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Over 60+ page SaaS SEO Guide in PDF format so you can read it whenever you want!
Over 60+ page SaaS SEO Guide in PDF format so you can read it whenever you want!
I'm going to give you the most effective SaaS SEO strategy and some tactics you can implement right away.
While I've written a comprehensive guide for SaaS SEO, the purpose of this article is to give you a short, sweet strategy you can implement to start delivering SaaS SEO impact right away.
We'll get to the strategy in a moment, but you need to know something first.
While most people think SEO is just technical optimization, it isn't.
You probably knew that.
You've also probably heard "content is king," but is that still true?
To an extent, it is but not the way content used to be king.
What about links? Aren't those spammy?
Not always, but they also aren't the single most important ranking factor anymore.
So what's working in SEO nowadays? What makes a SaaS SEO strategy different from any other type of SEO strategy? Why is it so hard to get your SaaS company to grow using organic traffic when you've built a technically sound website, have good content on your blog and had it featured on a few good sites?
It all comes down to the most important thing to Google, and that is user engagement.
Think about it; all the major search engines and social networks want more user engagement. Facebook, Instagram, Amazon, Snapchat, the list goes on. What does user engagement mean to them? Revenue.
So, what type of revenue does user engagement provide to Google? Ad revenue.
In 2018 over 70% of Google's revenue came from advertising.
Find more statistics at Statista
Google uses AI and its highly-developer machine learning aspects of the core ranking algorithm to monitor how users interact with websites so Google can decide which ones should rank better in the search results.
You're probably starting to catch my drift now.
If Google can continue delivering users content that keeps them engaged, users trust Google more and use it for all their searches.
So what does this mean for your SaaS SEO strategy?
Let's get into how Google defines user engagement while looking at sites individually.
User engagement is determined by how well users interact with your site in regards to specific measures you may be familiar with in Google Analytics such as:
Google gathers this data by monitoring what users do through Chrome, which is by far the most popular web browser.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers
Several things improve user engagement, and most of them are pretty traditional to SEO practices that have been around for decades.
Here is a quick breakdown of our favorite SaaS SEO Strategy for improving user engagement:
Your SaaS SEO strategy must begin with keyword research. You have to know what keywords to target to build your strategy, so we'll start here like we do for all our SaaS clients.
We've written a guide called Guerrilla Keyword Research, which offers a unique SaaS SEO strategy for uncovering high-converting target keywords.
Without getting too deep into an effective SaaS keyword research process, here's a quick overview:
Now we're ready to take some action that will start to deliver results.
More SaaS companies are coming to us recently with poor site content structure, which is different from technical structure and doesn't mean there are technical issues or anything broken on their site.
Content Structure means the way you've organized content on your site and how you've linked it in your site's overall menus, navigational elements, and deeper page link structures.
One of the first things we address for all clients that launch a project with us is to break down their site's existing menu and navigational structure to show them how their target persona may view the menu and engage with it. Why is this important?
Google knows the first several links in your menu are critical for users who are trying to find specific content on your site.
One of the most significant issues we see with the SaaS sites we work on is that they try to keep their sites too simple. By this, I mean they seem to think less is more in regards to the number of pages and links in their menu. While I understand the idea, the problem is their users don't feel the same way.
Most users interact with a menu on the site multiple times before leaving. The fewer pages you offer them, the less they will interact with the menu and your site overall.
Of course, this doesn't mean you should overhaul your menu by adding tons of links, as this will only create another problem; dilution.
Instead, you need to structure your menu around a few standard things customers are looking for when analyzing a product like yours to meet their needs. You should base these on your Keyword Research, so you know what users care about the most.
There are some default options here for SaaS websites such as drop-down menus for each of the following:
One of my favorite ways to figure out what's working is to search a client's high-priority keywords in Google and see what results come up first organically. Then you can start figuring out what kind of content structures users prefer because that data is being fed into Google and driving the rankings your competitor is getting.
Another mistake we consistently see our SaaS SEO clients make is relegating their blog to a small corner of their site, tucked out of the way.
There are several reasons this is a problem, but here are the main takeaways for why this impacts your rankings:
Two clients of ours recently implemented our proprietary SaaS Content Structure recommendations shortly into their respective projects, and the day after implementation, they saw the results roll in.
The first one offers a solution to the real estate industry for brokerages. They implemented our recommendations on January 14th.
The second client provides a highly customized enterprise suite of software for Fortune 1000 corporations.
They implemented our recommendations on January 12th. Check out their ranking improvements immediately afterwards.
Next, apply the Skyscraper Technique.
In short, the Skyscraper Technique is the process of analyzing all of the top-ranking results in Google to pick on the theme of what your competitors are writing, the length and focus of the content, and then combining everything you find into a more comprehensive overview of the subject.
Google wants to see content that covers a topic thoroughly.
After you know what keywords you want to target, you need to produce content that covers the topic of your keywords completely.
You have to go deep and write comprehensive content on a subject until you feel you've covered every possible angle on the matter. Write more extensive pieces of content beyond 1,200 words, and a great way to figure out the amount of content you should write on a topic is to Google multiple related variations of keywords and analyze the top-ranking content for word count. You can take the average with a more substantial weighting towards the top-ranking pages, and then you'll know the number to beat.
Now, we don't want to write something like Moby Dick, where your prime focus is just to produce word count. Remember, this content still needs to engage your users.
So how can you write lengthy content while also making sure you engage the user? Here are a few tips that help keep users engaged on longer pieces:
Look at your content production efforts as something you'll have to invest in over the long term. Eventually, you'll have written enough content to consistently rank well and drive plenty of organic traffic back to your site.
Most SaaS SEO strategies talk about technical optimization as one of the key things to drive rankings, but in my opinion, this subject is over-hyped.
Technical structure is fundamental, but I usually find SaaS businesses are doing better in this area over content and links.
Regardless, I want to run through the most significant technical issues we consistently see for our SaaS clients:
You can use Ahrefs's Site Audit tool to pull back a comprehensive site audit and determine what issues need repair on your site, including the problems I've mentioned above.
Now that your site has a proper content structure, you've addressed the major technical issues, and you're adding to your blog frequently in a way that completely covers each topic, you're ready to start link building.
Links have played a significant role in most of the SEO industry's lifecycle, starting with the Google PageRank algorithm back in 1998.
Google attempted early-on to determine the quality of a page in search results based on how many authoritative, relevant sites linked to the page and domain overall.
The inspiration for this method of determining quality came from the difficulty of getting other sites to link to a piece of content if you don't control those other sites. Doing this allowed Google to put public trust high on the list of ranking factors with link-based metrics ruling the top of the list for almost two decades.
User engagement eventually outpaced link metrics according to a June 2017 analysis by SEMrush on over 600,000 keyword analyses. Here are their findings:
Notice that first factor?
Direct website traffic.
That's an odd one I might not have expected, but it makes complete sense why it would be a factor.
If a user visits your site directly, meaning they typed your website address into the URL bar of their browser, then they must be dedicated to engaging with your site.
While Google has openly admitted they do not consider direct traffic as a search ranking factor, you can see why people would regard it as one.
It's also helpful to learn how to listen to Google when they make public statements about what affects search engine rankings. Sometimes, listen and apply. Other times remain skeptical.
I digress.
Back to this list of ranking factors by SEMrush, after you get through the first few, which are all user engagement metrics we already covered in this article, you'll find a handful of metrics that are all link-based in nature.
So how do you build links and do so in a way that they serve to promote your site in the rankings, don't waste time and don't end up hurting your site's rankings in the long run?
Easy, PR.
For as long as Public Relations has been around, link building has been around, which means link building predates SEO generally speaking.
While PR has evolved and morphed over the years, the core concept that lends itself to SEO is still true; What the public says about something is important.
So should you hire a PR agency for your SaaS company? Not necessarily.
Why not? It's expensive and may not do the trick from an SEO point of view.
The way traditional PR agencies deliver value is they work with clients to produce content with a newsworthy angle that they can promote to publications to gain media exposure. While this sounds well and good and in many cases delivers a real marketing impact, it doesn't mean the effort will fold neatly into an SEO campaign and deliver the results needed by improving your site's rankings.
Enter the modern era of digital PR, which is less about press releases and more about connecting with content creators for blogs and publications respected by your industry.
By using tools like Cision or Prezly, you'll be able to build a list of contributors at various publications based on your industry and then outreach to them directly through the software.
If you'd instead take a more guerrilla approach to build your outreach list, you can always leverage a tool like BuzzStream (what we use) to find contributors, get their contact info, and begin outreach.
Here's what the typical link building process looks like in summary:
One tip we always recommend for performing contributor outreach is to start with the smaller publications and bloggers first since they'll be more hungry and likely to link to a smaller-authority website first.
The more influential contributors are highly unlikely to link to completely unknown resources, so it's better to save them for later.
Eventually, you'll be able to use social proof when performing outreach to new publications by showing them where other significant publications have cited your research and content.
Now we've completed the full cycle of an effective SaaS SEO strategy, so what's next?
Since I'm talking to SaaS founders like yourself, it may help for me to break down the SEO strategy workflow into terms that are common to developing a SaaS product.
Using Agile vs. Waterfall methodologies, it's easy to categorize certain activities into one side or the other while a complete SEO campaign may not be wholly agile or completely waterfall. Regardless, you can implement everything we've covered here in whatever way your company works best.
Some things, like Keyword Research, happen in a waterfall style where one single effort occurs during a full workload. Other things link content production or link building, or even fixing technical issues on your site might happen in a more agile way where items are completed piece by piece and over a continuous period.
In both cases, it's best to continually monitor your site's rankings, traffic, and conversions to see what's working and what isn't.
We recommend using the following for tracking your KPIs to make sure your efforts are generating the results you want to see:
By looking at all three of these metrics, you'll be sure to know what's going on with your SEO campaign.
An important takeaway from looking at all of these metrics is that you shouldn't get too focused on any one of them in isolation.
For example, a common occurrence that doesn't seem ideal on the surface, but makes sense once you dig deeper is the fact that sometimes a SaaS client's site may experience a drop in traffic, but simultaneously see an improvement in conversions with no change in rankings.
What does this mean?
It's usually the case that we helped a client rank better for longer-tail keywords we weren't tracking rankings for (hence the lack of ranking change), which meant lower overall traffic, but higher quality traffic that converted better.
If you just looked at traffic or rankings in isolation, then you would've missed the big picture and likely considered the SEO effort a failure or even detrimental to your goals. Ultimately, you were looking for conversions in the first place, and seeing all three metrics at the same time allows you to grasp the results of your SaaS SEO strategy fully.
Now that you know what works and can see the impact in your KPIs of rankings, traffic, and conversions, you're ready to iterate and continue improving the way your SaaS business grows through an effective SEO strategy.
I think the best piece of lasting wisdom I can give you in regards to an SEO strategy for your SaaS company would center on the philosophy of knowing what's most important to Google over time in general, and then seeing what that's made up of specifically.
As of the time of this writing, user engagement is driving Google.
I don't think that'll change any time soon, but I do believe user engagement overall will evolve, and Google will follow.
When possible, consider the user in everything you do on your site and make them the center of your site's universe.
Google will see if a user feels they're at the center of your site's universe, and Google will reward you handsomely for years to come.
Jeremiah is Chief Executive Officer at SimpleTiger, responsible for high level vision, team growth, partnerships, and revenue generation as well as sometimes consulting clients directly.
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