SaaS in SEO. What should you know?

SaaS SEO is about making a SaaS company easy to find on Google and other search engines. The aim is to attract people who are looking for the solutions your product provides.

From a strategic point of view, the main benefit of investing in SEO for SaaS companies is reducing Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC). The reason is that SEO is cheaper than most marketing tactics, and the traffic it brings is substantial and well targeted.

Doing SEO work for these types of businesses comes with certain challenges, but also opportunities you won’t find anywhere else. You can find more information on this below.

What is SaaS SEO?

SaaS SEO uses online marketing to increase the visibility of websites of companies using a SaaS (software-as-a-service) solution. SaaS SEO is a process that involves organic search.

As with SEO for any business, an SEO strategy for a company with a SaaS solution will be about getting ahead of the competition. If you offer software as a service and want people to find you organically on Google, chances are your competitors are doing exactly the same.

Getting ahead of the competition on Google SERP pages involves several things:

• being more relevant for a given keyword than anyone else,
• creating more useful content with greater authority compared with other pages,
• acquiring more backlinks from relevant websites for your most important pages.

1. 01Organic growthSoftware visibility
2. 02Outpace the competitionPosition in Google results
3. 03Content relevanceBest answers to keywords
4. 04Authority and valueUseful and trusted materials

The key to success: building authority strategically and delivering the most valuable content for SaaS users.

What is different with SaaS SEO?

SEO for SaaS websites will be based on the same general principles as any other SEO. You still need keywords with strong traffic potential, optimised content and plenty of high-quality links. Moreover, most, if not all, SEO tactics that work in other businesses will also work here.

The only difference is therefore the unique ways of using your product to attract targeted traffic with a high likelihood of conversion. This involves three things:

• you should focus on product-led content (content that shows how to solve a problem with your product). That way, every piece of content you publish provides immediate value to your audience and creates a natural path to sign-ups or subscriptions to your content, 
• you can integrate the product with your content. For example, companies such as Airtable or Asana share their templates, which can be used in their products,
• you can literally turn your product into SEO content. Using small parts of the product to create free tools is a great way to acquire traffic, leads and backlinks.

The importance of SEO for SaaS

For your SEO efforts to make sense, you first need to focus on the traditional SEO approach aimed at delivering leads in the sales funnel. Then you need to focus your content strategy on a mix of evergreen materials about your product, services, industry, and timely updates and support.

Essentially, create any content that will be valuable to the leads you want to acquire and to the people who are already paying for your services. Evergreen content is an investment you make with the future in mind. It is timeless and will work effectively for you.

Moreover, the more up-to-date content you provide your current subscribers, the more they will treat you as a primary source of knowledge about a given service. Using these activities in a SaaS company is a real investment. All SEO strategies work in the long term.

As with any good investment, these activities will pay off after some time. Having plenty of evergreen content, a large portfolio of authority backlinks and a loyal customer base driven by incoming content assets is important for SaaS SEO.

Your SEO strategy will be driven mainly by on-site content. It is therefore worth promoting it on social media and in email messages.

1. 01Lead-focused approachTraditional SEO approach.
2. 02Evergreen contentA timeless investment.
3. 03Updates and supportFor current subscribers.
4. 04Main source of knowledgeBuild authority.

Investing in content builds trust and the future of your SaaS.

How to carry out SEO activities in SaaS

Create your strategy by following the rules below.

1. Find out who is competing with you in Google

Organic competitors are different from direct business competitors.

An organic competitor is any site that ranks for the same keyword as you. So this concept includes not only direct business competitors, but also blogs run by industry experts, partner sites and other relevant online platforms.

All these websites also want a share of “organic search”. You need their list in order to carry out further SEO research and track your progress. There are plenty of tools for doing this, but you can also do it using the standard Google search engine.

1. 01Overall marketing strategyAlignment with SEO goals
2. 02Implementing SEO activitiesDelivery within the strategy
3. 03Expanding skillsGrowth in other marketing areas

The key is synchronising SEO with marketing goals and the continuous development of interdisciplinary skills.

2. Check what is working for your competitors (so you can reverse engineer it later)

Once you’ve created a list of organic competitors, it’s time to make use of it. You need to carry out SEO competitor analysis.

The main aim is to determine what works effectively for your competitors in the following areas:

• the most effective site sections,
• the most effective pages,
• types of content that generate the most backlinks.

The most effective page sections

Are your competitors attracting the most organic traffic through a blog, product pages, tool pages, a knowledge base or another type of content? What is their approach to site architecture, for example how do they structure their URLs?

You can find the answers to these questions using various tools for creating reports on site structures. You can check this option, for example, in Ahrefs using Top Pages.

The most effective pages

Now that we’ve looked at the broader picture of a site’s organic performance, it’s time to move on to the details. After all, content has to be planned piece by piece, so knowledge of the content that brings competitors the most organic traffic is invaluable.

However, it is worth remembering that pages generating the most traffic do not necessarily deliver many conversions. Many of them cover top-of-funnel topics with high search demand. So make sure these content ideas are right for your target audience.

Types of content that generate the most links

You probably know that backlinks are one of the most important ranking factors in SEO. It is hardly surprising that acquiring good links pointing to your content is difficult.

However, some content can attract links more easily than others. In SEO, such content is called “link bait”. It does not necessarily generate organic traffic, but it is valuable, interesting or unique enough for other people to reference it on their own sites.

3. Searching for rankable keywords with high traffic potential

Drawing inspiration from competitors is essential in SEO, just like applying your own ideas. Keyword research is one of the most important tasks. It is the process of discovering valuable queries entered by target customers into search engines such as Google in order to find products, services and information.

Generally speaking, keywords in SaaS can be divided into four main categories, each representing a content type that matches the search intent you can see on the results page (SERP):

• blog posts – for example, “SaaS SEO guide” or “how to build links”,
• knowledge base pages – “domain rating” or “meaning of 4xx errors”,
• product and service landing pages – “backlink checker” or “free SEO tool”,
• comparison and review pages – “best SEO tools” or “ahrefs vs moz”.

Every time you are doing keyword research and keywords relevant to your business come to mind, write them down in a list that you can come back to when planning content.

Of course, many overlapping keywords with mixed search intents may appear. For example, “SaaS SEO” is a term suitable for guides like this one, as well as for agencies/freelancers offering SaaS SEO services. Stick to the label (search intent) that is more appropriate for your business.

The reason we recommend categorising keywords by search intent is that search engines always try to deliver the most relevant results aligned with intent. So if your content does not match the intent, your chances of ranking for it drop significantly.

When choosing keywords, it is important to pay attention to more than just search volume. Pay attention to the traffic potential metric – it shows how much organic traffic the top-ranking page gets. This figure can differ significantly from a keyword’s search volume.

You should also assess your ability to create content that outperforms what is currently ranking. Can you offer unique insights or additional value? It is much easier to rank with content that is objectively better than what you can find on the search results page.

4. Using product-led content to rank and win conversions

It is time to put all the research, discovery and competitor analysis into the content creation process.

Different types of guides are an excellent example of product-led content. They often mention various useful tools. Of course, the extent to which the product is promoted in the article varies. It is always better not to mention the product if it seems unnatural or too pushy.

5. Create free tools to attract traffic, leads and backlinks

Many companies have found that giving away products (or parts of them) is an effective marketing tactic. Such landing pages can generate traffic, backlinks, make people familiar with your product, generate leads, and even lead to conversions among some visitors.

A good idea is to offer various practical online tools. Of course, to get this kind of traffic, there needs to be significant search demand for the tool in question. It is worth checking the traffic potential metric and search intent.

Of course, some tool pages will be more valuable than others, because they may attract more relevant audiences. Some search results pages (SERPs) will be full of tools that offer more or less in a given area, so reaching the top will be difficult without innovation.

In addition to the standard SEO prioritisation criteria, you also need to think about developer resources. There is a considerable shortage of them, so it is a good idea to allocate them to a page that can generate profits in the future.

6. Build authority by sharing data through insights and research

We have already covered the main use cases for keyword research. However, there are some types of content that are not necessarily driven by traffic potential – namely industry insights and research.

The beauty of SaaS is that companies usually have huge amounts of data that can be analysed and interpreted as industry insights and research. Such content does not necessarily have to generate organic traffic. However, it is a great opportunity to earn more links, which help other content rank better on SERPs. 

It should come as no surprise that data-led theses or interesting findings are the kind of information that appears in many articles. However, this is a type of content that the writer usually cannot create on their own. You will probably need help from a data analysis team. Make sure the hypotheses and potential conclusions really stand out. This will help you achieve the desired SEO results.

Content distribution plays an even more important role here compared with standard articles. After all, if there is not much search volume, you need to actively put the content in front of people to win clicks. Here are some tips in this area:

• plan an outreach campaign to win backlinks and/or visibility among relevant people in your industry,
• promote the content using social media ads, which are better than standard organic posts with limited reach,
• share the content with email subscribers,
• repurpose your content into social media posts, Quora answers, newsletters, etc., and then distribute them repeatedly,
• update your internal links so that readers of your articles can move between pages.

Creating original studies does not necessarily require creating long or complex projects, nor do you have to run them in-house. They can therefore come from external sources.

7. Use programmatic SEO to generate traffic at scale

Usually, when creating content for SEO, you match a single keyword with a unique, manually created page. In the programmatic approach, you tackle a broader topic with dozens or even hundreds of similar pages created once in an automated or semi-automated way.

In this case, each page is almost identical. Only the short text fields and task and benefit lists related to specific apps, products, etc. change.

In some cases, you can use various kinds of templates, reviews, comments and other user-generated content instead of creating them yourself.

The key issue in programmatic SEO is finding keywords with the following characteristics:

• similar keywords with different variants, e.g. “SEO for estate agents”, “SEO for catering companies”, etc.,
• keywords with a similar main theme that can be presented in one content hub. For example, you could create a glossary of basic terms in your niche or a page where you share similar data about something that is important to your audience.

The simplest method is to look for patterns among keywords using modifiers. For example, let’s assume that the cost of living is something important to your business and your audience. Using “in” as a modifier makes it possible to find a certain pattern (“cost of living in [CITY]”, etc.).

8. investing in international SEO to reach global audiences

If you are interested in the global market, speaking the language of your audience is essential.

Simply put, some people prefer to type queries in their native language and expect to get results in the same language. This seems obvious, but it is fairly easy to overlook, because marketers think that writing everything in English is enough.

Here are three important elements of international SEO:

• technical aspects – you need to choose a URL structure, use hreflang tags correctly and consider investing in CDN services (e.g. a server located closer to the target country, for faster page loading),
• translated content — ideally written by a native speaker (or at least checked by one), 
• local backlinks – to compete on a localised SERP, you need high-quality links from the countries (and in the languages) you want to rank in.

However, localising literally every page on your site may not be the most effective approach. Search demand varies between countries, so make sure you use your resources properly. Target translating your highest-performing content, but only when the search demand in the target country is worth the time investment.

9. Don’t let technical SEO issues hold you back

Everything discussed so far is related to on-page and off-page SEO for SaaS companies. However, if you notice that the technical foundations are not right, then all the effort will be wasted, no matter how good your content is or what links you have managed to acquire.

You need to make sure that search engines can easily access and properly process the content that is to rank in the SERP. This involves a lot of things, but fortunately they are not complicated.

The good news is that SaaS sites are usually not complex from a technical SEO point of view, because they are quite small. Anyone who does e-commerce SEO and works with sites made up of millions of pages will laugh at the thought of our technical SEO problems.

Summary

One thing is to provide the best advice on SaaS SEO, but another is to make sure it all makes sense when looking at the bigger marketing picture. Make sure that everything you do within SEO aligns with the overall strategy and marketing goals.

Besides that, SEO is a field that covers many disciplines, so developing your skills in other marketing areas is always helpful.