The primary objective of every business is to reach target clients and expand its coverage. In the modern world, companies and business strategies have shifted to online platforms. It is no more a secret that businesses are thriving online, and this explains the continued surge of business presence on the internet. With lots of businesses assuming this trajectory, the competition to fish and convince lots of customers to purchase your product becomes a headache to lots of SaaS companies.
There is a multiplicity of ways that SaaS marketers leverage to attract customers to their products. However, there is one crucial strategy that is still a puzzle to scores of SaaS marketers.
Do you want to know which strategy this is? Yes, it is choosing the right keywords. With Google currently transforming their keyword index using intelligent UI, it is becoming more difficult to know which keywords work for a SaaS company.
This brings us to the topic of SaaS keyword research. You see the logic now? With proper keyword research facilitated by a professional SaaS PPC agency, there is no more guesswork but reliable keywords to improve SEO for your SaaS.
In this article, we shall walk you through how to do a keyword research for a SaaS Business.
Let us go. Shall we?
1 – Understanding Sales Cycles for your SaaS Keyword Research
Identifying and targeting potential clients from specific industries should be treated with caution. This process requires thorough planning and understanding of that target audience. These target audiences must be constantly given unique content, and deploying a good SaaS strategy is of significance.
A SaaS strategy, just like several other sales strategies, is represented by several cycles. However, this method is unique in that there are more decision-makers and that lots of emphasis are put on research.
The Content Types for Every Sales Funnel Stage
This SaaS strategy can be represented by a funnel starting from the top to the bottom.
1.1 – Pain points
For the best SaaS keyword research practices, it is crucial to clearly get a picture of the pain points of your customer at every single stage of their journey curve. With this understanding, the way you will approach or deliver your content will tally with the very people who will visit your page. Your content should have a clear goal that matches your keywords and the strategy itself.
1.2 – TOFU
Top of the funnel (ToFu) is often referred to as the awareness stage. This stage comprises several leads who have problems that need to be solved. They are unqualified customers seeking information using long-tail keywords. This customer is interested in their pain points. Therefore, it is your role to qualify them by choking your site with much content and keywords.
1.3 – MOFU
MOFU stands for Middle of the Funnel. MOFU lies immediately at the bottom of the attention-seeking TOFU. It is a stage where leads consider the available options. Your emphasis is on feeding the customer with relevant information to match their needs with a solution.
- While TOFU tries to educate customers, MOFU justifies why your product is the right solution to the customer’s problem. It is no doubt a critical stage, and you have to ring all bells and whistles to showcase your product’s capability to solve the problem. Based on your content, leads can either decide to buy your idea or opt-out.
- Don’t exaggerate your product by making false claims because you might attract wrong traffic that backfires in the long run. Common comparative SaaS keywords like advantages of and “vs.” are advisable in this stage.
- According to Forbes sales research, most buyers get past 60-70 percent of the sales process before engaging a salesperson.
1.4 BOFU
BOFU is the bottom of the sales funnel. At this point, the customer has decided to settle on your solution. However, not all is finished yet. This is an open chance to showcase your convincing prowess.
- Other competitors offer the same line of solutions. Therefore, you have to beat these competitors by demonstrating to your potential customer the superiority and effectiveness of your product.
- The keywords to use should directly relate to the solution you offer. This means they should be shorter with more sophisticated and valuable content.
2 – Identifying Topics and Seed Keywords
One of the most significant steps in a SaaS keyword research is identifying topics and seed keywords. This step has to be done meticulously because it translates to more leads when done correctly. It is useless to waste time and resources on keywords that don’t yield better results. You have to play smart and pull better strategies.
2.1 – Finding Relevant Topics
Finding the relevant topic is another critical step in your SaaS keyword research. Every phrase in the keyword carries a concept about what solution you offer to the customers.
Customers can use more words to reach your site, but what is important is that you try to match them with relevant topics. Knowing the kind of topics that matter most you target is the game changer when narrowing into topics for Keyword.
2.2 – Competitive Analysis
Running research on the topics covered by your main competitor is another key step for your Keyword Research.
- The first and easiest technique is to analyze the website of your competitor manually. It is on their website that you can derive the various topics they use to drive traffic to their site. To make it easier, check the navigable pages on the website and the blog.
If you can find any information on the blog that leads you to find out how many posts they create in each category. Try to pay more attention to those posts that are rich in content as these could be relevant topics driving traffic to the website.
- To get more and better analytics, leverage suitable software. There are plenty of these softwares and are very useful in generating analytics with fewer efforts. Some prompt you to simply enter the competitor URL, and you will receive the keyword research report in a short time.
The above is an example of a keyword research report with SEMrush software. It is quite comprehensive, and you can derive lots of insights.
3 – 5 Best Keyword Research Tools for your SaaS Keyword Research
Keyword research tools are of great essence to SaaS marketers. They help boost organic traffic by a large percentage. If well leveraged, keyword research tools can prove so vital to SaaS marketing. There are multiple Keyword research tools available in the market. However, there are those tools that have a proven record.
Do not just try any keyword research tool expecting to hit amazing organic traffic size. With a good keyword research tool, be certain to increase your SaaS traffic like never before. The following are some of the best keyword research tools.
3.1 – Soovle
Soovle is a free keyword research tool used by the scores of users across the globe. Although free, this keyword research tool boosts immense success, and plenty of users can attest to that. Soolve works by giving you suggestions of keyword ideas from multiple sites, including giant companies such as Google, YouTube, Yahoo, Amazon, and Bing.
All these suggestions will be available and accessible in one place! The beauty here is that this tool will unravel the untapped keywords your competitor is not aware of them.
One of the best features applauded by droves of users is the saved suggestions feature. Yes, you can seamlessly save your favorite keyword ideas via drag and drop under the “Saved Suggestions” feature. The program also allows you to download those keywords that stole your glance into a CSV file.
3.2 – Ahrefs Keywords Explorer
Ahrefs Keyword Explorer is majorly regarded as a backlink analysis tool but is a powerful keyword research tool as well. This tool is intelligent and makes keyword searching decisions that are very smart.
Ahrefs Keyword Explorer recently unleashed a new and improved version that gives users an in-depth analysis of every single keyword. Some of the keyword analytics you will receive include keyword difficulty, search volume, and the breakdown of the respective keyword clicks.
For the keyword difficulty analysis, the program gives you a rough score and suggests the number of backlinks you should use to rank among the top 10 based on that keyword. This feature is quite useful and is a favorite to plenty of keyword researchers.
The search volume category will give you the general search volume for that particular keyword. It also splits the total search volume into clicked and not clicked by assigning the respective percentages. This way, you can easily deduce whether the pages using these keywords were merely searched or visited as well.
The clicks and CPC sectional analyses the impact of organic and paid traffic.
3.3 – Google Keyword Planner
Google Keyword Planner, as the name suggests, is a fetch of its data directly from Google. This means it is very reliable compared to other keyword research tools. The reliability comes in because Google designed this particular tool for Google Ads.
One amazing feature of Google Keyword Planner is the Top of Page bid.
It is easy to see why this feature becomes a favorite to scores of SaaS marketers. In simple terms, it gives information on how much advertisers spend on bidding on a particular keyword. The more the number, the more weighted is that keyword and, therefore, a suitable choice for the keywords. If, for instance, the top page bid is $5, it means that people spend an average of 5 bucks for a single click.
3.4 – Keywords Everywhere
Keyword Everywhere is a powerful yet paid keyword research tool. This amazing tool displays keywords for the top ten websites, such as eBay and Amazon, among others.
Now, since the keyword data is displayed on your Chrome browser, you don’t have to go the long way of copying and pasting the keyword on Google Keyword Planner.
One of the major highlights on this platform is the “People Also Search For” category.
If you didn’t know, this is a very crucial segment of Keyword Everywhere. This section furnishes you with a list of related keywords majorly searched for by your competitors. These keywords are ranked based on search volume and also give the CPC and comparison values. With such information, you can find out what your target audience searches for when they are not querying about your product. Isn’t that amazing?
Take, for example, and you want to know topics related to “SEO Tools” that are frequently searched by target customers. You would type in the word “SEO Tools” and run it. The results will look as below.
If you are really targeting a good keyword research tool, then installing this extension will prove so useful.
3.5 – Semrush
Of all the tools listed above, SEMrush works differently. While the other tools were concerned with searching potentially viable keywords, SEMrush displays those keywords that catapult your competitors to the first page. Isn’t that amazing? Yes, it is.
Just enter the competitor’s domain name in the respective field at the top then search. You can narrow down your searches to a specific country by selecting the respective country. Tour the “Organic Search Traffic” section and have a look on the SEMrush Rank, Keywords, and Traffic Cost values.
- SEMrush Rank indicates how the site ranks in the SEMrush database.
- The keyword is a rough figure of how many organic visitors come from Google every month.
- Traffic Cost is an indicator of how much value this traffic is. This value is based on the Google Ads CPC.
SEMrush’s value is derived from the “Organic Keywords” information.
Just click on the “View full report” tab and explore all the keywords that your competitor’s site ranks for on the search engine.
For more reports on your competitor’s keywords, navigate to the domain overview, and select “Competitors Level.” Click on those displayed results and get a bigger picture of the exact search queries that make them rank better.
Remember, you can also do the SEMrush search using the keyword instead of the competitor’s domain. By typing a phrase, the program will display various results that are long-tail variations of your keyword.
If you searched for weight loss, for example, you would obtain long-tail keywords like the ones displayed below.
Conclusion
The above wealth of information shows how much invaluable keyword research is for SaaS marketing. SaaS keyword research is not an elementary task but involves a series of techniques and strategies. When this is correctly done, the company will drive massive qualified traffic to the site, and this immensely improves your sale.
If you’d like to learn more about how we help B2B SaaS companies grow their MRR through SEO and PPC, contact us online or send us an email today at info@getuplead.com to speak with someone on our team.
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