hyper-competitive environment, and their offerings — usually complex cloud-based applications — are not as straightforward to market as a tangible product. 

For startups, which often crunch for resources and strive to demonstrate growth potential to investors, implementing a tailored SEO strategy can provide valuable leverage. Yet, there’s always high pressure to deliver on results fast — and SEO is notorious for being a ‘long game’.

With various funding stages requiring some different tactics and expected levels of growth, these SEO strategies look different across various funding stages. For example, an early-stage startup may focus more on establishing a robust SEO foundation and brand awareness, while a mature, series-B funded startup could concentrate on ramping up demand capture and capitalizing on branded search.

Understanding your startup’s specific needs and funding stage is crucial for a successful SEO strategy and execution.

The benefits of SaaS SEO for startups

Before diving into the nuts and bolts of SaaS SEO strategy, let’s bust some myths and highlight the benefits that an effective SEO plan can offer your SaaS website:

• Increased MRR: Effective SaaS SEO means more revenue. Better visibility, conversions, and customer loyalty directly contribute to a higher Monthly Recurring Revenue.
• Increased organic traffic: One of the most important outcomes of a solid SEO strategy is an increase in organic search traffic to your website, leading to higher brand visibility and more potential customers finding your product.
• Cost-effective customer acquisition: Startups often operate within shoestring budgets, making SEO an attractive option when compared to more expensive paid advertising marketing channels that often see you needing to pump more money into them each month.
• Long-term results: While it’s true that SEO may take time to see results, investing in it from the outset sets you on a path for sustainable growth and increased market share in the long term.
• Better user experience: A good SEO strategy includes optimizing your website for user experience (UX), facilitating smoother interactions with your customers, and improving their perception of your brand.
• Higher credibility: By ranking higher in search engine results pages (SERPs), your startup gains credibility in the eyes of potential customers (and investors), instilling trust and authority in your product or service.
• Scalability and insights: A smart SEO strategy allows for growth in tandem with the rest of your business. The insights gathered from SEO fuel diverse areas — from product development and messaging to competitor analysis and PR, making it a tangible tool for success.

Ready to increase your revenue by >100% ?

Skale boosted Rezi’s revenue by 176% in just four months with powerful SaaS SEO tactics

How did we do it?

Despite these benefits, some misconceptions are deterring SaaS startups from investing in SEO. One common myth is that SEO isn’t as valuable or immediate as paid advertising. 

The reality, however, is that while SEO can take a little time to show results, its impact is long-lasting and cost-effective, making it a perfect investment for many startups as soon as they, well, start! SEO is not just about driving any traffic, it’s about bringing in the right traffic — your ICP — those that are most likely to become paying customers.

Another misconception is the excessive fixation on rankings. While rankings are important to monitor as a leading indicator, the focus should be on deeper-funnel conversions and the quality of traffic, as these more directly impact your bottom-line metrics like MRR. 

The challenges of SEO growth for SaaS startups

SEO is a powerful catalyst for growth, but it comes with its own hurdles.

Let’s dive deeper into these challenges and discuss solutions to help you navigate this landscape.

1. Securing budget and resources for SEO

Quick wins are enticing and achievable, at least to a certain extent. For instance, optimizing or linking to pages already showing results, but not yet in top positions or reaching their full potential. However, the most significant impact of SEO unfolds over the long term. 

So how do you convince stakeholders to invest resources in SEO? The key is to communicate the long-term benefits and ROI potential of SEO. 

Showcase industry statistics, competitor success stories, and projected forecasts to strengthen your business case, making it clear that SEO is an investment, not an expense.

To further drive home the value of SEO, case in point: Attest, a series B consumer research platform, was operating in a highly competitive market and needed to drive monthly organic sign-ups to scale cost-effectively. They engaged Skale’s SEO solutions to meet this challenge.

With detailed keyword research, content optimization, creating new landing pages, and strategic link-building, Skale helped Attest to spike their non-brand organic product signups by an impressive 8.5x year-on-year and bump up their non-brand organic traffic by 1.85x. This significant growth showcases how a well-directed SEO strategy can quickly become a critical engine for business expansion.

This real-world example shows that SEO is not merely an expense; rather, it’s a strategic investment with the potential for substantial returns. Like any investment, building momentum takes time, but the tangible outcomes make a compelling argument for securing resources for SEO.

How did Attest 8.5x organic product signups?

Skale’s team prioritized high-impact SEO for a serious ROI in a short time

See how we did it

2. Scalability 

Scaling your SEO efforts while maintaining quality can feel like balancing on a tightrope. Luckily, there are strategies and frameworks you can use to achieve this balance. 

For instance, implementing a topical cluster can help create a scalable content strategy. This involves crafting a primary pillar content piece around a key topic, then creating related subtopics that link back to your pillar, creating a robust, interlinked ecosystem.

Another way you can improve the scalability of your SEO is through programmatic SEO. This refers to the systematic and automated approach to search engine optimization (SEO) to achieve scalable and sustainable results. 

Programmatic SEO involves using tools, algorithms, and processes to efficiently manage and optimize various aspects of SEO, such as keyword targeting, content creation, link building, and technical optimizations. By employing programmatic techniques, businesses can streamline their SEO efforts, scale their strategies, and adapt to changes in search engine algorithms, ultimately achieving long-term success more efficiently.

3. Results tracking, analytics, and strategy adjustment 

SEO is not a static discipline; it requires constant tracking, analyzing, and adjusting. 

You’ll need dependable tools at your disposal to glean actionable insights from your data. Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and SEMRush are all vital tools that allow you to monitor important metrics like organic traffic, keyword rankings, and conversion rates. 

You’ll also need some trustworthy CRM (Customer Relationship Management) tools like Hubspot to help you organize, track, and manage interactions with your customers and potential customers. 

Combine these insights with regular SEO audits to keep your strategy aligned with your objectives.

4. Automation and choosing the right tools 

Automating parts of your SEO process can be a major timesaver, but knowing what tools to choose can be perplexing. 

Here are three automation tools that can improve your SEO game: 

• Position Tracking, by SEMRush, enables you to monitor the Google ranking positions of your website for a defined set of keywords
• Site Audit, also by SEMRush, automatically scans your website for over 140 SEO issues, including, duplicate content, redirect chains and loops, broken links, and many more
• A1QA is test automation software designed to assess website performance and stability, directly impacting SEO

Making the right choice comes down to understanding your specific needs, and matching those with a tool’s capabilities.

5. Knowing when to outsource your SEO efforts 

Choosing an SEO agency is a significant decision, as their expertise proves valuable at every stage of your SaaS business’s growth. The complexity and volume of SEO tasks may increase as your business expands, making the continuous support of a proficient SEO agency essential. 

At this stage, outsourcing to an SEO agency may be beneficial. They bring specialized knowledge, a proven track record, and the ability to keep up-to-date with SEO’s ever-changing landscape.

How to match your SaaS SEO strategy to your startup funding level

Your SEO strategy should be as dynamic as your startup, scaling and evolving as you move through different levels of funding. 

Here are a few guidelines for each stage:

1. Early-stage SaaS Startup SEO: Pre-seed & seed

Pre-seed and seed-stage startups often operate in uncharted territories. They’re often category creators, commanding a fairly niche market with sometimes very little search volume. 

That’s an opportunity! By starting with SEO early, you can become an authority in your niche, building a competitive moat, while also capturing demand for other legacy solutions or adjacent use cases. SEO offers an opportunity to capture demand by creating content that genuinely helps your audience solve a problem — and eventually, you can create content that shows why your business is the solution.

However, due to their size, early-stage startups may face challenges, such as limited resources. But, here’s the good news: SEO doesn’t require a huge capital investment. 

You can start your SaaS SEO efforts with limited resources compared to investing in paid ads (Though this can be more affordable in the short term.) The key here is to focus on your primary use cases and prioritize content creation around them. If content doesn’t link back to your core use cases, it is unlikely to generate revenue for your startup.

Using SEO early in your startup journey is a strategic move for visibility. In-depth ICP research should inform your SEO strategy, which will need to be regularly evaluated and tweaked as your business grows.

Customer support and success content are critical at this stage, as well as high-intent listicles for ‘alternatives’ and ‘competitor’ keywords to aid your sales teams. Such listicles capture demand once ranked (as long as they sit within use-case-centric content clusters.) Balancing gated and ungated content, including lead magnets, can create a more comprehensive and user-friendly resource base.

Plus, SEO for early-stage startups can be beneficial across the business—not just when it comes to traffic, rankings, and demand capture. We spoke to Jed Hackling, Co-Founder and COO at Ambl, about how SEO has provided insightful data:

“SEO has done more than increase our impressions and traffic. As a localized app, search volume data helps us identify new areas to launch in. It’s also helped make our case with investors. For example, we can turn to investors and show them that searches for terms like ‘last minute bookings London’ are on the rise—highlighting the need for Ambl, our last-minute bookings solution that connects people with the best bars and restaurants near them.”

The data uncovered through SEO research—like keyword research, competitor analysis, and ongoing results analysis—isn’t just for SEO, it can be used across an organization.

2. Series A-C: SaaS SEO for sustainable MRR growth

As you move into Series A-C funding, your startup is likely further developing its products and gaining more significant traction. SEO plays a key role in generating sustainable MRR. 

You’re no longer just creating a category; you’re also optimizing and maximizing within it by:

• Capturing branded searches
• Expanding content beyond focusing on just your core use cases
• Including adjacent use cases that can link back to your product
• Expanding to ‘problem unaware’ content, allowing you to capture your ICP before they’re aware of your solution

The above enables you to showcase your product as a solution to common problems faced by your ICP.

Leveraging brand awareness becomes increasingly important at this stage. Your SEO strategy should reflect this, capitalizing on branded searches instead of purely non-brand. 

You might have grown your internal team by now. If you don’t have someone focused on SEO, consider hiring an in-house manager or an SEO agency.

3. SEO for Series D and beyond

At this level, you’re likely a significant player in your market, with a mature product offering. Your SEO strategy should reflect this. 

Here, it becomes crucial to refine the balance of your ‘customer success and support’ content and high-intent listicles, re-evaluating them in light of your established position and potential new competitors. Note: high-intent listicles are important at early stage startups too, as these help set you apart from competitors and offer an opportunity to show the positive difference between your brand and competitors. 

More important than listicles at this stage is ‘vs’ content- pages showing your brand ‘vs’ a top competitor allow you to get granular in comparisons, positioning your business in the best possible (but realistic) light. This targets people who may be thinking of switching from a competitor- and shows them why your SaaS is a great alternative.

Getting buy-in for SEO from stakeholders may be more challenging at this size due to increased layers of management. However, if you have been investing from the start in a solid strategy, the benefits of SEO should be clear by this stage, underlining its impact on MRR and the long-term stability of your business. If you haven’t yet started SEO, it’s not too late- you can build a case for it by demonstrating the ROI of SEO for SaaS.

It’s generally easier to get buy-in when you can show actual case studies and data reflecting your successful growth curve.

At each level, remember that SEO isn’t a “set it and forget it” channel; it demands regular monitoring, scrutiny, and updating. 

As your SaaS grows, your SEO should grow with it. Just as your product evolves, so too should your SEO— refining and developing in response to shifts in the market, advances in technology, and changes in user behavior.

Stay proactive, stay patient, and lean into the data. Remember, the efforts you put in today will continue way into the future — SEO compounds over time.

The fundamentals of an SEO strategy for SaaS startups (no matter what funding stage you’re at!)

To ensure you’re driving MRR for your SaaS, it’s essential to focus on the core components of SEO, no matter your company’s funding stage. 

Here’s our step-by-step overview of how to make your SaaS website’s content as search engine–friendly as possible.

Focus on your on-page SaaS SEO strategy

The keel of your SEO vessel is the on-page strategy. Here’s how to construct it:

Run a competitor analysis

For an SEO strategy that cuts through the noise, a comprehensive competitor analysis is indispensable.

Kick off this process by cataloging your main competitors, then, dig deeper. Examine their SEO strategies, content topics, and the keywords they’re ranking for. 

Don’t stop at just identifying their strategies—dissect and comprehend the “why” behind their success. What keywords are they ranking for, and how? What makes their content resonate with their audience? Do they follow a particular content format or style?

Importantly, scrutinize for the chinks in their armor—gaps, oversights, or areas in which they fall short. Identify your startup’s strengths here—a fresh perspective, a novel approach, an innovative solution that your audience might miss out on from your competitors. 

This not only helps you put together a distinct SEO strategy but also enables you to serve superior, more engaging content to your potential customers.

Perform an in-depth ICP analysis

Analyzing and understanding your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) isn’t just the stepping stone to crafting high-converting SEO content, it’s the trailhead to a journey of engaging insights.

Dive into this process by zeroing in on the characteristics of your high-return customers. Use analytics tools like Google Analytics and data from your CRM to decode your most lucrative customers—their industries, job titles, challenges, preferred solutions, platforms they engage with, online behavior—everything.

Use this insight to create profiles of your ideal customers and address their specific needs in the content that you produce.This also shows you which topics will be most useful to cover in your content.

Do keyword research

Keyword research should cover the full depth of the funnel:

• Top of the funnel (TOFU): Broad informational keywords that generate brand awareness, e.g., “project management tips.”
• Middle of the funnel (MOFU): Keywords that demonstrate prospect evaluation and consideration, e.g., “best project management examples.”
• Bottom of the funnel (BOFU): Keywords indicating buying intent, e.g., “project management tool pricing comparison.”

Experiment with keyword variations and long-tail relevant keywords to target your audience more precisely. Some keywords will primarily help attract users to your site, while others will help in converting them.  

Use keyword analysis tools (like Ahrefs or Semrush) to identify terms with high search volume and low competition, optimizing your ability to rank and draw traffic.

Source

Think about content clustering

Content clustering, especially hub and spoke clusters, helps organize your content around specific themes related to your use case, ICP, and industry. 

Discovering the main topics and subtopics captivating your target audience requires an understanding beyond just surface specifications. 

Forums, customer interviews, review platforms, and competitor analysis can offer rich insights into your audience’s pain points and interests. Once mined, apply these insights to build clusters of content specifically geared toward addressing these needs and challenges.

As you create and publish more cluster content, your website’s authority on these topics will grow, leading to improved search engine rankings and increased organic traffic.

Don’t forget about optimizations

Ensure your content is structured and optimized for search engines. This includes title tags, header tags, meta descriptions, and URL structures. By optimizing these, your content meets search intent and leaves a positive impression on your audience.

Don’t forget about mobile optimization, as a growing number of users are accessing content via smartphones and tablets. Choose appropriate image sizes to ensure that your pages load quickly. 

Don’t forget to add alt text to each image — it’s not just crucial for screen readers, but also provides additional context to search engine crawlers.

Pay attention to internal linking

Strategically place internal links within your content to help users navigate and discover relevant information.

Internal linking also helps search engines better understand and index your content. Ensure link anchor texts are meaningful, matching the target page’s topic.

Use content planning

Finally, develop a content plan to manage and organize your SEO efforts. Develop an editorial calendar, outlining publication dates and the associated keywords, topics, and goals of each piece of content. 

Revisit and update your content plan (at least once every quarter) to ensure you stay on track with your overall SEO and MRR goals.

Check off-page SaaS SEO tactics

Your startup’s SEO strategy comprises more than meets the eye. 

On-page SEO is the visible part of the iceberg, but there’s a robust structure submerged beneath—off-page SEO.

1. Strategic Link Building

Link building is the off-page tactic of acquiring links from other websites to your own. 

The purpose? To boost your website’s authority in the eyes of search engines. Strategic link building is more than just winning links; it’s about earning high-quality, relevant links. These are from reputable and topical sites, signaling to search engines that your content is valuable and reliable. 

A prime example of this is our work with Moonpay, a fast-growing cryptocurrency payments platform. 

Moonpay aimed to rank for high-intent, competitive B2C keywords like ‘buy Ethereum with credit card’ and ‘buy USDT’, in a race against industry giants such as Coinbase, Binance, and Kraken. 

To overcome the challenge of high-competition and rapidly changing industry trends, we crafted a tailored link-building strategy that targeted evergreen keywords and captured emerging ones opportunistically.

A highlight of our campaign’s success was ranking Moonpay’s most competitive keyword (#1) in just seven months, multiplying Moonpay’s non-branded organic traffic by 256 times. This winning blend of targeted efforts led to Moonpay generating over 7k non-brand organic clicks per month from high-intent keywords. 

The key takeaway here: it’s the quality, not quantity, of links that matters most. 

How did Moonpay go from 0 to 7,000+ clicks per month?

They worked with Skale to build 80+ backlinks targeting competitive keywords, but that’s not all

See how we did it

2. Outreach

Outreach is another strategy used for demand generation, brand awareness, and even referral traffic and conversions. This tactic involves connecting with bloggers, influencers, and other SaaS companies who might be interested in sharing a link to your website from their content, hence extending your website’s reach.

For successful outreach, identify potential partners whose audiences align with your ideal customer profile. Approach them with personalized, value-adding proposals, such as offering to publish helpful guest content or suggesting your resource for a high-ranking listicle. There are several ways to do this:

• Listicle outreach: reaching out to sites ranking for high-intent terms in your niche, even if they list other tools
• Unlinked brand mentions
• Broken link building (which we go into in our masterlist of SaaS link building strategies) 

In return, not only could you gain valuable backlinks but can also shape the narrative in the SERPs to favour your brand

3. Social Media

While social media signals don’t directly impact your site’s SERP ranking, they play an indirect role. 

Engagement on social media drives traffic to your website, makes your content more discoverable, and increases its reach. 

X (formerly known as Twitter), LinkedIn, TikTok, Threads, Instagram—the platforms may vary, but the game plan remains constant. Share your content regularly and engage by replying to comments, answering queries, or participating in industry discussions. 

Remember that social signals, such as likes and shares, can indirectly influence your SEO while allowing your content to reach a larger audience.

4. PR Activities

Public Relations includes various activities—from issuing press releases about company news, creating shareable infographics, to participating in industry conferences, events, competitions, and awards. 

PR, when done right, can translate into valuable backlinks from news sites and blogs. It helps foster positive relationships with journalists, influencers, and investors that could be useful for future outreach.

Remember to opt for high-quality PR activities that resonate with your brand values and are likely to interest your target audience rather than chasing cheap PR cheats that could do your SEO more harm than good.

“In regards to high-quality backlinks, there are a couple of DIY approaches to help you garner the authoritative recognition you seek. Digital PR is an effective method to achieve this.

You can reach out to journalists offering your expert opinion for articles they may be writing in the future. Tools like HARO are great resources for meeting journalists who are currently writing articles that fall into your niche. You can also approach relevant websites and ask to write an article for them, which will include a link back to your website.

At the end of the day, you need to remember that you are the expert; you are the business owner, even before you start getting global recognition. With your pitches and responses be honest, be natural, and be yourself. There is huge competition out there but the majority are fake personas generated by AI. Journalists know the difference between real and fake, so your personal touch will go a long way.”

— Donna Gleize, Off-Page Content Manager, Skale

5. Forum Participation

Communities like Quora, Reddit, or industry-specific forums offer platforms where your potential customers may be asking questions or discussing issues you can solve. 

By providing useful answers and engaging respectfully, you can subtly guide readers towards your content or offerings. The dual advantage? Building credibility as a thought leader in your niche while possibly earning quality backlinks.

Consider technical SaaS SEO components

The technical aspects of SEO ensure your site is positioned for success. Here are some key areas to look at:

1. Site Speed

Nowadays, and especially in the digital world, patience is as rare as the dodo. A mere one-second delay in your page load time can swiftly steal 16% off your customer satisfaction score. Now, assume your site takes four seconds to load—you might be waving goodbye to one in every four visitors.

So, how about treating site speed as your daily morning jog? Make it a priority to routinely analyze your site speed using tools like Google’s PageSpeed Insights. 

Identify areas for improvement, which may include optimizing images, reducing HTTP requests, or leveraging browser caching to enhance the overall user experience and boost SEO performance.

2. Structured Data

Structured data, also known as schema markup, helps search engines better understand your site’s content, thereby improving your chances of scoring rich snippets in SERPs.

Use Google’s Structured Data Markup Helper to create the code for different schema types, like product pages, blog posts, or reviews. Set up this code on your site and validate it using Google’s structured data testing tool.

3. XML Sitemaps

Think of an XML sitemap as a roadmap guiding search engines to understand your site’s structure and discover new content.

Keep your sitemap updated and submit it to search engine tools like Google Search Console for better indexing.

4. Canonicalization

Canonicalization helps you manage duplicative content on your website, preventing the “divide and conquer” effect where similar pages cannibalize each other’s search rankings.

By using a canonical URL, you tell search engines which version of a web page they should index and rank. This practice ensures your preferred pages gain the rankings they deserve and reduces the potential for confusion when search engines crawl your site.

Create expert-driven, high-quality content that resonates with your ICPs

High-quality, authoritative content is what drives organic traffic and conversions. Here are the integral parts of creating content that resonates with your audience:

1. Properly plan and execute your content creation

Goals are the anchors of a successful content strategy. What do you wish to achieve with your content? Increase brand awareness among ICPs? Drive app sign-ups? Reduce churn? Determine clearly defined, measurable goals before setting pen to paper.

Research, then, takes center stage. Deeply understanding your customers’ pain points, desires, and the search phrases they use to find solutions, allows you to tailor content that aligns with their needs. Use tools like Google Keyword Planner, SEMrush, or AnswerThePublic for keyword research and topic inspiration.

Select topics that not only resonate with your audience but also showcase your specific expertise. Aim for variety, mixing deep dives into industry trends with product how-tos, customer testimonials, and SaaS implementation strategies. 

Budget constraint? No problem. A smaller number of well-researched, extensive, authoritative posts will always outrank a deluge of superficial articles.

Write in clear, concise, and engaging prose. Remember, this isn’t a sales pitch; it’s a form of building a connection with your audience. 

Finally, keep your tone friendly, accessible, and free from jargon. Ensure every piece answers a question, solves a problem, or enlightens a reader.

2. The importance of E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness)

With the term E-E-A-T, Google has emphasized its commitment to promoting high-quality, reliable content. This creates an opportunity for SaaS startups to demonstrate their knowledge and distinguish their brand.

To achieve expertise, leverage your in-house experts. Create well-researched blogs, informative how-tos, or insightful opinion pieces that display deep industry knowledge.

Authoritativeness is earned through recognition. High-quality backlinks, social shares, positive user engagement – Google considers these while evaluating your brand’s authority. 

Achieve these by publishing influential content on established platforms, guest blogging on industry-specific portals, or broadcasting webinars featuring industry experts.

Trustworthiness is built over time and with consistency. Secure your website, publish accurate and up-to-date content, be transparent about your business practices, and engage genuinely with your customers regularly.

“Something I think all SaaS startups should leverage is interviews with experts in their field and their ICP fields—interviewing prominent people in their client base would be particularly ideal, as they can then include 1-3 questions on how their own tool empowers growth, and can possibly extend the relationship to a case study. 

Interviewing any expert though (and doesn’t have to be a famous expert—it can be a senior at any company in their niche; someone like that is likely to be enthusiastic about the exposure) is beneficial for the E-E-A-T of the website, and they can then pull quotes from those interviews to be featured on more SEO-focused articles, and post to LinkedIn. If it goes well, it may even earn them a backlink from that expert’s own site!” 

— Katja Mamacos, Content SEO Specialist at Skale

3. How writing useful, expert-informed content can influence conversions & revenue

Create content mapped to your customers’ journey. From instructional blog posts for newcomers to expert guides for more advanced users, ensure you provide value at every stage of the user journey.

Focus on offering solutions. Users come to you with a problem; your content must guide them to a solution—your SaaS product. Show them exactly how your product can resolve their issue and the tangible results they can expect.

“As a startup operating in a niche relevant to your expertise, there is a high likelihood that you will have in-house expertise to help—usually the founders if you are still lean. Other than this, you can also leverage your customer base to crowdsource expertise via incentivized interviews or surveys. You could approach this via manual outreach, on-site surveys, or leverage your email list to crowdsource responses or collect information at scale to drive statistics.

Leveraging customer data/customer responses for statistics or unique data can be a little time-consuming, but this allows you to back up your arguments with unique, verified data (ensuring you’re collecting from a large enough dataset). This unique data can be reused in whitepapers, infographics, and social—all linking back to your content. Content with unique statistics/data is fantastic ‘link bait’ which can be sourced and referenced by other sites linking back to you.” 

— Ben Major, Head of SEO at Skale

Include compelling calls-to-action (CTAs) aligned with the content piece. It might be asking them to learn more about a specific feature, inviting them to schedule a demo, or suggesting they read a case study.

Don’t forget to measure your content efforts. Use tracking codes, monitor your analytics, perform A/B tests, and tweak your content as needed to continually optimize for better conversions.

Is SEO the right marketing channel for your startup?

Deciding if SEO is right for your startup requires considering a few key points.

Let’s explore each aspect more in-depth to help you make an informed decision.

• Consider your willingness to invest in long-term growth. SEO is not an immediate solution; it’s a channel that delivers results over time. You need to consistently invest in it and be patient—are your stakeholders willing to wait to see the full value?
• Pay attention to your competitors. If they’re already highly visible for industry-relevant keywords, then there’s search demand you can tap into with smart SEO techniques.
• Evaluate your current website’s traffic and lead generation. Are any of your current pages generating business revenue? Do they have room to improve to rank higher in organic results? If yes, then these are clear SEO opportunities.
• Think about your ICP’s tendencies. If they use search engines to find solutions, SEO can help you connect with your target audience effectively. SEO won’t work for every industry, simply because not every potential buyer uses search to find a product- word of mouth, social media, and traditional advertising are the way to reach people on some niches. 
• Even if your niche or solution doesn’t have a high search volume now, it might in the future. Investing in SEO can position your startup as an industry authority early on, providing a competitive advantage. If you can prove there will be growth in your niche, then get on SEO early, case in point: the drastic rise in AI products. 

So, while SEO isn’t universally a perfect fit, it could be a powerful driver of growth for your SaaS startup, as long as you deliver well on your strategy and know how to invest your cash.

Start your SaaS SEO strategy for maximum ROI

Laying the groundwork for a SaaS SEO strategy demands thorough comprehension of your brand and ICP. Gaining such clarity enables you to better understand your target audience and your niche in the market.

Once you set the foundation for your SaaS SEO strategy, you can craft a content plan that addresses your users’ pain points. Doing so means generating relevant, up-to-date, and captivating content that effectively tackles your ICP’s challenges.

By focusing your strategy on solving user problems, you elevate your SaaS offerings in SERPs, becoming the solution your audience seeks. This not only amplifies your visibility but also strengthens your reputation as an industry expert, bolstering customer trust and business impact.

If you need a hand in kick-starting your journey or require expert guidance along the way, you can always turn to us at Skale, a SaaS SEO agency renowned for driving real growth and revenue. 

SEO for SaaS Startups FAQs

In fact, 70% of online marketers say that, for generating sales, SEO is better than PPC. As SaaS businesses move from growth at all costs to sustainable growth, SEO is a must for driving new biz MRR.

Search Engine Optimisation isn’t just about reaching #1 or seeing a huge increase in website traffic—it’s also about the real-world impact on your business. We see this every day with results for the SaaS brands we work with, like:

• Piktochart improving signups by 10x in just 3 months
• Foyr increasing organic product free trials by 22x
• Attest improving product signups by 8.5x year-on-year

If you’re looking for a scalable way to increase SQLs, activations, and long-term SaaS growth, SEO is the way to go. That’s why we created this SaaS SEO guide, complete with actionable techniques you can use right away.

How to kickstart your SaaS SEO Growth strategy in 12 steps

Hopefully you’re now convinced that investing in SEO for your SaaS is an important pillar of your go-to-market strategy. 

Where do you get started? 

Here are a few basic steps you can take in order to kick-start building your SaaS SEO growth channel.

1. Set your SEO goals & KPIs in alignment with your go-to-market motion

Align internally on which go-to-market motion you are primarily focusing on: self-serve, SMB, or Enterprise. It will directly correlate with your ACV. This changes your whole approach so you need to align on this first. Let’s look at each of these go-to-market motions:

Self-Serve: This focuses on providing a streamlined, user-friendly experience for customers to discover, sign up, and start using a SaaS product without requiring much (or any!) human interaction. It often involves a low-touch sales approach and aims to capture a large number of customers through self-service platforms.

SMB (Small and Medium-sized Businesses): Tailored towards serving small and medium-sized businesses. It typically involves a mix of self-serve options and some level of human touch, such as customer support or account management. The goal is to cater to the unique needs of SMBs while maintaining a balance between SEO automation and personalized support.

Enterprise: Focused on selling to large enterprises and corporations. It involves a high-touch sales approach with dedicated account executives, customized solutions, and extensive relationship-building. The sales cycle is often longer and requires more personalized engagement to address complex needs and decision-making processes.

Depending on which go-to-market motion you choose it will indicate which SEO metrics you should focus on. However, here are a few more questions that will help you set the correct goals for your approach.

When setting your SaaS SEO goals, here are some questions to consider:

• Who is the target audience for the SaaS product?
• Which go-to-market motion (self-serve, SMB, or Enterprise) aligns with your target audience?
• What are the specific business objectives or desired outcomes for the SaaS product?
• Are you aiming for qualified signups and activations, or qualified pipeline and closed won deals?
• What are the key performance indicators (KPIs) that will reflect the success of your SaaS product?
• What are the current SaaS growth metrics and how can they be improved?
• What are the relevant keywords and search terms that your target audience is likely to use?
• How competitive is the SaaS market niche in terms of SEO, and what strategies can you implement to stand out?
• What is the desired level of brand visibility and online presence through SEO efforts?
• How can SEO be integrated with other marketing channels and initiatives to maximize results?

By considering these questions, you can set meaningful and actionable SaaS SEO goals that align with your business objectives and target audience.

2. Map out your buyer personas, product, use cases and jobs to be done (JTBD)

The most important thing in this step is to truly understand who your target audience is. And to do that, buyer personas are what you need to create. 

Buyer personas are fictional representations of your ideal customers, based on market research and data. These personas provide deep insights into the needs, preferences, and behaviors of the people who buy your product. By understanding your audience on a personal level, you can tailor your SEO efforts to resonate with them and drive meaningful engagement while attracting new customers. 

Buyer personas will help you identify the keywords, search terms, and topics that are most relevant to your audience. By aligning your content with their interests and pain points, you can create valuable and targeted content that ranks higher in search results. 

Additionally, understanding your personas’ demographics, interests, and online behavior can guide your decisions on website design, user experience, and content distribution channels. 

Ultimately, this deeper understanding of your customers allows you to deliver a more personalized and engaging experience that resonates with their needs, resulting in better SEO performance and business growth.

Interview customers to understand how they are currently using your product. Gather as much data as possible. Work with your product team, PMM, sales, and data teams to establish the most important use cases.

Pro tip: check out yours and your competitors’ G2 profiles and read customer reviews. More often than not, they’ll tell you what jobs they are trying to get done, and the different use cases that they value.

Pro, pro tip: analyze product metrics for each use case and track the E2E funnel so you can analyze ARPA, MRR Churn, and ultimately LTV by use case/job to be done. 

Pro, pro, pro tip: Take it even further and track sales velocity to create exponential revenue growth by focusing on the right topics.

3. Use the customer awareness framework

Map out content ideas based on your research using the customer awareness framework. Product aware, solution aware, problem aware, and problem unaware (ICP content).

4. Perform in-depth SaaS keyword research

This keyword research will form the basis of your SEO strategy and content roadmap. 

You can do this in a multitude of different ways, such as:

• Focusing on switch moments: what is your ICP currently using to solve their job to be done? Paper? Excel? Another SaaS solution?
• Sales call n-gram analysis: get all your successful sales call audios and transcribe them. Now run them through an n-gram analysis and understand what common words they are using to mine for keyword ideas.
• Customer support tickets: similar to the above tactic, but with customer support tickets.
• Software review websites: check your own reviews and your competitor’s reviews on G2. Analyse both positive and negative and understand jobs to be done, pain points, motivations, etc. 
• Competitor PPC data: use a tool like Ahrefs to see what keywords your competition is bidding on in PPC, and consider if they are interesting to form part of your SEO for SaaS strategy.

You can check out different SaaS keyword research methods in our free guide.

Additionally, it’s always good to understand that each stage of the funnel will have different keywords. 

TOFU keywords (problem-unaware):

• Focus on broad, informational topics
• Aim to attract a wide audience and generate awareness
• Typically used by users who are in the early stages of the buying process
• Examples: “how to increase organic traffic,” “what is SEO”

MOFU keywords (problem aware):

• More specific than TOFU keywords, targeting users who are in the consideration phase
• Intended to provide more detailed information and comparisons
• Can help users evaluate options and make informed decisions
• Examples: “best SEO agencies in London,” “top-rated SEO agencies”

BOFU keywords (solution aware):

• Highly specific and transactional in nature
• Target users who are ready to make a purchase or take a specific action
• Focus on product names, brand-specific terms, and phrases related to buying intent
• Examples: “case study Skale,” “Skale vs competitor”

Understanding the differences between these keyword types helps optimize your B2B keyword research by tailoring keywords to meet the needs and intent of users at different stages of the buying journey.

5. Create content clusters based on your topics & ideas

Based on our experience here at Skale, Google ranks topics and not keywords. This is key to driving sure-fire growth through SEO because you can’t easily rank singular keywords. Figure out which topic makes the most sense in relation to product-market fit, ease, and KPI potential.

6. Build an SEO model in Google Sheets

Here you’ll want to outline all the possible pages that can be made, their traffic potential, awareness stage, map potential conversion to demo rates, and referring domains needed to rank each topic. 

Now augment with ICE prioritization by topic in order to prioritize where you first put efforts for the biggest MRR upside.

7. Conduct competitor research to reverse engineer each page you’re creating

Part of your content marketing strategy should include digging into the top results in Google. Spend at least 2 hours on each page understanding concepts such as search intent, content structure patterns, NLP keywords, featured snippet & schema opportunities, etc. 

8. Create E-E-A-T worthy SaaS SEO content

E-E-A-T stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. It is a set of criteria used by Google’s search algorithms to evaluate the quality and credibility of web content. 

In order words, it’s what Google looks at when deciding which content to rank. In other words, something you should really be paying attention to.

The most recent addition to Google’s E-E-A-T is the last E, which stands for Expertise. So, how can you add this to your content? 

You can do this by interviewing experts (subject matter experts, or SMEs) in your niche and working with top-league SaaS-experienced content writers. 

Additionally, building trust with your audience is essential. This can be done by having clear and transparent communication, displaying customer testimonials or reviews, and ensuring the security and privacy of user data.

By focusing on building E-E-A-T in your SaaS SEO content, you increase the likelihood of attracting organic traffic, establishing credibility in your industry, and ultimately driving conversions.

Don’t cut costs on content creation at all—it’s a core part of growing a long-term SaaS SEO channel. 

9. Select pages you can optimize for quick wins

By focusing on specific pages that have the potential to generate quick improvements in search rankings and organic traffic, you can achieve early successes and build momentum for your overall SEO strategy.

How do you know which pages will give you quick wins? Consider the following factors:

Current ranking and traffic: Identify pages that are already ranking well in search results but have the potential to climb higher with some targeted optimization––remember, the first spot is always the goal. These pages may already be attracting organic traffic, and optimizing them further can help drive even more visibility and engagement.

Low-hanging fruit opportunities: Look for pages that have the potential to quickly improve their rankings with minimal effort. This could include optimizing meta tags, improving keyword targeting, enhancing on-page content, or fixing technical issues that may be holding them back.

Once you’ve identified these pages, focus on optimizing them by implementing SEO best practices, such as:

• Optimizing title tags and meta descriptions
• Improving keyword density and relevance
• Enhancing user experience
• Ensuring mobile-friendliness
• Ensuring fast page loading times

These early successes can provide valuable insights and serve as a foundation for further SEO efforts and long-term optimization strategies.

10. Kickstart an always-on strategic SaaS link building program

You need to build authority to the content you’ve published, by having other websites link back to yours. Without links, you will not be able to build a scalable SEO growth engine. 

We’ve proved this a multitude of times at Skale by securing 1000s of links to a myriad of different SaaS brands. Check out how we managed to get a €1 cost per signup for HappyScribe through strategic SaaS link building. 

Here are some SaaS link building tactics to get you started: 

1. Unlinked brand mentions. Research websites that have mentioned your SaaS but they didn’t add a link back to you. Outreach to them and ask if they can include a link back to your SaaS website.
2. Guest posting. This involves researching high-quality websites in your niche and pitching topic ideas for their blog. You create high-quality content for them for free, in exchange for adding a relevant link back to your website which helps boost your search engine results position. 
3. Conferences & podcasts. Get active speaking at conferences and podcasts, and more often than not when you’re published online as a speaker, you’ll get a link back to your website.
4. Product reviews. Reach out to experts & influencers in your niche and offer them 3 months of your SaaS product for free in exchange for a review, and a link back! 

Want the full list? Check out our SaaS link building guide here. 

11. Ensure your website is sound from a technical SEO perspective

This step is critical, because if you don’t have a strong foundation to build upon, then you won’t be able to scale your SaaS SEO channel. Alongside improving on-page SEO and off-page SEO, you need to work with a Technical SEO expert and get your website into serious shape.

A few things you can do are:

• Perform an in-depth technical SEO audit, and fix all the key things. Do not use an online tool to do this like Ahrefs or SEMrush as they won’t find all the issues. Instead, work with an expert who can dig deep manually and with custom tooling.
• Perform an internal linking audit in order to improve the overall architecture of your website and internal linking structure. This will seriously improve your search engine optimization because internal links count but are often overlooked. 
• Perform a cannibalization audit to find what content is competing with each other with the same search intent and thus hindering their ability to effectively rank in top positions. 

Lucky for you we’ve put together a technical SEO guide for you to get this job done. Take a look at it here.

12. Effectively measure SaaS SEO ROI

This is important because your marketing budget is being scrutinized and it’s finite. You need to prove to your CEO or the Board that not only can you drive positive results, but that the payback period or CAC:LTV ratio is within an acceptable range.

This said, do understand that on average with every SEO action, there is a 3-month lag to it impacting—so keep this in mind when measuring your SaaS SEO channel’s ROI. 

You can learn more in our guide here.

Well, there are a few steps to get started—but in reality, there are many more things that you need to do. So below we’ve put together 7 SaaS Growth Tactics you can start considering today.

7 SaaS SEO growth tactics to guide your long-term strategy

We’re working with some of the biggest names in SaaS to drive serious growth through SEO, and we’re going to let some secrets out of the bag.

Here are 7 things to keep in mind if you’re serious about using SEO as a business growth tactic. 

Psst, keep them a secret!  

1) Don’t forget BOFU keywords

Don’t simply spend all of your time creating content for problem-aware and problem-unaware audiences. Ensure you’re also building out content for solution-aware audiences who have an almost-immediate need to use your SaaS product. 

These pages will not just have high signup rates, but the signup-> customer conversion rate will be higher both in terms of rate and velocity. 

Examples of types of keywords you can include:

2) Build a SaaS SEO growth model

As mentioned before, the only way to seriously grow a customer acquisition channel is to design a growth model. So you need to do the same for SEO. 

How? Here’s the simple version:

1. Map out all existing pages with an SEO value. Identify the head term for each page. Ensure pages aren’t cannibalizing each other.
2. Add on your keyword research ensuring each keyword is a page (this is a page-level model). Keyword research can come in many flavors such as customer interviews, PPC data, spending hours going through your sales CRM, etc. 

See how to conduct a full SaaS Keyword Research here.

3. Augment this with the following data:
   • Clicks past 30 days
   • Traffic potential 
   • Topic cluster
   • Current RDs
   • RDs needed
   • Intent (low-mid-high)
   • Signup->Paying CVR % 
4. Include the following calculations:
   • Click uplift
   • Visit -> Signup CVR (based on intent) 
   • Signups
   • Customers
   • RDs Needed

Now you have the growth model built, you can find where the growth opportunities lie by selecting which topic is the easiest to rank, has the biggest upside, and is most closely related to your product (ensure high signup and signup->customer conversion rates). You can use some basic statistics on the data set you just created. 

Pro tip: you can automate the model so it’s up to date through different Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and Ahrefs data connectors. 

3) Conduct a SaaS competitor analysis to reverse engineer effective SEO tactics

There’s no point reinventing the wheel or failing for the sake of failing. Get a head start by digging into competitor strategies through tools like Ahefs, SEMRush, and Google itself. 

Here are a few questions you can ask yourself: 

• Who are my direct and indirect competitors?
• What solutions were my customers using before signing up to my SaaS solution?
  • E.g. paper, google sheets, a competitor, etc. 
• Who’s an SEO authority on the subject at hand, but necessarily not another SaaS or product? 
• How are these websites acquiring links, and at what speed?
  • Are they creating content collaborations, doing digital PR, being mentioned in roundups, speaking at conferences, or did they create a link building growth loop?
• How have they architected their website to scale SEO?
  •  What are the key sections on their website which have the most traffic? (Remember traffic and revenue aren’t correlated!) 
• What key SaaS content tactics are they leveraging?
  • Guides, alternative to pages, software listicles, glossaries, free tools, maker pages, integrations, etc. 
• What CRO techniques are they hiring to push people through their customer journey all the way from the top of the funnel content, to the bottom of the funnel content aimed at getting people to get a demo? 
• Are they focusing on specific industries within their total addressable market?
  • What personas are they speaking to, exactly?

Remember, what you find should be insights and used as inspiration. You cannot assume all these websites have it figured out—and traffic doesn’t correlate with revenue! It’s a quality game at the end of the day. 

Oh, and we wrote a guide on it here. Check it out! 

4) Rank for key switch moments

Think about where people are switching from before using your SaaS solution for the job to be done. 

We can look at two main categories of switch moments:

A) Switching from other competitors

These are customers unhappy with their current SaaS solution so they begin searching for alternatives. For example, if someone is unhappy with Mailchimp, then they’ll search in Google for “Mailchimp alternatives”. This keyword has a search volume of 9,100 globally per month!

Pro tip: you can even rank for “your SaaS brand alternatives”, to dissuade your own customers from churning. Take a look at what Zendesk did – they created a band called “Zendesk Alternative” and ranked it for this search term!

B) Switching from a non-software solution

There are still prospects using a pre-cloud solution to solve their current job to be done. For example, they might still be doing everything in Excel, so “job + excel templates” would be an interesting angle to look into in order to capture these people and educate them there is a better way. 

How to find these switch moments? 

Spend time interviewing your customers and asking them how they used to do their job before using your SaaS solution. You can also take a peek at your own and competitor G2 reviews. 

5) Build a link building loop into your product

Links are really hard to earn nowadays, and there are a couple of ways you can do this, apart from forming content collaborations, with your SaaS by building in growth loops. 

Here are a few examples of what other SaaS brands are doing with their link building strategies:

First, Mixpanel is giving away free usage of their product if you embed a Mixpanel badge somewhere on your website. Not only are they getting a link back to increase their DR, but they are also getting a tonne of brand exposure for their product. It’s not just a link growth loop, it’s also a brand marketing growth loop. 

Source

Second, Typeform is adding a link outside of their form embed code. So as people embed a Typeform on their website (e.g. a contact us form), they are automatically getting a link back. 

Not only are they getting links to their website, but they are also personalizing the link so it relates to a core use case: forms, surveys, quizzes, or polls. 

Third, Oliva, a mental health SaaS, is asking customers to mention them on their careers page when they’ve signed up as a customer. They promote Oliva as a benefit to their current and future employees.

If your SaaS has a direct benefit to another company’s employees, then you could leverage this tactic in partnership with your Customer Success team. 

Itching for more SaaS link building tactics? Check out 22 of them here. 

6) Leverage your user base (AKA community)

Here’s an underutilized tactic, which when you read seems pretty obvious. 

Everyone who’s signed up for your product or newsletter could be your community—but they need nurturing. Perhaps you’ve heard the new “community-driven growth” buzzword, it’s got something to do with this. 

You can leverage your community to create content in different ways. 

Here are a few of our favorite examples:

1. Maze leveraged their community to create 100s of templates to help people activate their product. They also rank in Google for longtail keywords and capture people with a high motivation to sign up and pay for their product. 

Other examples can be seen with Miroverse and Airtable Universe. 

2. Pitch are working with their community to create presentations on different topics. These presentations don’t just create brand awareness through social sharing, but they also rank in Google for a range of different topics. 

Not only are they leveraging their user base to create content, but they are also doing co-marketing with other brands in the space where they have an ICP overlap, where they create presentations and Pitch promotes. 

3. Maze are also working with their community to gather expert quotes. Not only does this improve the quality of the content they are producing, but it also helps with E-A-T metrics so that Google sees them as an expert and authority on the subject they are publishing content on. 

Gone are the days when you can simply outsource a piece of content to a freelance writer who has zero subject matter expertise. You need to speak to and include experts in all content you create. The best and easiest way to do this is through your community. 

7) Measure the ROI of your SaaS SEO correctly

If you’re investing in building an SEO customer acquisition engine, you need to be able to measure ROI correctly. 

Here’s a brief explanation of how you can measure SaaS SEO ROI and some tools that can help (or you can try our SEO ROI tracker):

• Set clear goals: Define specific SEO goals aligned with your business objectives, such as increased organic traffic, higher conversion rates, or improved keyword rankings.
• Track organic traffic and conversions: Use website analytics tools like Google Analytics or Adobe Analytics to monitor organic traffic trends, referral sources, and user behavior on your site. Track conversions or goal completions, such as sign-ups, downloads, or purchases, to determine the impact of SEO efforts on driving valuable actions.
• Calculate revenue attribution: Implement conversion tracking and assign a monetary value to each conversion. By analyzing the revenue generated from conversions attributed to SEO, you can estimate the ROI.
• Monitor keyword rankings: Utilize SEO tools like Ahrefs, SEMrush, or Moz to track keyword rankings. Measure improvements in organic rankings for target keywords and assess their impact on organic traffic and conversions.
• Analyze cost and investment: Evaluate the costs associated with SEO activities, including tools, content creation services, and any external SEO services. Compare the investment against the revenue generated to calculate ROI.
• Use ROI calculators: Some SEO platforms provide ROI calculators that help estimate the return on investment based on various factors like traffic, conversions, and revenue. Examples include HubSpot’s Marketing ROI Calculator and Neil Patel’s ROI Calculator.
• Compare before and after performance: Compare SEO performance metrics before and after implementing optimization strategies to gauge the impact on key metrics like organic traffic, conversion rates, and revenue.

Remember that SEO ROI is not solely about immediate revenue. It can also encompass long-term benefits such as brand visibility, customer acquisition, and customer lifetime value.

Why measure SEO ROI?

Because sooner or later your finance team will come knocking on your door asking you to defend your SEO investment budget and understand the results you are bringing to the table.

There are a few things you need to keep in mind when effectively measuring your SaaS SEO channel’s efficacy: 

1. SEO itself has a lag.

When you do something (secure a link, publish a piece of content, optimize an existing page, etc), it takes on average 3 months to see an impact. So you need to factor in a 3-month lag from action -> result.

For example, if you’re a SaaS company looking to increase organic traffic—you’re unlikely to bag the top spot on search engine results pages in the first month of your SEO campaign. 

2. B2B sales cycles are long. 

You cannot look at a snapshot data view of customers in the same month of SEO investment. Instead, you need to start doing a cohort analysis looking at how signups or leads convert over a period of time of up to 12 months from the signup creation date. 

The easiest way to model this is to predict the number of customers each month, having gathered data from an organic search cohort from > 12 months ago.

3. SEO is compounding. 

It’s not like PPC where you cut your spend and the whole channel collapses. You need to be able to articulate this in your model and tell the story to your senior leadership team, that the effort you invest into day compound and stick around in the long run. 

Want a template to measure ROI? Swipe the one we made here.

How is SaaS SEO different from other types of SEO?

SaaS SEO is different from other types of SEO for many reasons. Here are a few that stand out in my experience.

First, SaaS has 3 different key go-to-market motions: 

• Self-serve
• SMB
• Enterprise 

You need to prioritize one and build your SaaS SEO strategy based on your go-to-market strategy. If not, you risk creating a Frankenstein content strategy with ambiguous leading success indicators. 

For example, going after Enterprise deals is not the same as going after freelancers.

Second, compared to other industries like e-commerce, there are longer sales cycles, so the way you attribute success is different—and the type of content your produce needs to support the entire sales cycle, from lead generation to influencing opportunities in the sales pipeline.  

Normally, there is also a larger top of the funnel that can be opened, vs. content just focusing on transactional search intents, so you can focus on the key pain points of your target audience. 

Depending on your go-to-market strategy, generally, there are two funnels: an AARRR funnel (pirate), and a sales GTM funnel. Each one has different lagging and leading indicators of success. 

Learn more about the different SaaS funnel types in our comprehensive guide here. 

Third, people are using your software with a job to be done. You really need to map your product features and benefits to the JTBD framework to understand the jobs people have (AKA use cases), and which of these jobs correlate to higher ARPA and lower MRR churn rates, and thus higher LTVs. This will enable you to focus on jobs where you have better PMF and can therefore grow faster and more efficiently.

Check out the jobs to be done canvas:

Fourth, people buying SaaS are often switching from one solution to another. It can be from a cloud or non-cloud-based solution. 

For example, a cloud-based solution could be Google Sheets, or it could be another SaaS software they are looking to migrate away from. A non-cloud-based solution could be using paper, and we want to convince people they should instead be doing this in their computer browser.

Want to learn more about switch moments? Jump right to the relevant section here

Ultimately, SaaS SEO is a special kind of breed but, when roadmapped properly, it will give you long-term results that no Google Ads, Affiliate Marketing, or other PPC campaign will give you. 

Long-term benefits of SEO for SaaS companies:

• SEO offers a higher ROI compared to PPC advertising, as it generates continuous organic traffic without ongoing costs per click:

CTR by SERP position: source

• SEO provides independence from ads, which is crucial for SaaS companies with limited investment funds.
• It delivers long-term rewards and cost-efficiency by generating organic traffic and leads over time.
• SEO ensures a steady stream of qualified leads from prospects actively searching for specific solutions.
• It creates touchpoints at all stages of the buying cycle, maximizing conversion opportunities.
• SEO cultivates brand awareness, establishing a strong online presence in a competitive industry.
• It builds confidence and trust in the brand by appearing in organic search results.
• Measuring SEO results provides valuable insights into the brand’s audience, enhancing targeted marketing strategies.
• Technical SEO improves user experience through optimized navigation, faster loading times, and mobile responsiveness.

Prioritizing SEO allows SaaS companies to achieve sustainable and long-term growth that other marketing strategies can’t guarantee. 

The real secret to a good SaaS SEO strategy: time and expertise

​​SaaS SEO is a great channel, but it combines a myriad of disciplines to make it work effectively. You need a team of tech, content, growth, and outreach experts to truly make it work. 

In order to reap the full rewards of SaaS SEO, you must remember:

• It can take time to see the full results of your efforts
• Without a team of experts, you’re unlikely to achieve the best results

However, if you follow the tactics we’ve given you, SEO can be an incredible way to power growth and generate leads for your SaaS. Creating content your users love is also a great way to connect with them and encourage further engagement with your business.

And if you need help getting started, you can always enlist the help of a SaaS SEO agency along the way.

What is SaaS SEO?

SaaS SEO is aimed at helping Software as a Service brands create a recognized customer growth engine. It combines various techniques such as the four customer awareness stages, growth loops, jobs-to-be-done framework, switch moments, and more.

There are also different types of content when it comes to SaaS SEO. For example, depending on the stage of the funnel, there will be different needs and different styles of content to better deliver what the potential customers are looking for. 

So, for the Top of the Funnel, content like:

• Blog articles
• Infographics
• Branded ads
• Social media posts
• How-to guides

will be exactly what the users will be looking for in this awareness and discovery stage. 

For the Middle of the Funnel, landing pages, webinars, and product videos will be more useful. 

Finally, to effectively guide users toward making a final purchase decision, you’ll need SaaS SEO content specifically designed for the Bottom of the Funnel. This content should be persuasive and compelling, helping users to take the desired action: purchase. So, case studies, demos, and free trials are great examples of content for this stage. 

Last but not least, when it comes to SaaS SEO there are some key SaaS SEO metrics SaaS businesses should consider: 

• Organic traffic: This refers to the number of visitors who reach a website through unpaid search engine results, indicating the effectiveness of SEO efforts in attracting users.
• Keyword ranking: This indicates the position of a website or webpage in search engine results for a specific keyword or phrase, helping assess visibility and competition.
• Conversion rate: This measures the percentage of website visitors who complete a desired action, such as making a purchase or filling out a form, reflecting the effectiveness of a website in generating conversions.
• Return on investment (ROI): This quantifies the profitability of an investment by comparing the gains or benefits achieved with the costs incurred, providing insights into the financial performance of a marketing campaign or initiative.
• Backlinks: These are links from external websites that point to a specific website, influencing search engine rankings and indicating the authority and credibility of a website.
• Click-through rate: Also called CTR, click-through rate measures the percentage of users who click on a specific link or ad out of the total number of impressions, indicating the effectiveness of a marketing campaign or the relevance of a particular piece of content.
• Bounce rate: It represents the percentage of website visitors who leave a webpage without interacting or navigating to other pages, suggesting a sub-par level of engagement or relevance of the content.
• Monthly recurring revenue (MRR): It indicates the total revenue generated by a subscription-based business model on a monthly basis, providing insights into the recurring revenue stream and stability of the business.
• Churn rate: It measures the rate at which customers or subscribers cancel or discontinue their subscriptions or services, reflecting customer retention and the health of a business.

Why invest in a SaaS SEO strategy? 

You want to drive new MRR through SEO, not just vanity metrics like clicks or rankings. SEO is probably the best channel you can invest in for long-term ARR growth for your SaaS, for a multitude of different reasons.

SEO Compounds over time

The efforts you put in today will continue way into the future. This is different from investing in paid ads because once you stop investing, you stop getting the benefit. 

Take a look at the graph below. SEO starts slow but exponentially gets better, both in terms of more customers and a lower Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC), whilst PPC ramps up faster but has a CAC and number of customers glass ceiling—it’s finite.

Long-term “investors” are those who win the market they are operating in over time.

SEO doesn’t require a huge capital investment

You don’t need a huge amount of capital investment to start your SaaS SEO channel compared to other activities—like investing in paid ads. 

For example, one SaaS we work with is investing over $400,000 per month in Google Ads, and they achieve the same results for less than 5% of this cost through SEO. As a result, SEO has the lowest payback period.

Your SEO content is recyclable

The content you create to build an SEO growth engine can be repurposed for other channels. 

For example, you can share the same content on social media, via email marketing to your user base, on online communities, repurposed into other types of content like YouTube videos and infographics. 

The biggest benefit of investing in SEO is that it compounds over time, and outweighs the possibility of spending millions on paid advertising. 

SaaS SEO FAQs

Search Engine Optimization: the number one thing all SaaS brands are investing in to try and win a decent market share online customers. If you’re not on the first page of Google, do you even exist?

SEO boosts your organic traffic, increases your domain authority, and has a long-term ROI. However, there are many moving parts and having a hand to guide you through the SEO process is exactly what you need–and exactly what you’ll find in this here. How convenient.

Source

In this article, you’ll find the 11 things to put on your SaaS SEO checklist to help create optimized content, as sweet as honey to a bee. You’ll be turning casual website visitors into high-quality leads in no time.

Your SEO Checklist includes:

• Start with keyword research
• Have SEO-friendly URLs
• Optimize your meta descriptions, headlines, and title tag
• Think about headings
• Be original
• Consider readability
• Include relevant links–internal and external
• Use images, but optimize them
• Include clear CTAs
• Use schema markup
• Make it mobile-friendly

What do you need to know about SaaS SEO before you start?

Before we get started with each of the boxes to tick in our SEO checklist for SaaS companies, we need to understand the difference between traditional SEO and Software as a Service businesses.

Traditional SEO focuses on getting users and turning them into customers. It’s based on a shorter customer life cycle and cares much more about sales. On the other hand, SEO for SaaS companies focuses on generating, but also nurturing, leads.

As most software services are subscription based you need to be educating and nurturing your leads constantly. Not only about your product, but about their pain points and the general industry that they’re in. SEO for SaaS companies wants companies to become an authority on the topic.

In SaaS SEO, you’ll include ebooks, white papers, guides, and other types of educational resources much more often than a traditional SEO approach.

Here are the key points to consider before diving in in our SaaS SEO checklist:

• SaaS SEO content should be aligned with their funnel marketing strategy to reach potential customers–and current customers–at every stage of their journey.
• SaaS companies should aim to become an authority on the pain points that its users are facing.
• Considering on-page and off-page technical SEO is key for making sure the content is being seen by both search engines and customers.
• Link building is paramount for the success of any website.
• Focusing on providing high quality value should come first before other aspects of technical SEO–quality over quantity of keywords.
• SaaS SEO is all about building a strong and long term relationship with the users, not a quick game to a sale.
  

The ultimate SaaS SEO checklist: 11 steps for success

Let’s look at the eleven steps you should follow to build a comprehensive, competitive, and effective SEO strategy:

Step 1: start with keyword research

Keyword research is a basic, ground-level-move that all SEO strategies should include. Finding the target keywords to include in your website will be the foundation to what you use not only in your content copy, but also in things like your URLs, meta descriptions, title tags, web pages, headings, and much more.

When it comes to SaaS SEO, there are four types of keywords you need to find out:

• Informational keywords: those used when the search intent of the user is simply to inform itself. Some examples are ‘national tea day’, ‘burger calories’, or ‘internet speed’. These are crucial to target because they help you become an authority on a topic, even if they don’t directly lead to more transactions.
• Transactional keywords: these keywords carry a more action-heavy search intent, where the user is at the prime point to actually make a transaction. Some examples are ‘buy crypto’, ‘download X software’, or ‘hot dog stands near me’. Targeting these relevant keywords with paid ads can help increase sales.
• Commercial keywords: these are the keywords that a user utilizes when they are trying to learn more about a specific product or service. Some examples are ‘X software vs Y software’, or ‘X software reviews’. To target these keywords, brands usually do reviews, listicles, how-to articles, or comparison articles.
• Navigational keywords: these are mostly brand names or specific keywords that the customer knows will lead to a specific website they’re looking for. Some examples are ‘Youtube’, ‘Canva’, or ‘MailChimp’. These keywords only create organic searches when the brand or product is already well-known.

There are various ways of finding out each of these keywords. However, the two best methods are using SaaS SEO tools that do the job for you–like Google Keyword Planner, SEM Rush, Ubersuggest, or Ahrefs. Another way to do SaaS keyword research is by analyzing the keywords that your competitors are using.

Create a stellar keyword research process for your SaaS

Use our guide on B2B keyword research and overcome keyword challenges

Take a look now

Step 2: have SEO-friendly URLs

SEO is not only important in your content marketing. You need it everywhere on your website–and URLs are no different.

When it comes to URLs, they should be short, sweet, and include your primary keyword. For example, we didn’t make our SaaS Technical SEO Guide from Tech SEO Experts URL: www.skale.io/saas-technical-seo-guide-from-tech-seo-experts, no. We simply made it: www.skale.so/saas-seo/technical/. This not only looks way better, but it helps search engines understand what the page is about.

Step 3: Optimize your meta descriptions, headlines, and title tag

Once you have your keywords, and your URLs are on point, you’ll want to move your attention to optimizing your meta descriptions, headlines, and title tags. These three specific places will need your primary keyword for website crawlers to know what your page is about and to locate you properly on the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).

Additionally, your meta description and meta title are hugely important because they’ll be the very first thing that your users will see about you. So, make sure to include a primary keyword and to make them interesting and appealing to ensure a click.

Step 4: Think about headings and hierarchy

Most content management systems (CMS) will let you format your headings and copy with different hierarchies by using H1, H2, H3, and so on. This not only looks nice, but it allows search engines–and users–to better read and understand your page.

To optimize your headings make sure to be using primary and secondary keywords in them, and making their hierarchy logical so that users can easily follow your content. A smart thing to do here as well, is to include a table of contents in your blogs or posts.

Step 5: Be original

Although we also encourage you to be original in the traditional sense of the word, here we focus more on being original in your content–by eliminating duplicates. After all, search engines penalize duplicate content, whether from your own site or from other websites–so make sure you’re not copying or using duplicated content.

However, sometimes you do need to use some duplicate content in your website, or maybe you’ve restructured a URL and need to change the direction to which website spiders should go to. In that case, we advise you to check Google’s own Google Search Console help page to learn how you can avoid duplicate content.

Step 6: Consider readability

Although it might be a shocking fact, only 20% of users actually read the full content, and 80% only skim the page. What this means is that using white space, short sentences, and paragraphs as well as images and catching headlines–will make your page easy to read and easy to skim.

Make it so that the user that stays can read everything without problems or feeling overwhelmed with big chunks of text. You’ll also want to make it easy for those in a hurry to go in and find exactly what they’re looking for.

If you’re looking for a more precise measurement of the readability of your content, you can use Yoast’s readability tool that helps identify what you’re doing right and what needs improvement.

Source

Step 7: Include relevant links–internal and external

When it comes to SEO practices, 41% of companies say that back linking is their biggest challenge–which is another reason to add to the few reasons there are to outsource your SaaS link building efforts.

Back linking your page helps search engines know about the authority and relevance of your page. If you’re including other high authority website links in your content–even better if those sites are linking back to you–that’s a clear sign for Google and others to say ‘hey, this looks like high value content that we can trust‘. In fact, 43.7% of the top-ranking pages use links that also refer back to their website.

Additionally, internal linking helps crawlers get to all of your links and understand their relationships to your topics and pages. This in turn helps them better guide people towards your relevant sites. Lastly, make sure all links are working and there aren’t any broken links as this can harm your SEO efforts.

Ahrefs is a great tool that can help you measure and analyze back linking to your sites and that of competitors.

Source

Step 8: Use images, but optimize them

No person enjoys a text only content page and because of this, it’s only logical that search engines like sites that include images. However, it’s important to note that whether you include one or ten images, you need to optimize all of them.

First, you want to make sure you’re compressing them so the loading time of the page doesn’t skyrocket–after all, 53% of mobile users will leave a website if it takes longer than three seconds to load. A good free tool to use is TinyPNG–plus it has a cute panda that celebrates when each file has been decompressed.

Secondly, you want to make your images relevant for SEO, this means to include primary and secondary keywords on the image description, file name, and the alt text.

Source

Step 9: Include clear CTAs

Providing great quality value is great, but you also want your content to guide to other content on your page, or directly to your sign up or free trial site. Including call-to-action buttons that are clear and relevant will help your page perform better, guide your users to where they need to go, and increase conversions.

Step 10: Use schema markup

Schema markup is a great way to improve how your content looks like on SERPs and to guide both users and crawlers to the important part of information you have in your content.

Schema markup is perfect to showcase the key information you need to show for a specific user intent. For example, someone looking for a restaurant might like to see reviews, location, opening times, price range, and maybe the menu. Below are three examples of how restaurants and restaurant reservation services can use schema markup to provide more relevant information on the SERPs.

Use schema markup to create the rich snippets your industry and service or product deserve, and see the right users flying in.

Step 11: Make it mobile-friendly

With 92.1% of internet users accessing the internet using a mobile phone, and hundreds of different mobile devices being used by the 6.4 billion of smartphone users worldwide, it’s important for websites to be mobile-friendly.

What exactly does mobile friendly-ness entail? No, it’s not simply that the screen gets smaller. It means that everything adapts so that there’s a great experience on the website whether you’re using a tablet, a smartphone, or a huge TV screen. Everything should adapt, size of text and buttons, images, and overall navigability–think about touch screen vs mouse navigation.

Should You Consider a SaaS SEO Agency?

Search engine optimization is no easy game. There’s a lot to keep track of, many metrics that can indicate your success or your lack there-of, a wild competition for the attention of internet users, and a constantly narrowing attention span. With all of this, should you consider a SaaS SEO agency or have an in-house team?

Truth is, this will depend on the size of your company, since you really need to put effort, resources, and time into your SaaS SEO strategy. If your company is big enough, you might be alright by handling SEO with an in-house team. However if your company is just starting out or not too big, you’ll definitely benefit from having a professional team of experts helping you out.

If you’re ready to see your SaaS SEO strategy give the results you’ve been hoping for– without wasting resources in trial and error, or spending resources on creating your own in-house team from scratch–learn more about Skale and what we can do together.

Go ahead and use this SaaS SEO checklist, or get a SaaS SEO agency to help you out and start ranking like you deserve!

Stop wasting resources in SaaS SEO trial and error

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SaaS SEO Checklist FAQs

Software as a Service companies seem to be growing from trees these days–in fact, the industry is expected to grow 12% per year. This brings a lot of great companies into the arena, and a huge need for competitor analysis.

With this high number of competitors, if you want to survive you’ll need to know what your competition is doing, and use this information to stay on top. However, what kind of competitive analysis is crucial in the SaaS world? The quick answer, it’s a search engine optimization competitive analysis— an SEO competitive analysis.

SEO and SaaS: these two acronyms join forces because they are the best thing that can happen to any SaaS company.

SEO is what enables your possible customers and users to find you. In the digital world, the product or service prime location is achieved through SEO and will be a location on the SERPs, or Search Engine Results Pages.

Many SaaS businesses make the mistake of starting their SEO strategy from zero, without even looking at what the competition is doing–this is a big mistake. When performing a SaaS SEO competitor analysis you’ll discover:

• what you can do to outrank on SERPs
• the keywords you should be aiming to be ranking for
• where you can look for backlinks and off-page opportunities

Overall: an SEO competitor analysis highlights your own SEO strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT) as well as your competitors’.

Ready to dive in deep and learn everything you can about running a SaaS SEO competitor analysis? Let’s go!

Why should you do a SaaS Competitor Analysis?

In 2022, the SaaS market has over 17,000 companies in the US and it’s expected to bring $141 billion per year, globally. An impressive number when you think that only two years ago there were just 400 SaaS companies with a total revenue of $500 million.

Not only is the number of companies something to consider, but what’s even more important is to understand that SEO is crucial for today’s success. Here are two important facts for you:

• 59% of US consumers say they use a search engine in their research for a new product or service
• Most importantly: less than 1% of people using Google go past the first page of Google search results

With this large number of competitors lurking around and the competition for that online prime location being so wild, an SEO strategy is very much a ‘keep your friends close, but keep your enemies closer’ kind of situation.

When you perform a SaaS SEO competitor analysis, you’re not trying to copy your competitors, or steal their content and SEO strategy. What you’re trying to do is have a clearer picture of what they’re doing, what’s working for them and what isn’t. This will save you loads of time – and resources – and get you a step ahead of them.

You’re trying to answer these three key questions:

• Who is doing what?
• How are they doing it?
• Can it be done better?

“The goal of an SEO Competitor Research is to dive into organic competitors to discover tactics and opportunities that you may be missing in your SEO strategy. The competitor research process should allow you to fill up a backlog with ideas, tactics and experiments you can implement with your website over the course of 6-12 months.”

—Arianna Lupi, SEO Manager & Consultant at Skale

Not only will a thorough SEO competitive analysis let you know more about your competition, but most importantly, it’ll shine light on your potential users and how your SEO strategy can better target their needs.

How to Conduct a SaaS SEO Competitor Analysis

Maybe you’re looking for a new way to tweak your already robust SEO strategy. Maybe you’ve been relying on traditional marketing methods and haven’t put much of an effort on organic research. Or, maybe you just want to beat your competition and stay on top (of Google). 

Wherever you’re starting, these eight steps will help you run a successful SaaS SEO competitive analysis and get you where you deserve to be.

1. Identify multiple competitors

The first thing to do in order to analyze your competitors is to find out who they are. Of course, you might already know of some of your competitors, but a good way to find who they are is by using search engines.

From your own SEO strategy, there will be a few keywords that you know your business should be ranking for. Do as any user would do: type them on the Google search bar and see what you get. 

On most occasions you probably won’t be paying attention to the top of page PPC ads, however on this occasion take a look! It’s good to know where your competitors are choosing to spend their dollars. 

Another way that you can find your competitors is by using SaaS review websites like Crunchbase, G2, Capterra, and TrustRadius. There you can find what companies do, what keywords they are using to describe their products and services, and how users describe their product in reviews.

Whether these are companies that are direct or indirect competitors won’t matter much because either way they are direct keyword competitors. 

If you’re unsure of your keywords or would like a stronger SEO strategy, check out Skale. We’re here to help as a specialized B2B SEO agency.

Below is a quick example of a Google search for ‘SEO SaaS Tools’. As an SEO agency, many of our ideal clients will be looking for this key phrase. We can see there’s Skale as the first result after the paid ads — go us! — and what follows are other websites that, depending on their offerings, could be competition for us. Time to investigate!

Make sure you’re keeping all of the information you’re finding about your competitors in a safe and organized place like a spreadsheet so you can better do your analysis.

Skale top tip: Find at least five competitors to run your analysis. This will give you more robust data to make actionable changes to your SEO strategy.

2. Analyze competitors’ target keywords

Once you have figured out your direct and indirect competitors, both for your solution and your keywords, you’re going to start analyzing all their keywords.

Thankfully, you won’t be alone on this step. There are many B2B keyword research tools that will help you figure out and perform a keyword gap analysis. A keyword gap analysis, or competitive keyword analysis, is simply a process to identify those valuable keywords that your competitors are ranking highly for, and you don’t.

Remember that these keywords should be the valuable ones, this means those that have a high search volume, high search traffic, that are related to your business or those that are likely to convert. Prioritize!

Here are some of the best SEO tools to use when it comes to keyword gap analysis:

Ahrefs Site Explorer

This tool is great to gather in-depth knowledge about search traffic and keywords for any website you want. All you have to do is go on the Site Explorer tool and enter the competitor’s name on the search bar. The results will show you the organic keywords the competitor ranks for. There’s also the possibility to use filters to exclude any non-relevant keyword, and only see those high-value ones.

However, this tool comes at a price. Its lite version starts at $99 per month.

Ubersuggest

This tool allows you to search per domain or keyword and it gives you results like the keyword traffic, content ideas, search volume, and more. It gives your three daily free searches, and the paid version for entrepreneurs or small businesses starts at a more affordable $12 per month.

Moz Keyword Explorer

You’ll need to be logged in for its free version or have a subscription, but its tool will do much of the analysis for you. It will compare your keywords with those of your competitors and tell you all the search engine rankings your competitors are getting.

Answer the Public

This is a free tool by Ubersuggest that allows you to see topical information people are searching for when they use a particular keyword. It helps you better understand the user’s search intent–which is valuable data for your SEO inbound content strategy.

In the SaaS world, keyword research will help you better understand the real needs of your customers, and how they’re looking for you or your solution on the internet. 

3. Analyze competitors’ backlinking achievements

Now that you’ve got your competitors and their ranking keywords, you’ll want to run a backlink analysis. We know SEO is not only about keywords, backlinks are also a critical part to your SEO competitor analysis and overall SaaS SEO strategy.. Backlinks are what tells search engines that the website is an authority source.

The websites that link to your competitors, but have not linked to you are those you need to pay attention to. However, this is almost impossible to do manually, so again, you’ll need to use some of the many SaaS SEO tools that are out there.

Thankfully, there are quite a few to pick from, here are some of the top tools used:

• Moz Link Explorer
• Ahrefs Site Explorer
• SEMRush Backlink Gap Tool

Once you’ve identified what websites are linking to your competitors and what types of content they’re linking to, you can get to work on your own strategy knowing the types of sites that align with your content output. Additionally, you’ll know the top sites linking your top competitors and you’ll be able to reach out to these sites for a link as well.

If you want a stronger backlinking strategy, here are nine reasons why you should outsource your SaaS link building.

4. Take a look at your competitors’ content marketing

SEO can sound very technical, keywords, backlinks, tech audits, off-page factors. However, at the end of the day, high-quality, valuable, and relevant content is the key to great organic traffic.

This step of the SEO competitor analysis will take a bit more hard work that the ones we’ve seen previously. Mainly because there’s not a shiny new tool that can gauge how your competitor’s content is compared to yours–sure you can see things like web traffic, but in terms of quality and relevance you’ll have to do some of the heavy lifting manually.

Check the posts that your competitors have with more organic search volume and understand how and why they got that successful. Then, compare your results with your own content marketing strategy to understand your weaknesses, strengths, and differences.

Remember, the purpose of a competitive analysis is not to then go and copy what the other one is doing, nope! You want to understand why users are visiting their content and not yours, and use your strengths to drive those search rankings through the roof and to your website instead.

5. Study the user experience

Another important part to understand about your competitors is the user experience they are providing on their web pages. Google not only cares about SEO efforts like keywords, length of content, and backlinks. It’ll favorably rank websites that are easy to navigate, accessible for different devices, and so on.

Google really cares about ranking those websites that will bring a lot of value, and comfort, to the users visiting them. By paying attention to how your competitors are structuring their sites, what accessibility levels they take into account, and how navigation works throughout the page, you’ll be getting closer at achieving a user experience that your users will love.

6. Pay attention to social media channels and customer interactions

Brands can no longer hide behind their marketing and SEO efforts. They have to be on social media–and interact with their users 1-1. Not only does this serve the brand by creating a stronger brand voice, but it also helps them rank higher on Google’s search results.

Every repost, share, comment, and like, will create certain backlinks and social signals that Google will pick up. Understanding which channels your competitors are, how often they post, what kind of content they share, and how they interact with other social media users will give you a great insight into what you can do in those areas.

Here are some tools worth checking out when it comes to analyzing your competitors’ social media signals:

BuzzSumo

This tool helps you discover your competitors’ high-performing posts across social media channels. It gives you all the data you need on engagement, allows you to identify key influencers in your niche, and helps you monitor trends to be on top of your competitors.

BuzzSumo offers 10 free searches per month, or a Pro subscription for $99 per month.

Hootsuite Streams

This is another powerful tool that allows you to track keywords, competitors, and hashtags across every social network. Additionally, it has a very intuitive design and dashboard that shows you everything you need to know, all in one place.

HootSuite offers a 30-day free trial and a Professional plan for $49 per month. 

7. Adapt your SEO strategy

Now that you have all your competitor insights, you’ll want to analyze your own SEO strategy and see where it can be improved or tweaked.

SEO success comes from a thorough understanding of SEO strategies and an understanding of your SEO competitors. 

After all, an analysis not only guides your SEO campaigns in the right direction but helps lessen marketing expenses. Your competitors will already have done part of the job! You don’t need to run SEO research from zero and every dollar you spend on your marketing will go to a more or less bulletproof strategy.

Done right, your SEO competitive analysis will pay for itself in as little as three months!

8. Measure, rinse and repeat 

Now that you have adapted and improved your SEO strategy, there’s one final step that any good marketing strategist knows: measure, rinse and repeat.

You have to constantly measure how your campaign is doing. But, keep an eye on your competition too—perhaps they’ve figured out a new strategy that you’re yet to discover.  

It’s not unheard of for companies that were on the top to fall down the ranks if they’re not being proactive with their SEO efforts. 

Read more about the most valuable SaaS SEO KPIs according to SEO experts.

What Should Your Competitive SEO Analysis Include?

1. Identify competitors: once you have the websites of at least five competitors, check their domain authority and visibility.
2. Conduct keyword research: find your competitor’s keywords and write down these numbers: min and max volume, difficulty, ranking, and URL.
3. Run a backlinking gap analysis: which authority sites are linking to your competitors and not you?
4. Analyze the top content of your competition: check the titles used, links included, length, images used, topics addressed, content gaps, the works!
5. Take note of domain UX: how are competitor site designs for users?
6. Check social media signals and CX interactions: understand if your niche requires you to have a social media presence and on which channels you need to be
7. Adapt, rinse and repeat: only by tracking, adapting, and repeating this process will you be able to stay in the lead.

These are the basic things any SEO competitive analysis should include. However, feel free to include some more key analysis that are important for your particular niche and industry.

Build a Successful SaaS SEO Strategy with Competitor Insights

A well-conducted SEO competitive analysis will give you the necessary insights to improve your own strategy by understanding where important gaps need to be filled. The analysis will also help you understand the gaps in your competitors’ strategy and aid improving your competitive advantage. Last but not least, a competitor analysis will allow you to foresee any threats that your competitor might be cooking.

Get competitor insights with Skale

Be on top of the game by keeping your competition closer than ever before- our team will handle the analysis for you.

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SaaS SEO Competitor Analysis FAQ

If you’re a SaaS company and are looking to improve your SEO, this Technical SEO Guide is exactly what you need. It’ll ensure your on-page and off-page SEO efforts aren’t going to waste.

Here, you’ll learn the tech SEO elements and tools you need to check out to improve your traffic and search engine rankings in the most organic way possible. Psst. We mean no throwing money away on PPC ads. Take that budget, and reassign it here for long-term business growth.

A SaaS Technical SEO Checklist for 2024

• Meta elements
• Page loading time
• Web design and responsiveness
• Schema markup
• Keyword research
• Content marketing strategy
• Link building strategies

In this guide, you’ll have expert advice on how to improve your SEO game— as well as the tools to make this a reality.

Let’s dive in.  

The SaaS Tech SEO Audit

Before you can even start correcting SEO problems and building a stronger strategy, you need to get a technical SEO audit going. Without one, you could get blind-sided by the efforts you put on your SEO, and not the results it’s achieving. 

For a technical SEO audit, you’ll need an in-house SEO expert, or choose to hire one— we’re right here! Whichever way you go, follow this checklist to make sure you don’t miss a trick.

1. Check for duplicate content

Having duplicate content on your website can harm your search engine ranking and traffic. When search engines find duplicate content–or as Google calls it “appreciably similar”— they don’t really know what to do with it:

• Which version should they put in their indexed pages?
• Which version should they direct the link metrics to (or all pages?)
• Which version should rank higher on their search engine results page (SERPs)?

This confusion will negatively impact your ranking. Plus, duplicate content is a sign of thoughtless content strategy. Remember, SEO is not just about keywords, URLs, and meta titles. It’s mostly a sign of how valuable you are for your users, and duplicate content doesn’t add anything new for them.

Top tip: While you work on the duplicate pages, adding a noindex, or nofollow meta tag will stop search engine crawlers from indexing that page–helping you save some valuable ranking juice for your key pages and buying you time to regroup.

2. Source missing or incorrect HTML tags

Putting a hierarchy to your content using HTML tags —H1, H2, H3s— is only useful if you’re using them correctly. When a technical audit is performed, the keywords used and the type of HTML tag used for each title and subtitle will be checked to ensure they aren’t missing totally or are incorrect for your topic.

Using appropriate title tags makes sure both the user and the search engine genius bots know what’s going on. However, when misused, they’ll confuse search engines, negatively affecting your chances of ranking.

3. Identify pages missing canonical tags

When using a canonical tag, you tell search engine crawlers which specific URL is the master copy for the page, avoiding duplicates.

Although canonical tags are great to help avoid the duplicate content problem, they can be used incorrectly too. When auditing the page, there are a few things you’ll need to check about canonical tags:

• Wrong tags used: problems in the code can mean a new canonical tag is used for each URL— going against the point of using one in the first place.
• Mixed signals: if on page A you give the canonical to page B, don’t put the canonical of page B on page A. It’s already a lot to read, now imagine how a bot ‘feels’ trying to crawl them. 
• Near-duplicates: you can use canonical tags when you have duplicate pages and very similar ones, for example, a product page that only differs on the currency used. However, proceed with caution as using the canonical will take the other URLs out of indexation–and out of rankings.

Check canonical tags relatively often to ensure they’re supporting and not hindering your SEO strategy.

4. Understand response codes

Response codes show the state of the communication between the browser and the server.

Simply put, when the browser wants to access the website’s server, it’ll respond with a three-digit code indicating how things are working. Understanding the current state of the responses your website and server are throwing out is essential to understanding your website’s health.

“The use of temporary redirects instead of permanent ones, an uncontrolled number of redirection hops or broken internal links — all of this affects the crawl budget and the quality of the indexing process. With the help of software such as desktop Screaming Frog, Sitebulb, or different online tools like JetOctopus or Ahrefs site audit, you can have a full view of all server responses pages send, find broken links and redirects, and fix all kinds of important errors. In this way, you will help robots to crawl your site faster, and thus improve your site visibility and rankings.”

—Oksana Salvarovska, Tech SEO Analyst, Skale

Pagination

As of 2019, Google changed how it indexes pages. It used to be using a command that indicated the previous page or the next page (rel=” next” or rel=” prev”) were attached to the same page/topic, and so it should only index the first page.

Now, things have changed.

The way Google handles pagination is that it doesn’t handle it. It takes each page as an individual page. This means on-page SEO is even more important on each of those pages as it won’t seize the fact that it’s part of a larger cumulation of pages. 

In conclusion, during your technical SEO audit, ensure you’re not using obsolete links and that each page on your SaaS website can stand in its own right.

Robots.txt

Robots.txt is a text file command that tells web crawlers what parts of the website they can or cannot crawl. Ensure it’s being used properly. Otherwise, your different content elements like videos, images, or JavaScript for example, won’t be indexed.

“We often run into a problem with some clients’ websites when robots.txt instructions are written incorrectly, meaning some significant pages are not indexed. However, if you need to hide a page or file from search bots, we recommend using a noindex tag rather than robots.txt.

Another important case is monitoring. It happens on a regular basis when someone accidentally blocks the whole website from indexation — this causes significant losses in terms of ranking and traffic. That’s why we recommend using website monitoring services to stay on top of your website availability.” 

—Oksana Salvarovska, Tech SEO Analyst, Skale

Sitemap

Depending on the size of your website, you might need a sitemap, or it may be a nice plus and bit of forward planning.

A sitemap basically tells search engines which pages you want to show on search results. Ensure that the ones you do want to be indexed check all the boxes of your SaaS SEO strategy checklist.

Alt text

Alt text–alternative text, alt attributes, or alt descriptions–are image descriptions and functions stated within the HTML code.

They serve two primary purposes: to describe the image to those with visual impairments, and to add relevance to your page by optimizing the alt text copy.

However, if you have to prioritize due to the size of your website, optimize images on key pages first. Paying attention to this also helps your content to rank in Google image search. 

Technical SEO elements to maximize your website optimization

Once you’ve done your tech audit to check your website’s overall health, you can start working on the technical SEO elements needed to get your site ranking at the very top of Google— exactly where it belongs.

Meta elements

Meta tags are the site’s “self-awareness”. By placing meta tags in the code you are letting the site, and the crawlers, know what the page is all about. Meta elements include descriptions, titles, and other tags. Meta is different from standard on-page SEO because it goes deeper and is even more meaningful for crawlers.

To optimize your page, you need to include meta elements, just as much as you need correctly formatted HTML headings (H1, H2, H3, etc). These are essential ways that crawlers understand what your site is all about–and this is key information for rankings. Without knowing what your page is about, there’s no way for search engines to even start the ranking process.

Page loading time

The last thing you want is to lose prospective customers because your page was too slow. Since users prefer faster-loading pages, Google and other search engines use this as another factor to rank them higher in their SERPs.

Speed is even more demanding in the mobile world, where people want things given to them on the go, and as soon as possible. According to Google, 53% of mobile users will leave a page if it doesn’t load in three seconds. Adding to this, since 2015 Google users are primarily mobile users— the need to improve mobile SEO is a basic requirement today.

To ensure your page is loading as fast as possible, make sure the images, videos, and other elements on the page are optimized. There is no use in having an impressive-looking page if it’s going to take 30 seconds to load— no user will wait that long.

CTAs

CTAs or Call-to-Action elements are also super important. If your users open your page and don’t know what they’re supposed to do, or they’re wrongly linked, it’ll harm your ranking score.

CTAs are much more than just the ‘sign up’ buttons or the ones a user needs to click on to convert. CTAs are also the railroads through which you’ll start to drive people down a specific B2B content funnel to prepare them for the ‘sign up’ button. 

Not only this, but they encourage time on site. For Google, and other search engines, this is a sign that the page and website content on the whole is useful for the user, and as such helps the site rank higher.

Make sure you’re using the appropriate CTAs for your website’s purpose and that they are correctly linked, tagged, and placed.

Schema markup

SEO can sound very technical, but the truth is, it’s all about providing the right value to your users. One of the ways you can do that is by enhancing SERPs descriptions, also known as, rich snippets.

You’ve probably searched for a movie, a book, or an event on Google. You probably clicked the one with a search results box with a star rating, a review, a short description, a relevant title, and other information. These are the rich snippets you can do when using schema markups.

Schema markups are a way of structuring the information so SERPs can display it and attract more users to click on your site’s link.

For example, between the following three snippets, which one are you most likely to click on when looking for a quick recipe?

It’ll probably be the last one, the one with the rich snippet. See how it gives you people’s opinion on the recipes, it gives you the first few sentences of the recipe, and a mouth-watering picture of what your dinner should look like. 

On the other hand, that first snippet only gave you the name and website and a short description of what you’ll find. Not so great. The second snippet is a bit more rich, but it doesn’t provide you with as many details as the third one. 

How to make your content SEO-ready 

Now that you understand all the elements that will make your SEO strategy a reality, we’ll focus more on your content. Without it your SEO for SaaS won’t be complete— it’s the meat (or tofu, if you’re vegan) of your SEO success burger.

1. Keyword research

Target keywords are the foundations of your SEO and content strategy since they’re the primary connecting bridge between the user, search engine, and your SaaS website.

Before we continue, let’s look at the reason why SEO is important when it comes to users. Basically, SEO is a technical approach to fulfil user intent, also known as search intent. 

User intent is the reasoning behind what someone is looking for with the search engine. When a user types ‘quick recipes’ it’s because they’re looking for a specific type of recipe. Initially, the search engine will throw out a few results, with recipes that take from just a few minutes to a few hours to make. Slowly, and by seeing the each user’s behaviors on each page the search engine will understand that by ‘quick recipe’ the user means recipes that are about 15 minutes to make. 

This is search intent, and this is why ranking and keywords are important. Without it, Google would not understand that when users type specific words, they are looking for specific results. 

Finding the right target keyword for your topic or target customer is not as easy as you might think—especially because using the wrong keywords can harm your ranking. When using the wrong keyword you might be ranking high, but not attracting the right audience to your site. Or, you may be ranking for the wrong intent, but with a keyword people use for something else entirely, damaging your page ‘juice.’

For example, if you’re a website that provides language lessons online, but you use the keywords ‘traveling’, you may be ranking high for people looking to travel, but not necessarily to learn the languages from their go-to destinations. 

These users will come to your website due to your keyword, but leave in a matter of seconds as it wasn’t what they were looking for. Google will interpret this exit rate as a sign that your website is not great for these users and end up ranking you lower than you should be, all because you brought the wrong audience with the wrong keyword. 

There are a few reliable ways to find the most appropriate keywords for your SaaS business and content topics. 

First, research who your target audience is and what pain points and struggles they have. After this, you want to know what language they use when trying to find their solutions. It’s worth noting we’re not just talking about geographical languages here, we’re also talking about the language they use when discussing your product, solution, or their problem. 

With this information, you can brainstorm keyword ideas, find your seed keyword and all its variations. There are a few useful tools to help you do this that we’ll get into. 

Next, you’ll want to analyze your competitors, to understand the keywords they use, and how they work for them. If your top competitor is at the top of the ranking by using certain keywords, you might want to look, and those keywords, and also analyze which ones are actually doing them more harm than good. 

Thirdly, you can start measuring the necessary metrics, such as:

• keyword density
• search volume
• search volume over time
• click-through rate
• cost-per-click
• trends
• difficulty

If you want to learn more about proven methods to help you rank using the correct keyword research for SaaS SEO, head over to our article on SaaS SEO keyword research.

Leave keyword reseach to the SaaS SEO experts

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2. Content marketing strategy

Content marketing is not strictly speaking SEO, but once used correctly, it can supercharge your SEO efforts and have you eating that SEO success burger in a heartbeat.

Content marketing means marketing your SaaS business through your content. To do this, you need to have excellent quality content that genuinely solves customers’ problems, and provides them with solutions they didn’t know they needed.

Many SaaS companies like to have a blog, magazine, or a resource tab on their website where they publish in-depth content to prove they are industry experts, and slowly build up their community.

However, content marketing doesn’t end there. It’s important to strategize. Thinking not only about the content you want to put out for your audience, but also which channels you can find your audience on. 

Email marketing, social media, podcasts, eBooks, the list is long when it comes to content distribution. Be mindful of what your target audience is expecting to find in each of the platforms they use, and make sure you’re providing something different no matter where they are. 

One example we have that proves the efficiency of a solid content marketing strategy working harmoniously with SEO is our Piktochart case study. In just three months, Skale helped Piktochart increase signups by 860% and made it rank #2, above unicorn SaaS company Canva, for the lucrative keyword “presentation maker.” All done by focusing on building high-quality content for backlinking purposes and on-page SEO changes:

“Skale […] worked with talented writers to create topically relevant content that was pitched to authoritative partner websites as well as new ones. The team specifically focussed on sites in the business and design niche both for domain authority and relevant reach.” See the full case study here. 

3. Link building strategies

Before we delve into what link building is and how you can strategize to get the most out of it, let’s do a quick history lesson. What set Google apart from others when it launched back in 1998 was how it used links to rank pages. For Google, the number of links linked to a page was a sign of that page’s expertise, relevance, and the trust it had in the industry.

After more than twenty years, links are still a great indicator of expertise, and search engines are still using them to decide which pages should rank higher on SERPs. Although, clearly Google has got a lot smarter. Today, it uses so many more indicators to crawl links and determine its relevance, organic nature, and authoritative ‘juice’ it assigns. If you’re forcing links in as many places as possible it can actually do your website more harm than good. 

Link building may be frowned upon by some product marketers, however, done right; with quality content, SEO writing guidelines, and relevant domains, link building can do wonders for your SEO strategy.

Check out 21 tactics guaranteed to help you ace your SaaS SEO link building for more. 

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Five tools for your SaaS technical SEO strategy

SEO strategies would be hard to achieve without the use of site-saving tools. The tools we’ll show you help you find whatever issue is slowing down your SaaS SEO, enabling you to fix those problems to get you at the top of SERPs.

1. Screaming Frog

Screaming Frog is a tech SEO audit tool that will crawl up to 500 URLs for free— or you can get the subscription version for $190 per year to unlock advanced settings. It helps you check for technical SEO issues like generic or broken links, schema markup auditing, robots.txt use, duplicate content, and more.

“Quite often, we find that homepages are littered with these generic links. A link from a homepage is a signal that the destination page is extremely important, so ensuring these links are optimized is the ultimate low-hanging-fruit.”

—Ben, Head of Tech & Content SEO, Skale.

Another thing that Screaming Frog does very well is check for the hreflang tag. This is the tag used to tell crawlers what language the site is in and any geographical restrictions and targeting of a website.

“Screaming Frog SEO Spider tool is the best one to check hreflang implementation quickly and efficiently. With a dedicated tab, it’s easier to analyze at scale — find all non-200, unlinked, inconsistent or missing Hreflang tags.“

—Oksana Salvarovska, Tech SEO Analyst, Skale

2. Sitebulb

Like Screaming Frog, Sitebulb performs SEO auditing. One thing that makes Sitebulb different from Screaming Frog, is how it presents graphs. It might sound like a silly thing to focus on, but when you’re dealing with tons of data that you need to analyze and comprehend, having pie and other graphs makes your life much easier.

Besides that, Sitebulb is basically the same as Screaming Frog except for some user experience-related things like interface and explanatory content.

3. Copyscape

Copyscape is your go-to tool to solve any duplicate content or plagiarism issues. Its free version lets you do a few searches per month, and its premium version starts at $0.03 per search, and has a variable price depending on the length of the content to analyze.

Some of its features are that it supports many languages and payment can be made through PayPal. However, the best of it all is that it works on the search engine databases of Google and Bing so you can be sure that it’ll find duplicate content, if there is any— kind of like the Liam Neeson of duplicate content.

4. Google Tag Manager

When it comes to analyzing return of investment (ROI), there’s nothing better than Google Analytics’ Google Tag Manager tool, or as Google describes it: Tag Manager System. It really is a whole system to manage and analyze your tags.

This tool allows pro-coders and those just learning the ropes to manage their tags like true experts. All you need to do is embed a piece of the Tag Manager code on each website, and then you’re ready to create all tags from one interface and implement them — and analyze them — as quickly as you can say ‘tag‘.  

5. Google Search Console

Most people will tell you that if they could only use one tool for SEO, it would be the Google Search Console tool.

The GSC tool lets you:

• See what queries your website is ranking for (and the click rate it’s getting)
• Know the monthly search volume of queries
• Ensure if your pages are being properly indexed or if there are any issues popping-up
• Get notifications when Google finds any issues
• Analyze your website overall health (yes, even on its mobile version)
• Compare variations of keywords to see which is most popular where

Additionally, GSC is pretty good at analyzing things like schema markup. Something we’ve noted as becoming more and more critical to improving Click-Through Rate and overall site ranking score.

“Schema markup can be audited from a variety of sources, including Screaming Frog, however, Google’s own proprietary webmaster tool has a section (Enhancements), where they report on the number of pages, where structured data is recognized, as well as (if present) — some errors that exist with the mark-up.”

—Lazarina Stoy, Tech SEO and Innovation Manager, Skale

These are the basic and essential tools you should consider having in your tool belt to help you identify significant SEO issues and measure traffic, conversions, and your website’s overall health.

If you want to know about the fifteen tools that the pros on SaaS SEO tools use— that’s ten more tools for your tool belt–head over to SaaS SEO tools to become an industry pro.

SaaS Technical SEO FAQs

Not sure how to build links back to your SaaS? Here are 22 tactics you can use to build links in 2024 and beyond. Enjoy!

22 Link building strategies to try for your SaaS

We’re here to talk you through the link building SaaS companies use, as well as some alternative ways to acquire do-follow links, inbound links, and higher levels of organic traffic to your most vital target pages.

1. Unlinked brand mentions

Finding unlinked mentions of your brand on various corners of the internet can be a great link building method. Unlinked brand mentions are all about reaching out to website owners who have mentioned your brand but didn’t include a link. You can set up a Google News alert to regularly find websites which are writing about you and check if they included a link or not. 

Here’s an example from Squarespace, where they are mentioned in an article but the author did not include a link.

Research the author, and send them an email or a tweet, and kindly ask them to add a link back to your website.

2. Linked brand mentions

This tactic involves reaching out to websites which have linked to your homepage and asking them to change the link to a more relevant page on your website so you can capitalize on higher-quality referral traffic. 

For example, at Typeform, we asked websites to link to our survey maker page instead of our homepage. By doing this (and combining it with other link building tactics), I was able to help Typeform get above both Wikipedia and Survey Monkey in the SERPs- all thanks to more relevant link placement. 

3. Guest posting

Guest posting is a classic part of most SEO expert’s link building efforts. As such, it’s one of the most predictable ways to build links.

How does it work?

You (or the link building service you partner with) build relationships with a high authority site (or preferably websites) in your niche and ask them if they would like free high-quality content on their blog. After they accept your topic proposal, your team of writers create this content and naturally include a link back to the page you want to drive more page topic authority (and ‘organic’ traffic) to. This way, you can create great content, use your target keywords as anchor text, and eventually amass a decent number of relevant backlinks. While this might sound like a lot of effort, this pays for itself in domain authority and organic traffic to your site over time.

It’s more than worth cultivating a long-term relationship with a site owner who values content quality and is willing to support your backlink strategy in exchange for free guest posts your content team can provide.

However, it should also be noted that link prospecting can be time-consuming and involve a lot of back-and-forth. As a result, many SaaS businesses are enlisting external SEO services who already have guest blogging connections in their niche.

Here are some examples of guest posts we have achieved for our clients at Skale:

• https://piktochart.com/blog/business-storytelling-in-2020-5-creative-ways-to-share-your-business-story/
• https://whatagraph.com/blog/articles/content-marketing-metrics
• https://blog.carts.guru/ecommerce-landing-pages

Happyscribe reached 70,000+ organic signups with link building

Skale’s link building tactics lowered CAC for this brand by 98%

Read more

Bonus: Read about Enterprise SaaS SEO Strategies.

4. Trend reports

Venngage’s most-linked blog post is “8 Biggest Graphic Design Trends For 2020 & Beyond [Infographic]”.

How did they manage to rack up an astonishing 429 referring domains? Did all of this come from building relationships with authoritative websites? Not entirely. In fact, creating high quality content like trend reports can be an excellent way to side-step the more costly methods of building links. By creating content with search engine optimization in mind, Venngage has created a giant of a backlink profile for this page. So, how did they do it?

First, they created high-barrier-to-entry content by heavily researching 2020 design trends. It’s a long-form article with more than 13,000 words.

Second, they are 10xing their SaaS content by: 

• Creating custom high-quality infographics using their product. 
• Creating a high-quality YouTube video which has racked up more thank 48K views.

Third, they update the exact same URL every year with the current year’s design trends. By doing this, they increase the number of domains which link to it, and increase their search rankings. The referral traffic alone from this page speaks for itself:

What trend report can your SaaS brand be known for year over year?

5. Podcasting

Wait, how can search engines find your website from a podcast? What does that have to do with building high quality backlinks? It may be surprising to hear that podcasts are not only a great way to create awareness for your brand in the community where your ICP hangs out, but they are also a great SaaS link building tactic. 

Let me explain. 

It actually works similarly to guest posting: most podcasts have a website. So, when you speak on a podcast, they’ll publish it on their website afterwards and include links back to the websites that you mentioned, odds are, yours will be on the list. 

Here’s an example of how Hubspot built a link back to their own podcast show, after their VP of Growth was interviewed on the popular Everyone Hates Marketers podcast.

The big advantage of building links through podcasting (instead of guest posting) is that you don’t need to put the same time, effort and resources into building out high-quality written content. Rather, you just need to prepare beforehand and speak for 30-45 minutes on a topic you are already familiar with.

6. Product embeds

Product embed links are created when your users embed parts of your product on your website.

For example, at Typeform when people embedded a contact form, they also included a link back to Typeform’s contact form maker page, which in turn boosted its rankings.

Find a way to make your product embeddable, and get your users to embed it on their website and include a “Powered By” link back to a relevant page on your website.

This tactic is also called “widget link building.”

7. Shareable links

Here’s a surprising statistic:

30% of Invision’s links are to their projects subdomain (10,700 of them) where they host their client’s prototypes. They are getting top tier links from high authority sites such as Adobe, GitLab, Eventbrite, Dribble, Zendesk, SurveyMonkey, Hubspot, and other websites! 

How do they do this?

They entice their users to share their Invision projects on the Internet. In turn, their users are actually doing 30% of their link building to increase their domain topic authority. Not only are they turning their users into a legion of champion link builders, but the content they’re producing means that Invision can benefit from volunteer guest blogging from a range of different sources.

Here’s an example that was posted on Adobe’s website. See how the button “Prototype Experience“ links back to Invision?

So, allow your users to easily share parts of your product, and educate them to do this through email marketing, as well as in-app and blog content. By building resources for your users to create great content, your link building efforts are likely to benefit.

For example, if you have an analytics SaaS, it could be as simple as making your in-product reports easily sharable.

8. Roundups 

SaaS businesses everywhere are making good use of link building techniques like this one. Roundups (also known as resource pages) are collections of top tools or resources on a specific topic. For example, “top 20 design tools” or “top survey tools”. 

Here’s an example from CreativeBloq:

https://www.creativebloq.com/how-to/20-best-ui-design-tools

See how in the URL it says 20, yet on their page H1 it says 22? 

This is because people reached out to CreativeBloq asking them to be included in this roundup, and they modified their H1 but not their URL.

How many roundups are there in your vertical that you can proactively reach out to? 

9. Broken links

Broken link building is a tactic where you find a broken link on a website within your target niche (this may also apply to certain nofollow links, if you’re willing to get creative). If a website removes a blog article that was being linked to, then this is a broken link.

If you’re in the process of link prospecting and notice this, you can contact the site owner and make an offer for them to link to your content instead.

And search engines aren’t big fans either, so this tactic is effective for building links to your own platform. However, it’s also time-consuming if you have to create new content from scratch.

Download the free Saas link building guide

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10. CEO Interviews 

Interview link building is similar to podcast link building. It consists of creating a prospect list of websites that have previously interviewed SaaS founders and other experts from SaaS companies, to ask them if they want to interview your CEO. 

Here’s an example of an interview I did on Voucherify: 

It wasn’t live, they sent me a list of questions in a Google Doc and I spent one hour answering them before sending them back to be published in a blog post interview format. 

By doing this, I got a link back to my website’s homepage.

How many websites would be willing to interview your CEO or other experts from your SaaS company? Many websites in your niche will be interested in an expert opinion if you are willing to pitch them ideas or form long-term partnerships with their owners. While they benefit from your content and expertise, you can easily build backlinks and it’s a digital marketing win-win!

11. Infographics 

A few weeks ago, I got this LinkedIn message from someone at another SaaS company, asking me if I wanted a free infographic for one of my blog posts:

They didn’t explicitly say it was a link building campaign, but framed it as a “we’ll help you, if you can help us.“

This is a powerful link building tactic because you are offering something of high value that will add value to someone else’s article, and you are asking for something fairly easy in return: quality links.

Here’s an example of how they secured a link on Constant Contact:

Are there articles on websites in your niche that would include an infographic and mention you in return?

12. Image credit

An interesting SaaS link building tactic is to see who has used one of your website images and ask them for photo credit in the form of the link.

This is an email I personally received:

By using this tactic, they were able to acquire 44 links back to their website from high-authority brands such as Taboola and Springboard:

How many people should be crediting images that they copied from your website? This can be a simple enough way to build homepage links and links to feature pages where such images are prominently visible.

13. Product reviews

This tactic not only gets you links, but social proof and potentially new customers too. Not to mention the fact that many product reviews are naturally rich in your target keyword (or indeed keywords.)

Product review link building involves reaching out to bloggers in your niche and giving them 3 months of your product for free, in exchange for a review write up on their website within 2 weeks of gaining access to your SaaS tool.

People love free things. And maybe they’ll become a long-term paying customer afterwards after using your product for free.

This SaaS link building tactic wins on multiple levels and saves SaaS companies the time and effort involved with classic guest blogging.

14. Integration partners

Integrations are a key GTM strategy for many SaaS companies to drive MRR.

They are also a great source of backlinks.

When working with an integration partner, be sure to:

• Make sure they add a link to your integration directory listing.
• Write a guest post on their blog with a contextual link back to a key page you want to push and make sure they use your target keyword as anchor text, of course.

How many integration partners do you have that are not linking back to you or that you haven’t guest posted on? Reconnecting with your partners could be exactly the boost your backlink strategy needs.

15. Rankings

What’s one of the best ways to build backlinks but is also pretty high-maintenance? Building out rankings is a high-impact way to get brands to link back to you, as they like to brag.

Nathan Latka successfully used this tactic to drive dozens of links back to his SaaS company database, GetLatka.

How did he do it?

He created a special ranking report of the fastest growing SaaS companies by employee size:

He then did outreach to these brands, asking them to publish this news on their blog. In turn, this drove both brand awareness and heightened his link profile.

What special ranking reports can you create in your vertical to give brands bragging rights?

16. Badges

Badges are an often-overlooked way of building high quality backlinks for many SaaS companies. By offering your users badges, your platform can acquire a high volume of referring domains in a relatively paBadges are an often-overlooked way of building high quality backlinks for many SaaS companies. By offering your users badges, your platform can acquire a high volume of referring domains in a relatively painless manner. The most successful instance of “badge link building” is G2, which launches quarterly rankings of software companies.

If you’re looking to attach a prestigious accolade to your link profile, look no further than G2. Top brands add the G2 badge to their website as a form of social proof, with the goal of boosting conversions.

Here’s an example from Salary.com. The G2 “High Performer” badge links back to their G2 profile.

Furthermore, Customer Success Managers at G2 are trained to push their accounts to include the badge on their website and also push to include links.

Another example of badge link building is Mixpanel, who gives you extra usage if you add their badge in your website’s footer and include the link. They periodically run a script to detect if a website has removed this badge and downgrade the account’s usage plan.

Can your SaaS offer badges that people embed on their websites? How can your CS team get your customers to add them?

17. Free tools

Free tools are a great way to attract your ICP to your SaaS website and utilise product-led growth to drive product signups. By building resource pages and featuring tools that bring real value to your users, you’re bound to see more links for those tools.

It’s worth noting that you’ll need to make the effort to promote your free tool to relevant communities and get people to link back to it.

For example, Invision created a free design plugin for Sketch and Photoshop.

Not only do they generate leads that they nurture into product signups, but they also built 994 links back to their website.

What free SaaS marketing tools are you building?

18. Help A Reporter Out (HARO)

A great combination of positive PR and link building for SaaS companies comes in the form of HARO. Help A Reporter Out is an online tool which gives journalists sources of information for their upcoming stories. In exchange for this information, they are likely to link back to you in your author section on their articles. While this can be mixed as to whether you’ll acquire nofollow links or dofollow links, either way your website will be featured and linked to on a useful source, driving organic traffic to your platform.

For example, SaaS brands have got links from websites such as Forbes and Inc.com.

What about other benefits of using HARO? It’s free and you receive opportunities every day. With a paid account, you can even filter the topics you are most interested in writing about through using keywords.

Here are their plans:

19. Testimonials

Giving testimonials is an easy way to get links back to your brand. While many platforms will only give you nofollow links, it’s still worth it considering all of the products you’ve used recently. Then, reach out to them and let them know you’ll be willing to give a quick text testimonial in exchange for a link back to your website’s homepage.

For example, by giving a small review of Fomo’s software, you also get a link back to your website:

And Fomo’s stats aren’t to be frowned upon:

20. Conferences

Speaking at and sponsoring conferences isn’t just a great way to build thought leadership, it’s also a way to acquire high quality links.

For example, Invision spoke at Oreilly’s Design Conference and gained a link back to their homepage through their author bio page:

And this isn’t just limited to offline conferences, brands such as Drift are also acquiring links from online conferences such as from the Product Led Summit.

Make sure when you’re speaking at events, you’re also making sure the event pages link back to your website.

21. Q&A Sites

Scratch your prospect’s itch by solving their problems on Q&A sites such as Quora and Yahoo! Answers.

For example, Smartlook was able to get a link by answering the question, “Does anyone know of an alternative to ClickTale?”.

And not only were they able to get a link, they were also able to generate traffic and thus signups from an in-market audience looking to switch from a competitor tool.

What questions does your ICP ask on Q&A sites? How can you help them?

22. Get featured in thought leadership articles

This tactic involves giving your thoughts or being featured as an expert on a specific topic in your industry. 

See how Maze is doing it

With each article you get a feature in, you’ll get a backlink to your profile, your business, or both. You will get promotion from the website’s different channels and continuous exposure if the content ranks highly in the SERP.

How does it work? 

1. Pitch an article idea to a website, or find an article that could benefit from your expertise an input.

2. Feature your quote or idea, crediting you. 

3. The website owner will publish the article and promote it in their channels.

This is a great way for SaaS marketers to continue to help each other grow and lead the way for future-thinking SaaS brands.

See how we do it at Skale

This is something we actually do at Skale, so If you’ve been in the B2B SaaS industry for a while, specifically in marketing or demand generation teams, we could be a perfect fit.

Join other great experts from companies like G2, Slack, Help Scout, Holded, Maze, and more.

Become a member of our SaaS experts collective here

What’s the best link building strategy for SaaS companies?

When thinking of the strategies your business should take on as you build a natural link profile, there are a few things to keep in mind. Remember that it’s not about how many links your website has- in fact, your domain authority depends more on the quality of those links and the way your internal linking structure works.

It’s also important to consider that link building for SaaS is a long process, so you may need to trial-and-error your way through several strategies to find what works best for you. If that sounds time consuming, there are plenty of SEO agencies that specialize in SaaS– and if you look harder, you may find a dedicated SaaS link building agency they can save you time and energy by forming partnerships with relevant site owners on your behalf.

Want to dig deeper into the science of backlinks?

Discover how you can secure high-quality links from relevant sites your clients are already visiting

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This isn’t just any old SEO KPI article. We’ve not looked around and compiled a list of KPIs that hundreds of others have produced before.

We decided to go straight to the source and speak to SEO experts about what they believe are the most important SEO KPIs.

These SEO experts come from various backgrounds, but they all have one thing in common—they’re all part of the impact-driven SEO management team at Skale. 

Together, they’ve picked their top KPIs for SaaS SEO that you can implement in your SaaS.

1. Revenue: for overall performance
2. Conversion: for identifying strengths and weaknesses
3. Keyword SERP ranking: for measuring keyword strategy effectiveness
4. Non-branded vs. branded search: for brand awareness growth
5. Organic traffic by content: for identifying lead generation SEO content opportunities
6. ROI from organic: for measuring returns
7. Backlinks: for content value insights
8. Bounce rate: for better keyword targeting
9. MRR from organic: for identifying valuable pages to optimize
10. Organic CTR: for understanding customer journeys and sentiment
11. Crawl errors: for spotting minor issues before they become major

How is SaaS SEO different?

Digital products often rely on a digital-only approach to marketing efforts. This can make both selling the software and building trust in the brand trickier than with tangible products. SaaS SEO can help with both of these challenges. 

There are a number of ways that SEO can help SaaS companies achieve their business goals:

1. SEO helps SaaS companies with long-term growth: when done correctly, SEO can be the most powerful tool in a SaaS company’s marketing efforts.
2. SEO reduces long-term spending: by minimizing reliance on paid ads. The initial investment in SEO can bring long-term returns that don’t stop after you’re no longer investing. 
3. SEO provides greater product insights: as SaaS businesses have more accurate information on metrics like MRR, CAC, and MQLs. This helps inform the organization on how their SEO efforts are working and enables them to reposition to take advantage of their strengths.
4. Helps build trust via brand recognition: by providing searchers with educational information within the industry. SEO allows brands to identify key content opportunities within the market, and position themselves as a thought-leading brand.

Most valuable SaaS SEO KPIs

1. Revenue: for overall performance

When it comes to SaaS SEO, one of your main drivers should be revenue. That’s the bottom line— you want your SEO strategy to be supporting long-term financial growth. In fact, all our experts agreed that tracking and increasing revenue should be a priority for SaaS companies. 

Things become a little tricky when we start to consider attribution— where an increase of revenue comes from. It can often be difficult to track this back to the original source, as highlighted by Ryan Prior— SEO Growth Strategist at Skale:

“You could sign up for a freemium product and use it for a year before you upgrade. The attribution is completely lost by that point.”

The same goes for a long sales process— the revenue is difficult to track and attribute. Difficult, but not impossible. Ryan explains more:

“Usually you’ll have some sort of primary conversion metric that indicates that revenue is on the way and you’re doing the right things.”

Let’s take a deeper look into conversions.

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2. Conversions: for identifying strengths and weaknesses

Conversions are another important SaaS SEO KPI for measuring the success of your SEO efforts. Here are Ryan’s thoughts on how it relates to revenue:

“You’d have a primary goal, like an increase in organic free trials. Some SaaS companies could take this further and use a PQL— so, for example, someone who’s done something within the product. 

For sales-led businesses, this could look like a marketing qualified lead (MQL) or sales qualified lead (SQL), and it can take various forms depending on your goals and SaaS business model.“

By defining your conversion metrics you can gain insights into how organic traffic is contributing to revenue. 

Unlike revenue, an increase in organic traffic can be directly attributed to your SEO strategy. It’s important to understand your current organic traffic before you begin focusing on SEO, we recommend taking an average of the previous six months to benchmark against.

You can do this in Google Analytics.

Your conversion goals may look something like this:

• New organic sign-ups
• Multiple pages viewed
• Time spent on website or key pages

Once you’ve established your goals and benchmarks, you’re in a stronger position to report on any SEO-driven conversions.

3. Keyword SERP rankings: for measuring keyword strategy effectiveness

Ryan also mentions the importance of search engine result pages rankings when it comes to measuring the success of an SEO strategy. The goal of SEO is to increase organic traffic to your website, and the success of your keyword strategy plays a big role in this. Ryan explains:

“Revenue is the ultimate goal, but rankings are a good indicator that what you’re doing is working. For example, if you got from #100 to #12, that’s a pretty good sign that what you’re doing is on the right track. 

It’s very unlikely there will be any conversions to show for that, so rankings are kind of an early indicator of getting conversions and revenue further down the line.”

When it comes to matching keyword ranking with conversion rates, consider the search intent behind each keyword. For example, an informational keyword is going to garner a much lower conversion rate than a commercial keyword. Distinguishing between the types of searches is an essential step in your keyword research, and revisiting that may help you reach your target audience at the right time.

Tracking keyword rankings and their associated conversion rates is a key SaaS SEO metric, however, it’s also important to consider whether these keywords are branded or non-branded.

4. Non-branded vs. branded searches: for brand awareness growth

Organic traffic can come from branded and non-branded searches. Branded searches come from people who already know your brand— they’re trying to find you specifically.

Source

Non-branded searches are often where many want to be focusing. These are people that find your pages through querying a specific topic or keyword. An increase in non-branded search traffic demonstrates a successful approach to SaaS SEO.

It can mean an increase in brand awareness and help identify your best-performing or most valuable pages. You can then use this information to analyze your pages and identify any that aren’t performing as you’d hope. It’s a strategic approach to SEO that leads us to…

5. Organic traffic by content: for identifying lead generation content opportunities

The organic traffic you receive to each of your individual pieces of content helps identify what you’re doing right and what you’re doing wrong. For more on this, we spoke to Jordi Cubiró, SEO Growth Strategist at Skale:

“Classifying our traffic by content types helps us identify which areas of the website are underperforming and also where we should allocate more resources. 

For example, we might be focusing too much on creating ToFU articles for the blog when what we are missing is traffic in our BoFU pages. Defining and attributing our organic traffic to different kinds of content helps to understand the ‘Organic Acquisition Model’.”

The organic acquisition model that Jordi mentions refers to the way in which SaaS businesses track how their organic efforts attract, convert, and close business opportunities. A comprehensive understanding of the journey your leads take in order to become leads helps you improve the process and meet prospective clients halfway, or at the bottom of the funnel instead. Essentially, you’re meeting people when they’re more likely to buy your product. 

6. ROI from organic: for measuring returns

In order for SEO to be sustainable, you need to be able to measure and analyze the return on investment of your efforts. This includes technical SEO, on-page SEO, and off-page SEO.

Italo Viale, co-founder at Skale, highlights ROI from organic as one of the top three SEO metrics for measuring SaaS SEO success. Here are some questions he recommends considering in order to do this:

• How many PQLs or SQLs, according to your acquisition model, are you getting from SEO every month, quarter, or year?
• What is the average revenue per account of organic sourced users or clients?
• What’s the customer lifetime value (CLTV) of those users?
• How did this impact your customer acquisition cost/customer lifetime value?

These are all key metrics for understanding how SEO performance impacts your overall business success- and how to change your B2B customer acquisition strategy accordingly. Again, you must identify the conversion metric you’re going to consider in order to accurately attribute these ROI metrics to SEO.

Source

For details on how to calculate these metrics, check out our articles on 11 Crucial SaaS Marketing Metrics You Need to Track.

7. Backlinks: for content value insights

Link building is a key part of SaaS SEO, and search engine optimization in general. It’s something many SaaS businesses go for and build themselves or with an agency— like us! Backlinks not only boost your domain authority by acting as a vote of confidence for Google but also indicate the success of your SEO-driven content marketing strategy and brand trust. Check out why it’s beneficial to outsource link building strategy.

A strong organic link profile helps boost your organic search rankings and bring more users to your pages. When it comes to analyzing your SaaS link profile and categorizing all your backlinks, Martín Durán recommends a number of tools. He highlights:

“Google Data Studio provides the most pristine source of clicks. However, there are more sophisticated solutions like Segment that allow you to track customer data and events more efficiently and accurately.”

NB: Martín also makes a point to distinguish between leading and lagging SEO metrics. Leading metrics are KPIs that change before a SaaS business begins tracking a particular pattern or trend. Lagging metrics are KPIs that record the actual performance of an organization— in this case the organization’s SEO performance.

Alongside the other SaaS SEO metrics, keeping an eye on backlink performance provides key insights into the success of your SEO strategy.

8. Bounce Rate: for better keyword targeting 

Bounce rate is great for measuring:

• How well your content immediately engages searchers who find it
• How relevant the content is to the keywords you’re targeting

If people land on your page and don’t stay on it, they’ve not found what they’re looking for. This could either be because your content isn’t of high enough quality or it could be because it’s not answering their search query quickly enough.

Ranking highly for the wrong keywords will hinder your domain authority, not help it. Search engines prioritize search intent as one of the key factors behind the search results it shows to each individual searcher. The different keywords you target with your SEO-driven content marketing need to match up with the search intent behind the searches that use these keywords.

You can use Google Analytics to measure the bounce rate of your pages and identify any areas that require improvement or reconsideration.

9. MRR from organic: for identifying valuable pages to optimize

Monthly recurring revenue from organic reflects the number of paid subscriptions obtained through SEO marketing efforts. It gives you an idea of if your SEO efforts are bringing new customers to your brand. We spoke to Jordi for more on this:

“Attributing subscriptions to different landing pages is very helpful to assess which content clusters are bringing in most of our ‘valuable users’. It helps understand which are the main sources of paying customers and helps create a strategy that prioritizes those pages.”

Understanding your MRR and where it comes from can help your SEO team improve their efforts and push focus on what’s the most successful approach. Italo added:

“SaaS businesses need to impact the bottom line, and usually, it’s not a volume game but a strategic game where 20% of the pages can bring 80% of performance growth. “

10. Organic CTR: for understanding customer journeys and sentiment

Click-through rate helps determine different things depending on where you’re considering it. When looking at your CTR on search engine results pages, it points towards the strength of your brand domain, and the effectiveness of your metadata. 

If you’ve successfully attracted organic traffic to your website — a landing page, let’s say — you want to understand how people are using the page and where they’re clicking. This helps determine the performance of your on-page SEO and the relevance of your target keywords. In turn, this helps you understand:

• CTA copy and placement
• Visitors intent on your site
• Likeliness to convert

There’s little point in wasting time targeting keywords when your solution isn’t what people are looking for with their searches.

You can analyze the CTR of your pages and queries in Google Search Console under the performance report.

11. Crawl errors: for spotting minor issues before they become major

The last SEO metric on our list is crawl errors. This highlights any coverage issues your page is having and allows you to fix them. In order for Google to rank your pages and acknowledge your SEO efforts, crawlers need to be able to successfully index your pages. If they’re unable to do this, your SEO tactics on those pages will be for nothing.

Whilst this isn’t necessarily a KPI in nature, it can definitely help when aiming to understand why your SEO efforts aren’t working as planned. It can also point to wider issues that — if not addressed — can be hugely detrimental to your online presence and domain authority. 

Effectively measure your SEO ROI today

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What are the best SEO tracking Tools?

After picking the Skale team’s brains for the most important SEO KPIs, we spoke to the SEO experts about their dream team when it comes to tools. They all mentioned the following:

1. Google Analytics: for understanding website traffic
2. Google Search Console: for website indexing information
3. Ahrefs: for backlinks and SEO analysis
4. Segment: for data collection and analysis
5. Semrush: for keyword analysis

Your ideal tool depends on what you’re looking to do. Ideally, you want a tool that’s:

• Comprehensive: so you can keep all your data and insights in one place. Consider it your SEO one-stop shop. 
• Intuitive: so you’re not spending all your time figuring out how to use it. Plus, this makes it easier for the whole team to start prioritizing SEO.
• Cost-effective: so your SEO ROI is as great as possible. You want a tool that helps you, but if you’re a smaller business this shouldn’t come at a cost you can’t afford.

There are ample free SEO tools available, with many of the best platforms offering cheap — if not free — trials of their product. For a more in-depth analysis of the SEO tools you should consider, take a look at 15 Secret SaaS SEO Tools That The Pros Use To Outrank The Competition.

SaaS SEO KPIs FAQs

What SEO KPIs do SaaS companies use?

The SEO KPIs that SaaS companies use are:
1. Revenue
2. Conversions
3. Keyword SERP Rankings
4. Non-branded vs branded
5. Organic traffic
6. ROI from organic
7. Backlinks
8. Bounce rate
9. MRR from organic
10. Organic CTR
11. Crawl errors

For more information on how SaaS businesses use SEO, check out Skale’s SaaS SEO handbook.

How can I measure the ROI of SEO for SaaS?

There are a number of metrics that you can analyze to measure the ROI of SEO for SaaS, such as:
– Monthly recurring revenue
– Customer acquisition cost
– Customer lifetime value

For an in-depth view of how to calculate SaaS ROI, check out this article.

The things this article is not: 

• This is not a step-by-step SaaS SEO guide. 
• This article is not here to convince you that your SaaS brand needs to be focused on SEO. 
• This is not an entry-level article for those looking to start their SaaS keyword research efforts. 

The things this article is:

• This is eight proven methods we have used to help Skale clients (SaaS brands) rank on Google. 
• This is for people with SEO knowledge—who have perhaps hit a wall and are struggling to rank for specific SaaS keywords. 
• This is for people already focusing on SaaS SEO, who know the power of it, and who want to do more- with the help of some relevant keywords. 

By the end of this article, you’ll have eight new practical methods to inspire your SaaS keyword research and outrank your competition. 

This article also includes three bonus tips covering some misconceptions around keyword research, which can mitigate the amount of SaaS SEO growth you can get. Something to watch out for! 

8 Practical methods for SaaS SEO keyword research

A word of warning: these methods are not quick fixes. These methods will require time and energy from you and your team. They will require you to dedicate resources to your SEO efforts, especially your keyword research process. However, we have used these methods, and they’ve helped me achieve results like 3xing product sign ups in just 3 months, for a Skale client.  

If you’re serious about SaaS SEO keyword research, then read on.  

1. Dig into Google Ad converters

Your PPC team is now your best friend. Take them out to lunch, get in their good books, and book in some time to pick their brains (and keyword data sets) Seriously, when SEO teams join forces with PPC teams, you’ll create an SEO force to be reckoned with. 

It makes sense: you’re both working in the exact same channel, yet one is paying for the traffic directly, and the other isn’t. 

What can you learn from your PPC team? 

1. Look at the top converting keywords. Ask for a report of all the keywords in the past 30 days that generated a conversion. 

Remember to break conversions down and be clear on what the PPC team is paying for. Do you want click-throughs, lead gen, or something else? What do you deem as a conversion, and what’s valuable to you? You should be focusing on your leading indicator of new MRR, such as activations or MQLs. This is how the fastest SaaS companies—like Slack—scaled so rapidly. Not all SEO depends on fancy keyword research tools- but the data can come in handy when you’re looking for real business results.

2. Work out the conversion rate per click-through.  

Use this data to understand which new pages and articles you can build out to help generate organic traffic. It’s a great way of understanding what your potential customers want, the words that resonate with them, and their thought process behind getting to your product.  

3. Anticipate the number of conversions for your organic pages based on the conversion rates you got for keywords from your PPC team. This will help you set benchmark goals to shoot for with your page content and will also help you prioritize which pages to work on first. 

…Or cut out the noise with a SaaS SEO agency

You might not have the time to go through every method on this list, but these top 21 agencies do

Read the list

A few things to remember when working with your PPC team on SEO keyword research:

Avoid vanity metrics

Try to avoid vanity metrics like leads and signups. I used it as an example above but try to focus on deeper funnel metrics like MQLs or activations. This way, your data and the content you make from it have a higher chance to impact the bottom line.  

Instead of focusing on vanity metrics, there are a few things to take into account when choosing your target keywords:

• Search volume- if no one is looking for a keyword, no one is going to find it. Instead, find relevant keywords with a high search volume.
• Search queries- this is the specific language your target audience uses when they search, and it’s worth paying attention to what they are exactly looking for.
• Keyword intent- when your target audience uses the keyword, does that mean they want to buy your product? When it comes to SEO for SaaS, most business owners prefer to target the most profitable keywords possible.
• Keyword difficulty- how hard will it be to rank for this keyword? Weigh this against the resources you are willing to put into your content.

Set up a meeting cadence 

Set weekly catch-ups with your PPC team. I say weekly; this should be the very minimum you check in with the team. Try to eradicate silos if you can. That’s not to say you need to do lunch every week, but if you set up an easier method and communication process, it will do wonders for all. 

Go through top-performing keywords 

Generally, tie strategies together to create more impact in these meetings. The PPC team’s data can help you a lot. 

However, it also works the other way around. Perhaps you’ve got some surprisingly high-performing organic keywords and pages that you are ranking for. Your PPC team can develop their own strategy around your data or combine their spending with your pages and optimize them for conversions you all need. Go schedule that recurring calendar event right now; I’ll be here when you get back! 

2. Use reviews to get the voice of the customer (VoC)

Review portals are a fantastic insight into your VoC. Check SaaS review platforms like G2, Capterra, SoftwareAdvice, GetApp, and wherever else people are writing about you. Perhaps you’ve even got a few review threads going on Reddit.

Source 

Don’t forget to rule out social media reviews if you have a strong customer presence; Facebook and Twitter threads can be really insightful.  

By doing so, you’ll gain valuable insights, not only to your customer’s voice but potential keywords as well. 

How to analyze reviews for keywords:

1. Get all your reviews in one place. Copy and paste your reviews into one big spreadsheet. It doesn’t sound pretty, and sure it takes a little leg work, but it will be worth it— read on.

2. Time to analyze what people are talking about. Use a tool like WordItOut to visualize the most common keywords in a tag cloud.

Source

3. Take this a step further with an n-gram analyzer tool. It will help you to spot language patterns in order to weed out the most common phrases your customers are using to describe your SaaS product.

Source

4. If you can, this should also be a section of your competitor analysis. Look at your competitors’ reviews and see the language their customers are using. These keywords can give you even more clues into possible keywords you can be ranking for and those you can start competing for. 

3. Focus on jobs to be done 

The chances are your SaaS product can do many things, and people use it differently. Find out the jobs to be done on your platform, and learn from all of them. There are a few ways you can go about finding this information: 

Brainstorm with your team/peers: Set a brainstorming meeting and give people enough lead time to come up with ideas. Even if they are crazy or far-fetched, get them all down. No idea is a bad idea in this case. 

You never know, maybe the craziest ‘use case’ of your product highlights a potential goldmine. If you’re not able to get people in the same space, Miro is a great tool for virtual team brainstorming sessions.  

Source

Find jobs to be done in customer reviews: Points two and six in this article can shed some more light on this, but take a look at what your customers are using your product for by reading reviews. 

Run a user survey: If you’re ever in doubt, ask! Ask current users why they are using your product and if they’re using it in ways that exceed or differ from the product expectations. You can couple this type of survey with your NPS and kill two birds with one stone. 

By focussing on jobs to be done, you will gain a wealth of new ideas for content you can create and start attracting more people to your product who have a key job to be done that isn’t in your main product messaging strategy.  

4. Create a customer journey map

Customer journeys are difficult to do, which is why most people haven’t done them. I’m not talking about your customer product journey here; I’m talking about the full customer journey across your funnel. 

This journey needs to go right back to when someone doesn’t even know the problem they are trying to solve. What triggers make your customers realize they have a problem, and what encourages them to start searching for a solution in the first place? 

Mapping your customer journey can have two SEO keyword research-orientated goals: 

1. Generating new leads for your SaaS platform.
2. Influencing existing leads to generate revenue for your business.

How can you create an accurate customer journey? 

Fire up your CRM and analyze the common or mutual content people consume before generating revenue or becoming a lead. If you have Hubspot, this process is a piece of cake. 

Different types of leads will consume different types of content. For example, perhaps SQLs consume hyper-product-specific blogs, customer case studies, or Youtube video tutorials. 

Identify the successful types of content you have that help move people through your customer funnel, identify the keywords that support that content, and create more content to give it all the best chance of being seen by more people at the right time.

Pro Tip: Run a keyword gap analysis on your current content to see how you can optimize it for search. 

5. Analyze competitor keywords 

This isn’t such an advanced keyword research method, but that doesn’t lessen its importance in any way, and there’s a reason it made the cut. While you can’t always inspect organic search data from your competitors, a competitive keyword analysis can be just as good. How do you do it?

We have mentioned it briefly above, but analyzing competitor’s reviews is only a small portion of the greater competitor keyword analysis. 

Use a keyword research tool like Ahrefs to do a gap analysis to understand what keywords your competitors rank for, and you’re not— both direct and indirect. Inspect the reasoning behind each specific keyword, and see if it could add value to your own SEO strategy.

By running your gap analysis, you’ll instantly spot new content opportunities to build out and go head-to-head with your competition. With the right long-tail keywords, you’ll soon find yourself standing out as number one on the search engine results pages. 

Don’t forget to layer on metrics like: 

• Content type — for example, templates, blogs, landing pages, etc. 
• Number of referring domains
• Potential traffic 
• Visit —> Activation conversion rate (by the level of intent) from historical data
• Demand generation metrics — such as payback period & CLTV

Use these, alongside other metrics, to support your decision-making and prioritize your content build. Keep in mind your quarterly and yearly goals and identify which metrics can help work towards them.

6. Analyze sales calls

Sales calls are a massive insight into your B2B keyword research, both from a customer perspective and a salesperson’s perspective. 

There’s some smart software out there that can help you automate this process better. Gong is a fantastic SaaS that records and transcribes sales calls. By reading these transcriptions, you can understand the user’s motivation journey, what prospects are looking for, their pain points, and particular use cases. 

Gong Interface

Pro tip: segment sales calls into buckets:

• Revenue generators
• MQLs 
• SQLs 

This way, you’ll understand your leads better, their wants, needs, and problems. 

The results you document from your sales calls can help you rework your product messaging and customer journey to accurately reflect keywords that your prospective customers use (and used) to find your solution. 

At the same time, you may find salespeople are veering away from the sales ‘script’ they initially trained with, yet are getting great results. 

Your salespeople are in touch with your customers probably more regularly than anyone else in the business. They’ll have unintentionally adapted their script to sell better — learn from them and those keywords or phrases they find successful. 

Wait, how does keyword research generate SQLs?

Here’s a hint: you need a great strategy too. Here are 6 SEO case studies that generated serious ROI

Get your free insights

7. Dig into competitor’s PPC keywords

Find out what your competitors are bidding on and those keywords they deem as valuable for generating conversions. Spyfu is an incredibly in-depth tool that allows you to see your competitor’s keywords.

In Spyfu, you’ll be able to: 

• Search any domain’s bought keywords on Google ads 
• See every organic ranking of that domain 
• See every ad variation the domain has used in the last 14 years 

Source

As you can imagine, this keyword research can do a lot for your B2B SaaS business. The data will not only give keyword insight you can use in your PPC strategy, but it will also help to keep your content fresh with organic keyword data. By getting an insight into competitors’ old content, you can steer clear of it and continue to deliver unique content to prospects.  

8. Understand your key switch moments

Switch moments here can mean one of two things:

 1) People looking to make a switch to a SaaS solution. 

How did your users complete their job before using a SaaS product? For example, if your ideal customer is an accountant, perhaps they were doing everything in Excel. Or maybe if your product allows e-signatures on legal documents, your customers were still sending out documents by tracked mail and requiring physical signatures. Those were the days!  

Map out your switch moments to attract an audience yet to adopt a SaaS solution. By doing so, you can educate these people that using your SaaS solution will save time and money by automating their old way of doing things.

2) People looking to switch from their existing SaaS solution. 

Make a list of all of your direct and indirect competitors. Next, you can try to rank for “competitor + alternative” keywords by building out content talking about how you differ from them. 

You’re going head to head with the competition here, so make sure you do your research and don’t bend the truth! If your tool is genuinely better and at a better price point, then you should have no problems. 

IMPORTANT: this is a sensitive topic; the best way to do this is to quote G2 reviews vs. making statements yourself about another brand. Remember to add disclaimers and avoid bidding against competitor brand names if you can help it—it’s a low blow. 

9. Consider adjacent use cases

It’s not just the exact use cases of your product. Don’t get so worked up if the target keywords or use cases aren’t EXACTLY what your product does. For example, if you’re doing brand marketing surveys, it’s okay to rank for “brand management tools,” as long as that ranking article is relevant and you can tie it into your product or service. 

At the end of the day, you’re also looking to attract your buyer personas and brand ambassadors. Even if these people aren’t going to buy your product, they’re in the right space with the right network to talk about it to someone who is in a position to convert. Keep this in mind, and you can’t go wrong. 

10. The Industry is not needed 

You don’t need to focus on every niche you can appeal to. Open up the top of your funnel and people will adapt your content to their needs.

For example, if you’re targeting real estate agencies, don’t make the “B2B Sales guide to real estate agents,” make it the “B2B Sales guide.” As long as you’re delivering quality content, people will appreciate your work and be able to apply it to their own business. 

We have done it with this article; for example, we could create articles like: “HR SaaS SEO keyword research” or “Finance SaaS SEO keyword research” however, it’s simply not needed and tough to build with a small team. 

Keep things broad, deliver high-quality and focus on building one piece of golden content over multiple mediocre pieces of content. 

Pro Tip: Segmented content works wonders for sales enablement, but it’s just not needed for your SaaS SEO strategy.  

You’ve got to open the top of the funnel to maximize growth! Too many brands fail to do so, then they wonder why no one’s reaching their BOFU content and aren’t a SaaS unicorn yet. 

11. ICP & the anti-ICP

Ensure you really know your ideal customer profiles (ICPs) and buyer personas before building your content plan. Failure to do so may mean you increase MQLs and activations but fail to impact revenue and retain customers. 

Given you’re ramping up SEO as a performance marketing program, your goal is to impact revenue ultimately, and you need to focus on this.

Who said you can’t measure the ROI of SEO?

Skale’s team does it every day- and we’re sharing our secrets in this guide

Read the guide

How to impact revenue with SEO content for ICPs:

1) Survey your customers

You can do this by sending out a Typeform. Figure out questions to help you understand them better and enable your team to build profiles around the type of people they are. 

It’s a good idea to incentivize this questionnaire to get answers that people take their time writing. 

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2) Add onboarding questions related to customer roles

Onboarding doesn’t just need to be a learning experience for your users. Onboarding can be a learning experience for your business. Thread questions into your onboarding to help you understand your customers better. 

This data can ensure you help users reach their Aha moments quicker, further tailor their journey with you, and build ICPs for future SEO content. 

3) Use SaaS integrations

Yes, there’s a B2B SaaS tool for everything. Madkudu—which plugs into Salesforce and other CRMs— enriches your opportunity objects and builds an ICP & anti ICP model for you to work from. Read more on it here.  

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Understand who your real ICP is and level up your lead gen content. Don’t second guess this; it will be a costly mistake! 

Wrapping up

As I said at the beginning of this article, methods like these have helped the Skale team achieve results like 3xing product sign-ups in as little as three months. Yes, B2B SaaS SEO is a long-term strategy, and it needs to be given time, but you’ll be surprised by the quick wins you can achieve if you follow these methods. 

SEO is a scalable growth method that any SaaS brand should be looking to incorporate into its marketing and demand generation strategies. It’s easy to throw money at ads and see rapid growth, yet converting that to sustainable growth needs more thought, time, and care. 

Stick with your SEO guns, they’re valuable assets to your growth toolkit, and I hope this article is too. 

Got questions? Reach out to us via our client application form or on LinkedIn.

Bonus: Read about Enterprise SaaS SEO Strategies to see how SaaS companies acquire Organic SQLs.