SaaS SEO Mistakes: Are These 10 Mistakes Costing You Traffic & Conversions?

SaaS SEO can be tricky. Especially when you’ve been doing it for a while, mistakes can happen and get lost in the midst of all the strategies you’re implementing. 

Changing algorithms, updates, and strategies can make you feel overwhelmed if you don’t have an SEO Expert on your team. It can prove to be difficult to do an audit every 6 months, or each time Google updates its guidelines. 

SaaS brands often struggle to create an effective SEO strategy and end up making these easily-avoidable SaaS SEO mistakes. 

It’s easy to ignore these mistakes that you might be making with your SEO strategy, which might harm your organic growth. 

This blog will help you re-think your SaaS SEO strategy and find out about any 10 mistakes that you might be making. 

Ready? Let’s go!

Top 10 SaaS SEO Mistakes That can harm your SaaS Brand:

1. Publishing too much Content

Yes, you need to create consistent content. That’s a piece of advice we follow at SaaSLinko, but content overloading can prove to be a difficult issue to fix. 

Crowing your blog or resources section with guides, blogs, case studies, whitepapers, etc might seem like a good idea but it might interfere with your SEO efforts, if not aligned with your content strategy. 

Your Content Strategy and the quality of content you post have a huge impact on your SEO growth. If your blogs aren’t well researched, aligned with your strategy, and full of surface information, then visitors will come and leave your website without converting or giving you any traffic. 

You need to focus on quality over quantity, a few well-written blogs can give you more meaningful traffic than a bunch without any surface to it. 

2. Forgetting the User

SaaS brands often in the run for the first SERP forget the main focus of their SEO efforts, the user. Brands often lose sight of their customers when focusing on SEO. 

You need to balance your focus towards creating content for both the user and the search engines. Google has been creating strict guidelines and rewards websites that create content that’s user-oriented and not spider oriented. 

SaaS brands need to avoid keyword stuffing and improve the user experience. Keyword stuffing used to be a well-known tactic to rank on SERPs that brands used to rank higher. However, the scenario is not the same anymore. Both users and search engines now understand these gimmicky tactics. 

Now, this type of content isn’t what ranks on google, so SaaS companies need to put their focus on their users, while creating their SEO and content strategy, and you’ll be able to rank on google. 

3. Not publishing content on their own blog

Using third-party blog sites like Medium won’t get you the desired audience or traffic. Many SaaS brands hold their blogs on Medium. This is a great method to reach a larger audience but to build authority and rank higher on search engines you need to post content on your own website. 

If these party blogs are your only focus, you’re losing out on a lot of potential traffic and customers. Make your own website blog the first priority for posting SEO Content.

4. Not Updating their Content 

You need to update and optimize your content and your SEO strategy often to stay on top of the changing ranking guidelines and rules. Google is constantly adding new criteria to their list. 

Owing to these critical changes, you need to refresh your content and update your strategies to match the current criteria. You need to constantly optimize your blogs so that you can attract an audience due to the new and updated information while increasing your search engine’s ranking. 

If your SaaS published content about work productivity during COVID times, then you might want to update that content to match the current scenario. Doing this to pages that don’t get any significant traffic can prove beneficial, as you might notice an increase in traffic if the content is refreshed to match the current situation. 

You need to update your blogs every six months to analyze your strategies and create a new one. 

5. Not creating content that matches User’s Search Intent

Behind every search that happens on Google, there’s an intent of either buying or learning. While conducting keyword research, you need to understand the search intent behind that search and then create content that satisfies the search.

SaaS brands often forget the intent and target the wrong keywords or create the wrong type of content for the right keyword. To get traffic to your site, it’s important you solve the user intent rather than displaying the feature of your software every single time. 

This will help you gain the trust of your readers, and will help you get more leads and signups from your existing and new traffic. It’s important to create content around the terms your audience actually uses. If no one is searching for a specific keyword, then you won’t generate traffic even after ranking in the first position of search engines. 

6. Talking about the Features, and not Benefits and the Problem

A mistake SaaS brands often make is they create their service pages based on the features and not the problem they’re solving and the benefits the users will derive after using the product. 

Your software can have many features but if you want to prove how your product will actually get the brand’s result, no one will buy it. 

People don’t buy products, they buy solutions. 

You need to talk to your audience in their language and tell them how your product will help them get from point A to B while showing them how they can do it with the help of a product demo. 

You need to find the perfect balance in creating content and page that match the search intent, solves a problem, ad staples the benefit of your software. 

You can easily do this by creating content that matches the search intent. There are 5 different categories of intent,-

• Informational Intent- These keywords are searched with the motive of finding the solution to an answer. You can use keywords in this intent to create blogs, case studies, and video content, so as to attract an audience with the help of content that educates. 

• Navigational Intent-  These keywords are used to navigate through specific websites and pages. People use this intent to get a piece of quick information about a very specific problem they might be facing. This is your chance to create content around keywords that clearly outline how to use specific fears of your products so that your users can get all the information easily.

• Commercial Intent- These keywords are used when your target audience is searching for alternative options to their problems. This is the before-buying stage where the audience is considering their options and finding a product that matches their needs. You can create content to push your audience further down the funnel to actually purchase your product. You can showcase case studies, testimonials, product reviews, etc to win the trust of your potential buyers. 

• Transactional Intent- This is the keyword that people use when they’re ready to buy. This is the purchase stage of the target audience. You can use these keywords to display specific discounts, coupons, highlight specific features, and the value of your product. These are the keywords around which landing pages are created, and where the purchases are made. You can also create pricing pages or comparison pages to raj o these words, and show the usefulness and worth of your product to help make the buying decision easier for your customers. 

• User-based keywords-  These keywords are used to provide information about your SaaS after the purchase stage. This is where you equip your customers with everything they need to make the best of your product. This includes exclusive guides, how-tos and videos that make the onboarding process easier for them. This will help your customers save time and their experience while making them lifelong customers. 

7. Not keeping the Customer First

Before creating content or searching for potential keywords, you need to understand the person you’re targeting. SEO is not just about meta descriptions, and robots.txt files it’s about creating content that solves a problem. But how will you solve any problem if you don’t know your target audience inside out?

When you’re creating your SEO strategy, you need to understand the pain points, desires, demographics, and buying objections to creating content that educates, inspires, and converts. You need to understand their deep desires so that you can create content that meets them where they’re and shows them life after using your product. 

This is called the customer’s lifecycle. You need to take the buyer from one place to another with the help of your content.  

Most SaaS brands think they know their buyer but actual research is needed to understand the pain points. You want to optimze your content for keywords that your audience is actually searching for, or else your content efforts will go to waste. 

8. Focusing on One Primary Keyword

SaaS brands often think that they need to optimize their content for one target keyword. It’s the wrong approach. You need to maintain the focus on primary as well as secondary keywords. 

Not everyone who lands on your website/blog has searched for the same primary keyword. Oftentimes, people land on a blog after searching for a long tail keyword like, “how to prepare hostel food with low budget”, rather than searching for just “hostel food”.

Optimizing content for long tail keywords can help you rank for phases that are not popular but can give you a traffic boost. You should always include synonyms and long tail keywords of the primary keywords in your headers and subheaders to increase your chances of ranking. 

Similarly, you can also use semantic keywords, or keywords with similar meanings as alternatives to the primary keyword. The longer your keyword, the more relevant traffic you’ll achieve. 

Try looking at the Related Searches section of Google. The phases used there are often keywords that people type on the search bar. Using these keywords in your content will give you a boost as well as a chance to rank for the featured snippet. 

9. Forgetting basic SEO Best Practices

Core SEO practices include optimizing your meta tags, meta descriptions, URLs, image SEO, and the normal On-page SEO practices that most SaaS companies forget. 

Remember SEO doesn’t have to be complicated. Most white hate SEO practices are just,-

• Optimizing content for keywords without stuffing them
• Building links the right way
• Making the URLs look professional by adding keywords that add value 
• Making the use of meta tags, and descriptions
• Doing Image SEO
• Adding Alternative text
• Using secondary keywords in the headers and subheaders
• Making the content readable and easily digestible. 

These are some core SEO practices that don’t require much effort but can yield awesome results when done consistently. These are your typical practices that most brands forget about. 

Don’t be one of them. 

10. Not optimizing the Website Content

The only content present on your website is not just the blog section. 

It’s your website copy, the product pages, and other information pages that SaaS brands think are not worth paying attention to. 

Imagine, you’re a buyer who wants to purchase a photo editing tool. You find a tool whose blogs you quite like, and you decide to invest in them. Once you get to their product pages, you find a mess. You can’t understand the product specification, benefits, or anything else, and you decide to leave. 

It’s the same scenario with most brands, they’ve well-researched content on their website, but their website copy is unable to convert any leads. 

The same goes for duplicate, no-indexed pages. That’s why it’s important to conduct a content audit from time to time again to see what page needs to be removed, or updated. 

Everything present on your website is content that needs to be optimized with keywords, and user intent copy. Even if you end up ranking for a specific term, visitors won’t convert to customers and you won’t make any sales.

The goal of SEO is to make sales. 

Make sure that your website copy, the images you use and the URLs are optimized for search and user to make the best conversion. You can also use tools like Ahrefs, SEMRush and Moz to do a site audit and see what pages need to be removed and updated with the latest content and information. 

While you’re auditing the content on your websites make sure you give the backlinks a look as well. Backlinks are a very important ranking factor, so you need to have relevant and high authoritative backlinks on your site to boost your SEP efforts.

If the content is valuable enough to deserve a link on your site, it should be optimized and indexed. If the content is not something you want to be indexed, then be purposeful about it by applying no-follow tags to the links and by removing the page from any sitemaps.

My 2 Cents 

There you’ve it. A list of the common, easily avoidable mistakes that SaaS brands make.

Use this list as a checklist, next time you’re improving or auditing your SaaS SEO strategy and make it bulletproof. 

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