SEO for SAAS Startups: The Definite Guide

Some tech enthusiasts say “SEO is Dead!”. Might be true! But another truth is - when it comes to the discussion of SAAS (Software as a Service)  products, SEO for SAAS products is one of the most reliable and sustainable ways to attain more traffic for making them into potential leads.

Why! Because it brings the following benefits for your business that can bring extra boost in your business.

• Significantly helps to improve your business brand
• This method can drive more traffic to your webpage
• Improves subscribing rate of your SAAS product
• Reduces the dependency on the Paid Advertisements
• Significantly helps to rule over your competitors!

As you have started reading the discussion, it clearly indicates that to thrive more in the run of your SAAS business, you need a definite guide regarding SAAS SEO. And here is the complete guideline regarding that! So, keep your patience in reading the complete guidance until the last line comes!

Let’s say, you have multiple SAAS products on your website from where your customers can buy the subscription packages to get access to the products’ inner features. And the products are showcased on a particular landing page. In that case, for attaining more customers for your SAAS products, you will need more traffic. And here comes the importance of SEO!

SEO for SAAS is basically the process of gaining organic traffic by attaining top ranking on the SERPs for a set of relevant keywords.

Basically SAAS businessmen put their investments on building multiple pages for different products. Considering the overall plan or business funnel, the webpages are interlinked together for driving traffic from one page to another. And during this journey, a portion of the traffic is converted to your customers or leads.

It’s an open reality tha  there are no other effective strategies except running paid marketin for gaining instant and massive resultsg. But the main disadvantages of paid marketing is - even though it can bring instant results for your business, at the end of the day it is not sustainable for a long time that can bring you the long term profit.

But maintaining organic SEO for SAAS business can bring you the following benefits that can make your business more successful.

• Data Analysis: Applying this method will allow you to track your customer data and their journey who clicked on your webpage. By analyzing these data, you can figure out the approximate conversion rate of potential leads.
• Brand Improvement: Ranking your SAAS page for the relevant keywords on search engines means spreading your brand name to the mass audience. And that eventually initiates the “word of mouth” process as well that can enhance your brand even more if your SAAS product can satisfy them.
• Sustainable Results: Ranking your site on the SERP page might be a timely process, but it’s sustainable for massive long-term results. In fact, organic traffics are always valuable potential customers compared to the traffic of paid advertisements.
• Stand out From the Crowd: Running proper SAAS SEO strategies can allow you to dominate over your competitor and take you to the apex of business success! Especially when your plan is precise, and you know very well how to dig out your potential customers.
• Scale Up Your Growth Rapidly: If SaaS SEO is done well, which it typically is, it can lead to rapid evolution. Your ability to drive more traffic depends on how much content you produce (assuming that this is best-in-class content that ranks). And this is precisely the growth strategy that SaaS giants like HubSpot and Pipedrive have applied.

  Just have a look at the image below, which shows the compounding impact that evergreen content may have on development.

                             Source: tomtogunz.com         

• Reduce the Cost Per Acquisition: You pay for each and every click that leads to your website when you get new clients through paid advertising (usually PPC or paid social). You will be charged for all of them if you drive more clicks through the channel. It's just the way the channel is.

  Your cost-per-acquisition through paid channels typically increases over time as you exhaust the audiences with the highest conversion rates. If you're lucky, you'll be able to keep your cost-per-acquisition equal, but after your campaign has been optimized, you'll get to a point where further cost reduction is impossible.

  On the other hand, SEO usually achieves the exact opposite. Over time, it may enable you to lower your cost per acquisition.                  

Learn: Best SEO Agencies in Bangladesh

So, it’s high time to get into the discussion of the actual procedure, applying what you can bring your desired results for your business by doing SEO for SAAS business. Before deep-diving into the discussion a general recommendation you should consider.

The following steps are the definitive guideline for thriving your business with SAAS SEO. But this is not the end! The SEO industry constantly changes following the change of search engine algorithms. So, keep yourself updated and apply the knowledge to retain the healthy phase of your business.

So, without further ado, let’s begin the discussion!

 

So, without further ado, let’s begin the discussion!

1.  Figure Out Your Business Goal

Before getting into the technical part, you have to perform a proper calculation regarding the current growth of your SAAS business. In fact, you should consider calculating the growth for the previous years. And then, you can get a clear picture regarding what should be your next step in thriving throughout our journey.

In this regard, any SAAS businessman can follow the following steps.

• Step 1: Get a piece of paper and write down the business growth for the previous years in numbers. Important note, the calculation should begin from your breakeven year.
• Step 2: Considering the data, calculate the average growth rate of your business.
• Step 3: Consider some other factors such as customer satisfaction rate, product development and improvement, the increasing rate of clients, etc.
• Step 4: Calculate KPIs, especially when your company is in rapid growth
• Step 5: Consider reporting other factors such as MQL, MRR, ARPU, CAC, etc.
• Step 6: Set your solid business goal with a precise plan. And mention in numbers how much revenue you want to increase in the next year.

2.  Try to Define Buyer Persona

At the end of the day, all products are not for all types of buyers or customers. So, whatever SAAS products you develop, they’re not meant to be the solution of all buyers as well. In that case, what particular solution can maximize your revenue?

Here comes the importance of identifying the audience considering their persona!

That means, as your product is already developed, try to figure out what types of people need this product. And try to understand their online activity as well. Marketing your product targeting the right audience will minimize your cost and maximize the probability of getting more potential customers.

To figure out your appropriate audience base (who are your potential customers), you can try to find the answers to the following questions.

• What types of problems can your SAAS product solve?
• Which specific age groups face the problem where your product is the solution?
• What types of professions are the majority of your targeted audience continuing?
• What about their buying behaviour?
• How much detail research is needed to make an appropriate funnel for converting them into leads?

This is not the end! Depending on other factors, you may have to define your buyer persona precisely. So, do some brainstorming on it depending on your SAAS product type before thinking about SAAS SEO strategies.

3.  Find Out the Problems that Your Buyers Face

Let’s say - in your SAAS business you have produced multiple products that are meant to solve different problems. And as a businessman, you want all the products to get sold at a satisfactory rate, right? But the million-dollar question is -

If you use the same funnel to improve your overall sales by utilizing SEO for SAAS, will it work? The answer is - Yes and No!

If you have a sound knowledge regarding the authentic process of social media marketing for small business, then you probably know that marketers nowadays develop each funnel for different products for improving the sales.

In this run, identifying the buyers’ problem is the primary task to do, targeting what you will promote your product as the excellent solution.

4.  Research Your Competitors

No matter how small your business is, as a small mouse, you will always find the other mice in the same rate race running for the same cheese!

Even though it’s pretty sad that you will have to run after the same cheese to grab, you always have another way to make your way out.

It’s an open reality that - the primary fuel of any SAAS business is the content, which holds the ultimate potential to bring most of the traffic.

So, the simple equation is - to beat them and attain the dominating position in the market, you need to create more outstanding SEO friendly content than your competitors!

Before that, you need to figure out how your competitors are getting sufficient attention from the crowd and doing their business.

In this part, you should know the following information regarding your competitors’ activity.

• What type of customer base are they targeting? Are you targeting the same audience?
• What about their technical SEO improvement?
• What is their primary source of traffic? Are you gaining traffic from the same source?
• How much quality do they maintain in content production compared to your competitors?
• What do you prefer in content production? Quantity over quality? Or Quality over quantity?

When you get all the answers ready, you will automatically get an approximate idea regarding your competitors. And after collecting the necessary data of your competitor, you will be able to jump right into the next step.

5.  Dig Out 10 Golden Keywords

Even though modern search engines don’t care about the word count and how many times you repeat the keyword in the content, finding good keywords is still relevant for And before producing content, finding various types of keywords in SEO should be the primary task to do.

As your business is small, you need to work with fewer keywords to bring the best outcome with limited resources!

In this regard,our general suggestion is that as your SAAS business is small, it will be wise to start with 10 keywords and produce 10 content using these. It will ensure the proper utilization of the full potential of your resources and bring massive results.

So, go through the right keyword strategy so that you can filter out worthy keywords to work with. You can follow the following steps to gain the best keywords.

• Step-1: Open Google Keyword Planner
• Step-2: Click on Discover New Keywords
• Step-3: From the next page, select your desired country where you want to provide your service with your SAAS product
• Step-4: Search with a random keyword related to the SAAS product and the search query
• Step-5: Try to use the words such as “How to”, “Best” while searching. It will bring your the organized results
• Step-6: Pick up some of the keywords with high search volume
• Step-7: Check out the ranking difficulty with different tools such as Keyword Surfer, MOZ, It’s a good practice to use premium SEO tools in this regard to get more accurate results
• Step-8: Select the keywords with the highest possible search volume with the lowest possible keyword difficulty

Learn More: SEO for Ecommerce

6.  Improve Content Quality, Not Quantity!

When it comes to the discussion of content production, a general suggestion is - don’t fall into the number game! More content can’t bring more traffic if the quality is poor!

So, what does it mean to improve your content quality and how to do it? Producing better content than your competitor doesn’t mean writing content with more word count! Yes, search engines like Google like long informative content. But your content can bring massive success only when your content meets the searcher’s query.

On the other hand, the engaging tone of writing with great explanations can bring you massive results. And here comes the role of your content production team, as their skills and experience will help to produce better content.

In that regard, you can guide your content production team with the following instructions.

• Suggest them to write longer content than your competitor
• Try to produce content with in-depth discussion.
• Maintain proper formatting in your content so that your content gets easy to read
• Try to explain each topic with a small paragraph using proper Heading and
• Use infographics, images, videos to make the content more engaging and reader-friendly

NOTE: Don’t fall into the trap of blindly writing 20% more words than your competitors. In-depth discussion means explaining most of the pixel detail of any particular topic precisely in a simple and explanatory discussion, not just increasing word counts!

7.  Develop Funnel Targeting Problems

What is funnel? A business funnel is the appropriate and one of the most efficient processes of converting visitors into leads!

In the previous section, we have discussed how you can produce quality content. But before initiating the process, you need to think about three things -

• What type of solution can your SAAS product offer?
• What type of problem do your customers face?
• Can your product be the solution to that?

If the answer to the last question is “Yes”, you have the trump card to dominate the market! The solution is in your hand, and you have to target those searching for your solution to eliminate the problem he faces.

For instance, if you have developed a Restaurant Billing Software (which is a SAAS product), your primary target should be the small restaurant business owners who want to maximize their profit. In that case, you should do the following things-

• Figure out the primary problem that they are to face
• Research on that particular problem and gain more and more information regarding that
• Why are they facing that problem? Try to figure out the causes
• What challenges are they facing to grab the solution? Try to find out.
• Is your product buyer-friendly compared to other SAAS companies? Keep it in consideration.

Depending on all the things, you need to build up your funnel. There will be two parts of your funnel.

• Landing Page: Where the detailed features of your product will be represented with texts and images
• Blog Article Pages: Where the content will be published that will drive traffic to the product landing page.

Learn More: SEO for Mobile: Ultimate Guide for Mobile SEO

If there are two differences between SaaS SEO and SEO for other sorts of businesses that you need to be aware of, they are:

• Personas
• Problems

Here is why

The key to your growth is understanding your target personas and developing a plan that puts your platform in front of these people when they search.

After all, if you choose the wrong audience, they'll read your content but won't go through your sales funnel.

Now let's take a look at how searchers frequently find software: they're looking for a fix for their issues. They must fulfill their desire since they have one.

They may or may not be aware that there is a software platform. Your duty is to inform them that your platform can solve their problem because that is the one thing all of your customers will have in common.

When you approach SaaS SEO from the perspective of "personas and problems," you'll start to appreciate what goes into developing a plan that attracts traffic from the correct sources and positions your platform as a solution.

Well! We are almost near the end of the discussion. But! Even though we have covered most of the frequently asked questions, we want to put all the questions and answers together so that a newbie can quickly get all his confusion cleared by reading this!

So, let’s get started!

Q- What is SAAS SEO?

• In simple words, SAAS SEO is the process of obtaining organic traffic from search engines to your SAAS company’s website by achieving top ranking. For thriving in your SAAS business, this is one of the best processes to get massive results.

Q- Why SaaS Startups Need to Invest in a Solid Strategy?

• The answer is simple! Investing money in the wrong strategy is clearly the name of wasting time and money in the name of investing!

If you want a more specific answer, you can read the following reasons behind spending money on a solid strategy.

• It shapes your overall marketing budget that reduces your cost and effort
• Ensures the highest favourable outcome in limited resources
• Helps to maintain the track record of all the data, including the revenue of your SAAS business
• Eliminates unnecessary costs
• Enhanced convenience in maintaining customer data

Q- How Do I Do SEO for SaaS?

• The 7 steps that we have mentioned above are enough to take your baby step at this phase! But we have discussed only the essential steps. There is a lot more to do! In short, you can focus on the following things in this regard to perform the technical part.

• Analyze your SAAS product
• Write down the services that your SAAS product can offer
• Make a precise plan or funnel to sell your product
• Produce new content depending on the funnel and improve the quality of existing content
• Do better technical SEO than your competitors
• Produce high-quality guest posts and try to build high-quality backlinks with these
• Try to maintain sufficient interlinking between your posts
• Improve your ranking on search engines and try to get authority

Q- What is SAAS Content?

• SAAS content is the written infographics or video content that are made for attracting, educating and converting your potential customers into leads for your SAAS product.

Q- How Important is SEO in a SaaS Business?

• SEO for SAAS business can bring so many benefits. Even though this is not the immediate process of getting results, it will bring long-lasting benefits. SEO strategy for saas business can bring the following benefits.

• It improves the authority of your business.
• It helps to compete with your competitors and get the dominating position
• It helps to gain customers from different corners of the world
• Allows you to get targeted traffic
• Helps to achieve success in B2B business

So, should you perform SEO for SAAS business? At the end of this long discussion, what we can say - Yes! You should! As search engines are the primary source of your worthy traffic, this method will efficiently work for getting your targeted leads. And considering the long run, it will benefit your business.

Besides sticking with the procedures we have mentioned, keep yourself and your team updated regarding the recent algorithmic changes of search engines. The overall combination will bring massive success to your SAAS business for sure.