7 SaaS SEO Tips to Boost Your Organic Traffic

Launching a new SaaS platform? Find out how other SaaS platforms have used SEO to grow organic traffic with these key SaaS SEO tips.

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

SaaS buyers make purchase decisions based on accessibility, functionality, and versatility. Over the past several years businesses have seen massive growth in cloud usage and consequently service as a software based businesses. 

No wonder, SaaS firms are investing in cutting-edge tech and tools to boost productivity and reduce the time to market. We’ve seen SaaS brands investing resources in intuitive tools, such as web development tools, CRM platforms, no-code tools, product management software, and more to accelerate the product development process. 

Besides tools, they are working on strengthening their online visibility, traffic, and customer acquisition using SEO and content marketing. 

SaaS SEO may have a poor impression of taking time to show positive results. But, if you are consistent, it ensures sustainable long-term growth. In this post, we shall learn about the best SaaS SEO tips that will boost your organic growth. 

7 Tips for Changing Your SaaS SEO Game

#1. Run an SEO Audit on the Website

An SEO audit can point out your website’s problem areas, inconsistencies, or weaknesses affecting organic search performance. It uncovers issues in technical SEO, website structure, user experience, and more.

Technical SEO

Technical SEO is about optimizing the website’s technical elements to improve its crawling, indexing, and rendering by the search bots. These tips will help you streamline the website’s technical SEO effort.

• Ensure that your website is easily indexable by Google and other search engines. Update the sitemap at all times.
• Streamline the website user experience with seamless navigation, mobile responsiveness, website speed, and more. 
• Enable AMP on the website to speed up content delivery on mobile devices.
• Check the entire website for broken links and duplicate content issues. If found, ensure that you fix them on a timely basis.
• Handle the redirects correctly to ensure the URL changes do not affect their rankings.

On-page SEO

On-page SEO refers to optimizing the website content for search engines and visitors for gaining organic traffic. Follow these tips to boost your website’s on-page SEO.

• Add HTML tags, such as page titles, meta descriptions, alt tags, header tags, and more to the website pages to describe the content elements for search crawlers.
• Craft SEO-friendly and short, descriptive URLs by including the primary keyword in the URL slug.

For example, check out the website page URLs of Later, a social media scheduling tool. Each of these URLs is short yet descriptive and provides a wholesome idea about what the webpage is all about.

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• Enrich your content with relevant keywords by conducting detailed keyword research (to be discussed at length in the next section).
• Interlink the existing website pages for seamless navigation.

Website SEO audit is time-consuming and complex. Hence, leveraging tools like project management software can help in keeping a track of the tasks and steps involved. Create tasks, such as image optimization, rewriting page titles and meta descriptions, and more for your team members, and track their progress in real-time. 

#2. Craft a Funnel-Centric Keyword Strategy

Keyword research and strategy specific to the marketing funnel are crucial for SaaS SEO. Tailor your keyword strategy to the buyer’s journey to ensure that the readers find the desired content at the stage they are in. 

Conduct thorough keyword research to identify the best keywords (top funnel, mid funnel, and bottom funnel) for various stages of the buyer’s journey. 

Top Funnel Keywords

The top funnel keywords are used to target those potential customers who are searching for a software solution for overcoming their challenges. These buyers do not have any clue about your SaaS product. 

These keywords are usually informational and make up the vast majority of blog content. They focus on the buyer’s pain points and introduce them to your product. 

Now, let us look at an example where a prospect is wanting to buy SaaS software to manage employee contracts. The prospect would conduct a search based on the following keyword – 

What is a contract management system

Mid-Funnel Keywords

The mid-funnel keywords are used to target those prospects who already know about your product and have started conducting in-depth research about your offerings. These keywords are usually commercial ones and are used to highlight your product’s USPs. They help you distinguish your product from that of your competitors. 

Here, the keyword would be PandaDoc vs DocuSign

Bottom Funnel Keywords

Lastly, the bottom funnel keywords are the ones that convince potential buyers to go for your product. These keywords are transactional ones revolving around product pricing, product reviews, third-party integrations that the product offers, and more.

The keyword at the bottom of the funnel stage would be PandaDoc pricing.

Now that you have understood the impact of keywords on the buyer’s journey, it is time to build a list of keywords for your SaaS SEO. Here is a quick guide to help you out. 

• Find the primary and secondary keywords you wish to target
• Assess the search intent for the chosen keywords. Also, determine the ease or difficulty of ranking for those keywords
• Check out Google’s ‘People Also Ask’ box to understand the type of information customers are searching
• Monitor the keywords your competitors are ranking for using keyword research tools and include them in your strategy if possible
• Prioritize the keywords based on the page content and the stage of the buyer’s funnel
• Place the keywords in the right places throughout the page content. Avoid keyword stuffing.
• Monitor the performance of the keywords and tweak your content to accommodate the best-performing ones.

#3. Build a Robust Content Library

Based on your keyword research, develop a content strategy to create unique content that is relevant to the audience and satisfies their search intent. 

Here are a few tips to help you build a robust content library.

• Write for your target audience. Your content must satisfy the goal the visitors are trying to accomplish when they land on your website. Take a look at the search intent and then shortlist the keywords. 

This will help you create content that appeals to the audience.  Engage the audience by providing them with a variety of content – blog posts, case studies, industry reports, guides, product tutorials, podcasts, and more. 

• Create in-depth and informative content that is significantly better in all aspects, such as better structure, engaging tone, visually-appealing images and videos, animations, unique CTAs, and more.
• Present the content from a unique angle. For example, you can leverage the problem-solving approach for writing a case study. 

Databox is a business analytics platform that helps businesses measure their progress by collating performance data in one place. Take a look at their case studies. 

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The case study titles are striking and put forth the positive outcomes their customers have received in numbers. Secondly, Databox uses a conversational tone to present the content. This is further enhanced with short customer quotes that talk about how the product has helped them accomplish their goals. 

• Opt for target and semantically-related keywords rather than keyword stuffing.  
• Update the content on a timely basis with new research findings, industry trends, fresh examples, and more. This will help in keeping your content updated always and establish your website as a reliable source for finding useful information. 

#4. Leverage Other Channels for Lead/ Customer Conversions

A good SEO strategy, no doubt, involves extensive content creation. Leveraging this content to promote your product on other channels will boost your efforts even more and help you acquire additional leads or customers. 

Social media marketing and email marketing are one of the most widely used channels for promoting and distributing content. It places your content in front of a larger audience including your customers while increasing brand awareness. It also helps you create additional backlinks for your content pieces. 

For example, Slack, a team communication app leverages social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter to connect with their audience via social media.

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This short guide will help you get started with content distribution.

• Choose the desired channels, such as social media platforms, email newsletters, podcasts, community-building platforms, and others for content distribution. 
• Tailor the content and optimize the same for individual channels to communicate with the target audience on a more personal level.
• Experiment with different content types to provide the audience with a variety in content consumption. For example, if you are sharing a blog post on Facebook, then you could convert the post into images and share it as a carousel post on Instagram.
• Leverage an editorial calendar to plan your content distribution strategy. You can use tools like excel sheets or social media scheduling software to manage and promote the content.
• Track the content distribution KPIs, such as reach, engagement, audience sentiment, and more to check the impact of content distribution effort on your brand SEO

#5. Invest in Link Building

Quality backlinks help SaaS brands improve their SEO strategy by ranking their content for competitive keywords. Backlinks tell the website crawlers that your website is an authority on a certain subject. It enhances brand authority and drives relevant and quality traffic to the website to gain more leads and customers. 

Here are various methods you can implement to earn relevant backlinks for your website content.

• Digital PR
• Guest posting techniques
• Brand mentions
• Competitor analysis to identify backlink opportunities
• Partnerships with key industry professionals or business owners

Once you have finalized the link-building methods, create quality content that would compel external sites to link to your brand. According to Backlinko, long-form content receives an average of 77.2% more links than short articles, thereby making them the preferred choice for backlink acquisition.  

Let us have a look at some of the link-building best practices that will help you ace your SaaS SEO strategy.

• List your product on the ‘best of’ lists as these articles offer a great validation for your product. It serves dual purposes – building a backlink and gaining the attention of potential customers to your product. 

For example, check out this post about the best social media scheduling tools. This post lists 31 tools with information, such as features, pricing, pros and cons, ratings, and more. Getting a link to your site on a such article will position your product as one of the best. 

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• Textual content is not the only way to gain backlinks. Create images, such as infographics, product-related photos, illustrations, and other graphics, and promote them to attract more backlinks.
• Partner with industry influencers, press, subject matter experts, and businesses in your niche to build strategic partnerships for link-building activities.
• Focus on getting a minimum of 2-3 backlinks from high-quality sites every month. Remember getting too many backlinks at once can get your website penalized. 
• Use keyword-optimized anchor text to help visitors and search engines understand the context of the link better. Avoid using generic anchor texts, such as learn more, click here, visit this link, and others.
• Keep a track of your backlinks to know about their status. As these backlinks are on an external website, you do not have any control over them. The site owners might remove your link or delete the page without notifying you. 

#6. Improve the Website UX

User experience is a critical aspect that can skyrocket your SEO efforts. In fact, Google considers UX or page experience to be one of the ranking factors when determining the position of the content in search results. Hence, improving the website user experience helps in improving the SEO score. 

Here are a few tips that you can follow to deliver a great website experience to the users.

• Conduct a behavioral audit on the existing website design with the help of heatmaps, visitor surveys, website analytics, and more.
• Evaluate the findings to identify the bottlenecks and develop new user-centric designs. Consider the target audience, their pain points, needs, and the value you provide to them through your content. 
• Capture feedback from the team members throughout the design process. You can also share the design mockup with a small team of loyal customers to understand their thoughts about the new design. 
• Once the new design is published, monitor the visitor’s behavior continuously to check if it appeals to them. Leverage A/B testing tools to understand more about what elements are driving most conversions. 

#7. Monitor the Website Performance

One of the best ways to understand how well the SEO strategy is performing is by monitoring the website’s performance. Here are a few most important KPIs to track for SaaS SEO.

• Website Traffic Sources

This metric helps you target those sources and optimize the marketing campaigns for increased conversions.

• Website Traffic Pages

This metric helps you revamp the page to serve the highest-converting content or modify the page design in a way that ensures better conversions.

• Organic Click-through Rate

This KPI shows the percentage of visitors who are clicking on your website pages. You can use this metric to estimate the organic traffic and set ROI for the campaigns.

• Bounce Rate

A high bounce rate means the users are leaving your site without any interaction or engagement.

• Keyword Rankings

This metric helps you identify the best-performing keywords that could boost your organic traffic extensively. 

• Backlinks

Keep a track of the number of backlinks you have acquired or lost for the website. This metric tells you whether or not your link-building efforts are succeeding.

• Branded Traffic

This metric helps you identify the traffic you are receiving from visitors who searched for the terms that contain your brand name. It is an important metric for brand awareness.

• Average Time On Site

Monitor the average time a visitor spends on your website. This KPI helps in measuring the effectiveness of the content and monitoring visitor engagement.

• Page Speed

Monitoring page speed helps in improving various aspects of the webpage like load time, CSS, image optimization, and others.

Wrapping Up

A solid SaaS SEO strategy can boost organic traffic growth and lead to successful marketing campaigns. However, it requires continuous effort and patience. We hope the points we mentioned in this post have helped you craft an effective SEO strategy for your SaaS business.