The Software as a Service model is rapidly booming today and this is a great time to grow your SaaS brand. However, the thought of overcoming your competitors and emerging as a successful SaaS brand in your niche may be overwhelming at the moment.

Total size of SaaS market (in billion USD)

If you look at top SaaS business models, you’ll find that most of them have a solid search engine presence. No wonder SaaS businesses rave about Search Engine Optimization (SEO). As easy as it may sound, actually implementing SaaS SEO may be a confusing and challenging feat to achieve.

There are no set rules for SaaS SEO; all you do is implement proven SEO strategies and techniques with the hopes of dominating the Google Search Engine Results Page (SERPs) someday. This definitive guide to SaaS SEO will help you with just that.

In this in-depth SaaS SEO guide, we go into great detail to bring you different insights and techniques on how you can implement techniques that will help you rule the SERPs in due time. So, let’s dive deep into different SEO strategies to help you win the organic search engine game.

What is SaaS SEO?

SaaS SEO is the process of increasing the organic traffic to your SaaS website by implementing strategies that help you rank on the top of the Google SERPs. There are various elements to SaaS SEO, namely—on-page SEO, off-page SEO, technical SEO, etc.

A combination of all these techniques will help you gain top rankings on Google for relevant searches, thus acting as a great source of inbound marketing.

The Importance of SEO for SaaS: The Reasons Why You Need to Invest in a Solid Strategy

The importance of SEO for SaaS cannot be stressed enough. SEO can be the differentiating factor between your SaaS business and your competitors trying to make it to the top using outbound and paid marketing strategies.

Here are a few reasons why is it imperative for SaaS businesses to invest in a solid SEO strategy early on:

1. SaaS SEO has Compounding Effects Over Time

There must be a solid reason why SaaS giants like HubSpot and Pipedrive swear by content marketing and SEO. It is because SaaS SEO has compounding effects over time.

When you initially start implementing SEO for SaaS, you may feel disappointed with the progress. But once you start seeing results, the results will grow exponentially with every piece of content you put out.

Read how we helped Edtech giant Manipal ProLearn increase their organic traffic by over 67% using content marketing.

2. SEO Works in Unison With Other Marketing Channels

SEO doesn’t work as a stand-alone entity. We live in a world where omnichannel marketing is the key to attracting potential customers. And SEO plays a massive role in the omnichannel marketing strategy of any SaaS business.

SEO heavily revolves around content marketing. The content you create for SEO can be repurposed for other marketing channels such as email marketing, social media marketing, etc. SEO also helps create brand awareness and authority which ultimately helps you drive users from other marketing channels.

3. SEO Reduces SaaS Cost Per Acquisition (CPA)

If you have implemented PPC or social media paid advertising before, you’d know how expensive these channels can get. When you compare that to SEO, the amount that you invest in is considerably low. Hence, SEO can be a great way to lower your CPA.

Keyword Research For SaaS Companies

Keyword research forms the base of any SEO campaign, and hence it is important to discuss keyword research before we delve into SaaS SEO strategies. Let’s start with the keyword research basics.

What is Keyword Research?

Keyword research is the process of finding words or phrases that people use to search for something on search engines such as Google or Bing.

For example, while searching for SEO techniques for your SaaS business, you may have used terms such as “SaaS SEO” or “SEO for SaaS” on search engines like Google. These words or phrases are called keywords.

Why is Keyword Research Important?

Keyword research is crucial for any SEO campaign. This is because keywords form the basis of market research as they give a direction for you to head towards. Moreover, keyword research is the first step towards most of the SEO tasks that you’d perform, such as:

• Coming up with content topics
• Link building
• Content promotions
• On-page SEO tactics

And many more.

Keywords help you understand your target audience better. Without the right keywords, your entire SEO strategy and the campaign will go to waste as you have probably put all the effort in the wrong direction.

How to Find Keyword Ideas

Now that you understand what keywords are and why you should get them right let’s have a look at how you can go about keyword ideas for SaaS SEO.

Define Your Customer Personas

The primary idea behind SEO and keyword research is to offer your target audience what they are looking for. Hence, defining customer personas acts as a precedent task for keyword research. Only when you know your audience well will you be able to understand what keywords they are searching for.

Start by researching your current pool of customers or the kind of audience our direct competitors are targeting. You can also conduct surveys and come up with a rough idea about what your customer persona(s) will look like.

Next, dig deeper into each of your customer personas in detail. Understand their demographics, likes, dislikes, interests, passion, goals, aspirations, and more. The more you go in-depth, the better it will be.

Identify the Problems Your Personas Have and Build a Keyword Strategy

By now, you’d be clear about the different customer personas you are targeting. As a next step, start identifying relevant challenges they may be facing and how you can help them overcome these challenges.

For example, suppose that you are an email marketing provider. Then, you can dig deeper into the problems that your customers face when it comes to their email marketing needs. Furthermore, brainstorm a list of topics that they may be searching for.

For instance, your target audience may be searching for topics such as “building an email list,” “affordable email marketing tool,” etc. Now, you can start building your keywords list around these topics.

Brainstorm ‘Seed’ Keywords

Talking about brainstorming topics and building your keyword list, the first ones you’ll start with are “seed” keywords. Seed keywords are essentially the starting point for your keyword research. These are usually one to three words long and form the basis of all your other keywords.

Let’s take the example of an email marketing tool again. In such a case, your seed keyword may be “email marketing.” You can build on this to come up with other keywords and/or topics such as “email marketing software,” “email marketing tool,” “email marketing made easy,” etc.

For finding seed keywords, you can start by asking yourself the following questions:

• What is your SaaS business about?
• What SaaS product do you sell?
• What is your website about?
• What is the pain point that you are solving for your target audience?

Define Keywords to Optimize Your Platform’s Landing Pages

As a SaaS business, your landing pages will be the soul of your marketing campaigns, both inbound and outbound. Landing pages will act as the gateway that will drive users to your core product. Hence, optimizing your landing pages is extremely important.

Therefore, you should start defining the keywords that will best fit your landing pages. You can define this list of keywords from the seed keywords that you had defined before. If you’ve multiple landing pages, then each one will have a different set of keywords. Competitor and target audience research will also be of great help here.

Optimizing your landing pages for the right keywords is imperative as the organic traffic from these keywords will lower down your sales funnel and thus have higher chances of conversions.

For finding the right keywords, you can use SaaS SEO platforms as keyword research tools such as Semrush, Ahrefs, Moz, etc. Start by entering the seed keywords in these keyword research tools, and you’ll be provided with a long list of keywords that might be the best fit for your SaaS landing pages.

Ahrefs free keyword generator

See What Keywords Your Competitors Rank For

Going back to research, understanding what your direct competitors are ranking for is very important. This is because these competitors are already ranking for these keywords. Hence, trying to outperform them on the same keywords can be a great start.

For finding your competitor’s keywords, you can use the “domain explorer” feature offered by most keyword research tools. You can also use tools such as SpyFu that are specifically designed to spy on your competitors’ keywords.

Keyword Research Trimming & Finalizing

After the entire keyword research process, you’ll probably end up with a massive list of keywords. But, it is not wise to optimize your SaaS website and landing pages for every single one. So, it is also important to trim and finalize the list of keywords that you want to use.

Remove Bad Keywords

Certain keywords from your keywords list may not be the right fit for your SaaS business. The reason may be that these keywords are not directly relevant to your target audience. Or, the search intent behind these keywords may not match your audience’s search intent.

Another possibility is that certain keywords from your list may have very high keyword difficulty scores (more on this in the next section). So, it might not make sense to go after such keywords. So, it is essential that you trim and come up with a final list of keywords before you start with the optimization process.

Metrics to Analyze Keywords

As a part of your keyword research process, you’ll come across tons of metrics that define them. These metrics help you gauge each keyword and make better decisions on using them for your SaaS website.

Ahrefs

Most keyword research tools provide valuable insights into these metrics for keywords. Let’s have a look at each of these metrics:

Search Volume

Search volume refers to the number of searches that the keyword gets from search engines like Google in a defined period of time (usually a month). The higher the popularity of a keyword, the bigger will be its search volume.

Search volume is an important metric because it gives you a measure of the kind of traffic that you’ll receive when you start ranking for the keyword. When you start ranking for a high-volume keyword, you’ll receive relatively more traffic, and thus it will lead to higher profitability for your business.

However, high-volume keywords are usually highly competitive, and hence, it may be difficult for you to rank for such keywords.

Keyword Difficulty

Keyword Difficulty, or KD, is another important metric that tells you how difficult it is to rank for the keyword. For example, suppose that currently, there is high competition for a particular keyword with tons of high authority websites already ranking for it. In such a case, as a new SaaS website, you may find it extremely difficult to rank for such a keyword even after a lot of effort.

Usually, high search volume keywords also score high on keyword difficulty as most high authority websites go after these high volume keywords. Optimizing these keywords as a new website may be a waste of your time, and hence it is crucial that you make the right decision by analyzing these techniques.

Organic Click-Through Rate (CTR)

Another important thing to understand is that search volume doesn’t give you the complete picture of the traffic that you can get from a keyword. This is because other factors come into play, such as—Google ads, featured snippets, rich results, etc.

Hence, search volume is not an entirely reliable metric to gauge a keyword. Organic CTR refers to the number of users that would actually click through to an organic search result from the results displayed on the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). If the organic CTR is higher for a certain keyword, you can expect higher traffic for the keyword.

Traffic Potential

It is important to look at the long-term benefits of keywords. This is because SEO takes a lot of time. Hence, the keywords that you optimize today may yield results after a few months. It is crucial that the keywords remain relevant even after a month.

To take into consideration this, you should also consider the traffic potential of a keyword as a metric. For this, you can check Google Trends to see the current and future trends of a keyword.

Google Trends

If you notice that the popularity of a keyword is moving towards a downward trend, you may consider skipping the keyword altogether as it may not fetch you the desired results in the long run.

Cost Per Click (CPC)

The intent behind a search is also a vital factor to weigh in. Usually, keywords with high commercial intent are more profitable as the chances of converting this traffic are relatively higher. CPC is an apt metric that indicates the commercial intent behind a keyword. Higher CPC indicates greater commercial intent and profitability.

You must take into account CPC while finalizing your list of target keywords, as the ultimate goal behind SaaS SEO is more sales and conversions.

On-Page SEO For SaaS Companies

SEO can be broadly classified into on-page SEO and off-page SEO.

On-page SEO refers to the optimization techniques that can be implemented on your website pages in an attempt to show up for relevant search results on search engines. On-page SEO tactics include optimization of the title tag, meta description, URL, headings, content, etc., for the target keywords.

On the other hand, off-page SEO strategies include optimization techniques done outside of your web pages, including link building, email outreach, content promotions, etc.

On-page SEO strategies are easier to implement and more in your control. In this section, let’s have a look at the different on-page SEO techniques you can implement for your SaaS business.

How to Optimize Your Content

When a user types in a keyword on the search bar, Google scanners go through different websites and their content to find the best possible results that will match the users’ search requirements.

Google crawlers can go through the content on your website to check if it is relevant to the user. And if yes, how much is it relevant to the user’s search. Google gauges this using the keywords and their variations found in your content. Hence, optimizing your content for the right target keywords is the first step to on-page SaaS SEO.

Include Target Keywords in the Title

For on-page optimization, it is essential that you include the target keywords in your title tag. This is because title tags are one of the first elements that tell Google what your page is about.

Therefore, always include the target keyword or its variation in the title tag of your webpage or blog. A pro tip here would be to start your title tag with the target keyword as this carries added weightage.

Use Short, Descriptive URLs

URLs are another important element that helps Google understand the context of your webpage. Hence, it is important to include your target keywords in the URL as well.

Certain website CMS automatically generates URLs that do not make any sense to the users as well as search engines—something like “https://example.com/pyhb79979-99789789bb-87bjgj/”.

It is best to avoid such URLs and instead use short and descriptive URLs that appropriately describe the content of your web page, such as “https://example.com/email-marketing/.” This URL has the target keywords “email marketing” in it, and it also looks descriptive to the users.

Write a Compelling Meta Description

As described in the previous section, Click-Through Rate (CTR) refers to the number of users who click through to your web page after seeing it on the search results page.

One of the important factors that influences the users to click-through is the meta description. This is the brief description that can be seen below the title on the search results page.

Creating a compelling, keyword-rich meta description is crucial as it helps users understand what your content is all about. Based on this, the users will decide whether to click through to your web page or not.

Keyword-rich meta descriptions are also helpful for SEO as they help Google crawlers understand your content better.

Optimize the Headings, Subheadings, and Content

Apart from titles, meta descriptions, and URLs, you should also optimize the headings, subheadings, and other content on your website pages for the target keywords. Google also considers these keywords added to these elements to understand the meaning behind your content. This way, your content will start ranking higher up on search engines.

While optimizing your content for keywords, try to use a combination of short-tail keywords, long-tail keywords, and Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) keywords. Adding different variations of keywords helps Google crawlers understand and rank your content better.

Optimize Your Images

Just like text, images on your SaaS website can also help you rank on the search results page. Here, let’s talk about how you can optimize your images.

Name Images Appropriately

Google crawlers also consider image filenames to understand the context of your web page content. Hence, whenever you add an image to your website, make sure that you add descriptive filenames, preferably optimized for the target keywords.

Use Descriptive Alt Text

Alt text or alternative text is the text that gets displayed in place of the image when the image fails to load due to some reason. Just like image filenames, you should also aim to add descriptive, keyword-rich alt texts to all the images on your SaaS website. This also helps with website accessibility as assistive devices use image alt texts to help users with disabilities comprehend your content.

Compress Images

The speed of your website is one of the major aspects that has a significant impact on your organic search engine rankings. This is because Google’s main goal is to offer a good experience to its users. Users do not have the patience to wait for web pages that take a long time to load. Hence, Google prioritizes speed as a major ranking factor.

But what does website speed have to do with images? Images are usually the heaviest elements on any web page. This means that adding large-sized images may significantly slow down your site and thus hurt your SEO.

To avoid this, it is vital that you compress the images before adding them to your site. Compressing usually reduces the image sizes without taking away from the quality. You can use websites such as TinyJPG and TinyPNG for image compression.

Add Internal and External Links

Internal linking is the process of adding links to different pages on your website. Internal linking also plays a major role in on-page SEO. Internal linking organizes your website into a hierarchical structure which in turn helps Google understand the overall context of your website.

Internal links with keyword-rich anchor texts help both users and Google in the following ways:

• Offer more information on a topic.
• Urge the users to stay on your website for a long time
• Facilitate the flow of SEO or link juice from one page to another, helping the linked pages rank better on search engines
• Offer better UX to website visitors

On similar lines, external links are links from your website to other relevant information sites on the internet. External links also help your users with added information and thus provide better UX.

Therefore, make sure to add internal and external links to your website pages before you publish them.

Avoid Keyword Stuffing & Cannibalization

While performing on-page SEO on your SaaS website, it is easy to go overboard with the usage of keywords. You might end up stuffing your web pages with keywords so much so that the content stops making proper sense to your readers.

It is imperative to avoid keyword stuffing practices as it not only hurts the user experience but also that Google considers it as a spammy SEO tactic.

Keyword cannibalization is also something that you must be wary of. Cannibalization happens when more than one page of your website starts ranking for the same keyword. This essentially means that your web pages are competing with each other for search engine rankings.

To avoid cannibalization, make sure that each page on your site targets a unique keyword. If you find two or more pages ranking for the same keyword, then consider combining the pages so that they rank higher and offer better UX to your site visitors.

Advanced On-Page Optimizations

Let’s dive deeper into on-page SEO and talk about some advanced on-page SEO tactics for SaaS businesses.

Optimize For Featured Snippets

Featured snippets are excerpts that show up on top of certain Google searches. Google shows featured snippets for queries that can be offered in a short, concise manner. Gaining a spot in the featured snippets can be extremely beneficial for your SaaS business.

This is because featured snippets help you gain:

• More highly-targeted organic traffic
• Higher brand awareness

Here’s what you can do to optimize your content for featured snippets:

• Look for SERPs with featured snippets. Make sure that the keywords are relevant to your SaaS business. You can aim to grab the featured snippet positions for these keywords.
• Understand the type of featured snippet you want to go for—definition or QnA, table, ordered lists, unordered lists. You can figure this out by looking at the type of featured snippet that currently exists for the keyword.
• Try to provide short, precise, and standalone answers for these featured snippet queries. Make sure that your answers are better than the current featured snippet. Make sure you optimize your content based on the type of featured snippet as decided in the previous step.

Embed Link Magnets

Backlinks or inbound links are hyperlinks from other websites to your website. Backlinks play a massive role in SEO. If your website has numerous backlinks from relevant, high authority sites on the internet, then Google considers this as a good sign.

This indicates that many other websites find your content reliable, accurate, and trustworthy. Hence, this will provide a major boost to your search engine rankings.

There are many ways to gain such high authoritative, relevant backlinks to your site. One of the most effective ways is with the help of link magnets.

Link magnets are any useful pieces of content—white papers, statistics, graphs, charts, infographics, videos, and similar more that other bloggers and publishers in your industry find link-worthy.

By creating and embedding such useful link magnets in your site, you are essentially welcoming other websites around the industry to add links to your site. This happens when other websites feel that your content will be valuable to their audience.

Get Rich Results With Schema Markup

Schema markup is a piece of code added to your website that helps Google understand the information on your web page better. Schema markup helps your web page show up on Google’s rich snippets.

Rich results are additional nuggets of information that show up below your search results listing. These are highly beneficial in improving your web pages’ click-through rate.

You can get rich snippets by adding various types of schema markup code to your site. For this, you can take the help of your CMS plugins, or you can also hire technical experts to work on the same on your website backend.

You can use Google’s Rich Results Test to check if your web page supports rich results.

Improve Topical Relevance

Topical relevance, also known as topical authority, refers to the relevance of the content of your entire website to a particular topic or keyword.

For example, suppose that you own an email marketing-based SaaS tool. In that case, you should aim to create topical relevance around the topic of email marketing, as this will help you rank higher for more search terms related to the topic of email marketing.

To achieve topical relevance, you should aim to cover the topic at hand in great detail and in the most comprehensive manner possible.

So much so that any user who lands on your website should be able to find every piece of information on the topic. The user shouldn’t feel the need to move on to another website looking for information on the topic.

The key here is to conduct in-depth keyword research and create content around all the relevant sub-topics. Also, you must create supreme-quality, compelling content that adds value to your target audience who are actively seeking information on the topic at hand.

Use Related and ‘People also ask’ Keywords

To improve topical authority, you can create content around related keywords. Related keywords are those that are related to the target keyword. You can use a tool such as LSIGraph to find such keywords.

You can also use the “People also ask” section in the Google SERPs that lists questions related to the keyword users actually search for. Optimizing your content for these keywords and providing answers will help you increase your site’s topical relevance.

Run a TF-IDF Analysis

Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency or TF-IDF analysis measures the relative importance of a keyword in a web page or document.

This analysis helps you compare your web pages with competitors’ web pages to find the keywords or topics that you might have missed in your content.

After running TF-IDF analysis, you can generate a list of keywords or topics that you should create content around. This will, again, help you improve your topic relevance.

Technical SEO For SaaS Companies

We can easily say that technical SEO is the most important of SEO. This is because all the other SEO strategies work only when your technical SEO basics, such as indexing and crawling, are working fine. Without indexing and crawling other SEO techniques will have zero to minimal impact on search engine visibility.

Technical SEO Basics

Crawling

The main job of a search engine crawler is to go through the content on pages for relevant information. Next, these crawlers go through all the links on that page. This is how crawlers find subsequent pages.

You can control crawling on your site using the robots.txt file. This file contains information that tells search engine crawlers about which pages to crawl and which ones to avoid. You can understand the crawl activity for your website using the Crawl Stats report on Google Search Console.

Indexing

According to Wikipedia, “Search engine indexing is the collecting, parsing, and storing of data to facilitate fast and accurate information retrieval.” Google crawlers go through your website’s pages and index them so that it is visible for users.

Technical SEO Strategies

Check Indexing

If you want users to discover your website’s pages through Google, then you must ensure that these pages are indexed by Google. To check the indexing for individual pages, you can use the “URL inspection” tool on Google Search Console. To check for indexed pages in bulk, you can use tools such as Ahrefs and Semrush.

Reclaim Lost Links

Sometimes, you may change your website URLs. In such situations, you’ll lose all the inbound links directed towards the old URL. You can fix this problem and reclaim all these lost links by adding 301 redirects from your old URLs to the new ones.

Add Internal Links

Internal linking is an excellent way to redirect link juice or link authority from one page of your site to another. Internal linking allows search engine crawlers to understand the context of your content better. It also offers a good experience to your users by offering additional information on a topic.

Add Schema Markup

As touched upon earlier, schema markup helps search engines like Google comprehend your website content better. Hence, adding various types of schema markup can be a useful tactic for SEO. Schema markup also helps you optimize for Google’s rich snippets.

Additional Technical SEO Techniques For SaaS Websites

Page Experience Signals

Page experience signals are a list of factors that help Google measure the UX offered by any web page.

Here’s a list of factors that affect page experience signals:

Core Web Vitals

Core web vitals consists of a combination of three metrics that help Google understand the kind of UX offered by the web page. This includes three metrics—Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS), and First Input Delay (FID). These three metrics offer insights into the visual load capability, visual stability, and interactivity of a web page respectively.

You can measure Google’s core web vitals using the PageSpeed Insights tool.

HTTPS

Security is an essential factor when it comes to SEO. Installing an SSL certificate on your website helps you implement HTTPS protocol instead of HTTP. HTTPS indicates that the transfer of data between your website and the users’ browser happens in a secure, encrypted manner.

Mobile-Friendliness

Mobile-friendliness and responsiveness have a major impact on the user experience offered by your website’s pages. Hence, it is important that you ensure that your website is mobile-friendly and responsive. You can do this by using a mobile-friendly CMS. Testing your web pages on different devices can also help ensure mobile-friendliness.

Safe Browsing

Google crawlers check your website for any spammy links, malware, etc. Hence, always keep your website devoid of such content.

Interstitials

Any intrusive pop-ups or ads on your website may stop the user from viewing and accessing the page’s content. These are called interstitials, and it is best to avoid them.

Hreflang

If you have a multilingual website, then you probably have the same versions of content in different languages on different URLs. For such cases, you can add the Hreflang HTML attribute to specify Google about the geographical location and the language that you’re targeting with each URL.

Maintain Website Health

Here are a few other tips for maintaining the overall health of your SaaS website:

Broken Links

Broken links are those links that no longer work and usually throw a “404 Not Found” error. These links offer a bad UX and also hurt SEO. Hence, it is important to frequently audit your website for such broken links and replace them with working links.

Redirect Chains

At certain times, the need may arise to change the URLs or your web pages. For such cases, you must provide proper 301 redirect chains. 301 redirect chains tell Google to redirect from the old URL to a new URL. Adding redirects helps to maintain search engine rankings. It also helps you reclaim any lost inbound links.

Content Marketing Strategy For SaaS Companies

Content marketing is one of the biggest assets that can help SaaS businesses thrive from scratch to the top. This is because the nature of selling SaaS products is completely different from, say selling physical products on an eCommerce site or selling your services online.

The SaaS consumer market is always hungry for high-quality, thought leadership-driven content. Content strategy and marketing dominates the top of the funnel of any SaaS business, and if you can just get things right here, you’re halfway through the battle.

Content marketing also plays a crucial role in the middle and the bottom of the funnel of any SaaS business. Content marketing helps consumers pick your SaaS products over the others and showcase their long-term loyalty towards your brand.

Not convinced yet? Here are a few mind-blowing statistics on SaaS content marketing that prove the same points:

Why is Content Marketing for SaaS Companies Different? 

Content marketing for SaaS businesses is unique and different from any other business. Here’s why—as a SaaS business, you are marketing both products and services.

SaaS consumers are always looking to build long-term relationships with a SaaS provider. This means while deciding to go with a SaaS business, they are not just gauging your SaaS product, but they are also looking at the kind of support that you offer along with the product.

If the SaaS product is good, but the customer support you offer is not up to the mark, then good luck getting customers! The same goes the other way round. Hence, as a SaaS business, your content strategy should include marketing of both—your products and services.

Another factor that makes content marketing for SaaS companies unique is that you have to rely on SEO for your inbound marketing needs because of the kind of value that search engine dominance adds to your SaaS brand heavily.

What Goes Into an Effective SaaS Content Marketing Strategy?

The secret to an effective SaaS marketing strategy is that it begins with extensive market research to dig down deep into what the target audience is looking for. This is followed by producing high-quality content and going heavy on promoting the same.

To put it simply, here’s what goes into an effective SaaS content marketing strategy:

1. Deep understanding of your target audience to come with content that they are exactly looking for.
2. Analysis of keywords around the pain points of the target audience.
3. Coming up with content ideas and formats for customers along different stages of the buyer journey—top of the funnel, middle of the funnel, and bottom of the funnel.
4. Producing high-quality content based on the topic ideas.
5. Promoting content on different platforms such as emails, social media platforms, news publications, etc., in order to gain the maximum possible traction that the content deserves.
6. Monitoring content marketing campaign results and making consistent improvements based on these analytics.

We’ve discussed audience research and keyword analysis in the previous sections. Let’s talk about content production, distribution, and campaign monitoring in the upcoming sections.

Create Your Content Production Strategy & Plan

Many SaaS businesses make the blunder of creating content without any definitive goal or preset strategy in mind. This process of producing content is like shooting blind arrows aimlessly in the air. The content will most probably not hit the target and serve the intended purpose.

Hence, it is imperative that you proceed with a specific content strategy before you start producing content. This can be as simple as coming up with an editorial calendar each month that lists all the content pieces you’ll be producing for the month.

You can plan and include details like the content topic, content format, target keywords, target buyer persona, call-to-action, etc., for each of these content pieces that you want to produce.

SaaS content calendar example – Image source

Successful Content Types For SaaS

Talking about content production, here’s a list of content types that are proven to work great for SaaS businesses:

Pillar & Cluster Content

Pillar content refers to an extremely in-depth, comprehensive piece of content that offers answers to all types of questions that any user may have about the topic at hand. Topic clusters usually consist of a pillar page on the main topic along with several cluster pages that offer detailed information on the subtopics.

The goal of creating pillar content is simple—offer in-depth information on a topic so that the user doesn’t have to go elsewhere looking for information. A great example of pillar content would be the current guide that you are going through on the topic of SEO for SaaS that offers comprehensive information on the topic and related sub-topics.

Pillar content does wonders for SEO:

• It offers good UX
• Offers in-depth information on a topic
• Improves topical relevance
• Establishes thought leadership around the topic
• Acts as a link magnet
• And helps you avoid keyword cannibalization.

10x Content – Skyscraper Technique

On similar lines, 10x content or the famous Skyscraper technique acts as an excellent strategy for SEO. The Skyscraper technique was first introduced by Brian Dean from Backlinko and it talks about how you can produce high-quality content that is potentially unbeatable on the Google SERPs.

Here’s how you can implement the Skyscraper technique to create 10x content:

• For any given keyword, go through the top 10 results on the Google SERPs.
• Analyze them and try to identify the good points and the gaps in each of these results.
• Create content that is 10x better and in-depth than the top ranking result on the SERPs.
• After creating and publishing the 10x content, reach out to websites that are linking to the top ten rankings results on the SERPs. Reach out to these websites through cold emails, explaining how your content is 10x better than other results and how it can be much more valuable to their audience.

This way, you have not only created 10x better content but also gained tons of high-quality backlinks to your content. Eventually, this technique will help you shoot to the top of the Google SERPs.

Use Case Content

As a SaaS business, you probably have tons of use cases or personas that will find your products helpful. For example, as an email marketing-based SaaS tool, your use cases may include solopreneurs, small business owners, and marketers from top enterprises.

Each of these use cases will have different pain points and aspirations. The reason why they decide to go with your SaaS product may totally vary from others. Hence, creating content that is common for each of these use cases might not be a great idea.

Instead, you can come up with content pieces that target each of these use cases individually. These can be blog posts, landing pages, ebooks, white papers, etc. This strategy will offer you much better conversion and retention rates.

Expert Round-Up Style Content

People are always looking for points of view of industry experts on any given topic. But, very few content creators go through the pain of reaching out to such experts, understanding their point of view on a topic, and curating it into a post.

You can be the one who takes the pain of creating such an expert round-up style post. This will help you increase brand awareness. And you’ll also come into the radar of top experts and publishers who are well-known in your industry.

Case Study Content

Case studies are excellent pieces of content that work great as a middle of the funnel content. When consumers are aware of your brand and products but are not yet convinced whether to go for it, that’s when case studies can be extremely useful.

Podcasts & Interviews For Thought Leadership

Today, consumers are not only looking for SaaS products. But, they are also looking at the people who are behind the products. As the face of a SaaS business, it is essential that you establish thought leadership in your industry and win over the trust of your target audience.

Going on relevant podcasts and interviews can be a great way to do the same. You can also start your own podcast or interview series where you bring in industry experts to talk about interesting, thought-provoking content.

Outline Your Content Distribution Strategy

Next comes your content distribution strategy that involves planning around how you will be promoting all the content pieces that you produce. This step is important because, without the right content distribution strategy, even the best piece of content will be a waste of time and effort.

For creating a content distribution strategy, here are some things that you should consider and plan:

• Where are you planning to publish the content?
• Are you planning to offer the content for free or asking for something in return?
• Which distribution channels are you going to use for content distribution?
• Are you planning to invest in paid advertising to promote the content?

Figuring out answers to these and other similar questions will help you come up with the best possible content distribution strategy.

Monitor Your Results and Make Improvements

Finally, it is vital that you measure the results of your content marketing campaigns in order to identify areas of improvement. This way, you can make consistent improvements towards your SEO goals.

You can measure your campaign results by setting specific goals and identifying metrics to track these goals. For example, you can track metrics such as conversions, website traffic, search engine rankings, etc., to measure your content marketing campaign results.

Link Building & PR For SaaS Companies

As mentioned multiple times before in this SaaS SEO guide, backlinks or inbound links play an extremely important role in SEO. In fact, links are amongst the top three ranking factors for Google!

Gaining high-quality backlinks for your SaaS website can do wonders for your search engine rankings. The same goes for PR. Let’s talk about these strategies in detail.

Why Link Building For SaaS Companies?

Link building is extremely important for the SEO of your SaaS business. Without good quality, relevant backlinks, you might not be able to rise to the top of SERPs and gain the much-needed search engine visibility.

Link building also helps to build authority and gain brand recognition in the industry. When users see another high authority website linking to your website, it automatically projects your brand in good light and builds trust with them.

Link Building Strategies

Here are some of the top link building strategies that you can implement for your SaaS website:

Email Outreach

Gaining high-quality backlinks can be as simple as reaching out to other websites around the industry and asking them to link your website. Adding a quick note on how your content will add value to their audience can be a good idea.

To increase the chances of gaining such backlinks, you can reach out to websites that are already linking to your competitors. This way, you know that they are more likely to link to your site instead, provided your content is better.

Find Unlinked Mentions

Many times, certain websites will use your images, charts, graphs, infographics, quotes, etc. from your website but fail to add links to your website.

You can find such unlinked mentions with the help of Google alerts. Reaching out to these websites and asking for links can be a great way to get tons of backlinks.

Broken Link Building

Broken links are those hyperlinks that no longer work. Broken links are not good for any website as they may hurt the site’s SEO. Many top websites in your industry might have pages with such broken links.

You can use this opportunity to reach out to these websites and offer alternative links to replace them—a link to your website. This way, you can generate a reasonable number of links to your site.

Check My Links Chrome Extension

Guest Post on Relevant Sites

Guest posting is one of the least spammy ways to generate high-quality links to your web pages and blog. Guest posting involved publishing content on other relevant industry websites.

Most of these websites allow you to add links to your website from the content or from the author’s bio. This can be a great way to generate good-quality links.

Find Resource Pages

Most top websites around the internet have a ‘Resources’ page that consists of links to useful tools or content that can be helpful for their audience.

Such pages are gold mines for generating links as the publishers are usually on the lookout for useful links that will be helpful for their readers.

You can try reaching out to such websites via cold emails and explain how a link to one of your web pages can be valuable to their readers.

PR Tactics

You can also implement certain PR tactics to generate links. Here are some useful tips for the same:

• Go on interviews and podcasts around the industry.
• Launch research, studies, industry reports, white papers, ebooks, etc. that will catch the attention of publishers and journalists.
• Attend and host webinars.
• Consistently create thought leadership content on social media platforms.
• Offer expert advice on niche social media groups.
• Launch your own podcast or video interview series.
• Regularly send out press releases.

Implement SaaS Specific Link Building Strategies

Here are some link building tactics that are specific to the SaaS industry:

• If your SaaS product integrates with other tools, you can reach out to fellow SaaS owners, letting them know about the same. You can generate links from good-quality domains this way.
• SaaS products usually collect a lot of data, and you can use this data to come up with industry research and statistics that offer valuable insights to people from the industry. This can be a great way to generate links to your site.

Build Links to Your Blog to Help Your Site Rank

Building links to your product and landing pages may not be as easy as it sounds. Even after implementing the above-mentioned link-building techniques, you may not be able to generate enough links to your SaaS product pages.

Hence, a great tip here would be to try link building for your blog and content pieces instead. Blogs are much more informational and less promotional than product pages. Hence, most websites will be willing to link to your blog.

You can strategically add links to your SaaS products from your blog posts. This way, your link-building efforts will ultimately help your SaaS website rank higher on search engines.

Measuring SEO Results For SaaS Companies

At the end of the day, all of your SaaS efforts will make sense only when you are able to measure the results of these campaigns. By tracking the SEO results, you can gain valuable insights into the performance of your campaigns. You can identify gaps in your SEO strategy and come up with action steps to improve the same.

You can measure your SaaS SEO results using numerous metrics. However, you can begin by tracking the three most important ones—rankings, organic traffic, and conversion. Let’s discuss each one in greater detail.

Measure Rankings

The first metric you can use is search engine ranking. For this, you can set up rank tracking for a list of targeted keywords that you are going after.

You can set up rank tracking using top keyword research tools such as Semrush and Ahrefs. These tools will show the rise or drop in search engine rankings for the keywords that you are tracking.

Image source

Measure Organic Search Traffic

Another vital metric is the organic search engine traffic. You can use tools such as Google Analytics to measure the amount of organic traffic that search engines such as Google are sending your way each month. Ideally, this traffic should increase with each passing month.

Measure Conversions

Conversions are the metric that indicates the direct profitability of your SEO efforts. For your website, conversions can mean signing up for a free trial, requesting a product demo, etc. Tracking these conversions will help you understand how profitable your organic traffic has been.

You can use tools such as Google Analytics for conversion tracking. You can use the tool’s “Goals” feature to track conversions.

Why Should you Track all Three Metrics to Understand SEO?

Measuring all the three metrics mentioned above is important as a sum of all these metrics provides an ideal picture of your search engine performance.

Rank tracking and organic search traffic help you understand the performance of your optimization techniques. And conversions help you measure the profitability and ROI from your SaaS SEO campaigns.

Bonus SaaS SEO Tips

Set up Google Search Console & Google Analytics

Google Search Console and Google Analytics are free tools by Google that offer valuable insights on your SaaS website’s search engine visibility and performance.

Google Search Console helps you track the number of impressions, clicks, and the average CTR that your web pages get for different keywords.

Google Analytics, on the other hand, helps you track and analyze live data from your website. Once you link your website to Google Analytics, you can track metrics related to user demographics, acquisition sources, user behavior, top pages on your site, bounce rate, average time on page, and many more. You can also track conversion using Google Analytics “Goals” feature.

Claim Your Brand Name on Social Media Platforms

SEO doesn’t work as a standalone marketing tool. The reality is that SEO, along with other marketing channels, goes hand in hand to fetch you the desired results. Hence, omnichannel marketing plays an important role in your overall marketing strategy.

Users landing on your SaaS website from organic search results may want to learn more about your brand on social media platforms. Things may also work the other way around.

Therefore, it is important to have a consistent brand name and visibility across all relevant social media networks. For this, you must claim your brand name on as many social media networks as possible.

Set up Brand Mention Alerts

As your SaaS brand grows, you’ll find people mentioning your brand name or your product name on websites or on different social media networks.

It is important to keep track of these mentions and offer accurate responses if need be. For this, you can set up brand mention alerts on Google, Facebook, Twitter, and other social media channels using tools like Mention and Brandwatch.

Start Working on Your SaaS SEO Strategy

The SaaS industry is booming, and so is the amount of competition. While many new SaaS players may gravitate towards PPC and paid marketing channels, you can make a massive difference by investing in SaaS SEO early on, as this will yield you excellent results in the long run.

This definitive guide to SaaS SEO has everything you need to know and implement when it comes to SEO. Hence, begin today, use this guide as a reference and start securing the future of your SaaS company starting today.

Don’t Have Time? Hire a Reputed SaaS SEO Agency – Growfusely

SaaS SEO is something that is approachable, provided you invest ample time in learning and implementation. Another point to note is that SEO is more of an experimental process as there are no hard and fast rules to achieve guaranteed results.

Hence, if you wanna save time and leave SEO for your SaaS business at the hands of experienced SEO professionals, then consider hiring a reputed SaaS SEO agency — Growfusely.

Our team of experts at Growfusely, with 12+ years of hands-on industry experience, will take care of all your SaaS marketing needs—strategy, creation, promotion, SEO, social media, and PR. Feel free to contact us or hop on a free consultation call to learn more about how we can help you.

SaaS SEO: Frequently Asked Questions

What is SaaS SEO?

SaaS SEO is the process of increasing the organic traffic to your SaaS website by implementing strategies that help you rank on the top of the Google SERPs.

What is SaaS Content Writing?

SaaS content writing is the process of creating valuable and actionable content for potential SaaS customers in an attempt to generate awareness and conversions for your SaaS products. SaaS content writing is an excellent way of creating informative content to attract the target audience to the top of the SaaS sales funnel.

What is B2B SaaS Content?

B2B SaaS content is a type of content that is used to attract potential B2B SaaS consumers to your SaaS products. B2B SaaS content can be an excellent way to create awareness about the existence of your SaaS brand and products.

What is SaaS Copywriting?

SaaS copywriting is the process of creating content for SaaS businesses with the intention of selling the products. SaaS copywriting can include creating SaaS landing pages, sales pages, website copies, social media ad copies, PPC ad copies, etc.

How do you Write SaaS Content?

Here’s are the steps you can take to write SaaS content:

1. Understand the target audience and conduct research on competitors.
2. Create a SaaS content marketing strategy based on the research.
3. Come up with a SaaS content calendar with content pieces planned to target users across different buyer journey stages.
4. Create top-notch quality SaaS content.
5. Distribute your content across different channels.
6. Measure SaaS content marketing campaign results and improve.

What are the Top Three SEO Strategies?

The top three SEO strategies include on-page SEO, off-page SEO, and technical SEO strategies. On-page SEO involves optimization around your website pages. Off-page SEO includes techniques such as link building and email outreach. Technical SEO covers techniques that include website and server optimization done at the backend.

Is SEO a Waste of Money?

No. SEO is one of the best inbound marketing strategies that can yield high ROI in the long run.

How Can I Learn SEO?

You can learn SEO by going through tutorials and guides created by SEO experts. SEO can be a vast and challenging topic to learn. Hence, you can hire SEO experts to work on the SEO strategy for your website.