An Example of How SaaS SEO Works
Let’s set the stage for this guide by looking at the search term “invoice template.”
Before these results were a few ads, but below are the first two organic links to Microsoft and Invoice Simple. Both companies offer SaaS and stand to generate potentially hundreds of potential leads from their rankings.
Consider the type of person who would search for invoice templates. They likely own a business or are just starting one. If they don’t currently have an invoice template, they likely don’t have invoicing software or much business software at all.
They need a simple solution to collect payments.
If you can understand and empathize with what these people are searching for and how they’re searching, you can perform better keyword research for a more meaningful SaaS SEO strategy.
Why SEO for SaaS?
As you can see, it works. SEO for SaaS companies generates higher-quality leads, including prospects who are ready for a demo or a free trial—all using organic search. Like any program a SaaS company provides, your software is designed to solve some sort of problem. People use search engines multiple times a day, every single day, to find answers to those problems.
We’ve explored how the majority of all website traffic comes from organic search. By contrast, roughly 15% of website traffic comes from pay-per-click ads on search engines. In other words, if you’re not using a defined SEO strategy to garner that organic website traffic, you could lose out on attracting warm leads to your website.
SEO Strategies for SaaS Companies
Developing the best strategy for your brand goes beyond simply looking up a few keywords and plastering them across different pages of your website. As an agency providing SaaS SEO services, we recommend following some of these recommendations to attract your most valuable potential customers.
Using Search Empathy to Understand Your Customers
We always tell our clients to focus on their customers first, whether they’re a SaaS company, a nonprofit organization, or anything in between. To successfully execute digital marketing, you need to know more and care more for your customers than your competitors.
Creating content that addresses your customers’ needs means developing unique, engaging pieces that are designed to be helpful rather than focusing on what you’re selling. By understanding how your customers think, what their pain points are, and how they’re thinking about solving them, you’re more likely to gain them as leads.
Implementing On-Page, Off-Page, & Technical SEO
There are three general categories that any SEO service for SaaS companies should cover for their clients, including:
- On-page SEO: This subset of SEO tactics refers to the content you have on your website pages. These are the signals that your potential clients can use to determine that you know what you’re doing as a software provider and that search engines can use to bring relevant content about your SaaS products and services to users.
- Off-page SEO: By contrast, this form of SEO refers to the content on other websites that helps your SaaS company’s pages rank higher. One of the prime examples most SEO companies for SaaS refer to is having quality backlinks. A good volume of reputable backlinks validates your authority and tells searchers and search engines that you’re a trustworthy expert on the software and services you provide.
- Technical SEO: Across any industry, technical SEO refers to the steps you take in the back end of your website to optimize it. Most technical SEO measures are designed to help search engines easily crawl and scan your site. Common measures include improving your site’s loading speed, overall security posture, and indexability within search engines.
Creating Meta Titles and Descriptions
Otherwise known as page titles, a good SEO agency for SaaS will recommend adding meta titles to all your pages. While these titles and meta descriptions aren’t necessarily visible directly on your page, search engine results pages may show them. Therefore, it’s imperative to optimize your titles and descriptions so the reader wants to click on the link to your website.
Optimizing Page Load & Mobile Compatibility
The experience people have with your SaaS product’s website will send a subtle message about what your users can expect from your software itself. Having fast loading speeds is important because of that. Google and search engines like it incentivize websites with faster load speeds, especially if those speeds enhance user experience. It also takes a “mobile-first” approach to ranking websites, so it’s always important to have a site that someone can easily load and interact with on a mobile device.
A few steps you can take to improve load speed include:
- Minimizing the size of your images
- Reducing the amount of unnecessary scripts your page needs to run
- Making your website more mobile-friendly in general
- Working with a developer to implement lazy loading
Designing a Usable Website
SaaS and managed service providers tend to treat their website as an afterthought compared to their software. However, web design is pivotal to a positive user experience. Make sure that your website visitors can easily find what they’re looking for. Otherwise, you could miss an opportunity to turn them into a lead.
Conducting Keyword Research
By using a keyword research tool, you can gather great content marketing ideas to attract SaaS leads and address their issues directly.
In the screenshot above, you can see how tools like SEMrush allow you to drill down into subtopics of the keywords you want to target. In this case, searching for the phrase “invoice template” also shows results asking for Google Docs, Microsoft Word, and Excel templates.
If you want to bring in traffic for those broad keywords in a meaningful way, you should cover the topic thoroughly and include information and links on as many types of invoice templates as possible.
By writing content that is related to what your visitors are searching for and what your SaaS product does, you can build more domain authority online. Focusing on writing quality content that explores the questions, topics, and subtopics related to your subject matter will bring in more traffic—and better leads.
Writing Content
Creating content involves discovering more about your ideal customers and learning more about their thoughts and needs. Your goal is to identify quality content ideas that your customers will find helpful. Incorporating relevant keywords organically will also help you provide quality content that solves the searcher’s problems.
Building Links
Link building is the process of acquiring trustworthy links from other sites to your website, to illustrate authority. Search engines pay close attention to these links and will rank your website higher if you have relevant, trusted links directing to your site.
Utilizing Social Media
Your social media platforms offer another way to promote SaaS SEO. Promoting your software through your social media gives it the boost it needs to drive more traffic to your website. Not to mention, many social media platforms are reliable resources to establish a baseline for your backlinking strategy.
Looking for SaaS SEO Help?
Building links, writing content, implementing technical SEO measures, and implementing an overarching SEO strategy all take time—time that your in-house marketing team likely doesn’t have. A dedicated SaaS SEO agency like Avalanche Creative can help you implement these strategies with stellar results, rather than treat it as a low-priority afterthought so you never see the results you want.
