A Guide to Building a SaaS SEO Strategy

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, there were are a few ads, but below that are the first two organic links: 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 that would search for an invoice template:

• 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 for that matter.
• They are looking for a simple solution to a common problem that someone in business might have—they need to collect payments.

This is the type of person that Invoice Simple and Microsoft want to get in front of. By offering a great, free resource on a landing page that has links and tools to create an invoice template, they’re attracting their ideal customers to their site.

A key to gaining organic traffic is to understand user intent: what the searcher wants to find when they input a search term. The intent of someone searching “invoice template” is pretty clear, but other search terms may be more ambiguous. That’s why it’s important to conduct thorough keyword research to understand the search intent.

If you can understand and empathize with your target audience, you’ll be able to perform better keyword research, build an effective SaaS SEO strategy, and create great content for them.

Why SEO for SaaS?

In short, it works. SaaS companies can generate more sign-ups, demos, trials, and revenue by taking advantage of organic search. All SaaS products solve some kind of problem, and people go to search engines to solve their problems.

Studies show that the majority of all site traffic is from organic search, and around 59% of B2B traffic is from organic search. Meanwhile, only 15% comes from pay-per-click. If you don’t have an SEO strategy for SaaS, you’re missing out on a lot of potential leads.

How to Use Search Empathy to Market Your Services

We always tell SaaS companies to focus on their customers first. To successfully execute digital marketing, you need to know more and care more for your customers than the competition.

Online content isn’t just a blog post anymore. It’s images, video, slideshows, web applications, and more. All of this content can help establish your brand as a leader in your space and make your software solution more desirable.

Imagine being able to solve a problem for your customers before you’ve talked to them. Great blog posts or online tools can do that. Helping them first doesn’t just create an opportunity for a new customer, it creates a brand advocate.

The strategy, tactics, and marketing channels you choose, along with the time and capital investments you make, all need to hinge on your customer. Find out information about your customer like:

• What is their day-to-day job like?
• What does success look like in their job?
• What words and phrases do they use in their particular industry?
• What else do they search for at work?
• What are they going to experience before they need your solution?

By listening to your customers and gaining empathy for them, you’ll start to get a clearer picture of how they might use search engines to find your solution and what type of content might attract them to your website.

Parts of a Good SaaS SEO Strategy

Create Helpful Content

SaaS content needs to be timely, unique, and engaging in order to contribute to your business in a meaningful way. Churning out content with generative AI won’t cut it if you’re trying to bring value to your target market. Your content should represent real value for your customers, and show how your business can be the solution they need.

However, content writing for SaaS isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach. It’s also not as simple as creating a few blog posts and expecting sales to triple overnight. It requires having an internal strategy or working with an SEO agency for SaaS and using their content marketing services to meet the specifics of your industry. Otherwise, you likely won’t see the ROI you’re hoping to achieve.

Your content should cover a wide range of types, such as product pages, industry pages, or how-to blogs. It should also meet the searcher where they are—with the terms they’re using. For instance, people looking for automated text messaging software tend to use terms like “bcc text messages.” While that isn’t a term that people in the industry would use, you can still create a piece targeting that term and use it as an opportunity to educate the reader on the correct terminology. Then you can scoop up a new set of potential customers and establish yourself as a trusted source of industry knowledge at the same time.

Show Your Expertise

Google’s algorithm follows the principles of E-E-A-T: Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. Google prioritizes content that shows it has been either created or reviewed by someone with first-hand experience in the field.

Great SaaS SEO content needs to show the depth of your company’s understanding of roofing services. It should also strike the right balance between being accessible to the average reader and having the technical depth expected of SaaS professionals.

Prioritize User Experience

Building a website that is clear, attractive, and easy to navigate is essential to climbing the ranks of Google’s search engine results page (SERP). This is especially important for SaaS companies. If a potential customer finds your website to be slow and hard to navigate, they won’t have much trust that your software tools will be any better.

Include Internal Links

Internal links are a great way to smoothly funnel your readers to other helpful blog posts and eventually send an email, fill out a form, or make a phone call. If people are landing on your site to answer general questions, they may leave if they read content that’s more interested in selling to them than educating them. Internal links allow your visitors to decide when they want to continue reading and when they want to reach out to your team.

Implement Robust On-Page SEO

On-page SEO is the keywords, page titles, headings, meta descriptions, and other information that Google uses to crawl and index your site. Making sure your on-page SEO is clear, readable, and relevant will be essential to helping the website rank for the keywords you’re targeting.

Content Marketing for SaaS Companies

How to Identify Content Marketing Ideas

Talk to Your Customer

The best way to generate ideas for content marketing is by asking your ideal customer the right questions. Start by surveying your current customers to get more information about who they are, what they do, and how they think. You can also have a conversation with some of your best customers to get a sense of what they’re looking for when they use Google or navigate your site.

Do Keyword Research

By using a keyword research tool, you can gather great content marketing ideas to attract SaaS leads.

In the screenshot above, you can see on the left how to drill down into subtopics of “invoice template.” SEMrush’s tools show that people also look for Google Doc, PDF, Word Doc, and Excel templates.

If you want to bring in “invoice template” traffic, you’ll need to cover the topic well and include links and information on all the different types of invoice templates.

When you write great content that is related to what the SaaS product does, you’re supporting your domain authority online. By focusing on writing quality content on all the questions, topics, and subtopics people search for related to your subject matter, you’ll start to bring in greater traffic—and leads.

Create a Shortlist

As you use your keyword research tool, add your keywords to a shortlist. These can be high-intent, low-intent, short-tail, and long-tail. Add any that seem relevant for now, and you can chisel them down later. The point of creating a list is to get a good overview of your entire potential so you can create a content plan based on all your keywords.

Look at Content Types in SERPs

Content is not just written copy, and your target customer doesn’t always want to read an article. It often makes sense to support your content with images, video, and interactive tools like calculators and quizzes.

With a tool like SEMRush, you can determine which SERP features show up on each of your keywords. In the screenshot below, we’ve filtered our keywords by those that include a video in the search engine results page. If we search any of these terms a video will show up in Google.

This is important to note because what the search engines provide in search results should guide what you include on your web pages. You need to have great content for your target keyword, and using available keyword data can help you determine what high-quality content should look like.

Our SEO Services: Working with a SaaS SEO Agency to Get More Patients

When you work with the SaaS SEO experts at Avalanche Creative, you can rely on our experience to get you great results sooner. We know your digital marketing department is already busy enough, and they’re probably not looking for more on their plate. That’s why Avalanche offers a range of SaaS SEO services that will make your job easier and generate more leads.

Schedule a call with our staff to see how Avalanche Creative can create an effective SEO strategy for your company.

Evidence-Based SaaS Marketing

At Avalanche Creative, we build evidence-based, highly executable search engine and content marketing plans for SaaS companies. When you start working with Avalanche Creative, we’ll spend two months conducting extensive research into your website, your competitors, and your customers to create a custom plan that is unique to your business. We’ll also spend time getting to know your products and services inside and out, so we can market and write about them with accuracy and intention.

Get a List of SaaS SEO Keywords

Looking for an SEO agency for SaaS companies? Reach out to the team at Avalanche Creative, and we’ll build a list of identified keywords and create a high-quality strategy plan for your business.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

How Can I Evaluate My SaaS SEO Strategy?

When you’re analyzing the data of your website from month to month, there are a few different metrics to watch that can indicate your success. Here are a few ways to measure success for your SaaS content marketing strategy:

• Keywords ranking on the first page
• Number of visitors who converted on your website
• Average amount of time spent on the site
• Number of inbound links from other websites
• Number of visitors who eventually became clients
• Low bounce rate

These are just a few of the most valuable KPIs to watch. However, page hits aren’t typically a solid indicator of success, so we generally consider them to be a vanity metric.

PPC vs. SEO for SaaS: Which Is Better?

While PPC (pay-per-click advertising) can be effective in generating immediate visibility and driving targeted traffic, SEO holds several advantages that make it more favorable for SaaS companies in the long run.

• Cost-effectiveness: With PPC, you pay for each click on your ad, and the costs can quickly add up, especially in competitive markets. In contrast, SEO focuses on optimizing your website’s organic visibility, meaning you don’t incur direct costs for each click. 
• Sustainable results: PPC can deliver immediate traffic, but its impact diminishes immediately once you stop running ads or exhaust your advertising budget. On the other hand, SEO efforts build over time, creating a sustainable source of organic traffic that can continue to drive qualified leads and conversions.
• Greater click-through rates: Research shows that organic search results receive a higher click-through rate (CTR) compared to paid ads. Users often skip over sponsored results and prefer clicking on organic listings that they perceive as more relevant and trustworthy.

What Should I Look for in an SEO Agency for SaaS?

There are a few different criteria to look for when you’re in the market for a SaaS SEO agency.

• Reviews and testimonials: A good indicator of whether an SEO agency is right for you is the type of feedback they’ve received from other businesses. Look for recent reviews the agency’s customers have added to sites like Google to get a clear view of what you can expect.

• Portfolio samples: The company should have examples of work they’ve done, including hard numbers for the growth their clients saw in case studies.

Transparency and honesty: A good SEO agency won’t promise you anything they can’t deliver. See what recommendations they’re providing, but be wary if they say they can ensure you rank for a specific keyword or see specific increases in traffic each month—they may be overpromising on what they can offer.