Every marketer aims to be at the top of search engines. Being on top or even the first page of the search engines establishes your brand. The entire digital marketing strategy revolves around bringing the brand to the top search results. Digital marketing is an ever-changing and evolving world for every industry. However, when it comes to the SaaS industry, it is a different ball game altogether.
Software as a Service or SaaS industry is the most dynamic when it comes to scientific advancements and innovation. SaaS products are constantly evolving. With the growth and improvement in Saas products, another issue is the huge competition.
Thus, Saas websites find it difficult to land or stay on the first page on Google. With the constant development in the Saas industry, relevant keyword research becomes even more difficult. This in turn creates issues in delivering the right content for algorithms. Thus the correct Search engine Optimisation(SEO) strategy becomes imperative for Saas companies for organic market growth.
What is SEO and Why is it Important?
SEO or search engine optimization is important for any business in today’s world of the internet. For every business to thrive, it has become imperative to have an influential online presence. Today, even if someone has to buy a pencil, the first thing they do is search for it internet.
This makes it crucial for every business to create a website and publish high-quality content on it to show up in these searches. What SEO does is, help you come on top of these searches which leads to the sale of your product.
SEO helps with increasing your visibility online. With the help of a good SEO strategy for your website, there are higher chances of your content ranking on SERPs i.e. Search engine results pages. The higher the search engine rankings, the more the chances of people seeing it. The more visibility you get, the more your product or services are discovered by the audience.
Now, any person landing on your website landing pages does not guarantee that they will buy your product. For your product or service to sell, it is important that they are your target audiences i.e. that the person should be interested in the product.
SEO helps bring organic traffic. It brings your potential clients with any money being spent on advertisements. SEO brings genuine buyers to your pages and thus helps convert leads into customers.
Because of organic buyers visiting your website, it creates a brand authority for your company or business. Being on top of the search results for relevant keywords helps potential customers know that your company is trustworthy and credible. This in turn brings more potential buyers to your website without paying for any kind of online advertisements.
SEO also ensures that the structure of your website becomes user-friendly to navigate from one page to the other. A better and more convenient experience for the customers makes it easy for them to make quick decisions and thus buy your product.
Not only this, but SEO also ensures that you get an advantage over your competitors in the business. By optimizing your content for the relevant keywords, SEO ensures that the content on your website is relevant to the target audiences.
It is true that SEO strategy takes time in planning and execution, but there is no shortcut to achieving the goals without a proper SEO plan for your website.
What is SaaS SEO?
Before we dive into the technicalities of Saas SEO it becomes important to understand the basics first. Saas Seo is an SEO strategy especially catering to the challenges related to SaaS companies. Software as a Service(SaaS) is a cloud-based model for delivering software applications to customers over the Internet as a service that allows users to access applications over the Internet via a subscription.
This subscription can either be monthly, quarterly, or yearly which allows customers affordable options than to invest in some expensive hardware or software. This also allows continuous improvements and updation of the service which keeps them satisfied and makes their life easier.
It is a business model related to the online purchase of software products. This allows the users to access the software from anywhere in the world through a web browser or an application on their mobile devices. This allows customers to access and use the software from anywhere with an internet connection, often through a web browser or mobile app.
SaaS includes everything today. Productivity tools such as Google Workshop; CRM software like HubSpot or project management tools, human resources tools, or accounting or finance software are all SaaS.
Why SEO is Important for SaaS Companies?
Why one needs an SEO strategy for establishing a digital presence is a well-asked and answered question. For every industry catering to any product, SEO is as important as the product itself. Thus, SEO becomes important for Saas Companies as it is a cost-effective way to attract potential clientele online.
SEO helps with driving high-quality organic traffic to the website, lead generation, and conversion. Be it B2B or B2C clients, online research before buying any product is the first step. Proper SEO helps you find the best customers online.
While the normal strategies include keyword research, site-wise audit, on-page SEO, high-quality images, relevant content, and generating links with other websites, it is not that simple when it comes to Saas websites. Let’s understand why.
Why Saas-Specific SEO Strategy is Important?
It is a well-known fact that the world today is changing every second. Especially, the virtual world. Everything virtually is supported by some type of software of the other. This requires the SaaS products and brands to keep providing a better and updated version of themselves almost every time a customer approaches or uses the product.
Let’s dive into the reasons why the Saas industry requires a distinct SEO approach. Following are the top 4 reasons Saas requires a solid SEO strategy:
Digital Services
Saas products are entirely digital. They are delivered online and used online. The products are created for online usage and they can’t be touched as other industry products can be. Thus it becomes essential for digital services or products to maintain their online presence in each field, be it the website, social media, or other digital channels.
Your SEO strategy should be able to portray your services and help you with the best possible way to improve your online visibility, drive organic traffic as well as optimize the social media platforms to attract the best audience.
Global Competitors
Saas businesses are competing with global competitors. Every product/ service has multiple competitors delivering the same thing at a time. This condition creates the necessity for Saas businesses to create an SEO strategy that is globally oriented.
It is like optimizing your websites not just for Google but also for every international search engine. Companies are required to keep all international factors while creating their digital marketing strategies including multiple language options etc.
Industry Trends
Saas is associated with innovation and technology. The SaaS industry’s rapidly changing trait makes it imperative to stay up-to-date. An SEO strategy should also be focused on these rapidly changing and improving parameters.
Subscription-Based Model
Another distinguishing feature of Saas companies is that they work not only on selling their products but also on Subscription-based sales. Thus, it isn’t enough to get customers but it becomes as important to keep them.
The marketing team has to do 2 fold tasks where attracting better clients is just half of the work done. Maintaining long-term relationships with existing customers and keeping them engaged with your company is as important.
How To Develop the SaaS SEO Strategy
Ultimately, all that people search for is CONTENT. All digital marketing strategies revolve around the right content. SEO strategies also revolve around the same focal point. Content is what sets the roadmap for communicating your product to the audience.
Thus the best SaaS SEO strategy focuses on Content. The perfect SEO strategy revolves around Content Organisation and Content Production. A combination of these strategies with your product can result in a perfect SEO strategy for any SaaS company.
Intent-inspired content
The thumb rule to content marketing is creating the content your audience needs. It is also important to understand and categorize your audience and establish where which category stands in the buying cycle. Once this is done, the content’s role starts. Content that is focused on the requirements of the customer at each stage.
3 steps to Follow:
- Create Valuable Content that addresses the target audience’s requirements and answers them in your blogs, articles, videos, etc.
- Optimise for SEO with the right target keywords.
- Promote your content by sharing it on all your social media platforms or email marketing.
Link Building
Once the content front is dealt with, link building follows. Internal links are important as they portray how organized a website is and what the content focuses on. However, backlinks have always proved to be of great help in Google’s ranking. Google trusts a website based on the quality of links one has from other top industry websites.
Create link-building opportunities for your website including naturally attracting links. The easiest way to attract publishers to pick and share your content is by creating and publishing reports with visually- attractive infographics and finally, running surveys. Getting the audiences involved by asking questions can be useful not only for your brand but also for the industry at large.
4 Steps to Follow for On-page SEO
- Title tags must be created for each page that is compelling and keyword-rich.
- Add a Concise informative meta description to users to bring them to your website.
- Structure your content with proper H1 H2 etc headings.
- Use internal linking to connect important pages on your website with each other. It improves navigation on your website and the audience finds it easier for you to reach the desired pages.
4 Steps to Follow for Technical SEO
- Improve user experience by optimizing your website’s loading speed.
- Optimize your website to be mobile-friendly. Above 85% of the searches and traffic comes from mobile devices.
- Create a proper XML sitemap for the search engines to understand your website better every time it crawls through your content.
- Use Robots.txt and control which content or pages can be crawled by the search engines.
3 Steps to Follow for Off-page SEO
- Build high-quality backlinks from websites with good domain values to improve your website’s trustworthiness and authority.
- Build a strong social media presence to bring organic traffic for all mediums to your website pages. Create a specific social media marketing strategy and align it with your old and new content. Design online campaigns around your products and run social media campaigns that can involve audience engagement.
Keyword Research
One of the myths related to keywords is that the SEO strategy decides the keywords. In truth, it is the other way around. Your SaaS SEO strategy should be focused on the words that your customers and industry are using in search. Thus, keywords become the most important ingredient of your SEO Strategy.
3 Steps to Follow:
- Identify relevant keywords with online tools such as Google Keyword Planner, SEMrush, etc., or hire a digital marketing agency.
- Optimize your content by incorporating keywords in the website’s content. Also make sure that keywords are present in the titles, headings, meta descriptions, and content body. For images and videos, do not forget to include keywords in the Alt. Text and description.
- Use Long-tail keywords with lower competition but are specific to your product.
Additional Tips for SEO
Use Google Analytics to track your website and how it is performing based on your goals. Monitor your traffic sources and analyze how has SEO strategy helped you with bringing traffic and generating leads. Keep doing what has helped and change what has not.
Set up conversion tracking and measure the numbers and customers that have been generated on the website post applying the SEO strategy.
Keep updated with the latest SEO practices and guidelines suggested by your search engines.
Stay patient! SEO generally takes 3-6 months to show results.
Hire a digital marketing agency to help you with your website content and SEO strategy if you can’t do it for yourself. The goal is to attract organic traffic and drive business growth. If you do not have the time, consider hiring a digital marketing agency or an SEO expert who can help you with your goals.
How to Find the Best SaaS SEO Agency?
To significantly boost your online presence, instead of coming up with your own strategy you may look into finding the best SaaS SEO agency to help you out.
While Deciding on it Consider the Following Points:
- Define your goals for the agency. Explain to them what exactly your product is and what you want to achieve out of the SEO. Help the agency identify your target audience.
- Look for an agency with prior knowledge of the SaaS industry and make sure they understand the challenges you are facing.
- Check reviews of the agency before hiring them. Go through their previous client profiles and evaluate their search results.
- Consult with multiple SaaS SEO agencies before deciding the correct one for your business. Go through multiple portfolios and filter out agencies based on your budget and other factors.
How Does SEO Help with SaaS Organic Growth?
Lets dive into how SEO determines which page to rank and how SEO helps with the ranking factors to increase the website visibility. SEO has always been essential for creating a digital presence be it increasing organic traffic or converting traffic into customers.
Before getting into details one must understand that SEO is all about understanding how search engine algorithms work and applying it to your company.
The most popular search engine is Google. Google search works with 3 stages. First is Crawling i.e. google’s crawlers or bots travel around the internet. They visit pages and download content on them. This is how Google identifies content.
The second is Indexing i.e. scrutinizing the downloaded content and storing it in a database called the Google Index. Finally, it serves the search results. This is when someone searches, google pulls information for the search results from the database.
At each stage, SEO is the key. SEO strategies make it easier for Google crawlers to easily access your website. Make sure you create and submit a sitemap of your website to Google to guide the Google bots. Another thing you can do is make sure that your website is mobile-friendly.
As most searches are made out of mobile devices in this digital world, Google follows a Mobile-first indexing strategy. A must-follow rule is using relevant long-tail keywords, question-based searches, and submitting meta-descriptions to your content.
Conclusion
SaaS SEO can be intimidating, technical, and challenging. The key to online growth is to have the correct tools, the right strategies, and their implementation. To expand your business you must prepare for search engine optimization, increasing organic traffic, and generating leads.
The work doesn’t end here. Once your audience is on your site, the content must keep them interested enough to make the purchase and generate revenue.SEO shall help in organic growth online. But your SaaS SEO strategy must keep up with the industry advancements.
It is correct that SEO generally takes some time, but it is also an absolute truth that once the right strategies are used and consistency is maintained the growth speeds up resulting in a maintained solid online presence. SEO results are long-lasting and a solid foundation to success for Saas industry.
FAQ
What are the best tools for SaaS SEO?
Google Search Console and Google Analytics are the free SEO tools. There are other important SEO tools such as SEMrush, Yoast, Moz Pro, etc. which have limited free and limited paid services. These tools help drive organic SQLs and increase your visibility on SERPs.
Why does SaaS require a specific SEO strategy?
As SaaS companies’ products have a higher competition on the global level it becomes important for SaaS companies to have a specific SaaS SEO strategy over any traditional SEO strategy.
Should I hire an expert or can I do SaaS SEO myself?
It is not impossible to implement a SaaS SEO strategy by yourself, but it is time-consuming and very technical. Thus, if you are a beginner you should hire an SEO expert to help you with effective saas SEO strategy.
How long does it take for my SaaS SEO strategy to show results?
Any SEO strategy takes some time before showing results. It may vary from a month to a few months depending on many factors including your SEO optimization, the SEO trends, Competition, Content quality, keywords and search volume etc.
Adam White
Posted on October 21, 2024
Adam White is a 20+ year SEO professional who has optimized over 400 websites, built and sold over 20 internet and SaaS businesses all with SEO as the main traffic source. Follow him on Twitter/X