SEO for SaaS – 21 Important Campaign Elements Guide

SEO for SaaS is an effective strategy with a closure rate of up to 14.6 percent, reports marketing resource WebFX. With the increase in online visibility, businesses can expect more website traffic, greater leads, and a higher rate of conversions.

How to do SEO for a SaaS business?

An SEO campaign for SaaS companies should begin by identifying a target audience, focusing on topic clusters, and performing keyword research. Next, the campaign can incorporate on-page SEO strategies, such as site audits, proper tag usage, using long-tail keywords, and improving the user experience. Off-page SEO tactics to use include backlink audits.

This SEO guide for SaaS businesses will elaborate further on the above campaign strategies, including recommendations of tools for measuring success.

What Is SEO

SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is a crucial strategy used by businesses to enhance their rankings in search engine results. Google, for instance, employs complex algorithms to determine a website’s position on the search engine results page (SERP).

The ultimate goal is to secure a high SERP position, ideally on the first page, as first-page results receive a significant 91.5% of all Google traffic, while the second page garners just 4.8%. Achieving this requires optimizing for factors such as quality content, relevant keywords, authoritative backlinks, website speed, and more.

For a deeper dive into this, check out our article for valuable insights!

SEO for SaaS: Creating a Winning Campaign

In the ever-evolving landscape of technology, SaaS (Software as a Service) has emerged as a dominant force. With tech giants like Salesforce, HubSpot, Adobe, and others at the forefront, it’s evident that SaaS is not just a trend but a thriving industry.

As the SaaS market continues to surge, raking in a staggering $261.15 billion in sales in 2022, Search Engine Optimization becomes a paramount for these brands to ensure they capture their share of the digital market.

Now  we’ll explore the strategies and tactics that can help SaaS companies create winning SEO campaigns and harness the full potential of this booming industry.

1. Understanding Your Audience for Better SEO Results

Learning about your target audience makes your SEO efforts fruitful, as you will form the foundation for effective SEO strategies.

Review customer trends, purchase behavior, statistics, and other data to determine who comprises your leads and repeat buyers.

Next, build audience avatars that identify various segments and narrow the focus of your sales and marketing teams more easily. A customer avatar is an amalgmation of audience segments based on their behaviors, preferences, pain points, and demographics.

Segmenting your audience unlocks the door to tailored SEO content and efforts that address the needs of each specific group. If your business lacks the customer knowledge to build avatars, try conducting a survey, reviewing your website analytics, and leveraging your social media insights.

2. Divide Your Main Topics Into Clusters

Next, you can turn your attention to creating content. That begins by determining the main topics you wish to cover based on your audience research.

Consider your customers’ pain points when selecting a topic. You should also choose topics based on relevancy and search volume.

Once you’ve picked your topics, break down a broad, general concept into smaller, highly relevant content clusters. A content cluster includes a main pillar page and related subpages.

Content clusters help you fill your editorial calendar and ensure you cover a topic thoroughly. More benefits of content clusters are an organized content structure, a better user experience, and improved search engine visibility.

3. Define a Publishing Strategy

SEO for SaaS requires creating a publishing strategy to sharpen your content focus, narrow keywords, and plan a publishing frequency for your content. You will also achieve long-term goals like better consistency and aligning your content with your target audience’s needs.

Diversify your content, expanding into webinars, infographics, videos, and blog posts. This varied, unique content engages different audience segments. Publish content consistently according to your audience’s preferred frequency.

4. Look for Keywords with a Good Volume/Difficulty Ratio

What is your keyword selection criteria? It’s not about choosing any keywords, but finding those that strike a balance between search volume and difficulty.

Keyword volume refers to the search volume for a specific term. Try to gravitate toward the semi-popular keywords with a good search volume. Your terms shouldn’t be so inundated that all your competitors have covered them several times.

As for keyword difficulty, this measures how hard it is for a keyword to rank well in organic search results from Google. Keywords receive a difficulty score based on factors such as content quality, page authority, and domain authority.

Refrain from selecting overly difficult keywords for your campaign, as the middle ground is best.

5. Insert Keywords into Clusters

You’ve chosen your content clusters and keywords, so next, it’s a matter of putting everything together in your SEO for SaaS campaign. Match the keywords with the appropriate clusters by common themes, user intent, or content topics.

After keyword selection, strategically place the terms into your content. Make your keywords sound natural, as stuffing (i.e., overloading) your content can hurt your SEO standing.

SEO Tools to Perform Keyword Research for SaaS Companies

The following SEO tools will help SaaS companies find valuable keywords with a suitable volume-to-difficulty ratio.

SEMrush

Select from six keyword research tools within SEMrush:

• Organic Traffic Insights, which uses Google Analytics to recommend keywords and monitor your organic growth
•  Keyword Manager, which produces keyword clusters of up to 2,000 terms
• Keyword Gap, a tool for strengthening your SEO campaigns through better keywords
• Keyword Magic Tools, which can produce keyword combos in a snap
• Organic Research, a tool for producing and optimizing organic keywords
• Keyword Overview, which tells you the relevancy and profitability of your terms

 These tools can help you identify keywords, find ranking strategies, and generate keyword clusters.

Google Trends

How do you know whether a keyword has a good search volume? Use Google Trends.

This free tool lets you tailor results by search location, time period (whether from the last hour, year, or a custom time range), keyword category, and type of search, including web searches, news searches, image searches, YouTube searches, and Google shopping searches.

Google Search Engine

You can also rely on Google’s powerful search engine to determine the viability of your keywords. When you search a query on Google, the search engine will present FAQs that can direct you toward keywords and content ideas.

How to Boost On-Page SEO for SaaS Companies

On-site or on-page SEO for SaaS includes the changes made to your website to improve your SERP results. The following 10 strategies will help you improve the ranking factors Google cares most about.

6. Run a Site Audit to Fix the Issues

Begin with a website audit, analyzing the state of your site and what’s preventing it from ranking well. Here are the factors to pay attention to during your audit:

• The quality of website content, including website pages, blogs, and landing pages, to determine if the content receives enough traffic and is SEO-optimized.
• The design of your website and how well it promotes a positive, streamlined user experience.
• The rate of SEO issues, such as your site loading slowly, a lack of alt tags for images, failing to use keywords with a good volume-to-difficulty ratio, or a lack of meta descriptions in your content.
• The rate of technical errors, which can impact more than SEO but also your website’s security, performance, and user experience.

A site audit report will neatly compile the existing issues so you can go one by one and fix them. Leads and customers will find your site more navigable, and Google and other search engines should rank it higher, especially if you continue with the other strategies we’ll discuss.

Other benefits of a website audit are more website traffic, a better user experience, and improved SERP rankings.

7. Assign the Correct HTML Tags to Page Elements

An HTML tag formats a webpage. You’ll see these tags formatted like this: <html>Insert your code here</html>.

Although HTML tags are simple to execute, businesses don’t always do so properly. Failing to assign the correct tags to your page elements can cause them to display poorly on mobile and desktop devices, hurting SEO for SaaS strategy effectiveness.

With over 58 percent of global website traffic coming from mobile devices in 2023, you must have a website that displays properly.

8. Add H1s to Each Page

Another on-page element to pay attention to is the proper use of headers. A header is represented as an H1 tag and is exclusively reserved for titles.

You should only have one H1 tag per webpage. Secondary subheads begin with H2 tags, followed by H3, H4, and H5 if necessary.

H1 tag code is <h1>Content</h1>. However, many website builders allow you to select from heading formats without the need for manual coding.

9. Optimize Meta Descriptions and Make Them Unique

A meta description previews your article content within 140 to 150 characters. This limit ensures your meta description displays correctly in social shares and search results.

Each meta description should be distinctive, which helps search engine optimization and entices more users to click through. Incorporate the main keyword naturally into your meta description to reinforce content relevancy to potential readers and search engines.

10. Focus on Long-Tail Keywords

SEO for SaaS requires utilizing long-tail keywords, keyword phrases that usually convert well due to their specificity.

Long-tail keywords are advantageous for improving conversion rates and enhancing user intent targeting. They can also sometimes reduce competition if you use specific terms. The alignment of your long-tail keywords should be between term specificity and user intent.

Keywords must be catered to queries that customers or leads will search, as this makes them likelier to convert.

11. Optimize Content for Only One Keyword

When optimizing planned content, stick to one keyword at a time, choosing the keyword based on its potential to generate traffic. The keyword should match the search intent of your identified audience.

The content should be easily readable, enjoyable, and a solid resource, covering the topic fully. You already know to optimize with headers, a meta description, and title tags.

12. Optimize the URL and Permalink Structure with the Keyword

A permalink refers to a webpage or post’s URL. You control the URL’s contents, so optimize it for SEO purposes.

Optimization includes adding the keyword to the URL, using descriptive terms, spacing words with hyphens, using all lowercase letters, and watching URL length.

A good URL shouldn’t exceed 120 characters, with 75 characters considered the sweet spot.

13. Focus on the User Experience

SEO for SaaS companies focuses heavily on the user experience. Embracing a clean and aesthetically pleasing design not only encourages visitors to explore your website but enhances credibility.

You can prioritize UX on your website by incorporating a clean, appealing design. Make your website easy to navigate with a user-friendly search bar, clear and logically structured menus, and strategically placed CTAs both above and below the fold.

14. Increase Your Website’s Loading Speed

If your website takes longer than a few seconds to load, it’s officially too slow for today’s consumers. You will lose traffic (and business), and Google will ding your SEO rating.

Website speed is one of the top ranking factors, so add the following to your SEO plan:

• Reduce the usage of JavaScript and CSS files
• Cut back on external scripts
• Turn on browser HTTP caching
• Compress image sizes
• Use a well-known, dependable hosting solution
• Lower the number of redirects and HTTP requests
• Cache the web pages
• Consider a Content Delivery Network

15. Create Internal Links in Your Content

A benefit of writing content in clusters is the potential for internal linking. This SEO strategy involves strategically placing links within your content to connect related topics, guiding your audience to additional valuable information. This will help your SEO and increase the time visitors spend on your website.

Internal links also provide a clear map to search engines, revealing the content hierarchy. When linking to related pages, you will improve your website’s overall structure and topical relevance, boosting your SEO efforts.

How to Boost Off-Page SEO for SaaS Companies

These off-page SEO strategies will help your SaaS company further its ranking goals.  

16. Do a Backlink Audit and Remove Toxic Links

You’ve already done a website audit, but since off-page SEO refers to strategies beyond your site, you must add a backlink audit to your to-do list.

An audit can reveal toxic links associated with your website, with tools like SEMrush producing a Toxicity Score as a percentage. A rate of three percent (or lower) toxic backlinks is low, three to nine percent is medium, and 10 percent or more is high.

A backlink is toxic if it has many manipulative links, community spam, or link networks. Toxic backlinks can drag down your site ranking and hamper your SEO efforts. After identifying them, remove them to scrub your SEO standing.

17. Get New Natural Backlinks

Building natural backlinks is not an overnight process. However, the time it takes to acquire them is worthwhile, as non-toxic backlinks are powerful and can push your SEO ranking forward with due time.

18. Purchase a Service to Receive Backlinks

If your SaaS company can’t wait for backlinks, you can always consider working with a service that sells them. Purchasing backlinks comes with the perk of immediate link receival but Google doesn’t perceive this practice favorably.

You might see an uptick in your SEO position, but if Google discovers you didn’t organically generate your backlinks, you could slide back down in the rankings well below your former spot.

SEO Tools to Track Traffic Performance for SaaS Companies

Monitoring SEO for SaaS is attainable with the right tools. Here are several to add to your marketing stack.

19. Google Search Console

Gain more valuable insights into your search traffic using the Google Search Console. This tool can track SEO performance, recommend strategies to enhance your search visibility, and address issues that might be hindering your website’s SERP rankings and overall performance

Search Console includes Search Analytics for reviewing your website’s position, clicks, and impressions.

Pro Tip: tilize this tool to submit new URLs and sitemaps for Google to crawl, ensuring your latest content is indexed promptly.

20. Google Analytics

Uncover all the details about your website’s performance through Google Analytics. With this collaborative, detail-rich tool, you will better understand your average customer lifecycle and glean strategies for boosting your ROI.

Pro Tip: Don’t limit your use of Google Analytics to simply the most fundamental indicators. Develop your data segmentation skills and create conversion targets. This will enable you to precisely track the efficacy of your marketing initiatives and comprehend certain user habits. You may use Google Analytics to its maximum potential to make data-driven decisions that will take your SaaS business to new levels of success.

21. SEMrush Position Tracking

Another selection in the SEMrush toolkit is the Position Tracking Tool. This alternative to Google Analytics details your ranking distribution, keyword cannibalization rate, featured snippets, and how your site stacks up against the competition.

You can also rely on the Position Tracking Tool to review the locations and devices your audience uses to access your site and learn more about which landing pages perform best.

Pro Tip: Set SEMrush Position Tracking Alerts for Real-Time Rankings and Competitive Edge. Use the tool to identify high-impact positions for valuable traffic and competitive advantage.

FAQs About SEO for SaaS

You won’t have any burning questions about SEO for SaaS after perusing this collection of FAQs.

Why Do SaaS Companies Need SEO?

Companies across all industries need SEO, including SaaS. Without SEO, your website can get buried in the SERPs, appearing on the second, third, or fourth page or beyond. You’ll be invisible online.

Potential customers searching for a SaaS service will see your well-ranked competitors and select their services, never knowing yours exist.

What Is the Difference Between SaaS SEO and Traditional SEO?

Traditional SEO homes in on areas like landing pages and blog posts, prioritizing a content-heavy strategy. SEO for SaaS focuses more on product benefits and features with personalized content bolstered by an on-page and off-page strategy.

Hire an SEO Digital Marketing Agency for SaaS Now

SaaS companies need SEO. On-page strategies like HTML tagging, prioritizing the user experience, and internal linking will set up your SEO campaigns for success, as weil off-page tactics like prioritizing backlinks.

Hiring an SEO agency for SaaS companies is best, as you’ll have trusted professionals to guide you through a high-performance strategy that will yield results.

Mediaboom provides SEO consulting for SaaS companies. Our record of excellence makes us a trusted solution for increasing your site ranking.

Contact us today to plan your SEO roadmap.