Choosing an SEO Agency for SaaS

There are hundreds of thousands of SEO agencies for SaaS companies all over the world, all of which are vying for your company to buy their services. However, with as many as there are, it can be hard to find the right fit for your SEO needs.

Here’s a guide that cuts through the noise and shows you exactly what to look for in a SaaS SEO agency to know you’re getting the most bang for your buck.

Why Choose SEO for SaaS?

In summary, it works. SaaS companies can use SEO strategies to generate higher-quality leads, including signups for demos and free trials, by using organic search. Like all other SaaS companies, your program solves some sort of problem—and people use search engines to find answers to that problem.

We’ve also mentioned before that the vast majority of all website traffic is from organic search. By contrast, only 15% of traffic comes from pay-per-click ads on search engines. In other words, if you’re not using a defined SEO strategy, you could be missing out on attracting potential leads to your website.

What to Look for in an SEO Agency for SaaS

Not all SEO agencies are created equal. Here are some of the characteristics you should look for in a potential SEO partner.

Case Studies

Any SaaS SEO consultant worth their salt will have at least a few case studies to show for their work.

Check their website for case studies both within your industry and in other highly technical industries like manufacturing or construction. The presence of these case studies signals that they have clients who were so happy with their results that they were willing to have their branding and story posted on the agency’s website for the world to see.

Ideally, the case studies will also show specific numerical results to support the story of how the agency helped their client reach its goals. Look for positive but realistic figures, and specified solutions they used to make them happen.

Experience

Sometimes, experience isn’t best measured in years. Instead, it can be measured in the variety of different clients the SaaS SEO expert has served.

The best SEO agency for SaaS companies is also one that doesn’t exclusively work within the SaaS industry. By developing SEO strategies for other industries, such as manufacturing or healthcare, an SEO agency can demonstrate its flexibility. This also signals to you that they can learn and successfully optimize for even the most technical of products.

Results

Your SaaS SEO agency should be willing to display the results they’ve gotten other clients across every service they offer. In addition to illustrating the results through case studies, they should also have a portfolio of the websites they’ve designed for their clients, successful SEO campaigns they’ve run, curated reviews, and more.

Transparency

You should absolutely pay attention to the man behind the curtain at your SEO agency. A good SaaS SEO consultant or partner will be straightforward with you about the results they’re trying to achieve and how they’ll get there.

However, the most important thing they can do to be transparent is not overpromising or under-delivering. Failure to do so ultimately harms them just as much as it hurts your SaaS firm.

Collaboration

Your partnership with an SEO agency should feel like just that: a partnership. An agency that rolls over and immediately does whatever you tell them to do may be great for getting some of your company’s pet projects done, but it can hurt your ability to start seeing real results. Likewise, they shouldn’t necessarily dictate everything they want you to do without the data and reasoning to support their recommendations.

At Avalanche, while we often take suggestions for pieces of content that our clients want, we won’t necessarily say “yes” right away when they ask for them. Instead, we like to make sure the content they want makes sense for their SEO strategy. If it doesn’t, we’ll decline or offer to do something else that’s more fitting with the SEO strategy we’ve deemed best for them.

Reviews

Even more than case studies or historical results, the reviews an agency has online can tell you a lot about what it’s like to collaborate with them.

Search online for the agency’s Google Business Profile. There, you’ll likely find a list of Google reviews. Since the agency can only respond to these reviews rather than easily censor bad ones, they can give you a clearer view of what it’s like to work with them.

White-Hat SEO

White-hat SEO refers to the best practices that help your website get better traction with search engines while playing by the search engine’s rules. By contrast, black-hat SEO refers to techniques and tactics that violate search engine guidelines.

Some common white-hat SEO tactics include:

• Offering valuable content: Google prioritizes the people using it when it’s ranking content. By creating relevant content that illustrates expertise in the subject matter relating to your software, you’ll be more likely to rank on search engine results pages over time.

• Answering search intent: Google’s top priority is providing results that match the searcher’s intentions. For example, if someone searches for the phrase, “tax notice management software,” it will infer that person is potentially shopping for a notice management system. Your SEO agency’s job is to think like a customer and create content that addresses that intent.

Conversely, some common black-hat techniques include:

• Keyword stuffing: For websites, this often means including phrases in your content that appear so frequently that it’s unnatural to read.

• Cloaking: This entails showing one piece of content to users and a different piece to search engines to rank for terms that are irrelevant to their content.

• Sneaky redirects: This goes hand in hand with cloaking. It means sending someone to a different URL than intended to manipulate search engine results.

• Link farming: This is the reason why you need to be careful with backlinking campaigns. Some black-hat SEO agencies will use websites purely for the purpose of backlinking to other sites. Google has been known to deprioritize websites found guilty of doing this.

• Relying too heavily on generative AI: Google can tell you’re using ChatGPT, and so can your users. While AI can be great for getting started with your content, it should still meet human quality standards before you add it to your website. Otherwise, Google will penalize you for taking the easy way out.

While it can be tempting to work with an agency that employs black-hat tactics to get ahead quickly, doing so comes with a lot of risks. Search engines penalize websites that rely on black-hat SEO—so if you’re caught, you could end up paying dearly for it without having any results to show for it.

What to Ask a Potential SaaS SEO Agency

Before you commit to working with an SEO agency, you should ask them a series of questions. These questions—and how they answer them—will tell you a great deal about how they operate and what it’ll be like working with them.

How Will You Build a Strategy Tailored to My Business?

The way your B2B SaaS agency answers this question can tell you a lot about how they operate as an SEO partner.

Their optimization strategy for your business shouldn’t be a one-size-fits-all solution that they’re using for every other SaaS company they’ve ever worked with. Instead, they should take the time to research your business, your competitors, your target audience, and the inner workings of your industry, along with auditing your existing website and content to deliver meaningful recommendations. This helps them develop a unique SEO strategy that prioritizes the generating the best leads for your business.

Lead generation doesn’t look the same across every business in the SaaS industry. A good agency will recognize that your strategy to generate leads shouldn’t, either.

How Do You Approach SaaS Content Writing?

It can be challenging for SEO agencies to find the golden ratio of SEO tactics and content writers who know how to use them.

If an agency’s content writing samples tend to focus on writing about SaaS products without including any verbatim keywords folded into the content, be careful. That could be a sign that their writers don’t know the value of incorporating those keywords directly into the body of their landing pages or blog posts. Or worse, it could indicate a disconnect between their SEO team and their writers.

At Avalanche, our content writers understand how to target keywords within their content. Both our content team and SEO team work closely with each other to understand the intent behind our SEO strategies and find meaningful ways to execute them with content.

Another indication of an agency’s approach to content is whether they rely heavily on freelancers and contractors to get the writing done, or if they have a full-time content specialist on staff. If they’re willing to invest in an in-house writer, that shows you they care about making sure their SEO content writing is top-quality.

What Tools Do You Use?

The tools in your SEO agency’s arsenal can also be a strong indicator of how they operate. Some of the tools that agencies trust the most to conduct SEO audits and develop recommendations include:

• SEMrush
• Google Search Console
• Google Analytics
• Screaming Frog
• HubSpot
• Mox
• Ahrefs

This list is not exhaustive. Every good SEO agency has a suite of tools they use to make informed decisions about your SEO strategy—and they’ll be transparent with you about it.

What Metrics Do You Use to Measure Success?

It’s one thing for your agency to tell you that your website traffic is up. It’s another thing altogether if that traffic isn’t converting into leads or taking any other action on your website.

A good agency will understand which metrics matter most—and that what matters for your business might not be the same as what matters for your competitors. Some of the metrics a good agency will pay the most attention to include:

• Leads generated from organic search
• Leads converted into sales
• Number of backlinks
• User engagement
• Amount of branded and non-branded traffic
• Branded and non-branded keyword rankings
• Cost per acquisition
• And more

How Long Will It Take to Start Ranking?

If an SEO agency promises you results—especially within a set number of months—that should raise a red flag. Even if you have the most robust SEO strategy in the world, you can’t guarantee instant success.

In most cases, a good SaaS marketing agency will tell you it can take several months before you start seeing tangible results from your SEO strategy. Once in a while, an agency can identify some easy keywords to help you start ranking quickly, but it typically takes time for Google’s algorithm to crawl your website, recognize your efforts, and start ranking your pages.

Fortunately, once your pages begin to rank highly, you can usually keep your brand in that position for months or even years to come.

How Does the Contract Work?

If your SEO agency brushes past the fine print or doesn’t explain the contents of their contract, you may be about to get burned.

Before you sign on the bottom line, the salesperson and agency leadership should be willing to go over the entire contract with you in detail. This allows you to go in with no surprises. Even more, it helps both parties set realistic expectations for the partnership and understand what each phase of the contract will look like.

Looking for an Experienced SEO Agency for SaaS?

Avalanche Creative has worked with SaaS providers across a multitude of industries, ranging from software development to marketing tools. We specialize in helping SaaS companies find high-quality customers by providing customized SEO strategies, content writing, and website development services. This helps them attract and retain the customers they want.

Our team works with B2C and B2B SaaS companies of all sizes and types to help them achieve tangible, data-driven results for long-term lead generation solutions.

Let’s Start Building Your Strategy

Ready to start attracting more leads for your SaaS products? Connect with our team of SEO experts to see how we can help your business grow with organic search.