Most B2B SaaS companies believe that an SEO strategy starts and ends with keyword research. That's totally off the mark. A solid SEO strategy entails every activity that shoots your pages to the first page of search results.
According to BrightEdge, search engine optimization (SEO) accounts for 53.3% of website traffic. Meaning, when done right, it can reduce the dependency on paid ads, thereby improving brand visibility, domain authority, audience reach, and tropical authority which ends in trust, leads, or sales.
But to enjoy the benefits of SEO, SaaS businesses need to play the long-term game. This means not expecting your page to rank on the first page in a month, or to drive 50,000 monthly traffic within 3 months of publishing your first piece of content.
This guide lays out our detailed roadmap for B2B SaaS SEO, plus how to drive product sign-ups.
We hope that at the end of this, you will leave here with clear steps on how to do SEO for your SaaS website, or that of your client (If you’re an agency owner).
Difference Between SEO for SaaS and Other Businesses
The SEO process for every niche is the same irrespective of whether it's SaaS, eCommerce, or Affiliate marketing.
Usually, all SEO campaigns must tick the following checklist:
- Keyword research: Identify the target keywords your ideal audience is searching for. Afterall, 68% of buying journey starts with a Google search. The higher the search volume, the better (But keyword difficulty score plays a big role).
- High-quality content: Answer user's queries to build trust and authority.
- Link Building: Drive backlinks to improve authoritativeness and serve as a trust currency from other websites.
For SaaS SEO, the above rules still apply. However, there are a few things SaaS SEO strategy entails:
- Heavy focus on driving conversion (product demos, sign-ups) and not traffic
- Develop content around BOFU keywords first before moving to TOFU and MOFU.
- Most target Keywords are product and problem-related not, location-based like in the case of service providers
- Buying intent is prioritized over keyword search volume and difficulty score.
- Zero-volume keywords aren't ignored but are seen as a chance to dominate SERPs before competitors catch on. Going by this Google’s tweet, 15% of searches are new.
- Product weave-in during content creation
- Prospect nurturing is done via content to shorten the sales cycle.
With that said, here's our complete roadmap for SaaS SEO. Plus, each step in the roadmap is a sub-step of all 4 processes listed above.
How We Approach SaaS SEO - Our RoadMap for Generating Product Sign-ups
1. Create all your company pages
Often ignored, but this is a vital component of our SaaS SEO strategy . Having the right business pages tells Google that you’re a real business people can trust and buy from.
What pages are essential to have at least?
- About page: Tell Google and web users what your business is all about and what differentiates you from competitors.
- Contact page: Should include your contact info: Company phone number, email, or any means of the customer contacting you.
- Pricing page: For SaaS, this should contain your product's different pricing plans.
- Privacy Policy Page: Tells visitors the type of data that’s collectable, plus assure them that their data is safe
2. Keyword Research
The keyword research technique for SaaS is about finding search queries your audience are searching for on Google. For software companies, it's best to target high-intent keywords if you want to drive sign-ups. And even more important to verify that you have a chance of appearing on the first page of search engine rankings.
High-intent keywords indicate that someone has a problem your product solves and is interested in paying for it.
Keywords that fall into this category can be long-tail keywords or product-related:
However, because we target BOFU keywords, doesn't mean we won’t make room for TOFU and MOFU terms in our keyword strategy .
They have to come in later down the line.
The reason for this is simple. For SaaS companies, the goal of SEO is to drive conversion (free trial sign-up, product demo) over traffic.
Tim Soulo, CMO at Ahrefs, articulated it best when he said: "Traffic is good for the ego, but not your bank account."
Why waste resources and time educating people that don’t need your product, while there’s a starving crowd waiting in line.
3. Content creation
After keyword research, the next step is to create content for each keyword you intend to educate your prospect around.
When it comes to content creation, it's essential to create your content in line with Google’s ranking factor. Key parts of that ranking factor includes matching search intent, and aligning with E-E-A-T.
For search intent, it’s simply the reason behind the search.
It's divided into 4 categories:
- Informational: The user wants to learn about a topic.
- Navigational: User wants to go to a specific website, e.g., Facebook.com or SEOmatic.ai
- Transactional: Searchers want to buy or sign up for a product.
- Commercial: Researching different options before making a choice.
For SaaS companies, 2 content types matches the above intents:
Educational content
Educational content is best for keywords with informational and commercial investigation search intent. In either case, the user is seeking information.
Content types within these categories are:
- Blog posts - “Best X tools”, “Top X tools under $100”, or “How to do XYZ”
- FAQ page to answer frequent questions and answer long-tail queries.
- Case Studies to show that your product works.
Landing Pages
Landing pages are best for keywords with transactional intent. These web pages offer detail about the product and help with lead generation.
Examples of pages that fall into these categories include:
- Product feature pages: Highlight the features your product offers. For products with large feature lists, it’s best to create individual web page for each feature.
- Comparison pages : Competitor alternative, Competitor tool pricing, Competitor tool review, X vs. Y tool.
- Templates pages: E.g Content marketing templates, Content calendar templates.
- Micro-tools pages (small free features related to your SaaS)
- Integration pages
4. Link Building
Link building is the process of driving backlinks from other sites to yours. You earn a backlink when another website includes links to your content on their page. But for that to happen, they have to find your content insightful and of high value.
High quality links also serve as a quality assurance signal to Google. And it encourages them to show it to more people.
According to Ahrefs, 66.31% of pages have no backlinks. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t earn them.
Even though you can rank on the first page of a search engine without it, you can easily lose your place, and fall off to page 2.
With backlinks, you cement your position on search engine ranking, and second, you can drive passive organic traffic from other websites.
Here’s a detailed guide on link building that will help you out.
5. Technical SEO
There are 3 parts of technical SEO we pay attention to:
- Indexing
- Page speed
- Optimizing for featured snippets
Indexing
Indexing is the process of Google adding your page to their database and serving it among search results.
If your page isn’t indexed, your overall content marketing strategy will fail. It doesn’t matter if you choose the right keyword, or produce high-quality content. Failure of Google to index, means it won’t appear on search engines, and no one gets to see or read it... so make sure your pages are indexed.
Page Speed
Page speed is a metric that indicates how fast the content on your page loads. According to Think With Google, the ideal page load time should be between 1 to 3 seconds.
If it takes longer, you might experience a high bounce rate. Make sure to optimize for page speed and get a Google Lighthouse performance score between 80-100.
Optimizing for Featured Snippets
Featured snippets are selected texts that feature at the top of search results.
These selected texts usually offer quick answers to searcher’s questions without needing to read a full blog post.
A featured snippet could be a list or 2-3 short sentence paragraphs.
According to Ahrefs, pages selected as featured snippets get 26% clicks - More than what the #1 ranking pages on SERPs. Hence, optimizing for featured snippets should be a part of your content strategy.
So, what’s the on-page optimization hack for earning a featured snippet?
- Define the topic in 2-3 short paragraphs
- Add TL/DR section
- Add an FAQ section to optimize for user queries
- Include JSON mark ups to structure your content
Wrapping it Up
Your entire Keyword Research process is just one step in your SaaS SEO strategy. You must implement all the steps mentioned above for your SEO efforts to pay off.
For instance, it’s possible for your page to rank on the first page of Google for the right keywords without backlinks, but zero backlinks makes you vulnerable to losing your spot on the first page of SERPs.
Also, you can stuff your content with keywords for it to rank on Google’s search engine result pages, but that might also end in poor reading experience for your audience.
Poor UX experience = high bounce rate.
There’s really no shortcut. You just have to unite all the steps above. And while doing so, exercise patience, as SEO is no magic wand.
