As you may know, SEO for SaaS companies is different from traditional SEO, but you may be wondering what are the best strategies that are going to help your SaaS business and get you better ranking.
In this article, we’ll take a look at the best strategies that will help you to improve your SaaS SEO but also why these methods work.
1 – The specificity of SaaS SEO vs. traditional SEO
1.1 – You need to know your customers
This is an area that a lot of businesses get wrong or don’t put enough time into. You really need to know as much as possible about your ideal customer to be able to serve them fully.
You’ll need to dig a little deeper than just knowing a person’s age, gender or location in order to provide them with the best service your business can offer.
By really getting to know your customers, you’ll be able to understand what their problems are and how to provide the correct solution for them. Understanding your users’ needs will enable you to create tailored content to effectively promote your software.
1.2 – You need to understand the “buying journey”
When you’ve done your user research and have a really clear understanding of who your customers are, you need to define your content strategy and your goals.
The ideal content strategy will allow you to engage with potential customers who will enter into what’s known as the buyer journey. By managing their journey in the correct way, you’ll be able to turn those people into repeat and loyal customers for your business.
So how is this done? The B2B buying journey consists of 4 main phases:
- Awareness
- Consideration
- Decision
- Retention
Awareness
These are the customers who are what is called ‘top of the funnel’ (potential customers) who’ve just become aware of who you are and what you do.
You’ll need to capture their attention by creating engaging content, brand awareness and solutions as to how your software will help ease their pain-points.
Consideration
At this stage, your potential customers are engaged and at the point of buying your software. Make sure you’re creating content that will allow them to compare your services with others that are available, but also draw attention to how your software can solve any specific issues they’re having.
Conversion
You now need to really demonstrate the value of your service and point out comprehensive product descriptions to ensure any potential customers are turned into buyers at this stage of the journey.
Retention
Once someone has engaged and become a customer, it’s really important as an SaaS that those customers keep on returning. By publishing content that covers topics such as industry trends and information about other services you offer, you ensure that customer will come back time and time again.
2 – SaaS SEO Strategies
By applying the correct SEO techniques and by working towards consistently improving your website’s performance in search engines, you should be able to rank for the right keywords.
Take a look at the following SaaS SEO tips and tricks that will help you get your SaaS to the top of Google.
#1 – Think Beyond Keyword Targets
Nowadays, Google’s algorithms understand a lot more than traditional keyword searches; they understand the intent behind a search. Because of the advancement of understanding searches, you need to build your keyword research strategy and instead, forums on topical authority for your subject.
In short, this means you need to understand how keywords relate to one another, and ensure these concepts are well represented in your strategy. Keywords are undoubtedly still important, but so is understanding that you need to take into consideration, relevant topics when producing any content.
You can do this by:
- Research, analyse and learn as much as you can about your target audience
- Look at how other websites for your chosen subject are ranking to give you a better understanding of how to approach related topics
- Create targeted content to answer your users’ queries and concerns which will indirectly increase your ranking for related keywords.
Always remember that a good content strategy goes hand-in-hand with a good Saas SEO strategy and should complement one another for best results.
#2 – Focus on Personalized Content
As you may know, high quality content is of utmost importance when it comes to SaaS SEO, but in order to rank highly you need to be working towards a personalized content strategy.
By creating personalized content, you not only help ease the users’ pain-points, but it also helps in your keyword research process.
Many companies still lag behind and create content that’s too generalised – a scatter gun approach that doesn’t speak to anyone in particular.
In a report by Demand Gen, over 70% of customers said that personalised content is of high significance.
The 3 stages of creating personalised content are:
- Collecting data using email and mobile surveys.
- Analyzing this data to understand needs/requirements of your audience and how you could best serve them.
- Using the users’ pain- points to create targeted content such as industry news articles, blog posts, videos, infographics and more.
You should be focusing on producing content which provides a solution as well as relevant information.
#3 – Connect Content with User Intent
Understanding user intent and research into content that is already ranking for your target keywords, will really help you find keywords that complement your content marketing strategy.
Analyze factors such as:
- The kinds of “relevant” content pieces that are ranking on the first page of the search engine.
- How these pieces of content are providing solutions and if they are offering the right user experience.
- If there are any competitors ranking in the top spots in the search engine results.
- How many ranking pages are effectively matching their content to user intent.
High ranking for SaaS SEO can no longer rely purely on matching keywords, SaaS SEO in 2020 is about matching your content to your target user search intent.
#4: Have a Mobile SEO Strategy in Place
Having a mobile SaaS SEO strategy in place is a no-brainer in today’s market. Just by looking at your analytics, you’ll be able to see that a large proportion of your site’s traffic comes from mobile devices.
If you don’t have a mobile strategy, won’t be ranking for your target keywords when potential customers search using their mobile device.
Here’s how to build an effective mobile SEO strategy:
Find Out If It’s Worth Investing In
As previously mentioned, you’ll need to work out what percentage of your traffic is coming from mobile devices so take a look back at the last 12 months and then go back for a few years (if relevant to your organisation)
If for example only 10% is coming from mobiles, you’d want to implement a totally different strategy (and resources) than say if 70-80% of your traffic came through this channel.
Also take a look at how much mobile traffic has grown in recent months. A figure of 20% growth rate is a good indicator that you want to really focus in on your mobile SEO strategy.
Choose Your Tactic
When you’ve analysed your traffic and are sure that you need to implement a serious mobile SEO strategy, you can decide which out of these 4 tactics suits your strategy:
- Responsive web design
- Standalone mobile pages
- Dynamic serving
- Accelerated mobile pages or AMP
All 4 of these tactics will serve your overall SaaS SEO strategy well, although Google have consistently recommended Responsive Web Design, so this may be the area on which to focus your efforts when getting started.
#5 – Make Sure to Leverage Schema
Schema is structured data markup that enables search engines to understand the context of your website content. In short, schema organizes and structures information on the website to relate entities to each other (people, places, and things).
Google’s focus is to deliver results that are relevant to the user – if your website doesn’t offer results or information that match what someone’s searching for, they don’t want to rank you. That’s why schema markup has become really important over the last few years.
Just by looking at how Google serves results you can see just how important schema markup is especially for SaaS companies. Google shows:
- Rich snippets that offer more insight into the search result.
- Answer boxes that help users find the exact answers they are looking for.
- AMP results and reviews from customers.
Websites that take advantage of schema markup tend to have a much higher SEO visibility score compared to those sites that don’t use it. By fully understanding what Schema is and how it affects your business, you will be able to boost your website in the search engine results pages and provide more information about your SaaS in the results pages, along with customers’ reviews of your services.
#6 – Take a Question-Based Approach to Content Development
When implementing your SaaS SEO you want to ranking in the top position of search engines for not only search topics and keywords but also for questions that people may be ‘asking Google’. Therefore it’s important to produce content that will answer these questions and feed into your overall strategy. This is precisely where our SaaS PPC agency can add significant value by integrating targeted PPC campaigns with your SEO efforts for a comprehensive digital marketing strategy.
Semrush and Google’s Keyword Planner are brilliant at finding the right keywords for your site, but they’re not the best for finding questions users might be asking.
You need to consider long-tail queries which might not have the same high volume that Semrush or the Keyword Planner base their suggestions on.
There are a variety of ways and tools you can use to understand these questions such as I start by typing basic questions into Google that incorporate core keyword targets and see how Google finishes them based on popular queries. Google then provides questions that are related to that one at the bottom of the search page so you can use these as topics on which to base content.
Tools you may want to look at include answerthepublic and keywords everywhere.
#7 – Create More Extensive Content Pieces
Don’t just think about ‘content’ as text. It’s still important to produce articles that are around 500 words or more, but don’t simply be writing one news article or blog post every week or month and think that’s enough.
Content should be relevant to your audience and should include things like e-books, whitepapers, videos, vlogs, blog posts, press releases, podcasts, webinars and anything else you think will sell your SaaS solution and get you ahead of the competition whilst meeting your customers’ needs.
Remember that Google loves fresh content, so even making edits to existing content on a regular basis will help with your SEO.
#8 – Build links to your content ( link building)
Link building is still an incredibly important part of a solid SaaS SEO strategy. Why? Because you’re telling Google that your site/service and content is important and relevant when it’s being linked to by other sites.
Years ago, some sites would have pages of just links to other sites to fulfil this Google requirement, but things have become a bit more sophisticated in recent years.
There are many ways you can build links and they all depend on what content you’re trying to promote but whatever content it is, you will want to be:
- Telling your email list about new content (and ask them to share it) – so make sure you’ve set up a mailing list service
- Make the content available to key influencers in your sector – by email, social media etc.
- Add an email about that content to any relevant automated drips
Remember that it’s a lot easier to get engagement for a new piece of content from an existing audience than from a brand new one. So make sure you’re leveraging your current user base – whether that’s customers, industry partners or people within your company to promote any content.
By following the 8 tactics you should be well on your way to the top positions of search engines. Remember to keep producing quality, consistent (and interesting!) content and keep abreast of any new techniques that can help improve your SaaS SEO.
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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