9 Proven SEO Tips For SaaS Companies

There’s a big difference between average SEO and great SEO. 

Great SEO means a steady stream of the right customers finding and staying with your product. This not only increases revenue but it lowers customer acquisition costs and churn rate. 

The trouble is that getting this level of SEO knowledge requires time and experience. Fortunately for you, we’re a SaaS SEO agency that has real industry experience and we’re going to share what we’ve learned. 

This article is loaded with practical SEO tips for SaaS companies grounded in proven methods and data-driven insights.

Map Keywords to the Buyer’s Journey

Ever thought about how your potential customers’ search terms change as they move through the buyer’s journey?

Mapping out their needs at each stage with relevant keywords is a savvy SEO strategy that ensures you have everything covered and directs consumers to purchase. 

It’s common to start your SEO strategy with a top-down approach. However, when we do SEO for a SaaS company we nearly always begin with a bottom-up approach. This works hand in hand with the buyer journey and prioritises creating higher-converting content first. 

The typical buyer’s journey is a top-heavy funnel with the following stages:

1. Awareness: The consumer is looking for a solution to a problem or question.
   2. Consideration: This stage is about the consumer building a list of possible solutions.
   3. Decision: Finally, the consumer is narrowing down to actual products or services that will best provide the solution they’re after.

How does this work for keywords?

Typically, awareness keywords are going to shorttail, high search volume, and competitive keywords. Because they are popular and drive a lot of traffic, they’re going to be difficult to rank for unless you have a high authority website. 

This is why we tend to assign these keywords a lower priority. They’re still important as they help to build your brand name and build trust with consumers. However, content further down the funnel has a higher converting potential. 

Let’s say that your SaaS product is a social media marketing tool that helps businesses get more leads.

This is a general example of what your keyword research might look like. Also, pay attention to the type of content needed for each keyword. While you can create blog posts for all those keywords, some will be better suited to product/service pages. 

Keyword research isn’t just about finding high-volume search terms; it’s also about understanding customer insights into what your prospects are looking for at different stages of their purchase process. These insights are vital to creating a conversion optimisation strategy that aligns with their needs and challenges.

Journey mapping these keywords according to the stages of the buyer’s funnel can be particularly useful for optimising your website content.

This semantic SEO approach ensures that you’re not only attracting more traffic but also guiding visitors towards conversion effectively.

Remember, SEO success lies not just in ranking higher on Google, but in ensuring that those rankings lead to meaningful engagement and ultimately conversions.

Find Your Buyer Personas

Understanding your buyer personas isn’t just a marketing strategy; it allows you to enhance the value and relevance of your content. 

This process, often referred to as persona research, involves delving deep into what your target audience might look like. 

• Personality traits
• Lifestyle 
• Interests
• Attitudes
• Opinions
• Values

It is through this exploration that you can begin to understand their preferences and user behaviour better. Additionally, understanding these aspects will enable you to create SEO-friendly content that resonates with them on a deeper level.

Market segmentation goes hand-in-hand with developing buyer personas as it allows for a more tailored approach towards different sections of your audience. 

For example, the pain points a small business has will be different to what an enterprise company have. This means that if you’re SaaS can provide solutions to both of those problems, you need to market to them differently. 

By focusing on user behaviour instead of merely demographic factors, you’ll be able to deliver an enhanced user experience while improving your overall SEO efforts significantly.

Topic Clusters to Build Topical Relevance

Building topical relevance begins with grouping your keywords into topic clusters, a strategy that can significantly boost your authority and answer multiple user questions concurrently.  This content grouping isn’t just about creating a lot of content around similar topics, but it’s about strategically organising this information in a way that reinforces the main topic and increases its relevance in the eyes of search engines.

Pillar page: The page that you will create to rank for broad keywords.
Supporting page: Pieces of content that will be on the same topic as your pillar page but more specific. Typically questions around the broad keyword. 

The cluster strategy allows you to reserve broad terms for long-form ‘definitive guide’ posts while using lower volume terms for supporting pieces. This creates a comprehensive knowledge hub that establishes your topical authority.

Another important part of topic clusters is internal linking. This passes link equity around relevant pages on your site, helping to elevate the whole cluster; not just single pages. 

• Homepages and pillar pages should interlink. 
• One supporting post and its pillar post should link.
• Then supporting posts should have at least one interlink to another supporting post. 

Incorporating topic clusters into your SaaS SEO approach offers lots of benefits. Primarily, it boosts relevance by ensuring each piece of content supports another, thereby increasing the chances of ranking higher in search engine results. 

Beyond achieving better rankings, this approach also positions you as an authoritative source on specific topics within your industry, enhancing trustworthiness among prospective customers.

Remember though; don’t overlook low-volume keywords in this process. They might seem insignificant individually but combined they can play a role in driving traffic and setting you apart from competitors who may be neglecting these opportunities.

Establish Metrics & KPIs for Success

While pure SEO is important, there also needs to be a way to make sure that what you’re doing is working. This is where your SaaS metrics and Key Performance Indicators come in. 

SaaS-specific metrics such as the following will show you how your SEO efforts are translating into performance. 

• Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs)
• Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs)
• Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR)
• Average Revenue Per User (ARPU)
• Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)

These key metrics will help you interpret data effectively, driving insights from analytics to shape your future strategies. Remember that conversion tracking isn’t just about counting sales; it’s about understanding how users are interacting with your platform at every stage of their journey.

Beyond interpreting past performance, you also have to forecast future trends. This is where performance forecasting comes into play. By analysing patterns in user acquisition, churn rates, or even feature usage, you can predict future outcomes and set realistic targets for your team.

Metrics and KPIs aren’t simply numbers-they’re the heartbeat of your SaaS business. Stay connected to them, understand what they mean for you both now and in the future, and most importantly – use them to guide strategy development within an ever-evolving marketplace.

Optimise Existing Content

Don’t underestimate the power of your existing content, there’s a lot of potential there sat waiting to be optimised for better user engagement and conversions.

Content updates and optimisations are an excellent strategy to get more mileage out of your old posts or pages. This could mean updating data, statistics, or information in your articles to keep them relevant. It could also involve adding new sections that address questions frequently asked by your target audience.

The goal is not just to update the content but also to enhance its value through on-page optimisation. 

This can look like:

• Keyword usage
• Improving metadata
• Internal and external linking
• Improved content structure and copy

To help you with this you can use SEO tools such as SurferSEO. It should be noted that for pages already ranking in the top 10, you should proceed with more caution. Make small changes and see what happens. Remember that ranking can move down as well as up. 

In addition, regular content updates signal search engines that your website remains active with fresh information, which can improve its ranking position. While making these updates and optimisations, focus primarily on enhancing user engagement. Google loves websites that visitors find useful and engage with.

Experiment with different formats like infographics or videos as part of your repurposing efforts. These formats might resonate better with certain segments of your audience. Keep track of how these changes affect user behaviour and adjust accordingly.

Through constant optimisation and refreshing existing content, you’ll reap rewards in visibility, traffic growth, and conversions.

Digital PR for Building Valuable Links

Harnessing the power of Digital PR can propel your brand’s authority to new heights by securing valuable backlinks from industry leaders. These backlinks aren’t just any links, they’re a vote of confidence from well-established businesses in your sector.

When we work with SaaS companies we will run a Digital PR campaign that involves creating an infographic or a free tool that lives on their website. We then reach out to relevant, authoritative websites for them to link to it. 

This is the best way to build high-quality links and one of our best SEO tips for SaaS companies.

Remember, Digital PR doesn’t just build links; it helps you create meaningful relationships within the industry, fostering trust among potential customers and boosting overall brand awareness.

Skyscraper Content

This method revolves around creating top-tier content that outshines your competitors. 

It starts with competitor research, where you analyse high-performing articles for your chosen keywords. You take these successful pieces as a base and create something even better – more comprehensive, more engaging, or updated with the latest data.

Incorporating visual design into your content can give it an extra edge over others by making it more attractive to readers.

However, merely creating superior-quality content isn’t enough. This is where Content Promotion comes into play; you need to put effort into getting your content noticed by promoting it on various platforms such as social media channels or through email marketing campaigns.

To make sure your skyscraper stands tall and visible for long-term success in SEO ranking, complementing this technique with a solid backlink strategy is essential. Reach out to other website owners who have linked to similar articles before and ask them to link back to yours explaining how you provide more value.

Remember: when done right, Skyscraper Content not only improves visibility but also helps build authority in your niche – just like a towering beacon amidst shorter buildings!

SWOT Your Competitors

Conducting a SWOT analysis on your competitors can give you an upper hand in understanding their strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.

This process of competitor analysis allows for a benchmarking strategy that helps position your SaaS company effectively in the market. 

Here’s how it works: By exploring what others are doing right (strengths) and where they’re falling short (weaknesses), you can pinpoint potential opportunities for your own growth and recognise possible threats looming around the corner.

Delving deeper into competitive intelligence may seem like a daunting task, but consider this as reverse engineering success. 

You’ll need to roll up your sleeves and dig into things like

• SEO strategies
• Content marketing efforts
• Customer feedback

The insights drawn from this research will not only help you find gaps in the market but also enable you to tailor your services or products better than ever before. Remember, understanding your competition is crucial for superior market positioning and driving business growth in today’s cutthroat landscape. 

Track Brand Mentions

Keeping tabs on who’s talking about your brand online isn’t just a vanity thing; it’s vital for staying ahead in today’s world.

To make this process easier, you can use brand mention analytics tools to monitor and analyse how, where, and by whom your brand is being mentioned across the web.

Mention analytics not only helps you measure the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns but also offers valuable insights into customer sentiments, competitor strategies, and potential influencers in your industry. 

If these mentions haven’t linked to your site then it’s an easy backlink opportunity. This type of social listening also allows you to proactively manage your online reputation and identify opportunities for influencer outreach.

Reputation management is another crucial aspect that tracking brand mentions can aid with. By monitoring what customers are saying about your product or service online, you’re better equipped to handle any public relations crises before they become unmanageable.

Moreover, seeing who’s talking positively about your SaaS company can lead to potential collaborations via influencer outreach. At the same time, customer engagement becomes more personalised when you understand their concerns and praises through what they share publicly about your brand.

Ultimately, tracking brand mentions helps turn chatter into actionable data that drives SEO success for SaaS companies.

Frequently Asked Questions

How does website load speed impact SEO rankings for SaaS companies?

Load speed significantly impacts your SEO ranking. Through impact analysis, you’ll see that speed enhancement improves user experience and technical SEO. 

What role does mobile optimisation play in SEO for SaaS companies?

Mobile optimisation is crucial for your SaaS company’s SEO. A mobile-friendly design, keyword optimisation, improved user experience, responsive layouts and accelerated mobile pages enhance visibility and relevance in mobile-based search results.

Are there any specific SEO strategies for international SaaS companies targeting multiple countries?

You should consider a local keywords strategy, create multilingual content, employ geo-targeting techniques, partake in international link building, and make strategic domain decisions to target multiple countries effectively.

How can SaaS companies effectively use Google Analytics for SEO improvement?

Through analytics implementation, track keywords and assess the traffic to understand user behaviour. Use this data for conversion optimisation. Google Analytics helps you spot SEO improvements by providing insights into your site’s performance and visitor engagement.