Enterprise SaaS SEO: The Why, and HOW of building an enterprise SEO plan

According to Martin McGarry, an SEO consultant, the basic difference between Enterprise SaaS SEO and Traditional SaaS SEO is the deployment of specialized teams for every specific task.

“You can’t rely on generalists to perform in all areas of SEO. You’ll need an expert tech SEO, a dedicated content strategist, on-page analyst, link acquisition team, conversion analyst & maybe more.”

According to SEO experts, enterprise SEO is a very specialized skill requiring dedicated teams for every task. 

Because of the huge amount of data and information which needs to be planned and executed not generalized, systems and processes need to be automated and scalable. This becomes more crucial due to the impact one mistake can have on thousands of URLs across different segments of the website. 

In order to avoid such blunders, it’s very important to do a deep dive into Enterprises SEO and its fundamentals. 

Ready, let’s go!

What is Enterprise SaaS SEO?

Enterprise SaaS SEO deals with hundreds of pages to be optimized and managed under a website. This applies to big conglomerates that have different products and services and have a presence across different countries. 

This calls for a different approach because one is dealing with so much content that needs to be portrayed to so many different people with different needs and requirements.  

SaaS giant HubSpot is a perfect example of an Enterprise as they have millions of pages linked to its website.

What are the main parts of enterprise SEO?      

“…the volume of everything changes everything. More pages, more data, more people to work with, more money [available and at stake]”.  -@SEOGoddess

The three main components of Enterprise SEO are scalability, specialization, and eternal conflicts.

Large enterprises have thousands of pages linked to their website so it calls for different approaches towards strategies and planning which is automation and scalability. 

Let’s take SaaS giant Hubspot as an example. 

HubSpot has 35000 pages on its site and ranks #1 for more than 30000 keywords. In order to maintain that authority, it needs a dedicated team for SEO.  

That’s a huge amount of data and work, it is quite natural that this can’t be comprehended by a small SEO team. This calls for specialized experts for each specific domain. For example – content strategist experts, front-end SEO experts, back-end SEO experts, etc.

When there are so many people with different expertise working together this would surely cause tension and conflict in decisions. But as SEO is the main component of creating brand awareness, it’s important to have clear-cut strategies and systems in place.

How does SEO help in building a brand?

Since large enterprises have huge resources to work with they certainly can focus on creating brand value. 

A small business might be in shortage of leads so they might consider a different approach to fulfill the requirements. 

But since enterprise brands have other channels of fulfilling their short-term goals, you should definitely consider investing in building brand awareness about your products and services. 

Ranking on the top pages of search engines establishes a domain authority as well as confidence in the products.

The benefits of SEO are not just limited to building brand awareness, but also to generating leads, improving brand authority, etc.

Benefits of enterprise SaaS SEO 

SEO offers a lot of benefits to SaaS enterprises, in the form of-

Reaching customers at every stage of the buyer’s journey

The SEO strategy for enterprises depends on on-page SEO, content, and outreach for link building. With the help of these three components, enterprises can meet buyers at every stage of their journey and take them through the sales funnel. 

There are three stages of the buyer’s journey-

• Awareness stage
• Consideration stage
• Decision stage

Taking the buyer on this journey with the help of SEO, and content helps in gaining the trust of the customer. 

Improve your brand reputation

Searches are basically of two types- branded and non-branded. Your buyers use the branded keywords at every stage of their journey. Branded searches lead the buyer’s to-

• Blog pages, social media profiles, and other microsites. 
• News articles, and other third-party websites. 

When it comes to blogs and social media profiles, enterprises can control them, but pages on third-party sites are something enterprises cannot control. The problem arises- customers trust you only when other people vouch for you. 

To control or rather influence your brand image on the internet, enterprises SaaS SEO helps you- 

• Focusing on creating a positive impact on third-party review sites, and social media channels.
• Creating content that establishes you as an authority in your space, and gives signals to Google that you’re an industry expert. 
• Address customer objections due to negative reviews. 

The first place in SERPs gets an average CTR of 31.7%. Doing SEO right can give you the benefit of gaining traffic that converts into paid customers.

Rule the industry and the product category

To dominate your industry, creating just product pages is not enough. You need content that educates the readers about your products and helps them find the right solution to their problems. 

Creating TOFU or Top of the Funnel content helps you create awareness about your SaaS product and push the buyer further down into the sales funnel until they’re ready to buy from you.

Why Does SEO Matter For SaaS Enterprises?

SaaS enterprise SEO is different from SEO for small businesses. 

Enterprises having a large number of teams and product stakeholders, it becomes time-consuming and hectic to publish content after approving it from the product team, marketing team, legal team, and stakeholders. 

If a technical issue arises, then there’s a complete process of dealing with engineering teams, securing buy-ins from stakeholders, etc. This process takes more than two weeks.

Enterprise SaaS SEO works very differently from traditional SEO for small businesses. That’s where SEO for enterprises comes to the rescue. 

• SEO gives a competitive edge 

Competition is in every scenario of the business world. 

In order for enterprises to leave a mark, they need to employ SEO in their marketing plan. Using SEO, brands can promote their products through their website. SEO can help enterprises edge out the competition with the help of content. 

• Conventional fixes don’t help anymore.

Traditional SEO is different from enterprise SEO. Even though the principles of SEO remain the same, the process of doing it differentiates. When an issue arises, it’s far more difficult to fix them.

If you want to update the links to your website with more relevant, and highly authoritative links, you have to consider the content, inbound links, number of pages, and technical issues. This will also involve getting approval from product teas, marketing teams, and internal SMEs.   

You’ll have to explain to the stakeholders the business case for this change, and the resources needed to execute the changes to the product, marketing, and IT teams, and SMEs will be required to execute the change.

This becomes really time-consuming for SEO teams, that’s why Saaslinko manages outreach and link building for you. Then you can contact us through this form, and our team will get back to you ASAP.

How is Enterprise SaaS SEO Different From “Normal” SEO?

Talk about the difference in terms of-

• Scalability and automation
• Multiple locations and teams
• Multiple sites and sub-domains
• Reputation management

Challenges of Enterprise SaaS SEO

Enterprise SaaS SEO is more challenging than any other industry SEO. The major challenge faced by enterprises is managing complex technical challenges like a buy-in. 

Getting buy-in

Since we are talking about large companies with thousands and millions of pages to optimize. It’s not possible to be managed by a single department so there are multiple departments and teams working on making the website SEO friendly. 

This leads to getting difficult buy-in. This is nothing but pitching your suggestion or ideas to a group of people for consideration and change. 

This is a challenge for enterprises because changes are reluctant here. A minute change in web structure might lead to multiple different issues. Especially when work is coordinated between different teams who might be located in different locations. 

A simple solution to this is by bridging coordination between teams and differences through the ties of communication, engagement, and feedback. 

Since we are dealing with teams with different standpoints, it’s very crucial for team members to create bonds and communication within the group. They can nurture this with the help of a feedback system between teams where people can come up and share their ideas freely.

How to Do Enterprise SaaS SEO

Enterprise SaaS SEO has two main areas of focus. 

• Personas
• Problems

To get the best results in SEO, you need to understand target customer personas, as well as their problems to create strategies that solve those problems and represent you as an authority. 

Your customer personas need to be correct, so that you can create content that attracts the right kind of people, aka the people who will eventually buy from you, and will push them down into your sales funnel. 

So, enterprise SaaS SEO revolves around creating customer personas and solving their problem with content.

Let’s discuss each one of these in detail. 

Strategies to help you develop an enterprise SaaS SEO roadmap

• Perform keyword research

The most important part of enterprise SEO is research. Define your target customer personas. Find the keywords your target personas use in search queries to find software, and understand the search intent. 

Build customer persona

• Build customer persona

A customer persona is a representation of the type of customer who will benefit the most from your product. Creating personas takes time and a combination of enterprise SEO analytics data, surveys, customer interviews, and internal team discussion.

Customer personas for SaaS products depend on three aspects:

• Demographics: age, gender, market segment, geo-specifics, job title, the company they work in
• Primary goal: What is the customer trying to accomplish? How is your product going to help them meet that goal(s)?
• Pain points/blockers: Are other solutions too time-consuming? Does their current tool lack some features? What things are preventing them from completing their work?

Brainstorm and research keywords

Now that your target personas are ready, it’s time to brainstorm with your team about the different ways in which your customers are searching for you. 

1. Seed Keywords

2. Keywords where competitors rank

3. Branded keywords that could impact brand reputation

4. International keywords

On-page SEO 

“On-page SEO mainly focuses on optimizing the content of the website to make it algorithm friendly”. Since content is a backbone of your website it should work as a strength not a drawback. As mentioned earlier, Enterprise has a huge number of websites to be optimized. Therefore it becomes a hassle to automate and audit the content individually. Although there is no fixed set of rules when analyzing the content, there are standardized rules which can be used in most of the scenarios.

1. Valuable content:

 Google algorithm analysis content on the basis of E-A-T which is Expertise, Authoritativeness and trustworthiness. While evaluating the content utmost important should be given to the three factors.

2. Consistency:

  ” Publishing great content once is not enough, it should be done with consistency”. Consistency plays a major role in increasing traffic to the website.

3. Title tags:

Title tags are titles of a page, try focusing on reducing your length to 60 characters. Longer than 60 characters have chances of not being visible.      

4.  Meta description:

Meta descriptions are summary of your page keeping it simple and short are advised for better results. 150 characters of meta description is what you should aim for.

 According to data by first page SEO, which supports the following idea that consistently posting valuable information plays a major role in driving organic traffic. “Valuable content followed with  consistency was given an importance of 26% highest of all the other factors mentioned here”.

Source: first page SEO 

Technical SEO 

  “According to data from https://testmysite.thinkwithgoogle.com if a website requires more than 5 seconds to load then it leads to 10% of your traffic leaving the page”.

Not fixing page loading speed is one of the main reasons to bounce away your audience from reaching you. It’s not just page speed but much more elements to technical issues which could be hampering your reach. 

 Technical SEO means fixing technical issues which are compromising your visibility and reach. Technical issues lead to less credibility in the eyes of the Google algorithm.  This generally consists of broken links, page loading speed, 404 pages, duplicate content, and poor mobile experience.

We can quickly solve some of the problems with the help of certain tools, which help you figure out the problems in your pages. 

• In order to fix issues of slow page loading and increase the overall speed, you can use the Google Page speed tool .
• Detecting and testing 404 and broken links can easily be done with tools like sitechecker, semrush, and Google webmaster.

Content marketing strategy

Having a content marketing strategy is key to getting the best results out of your SEO strategy. Without content, there’s no benefit of optimizing your website or just doing SEO.

Content is the best way to get the #1 place in search results.  Ranking on google isn’t the only benefit you get when you create content. You build authority in the industry, and trust between your customers. Content will help you take your customers into the funnel, educate them, and motivate them to buy your products. 

But just creating content won’t cut it. You need to create content that aligns with your strategy and distribution plans.

Enterprise link building

Link building is the number of websites referring to your website. It acts like a referral for your website. It not only increases your domain authority but acts as credibility for your website. Google algorithm loves backlinks, and it gives huge eyeballs to your content. 

We at Saaslinko help other SaaS brands build relevant, and highly authoritative links that will boost your ranking higher on the search engines. Book a free call with one of our experts now!

Meanwhile, you can also check out some of our case studies here. 

Teams and tools

You can have the best content and SEO strategy, but it will not bore results unless you’ve someone to execute it. You need to have a team, a Content Team, who will focus on creating content strategies, and content creation, and an SEO team to help you optimize the content produced so that it ranks on Google. 

An added benefit would be selecting the right tools for your business. These two factors greatly affect your enterprise SEO campaigns. 

Measure, track, and report

Doing SEO is great. Most of your job is done. But to understand how you’re doing with SEO. You need to have a system for tracking, measuring, and reporting your efforts. 

You need to measure SEO KPIs and metrics and keep a track record of them to understand what’s going great and where you need to level up your game. This will help you determine your SaaS SEO ROI. 

My 2 Cents

There you’ve it! 

Your complete guide to enterprise SaaS SEO. To summarize, there are 3 factors to building an SEO campaign. 

1. Content
2. Keywords
3. Links

If you do these three factors correctly, you’re bound to see great results in no time. 

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