SaaS SEO Strategy: How Can SEO Grow Your SaaS Company
Photo by Stephen Phillips – Hostreviews.co.uk on Unsplash
Here’s the deal: All businesses require SEO, but your SEO approach and the extent of your SEO strategy will vary depending on your industry and your products.
SaaS companies that want to increase their organic traffic and earn top rankings on search engine results pages need to have a personalized keyword strategy and make personalized content.
As creating an effective SaaS SEO strategy can be a time-consuming and costly task, we’ve created this extensive guide on how your in-house staff can do it to grow your business.
Alternatively, if by the end of this article you realize that you need some additional support, we’ll provide you with sufficient information on how to outsource the best SEO companies for your strategy.
Build an effective strategy
Business growth happens when you successfully broaden your customer base and increase revenue from the products and services you’re offering.
To do that, you need to figure out a way to attract more traffic to your website, which serves as a shop window showcasing your products.
In other words, to rank higher on search engine results pages, you need to build a strategy on how to optimize your website and content.
To build an effective strategy, you need to answer a couple of questions first.
Start with understanding the profile of your target audience. If you’re already present across multiple platforms, you can do that by analyzing the buying behaviors of your customers.
After collecting this data, you need to create broad descriptions of your audience. Include information like:
- Their demographics
- What do they care about?
- What are their needs and problems?
- How are they finding you?
Once you have the answers to these questions, you’ll be able to better direct your business and marketing efforts to target only your ideal customers, which will in return positively affect your return on investment (ROI).
Moreover, by understanding the problems your audience has, you can better optimize your website’s content and showcase how your SaaS product solves their issues.
[Source: Pixabay]
And while we’re on the topic of business and marketing efforts, your next step should be defining what you’re trying to achieve.
Be clear and focus on realistic short-term and long-term objectives.
And how will you know which goals are achievable? By assessing your current performance.
This assessment will showcase the weaknesses of your current strategy, allowing you to improve in key areas to find new opportunities.
Apart from that, performance assessments are a great way to discover your unique selling points. This is what sets your product apart from your competitors in solving the pain points of your target audience.
Once you figure out who your target audience is and what you want to achieve, your next step is figuring out the way to do it.
In other words, you need to find a way to attract your ideal customers to your website and have them engage with the content that has the potential to sell your SaaS.
[Source: Pixabay]
The way to do it? Keyword research.
Keywords reflect what your target audience is typing into search engines. They’re a key factor in increasing your visibility and boosting your SERP results and traffic.
When deciding which keywords to use, keep in mind your ideal user’s intent. What are they trying to achieve or solve when performing a search query?
Then, look for keywords with a high search volume but low competition. In the awareness stage of a buyer’s journey, using long-tail informational keywords can be a great strategy. These “what is” and “how to” keywords will educate your audience about SaaS while increasing your brand awareness.
In the consideration stage, you should go for keywords and content that promote your SaaS and attract traffic that has the potential for lead generation.
You could create listicles with the “best” or “top” SaaS software, and feature your SaaS software. Or, you could make comparison pages, where you’ll measure the performance of your SaaS against another similar software.
Finally, in the decision stage, branded keywords are your best friend. Even if you’re a smaller business, you can use Keyword Research Tools to understand what your target audience is looking for in relation to your industry.
Perform a thorough audit of your website and content
Website audits are important because they provide insight into the performance and speed of your web pages and the content on them.
As your site and your content are the first contact points your audience has with your SaaS product, performing regular audits improves your site’s visibility, its search engine ranking and your conversion rates.
When performing website audits, make sure that your whole website is:
- Running smoothly and doesn’t have a long loading speed time
- Secure from data breaches and hackers
- Friendly to Google and other search engines
- Easy to navigate and explore
- Filled with engaging content and backlinks from authoritative sources
- Including effective and relevant CTAs in your content and on your landing page; CTAs help generate more leads and increase conversion rates
- Optimized to rank higher than your competitors for relevant keywords
- Free of broken links
Think of these bullet points as your post-audit objectives. Just make sure to have solid metrics set in place, so you can check whether you’re meeting these goals along the way.
To meet these objectives, you need to identify the areas where your website excels and where it falls short.
That means identifying:
- Which pages does your audience visit first?
- Which pages do they stay the longest on?
- At which point of the buyer’s journey does your audience leave your website?
Answering these questions will uncover your weak links, including your web pages, design elements, content, anchor texts, CTAs, etc.
With this data, you can work on reducing your bounce rates, increasing your traffic and improving your strategy for lead generation.
Now go ahead and propose those changes to the stakeholders!
Showcase your software through quality content
In 1996, Bill Gates said that content is king. This statement couldn’t be truer, now more than ever.
If you want to sell your SaaS, you have to create relevant and engaging content to showcase:
- The way your product works
- The problems that it solves
- How easy it is to use and navigate
- How reliable it is
Writing quality content isn’t easy. Quality content isn’t just well-formatted and grammatically correct, but it also provides unique value to your audience.
In other words, it has to address the specific pain points of your audience, while highlighting the advantages of your SaaS.
You also need to strike a fair balance between creating problem-solving and promotional content.
If your content doesn’t contain relevant keywords, visuals, backlinks, CTAs and other ranking factors, you’re not going to rank high on the search engine results page.
On the other hand, resorting to keyword stuffing and having an aggressive promotional campaign can put off potential customers.
Although written content, like blog posts, social media posts, e-books, guides and press releases, seems to be the most popular choice, it’s important to diversify your content every once in a while.
Try organizing webinars, including visuals, filming demo videos and recording podcasts that focus on your SaaS product. This way, you’ll get a chance to tap into a broader market and a wider pool of potential customers.
Optimize the infrastructure of your website
If content is king, then technical SEO comes second to it.
But before you can optimize your website for search engines, you first have to do a lot of testing to figure out what works and what doesn’t.
For one, you need to test the speed of your website. Fast websites are essential in providing a superb customer experience and reducing bounce rates.
There are many website speed test tools, like Google PageSpeed Insights, which can help you analyze the loading speed of your site.
Ideally, your website should load within 2-3 seconds, as that’s the time the majority of the consumers are willing to wait before bouncing to a competitor’s website.
Next, you want to make sure that your website is accessible and friendly to your users. Such website has:
- Intuitive organization and simple navigation
- Properly formatted texts and images and responsible design
- Scannable content with headings, subheadings, short paragraphs, lists and smart usage of white space
- XML sitemaps, descriptive anchor text and recognizable links to increase indexability and crawlability for search engines
- Optimized title tags and meta descriptions
Don’t forget to optimize your website for mobile phones, too. Not all content works as well on smaller screens as it does on computer-sized ones, so try reformatting it and optimizing your images for easier mobile navigation.
Lastly, besides optimizing your website, invest some time into optimizing your social media profiles.
Social media platforms are a great way to establish a strong online presence for your business and improve your brand visibility.
Redefine your content, use your visuals and hashtags and engage in conversations with your audience. You could even reach out to social media influencers to help increase your traffic.
Don’t be afraid to steer far from traditional marketing campaigns and try something new!
If you need help with your search engine optimization, driving organic traffic and generating quality leads, take a look at these best SEO agencies in Denver!
Build authority
If you want to have an advantage over your competitors and build a loyal customer base, you need to ensure that your website (and your brand) is considered authoritative.
The more credible and respected you are in the industry, the more likely your customers will be to put their trust and their money in your products.
That’s why it’s important to make building authority a part of your marketing and SEO strategy.
The way you can do this is by using external links. External links are hyperlinks included in the content of other websites, leading to pages and content on your website.
However, getting external links on just any third-party website isn’t worth the hassle. You need to ensure that your links are authoritative and that they’re driving referral traffic from another leader in your industry.
If you do that, you’re directing your marketing and SEO efforts into attracting a new audience with a high potential of converting to leads and sales.
Of course, the content which includes links to your website should also be relevant to your target audience. That’s why you should establish partnerships with businesses that share your vision and your objectives.
Finally, use social media to build authority. There’s no better way to gauge information about the opinions and preferences of your audience, as people love to share their thoughts and leave reviews on social media pages.
Use them to connect with your audience and promote your SaaS product. Just make sure that you’re keeping up with the trends, staying relevant and remaining consistent throughout.
Conclusion
As you can tell, regular evaluations of your performance are an essential factor in growing your business — and SaaS SEO strategies exist to make meeting this objective bulletproof and easy.
Take your time to answer the questions asked in this article, analyze the data you’ve collected and use your insights to implement changes with the potential of increasing your revenue.
Author bio
Travis Dillard is a business consultant and an organizational psychologist based in Arlington, Texas. Passionate about marketing, social networks, and business in general. In his spare time, he writes a lot about new business strategies and digital marketing for DigitalStrategyOne.
