SaaS SEO Roadmap: How to create a roadmap that leads you to higher rankings
- Published On:December 26, 2022
SEO Roadmap helps to keep your team focused and aligned on the most important SEO objectives and ensures that you are making progress towards your goals. In this article, we will discuss the importance of having an SEO roadmap for your SaaS brand and provide tips on how to create and implement one.
SEO takes at least 6-7 months before you see any results.
How many times have you heard this statement from SEO gurus on Socials? We’ve heard many, and we know that it’s a lie. You don’t have to wait 7 months to see results when you can get significant traffic to your website from Month 1.
How? By having a roadmap to higher rankings. A roadmap or a game plan is necessary in order to create goals, track them, and improve them as you create content.
Creating SaaS SEO Roadmaps is the best way to plan your SEO success, and start seeing a tangible increase in traffic from Month 1.
The process of creating a roadmap shared here is the same method that the team at SaaSLinko used to increase their rankings and traffic by a significant amount.
This blog will take you through the entire process of building an SEO game plan from scratch, and help you get higher rankings on Google.
Ready? Let’s go!
Why do you need an SEO Roadmap to get early success?
Be it in Marketing, or IT sectors, everyone needs to have a roadmap so that they can stay consistent with their goals, and strategies.
Product Plan defines a Roadmap, as “A roadmap is a strategic plan that defines a goal or desired outcome and includes the major steps or milestones needed to reach it.”
An SEO Roadmap will help you build clear SEO strategies, map the milestones, or quarterly/monthly goals and achieve them. They also help you in communicating your goals to your team so that they stay as motivated as you are.
This roadmap will help you stay consistent and laser-focused on getting the desired results, and will give you a birds-eye view of each and every strategy that you implement. You can create these roadmaps on a spreadsheet or any tool that you use.
5 Elements of Creating a SaaS SEO Roadmap
In creating an SEO Roadmap, SaaS Brands need to have these 5 elements in place.
Set SMART Goals
Creating SMART(Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Timely) goals is the first step toward building any business plan. You need to get in clear writing, what your SMART goals are.
To create strategic smart goals and to get a free template, you can also read this blog post by Hubspot How to Write a SMART Goal [+ Free SMART Goal Template]
Create Content that’s strategic
Before following any of the steps outlined below, you need to make sure that you’re creating content(e.g blogs, guides, videos, etc) that aligns with your marketing plan. You need to make sure that the content you’re putting out matches the search intent, and is actually useful to the reader.
Do an internal analysis and check if you can de-index content that doesn’t match the search intent. Delete these pieces as they’re cluttering your blog section, and bringing no results. These blogs will make search engines believe that your website is irrelevant.
Optimized all Website Pages
A SaaS website has too many pages including product/service pages(more on this later). You need to make sure that your homepage, about, contact, and services page are clearly optimized for both humans and spiders.
Your website copy should clearly indicate your USP, and how you can help your Target audience with your product. Make sure you’ve used the right keywords, and phases that you want to rank for.
Ensure that the Technical SEO is done right
Technical SEO plays a huge role in helping spiders easily crawl your website, analyze its content, and get you on the first page. Before you dive into these strategies, snake sure that your tech SEO game is top-notch.
This means checking if you’ve,-
- Included the right keywords in Meta Elements
- Fast page loading speed
- Great web design and responsive website
- Schema Markup
To check the Technical part of your SEO plan, you can try doing a Technical Audit. This will help you realize the shortcomings and work on them.
Built Strategic and Relevant Backlinks
Backlinks are great traffic boosters, only if used strategically. By using the word strategic, we imply,-
- NOT using links that are irrelevant
- NOT using links that are broken
- NOT adding links that are not useful to the reader
If the links you want to add to your content pass the 3 criteria, you can go on. But if they don’t, you should remove the links. These links won’t build your authority, but will damage your reputation, and will lead to readers leaving your page.
Creating in-depth Service/Product Pages
Your SaaS product pages are where the deals happen and close. It’s your chance to reap the results of all the content creation and SEO you’ve been doing. Your product pages need to be well-optimized for both search engines and humans.
These product pages are the final destination of your prospect and the search engines, to optimize them,-
- Add Internal Links
- Make sure the copy is crisp, clear, and has benefits outlined
- Make it about the Target Audience’s pain and not your product
- Target the right keywords.
- Add reviews and case studies
- Address customer objections, pain points, and limiting beliefs.
This will ensure that your product pages convert and help you increase SERPs.
How to get the most wins out of your first 12 months of Content Creation and SEO
The first 12 months are very crucial in order to set up your website for success. This is the time when you’ll be doing the most work on your organic traffic to reap the results in the later years.
To get the most out of the first 12 months of your foundation, you should consider following these steps.
Plan your Quarterly Goals
Algorithm changes, competitors, and constant content creation may leave you feeling confused as to how to deal with the next 12 months. Planning your SEO roadmap on a quarterly basis will help you create a long-term plan for success while allowing room for flexibility and change.
You can steal our quarterly process to make the most out of SEO.
We spend our first quarter, Q1, auditing our website. This means checking for all technical SEO issues, indexing pages, cleaning out junk, and finding out gaps.
Once we’ve figured out the gaps, and solved all the present tech issues, we create a plan to improve all the existing pages and improve them with the latest algorithms, and best practices.
In the Quarter 2, or Q2 phase, we spend it on creating your funnel content, mostly Bottom of the Funnel content to attract more visitors, and increase brand awareness.
During quarters 3 and 4, we revamp your website, start creating strategic content and focus on creating more BOFU Content. This is basically the structure we use to map out our first year as a Linking building SaaS.
Performing keyword research
Performing keyword research is going to set the foundation for all the MOFU and BOFU Content you’ll be creating in later phases. You need to be very strategic with the use of keyword research.
Before starting any keyword research, audit your website and see what kind of keywords are you already ranking for, and what keywords can you potentially rank for. You need to check if these keywords are branded keywords or non-branded keywords.
Once you’ve got a list of all the keywords you want to rank for, go on to the next step of creating BOFU Content.
Here’s a list of our favourite keyword research tools that you can use,-
- Ahrefs, the team at Saaslinko personally prefers this.
Using these tools will give you a clear idea of where you’re currently standing with keyword research and how to go on further from that end.
Creating more BOFU Content
Bottom of the Funnel Content is the best way to attract niche traffic with the help of blogs that educate your visitors and guide them through your product. These BOFU blogs are usually educational and thought-provoking content meant to attract an audience on a small scale with purchase intent.
You can start by creating an editorial calendar with your blog topics, keywords, and audience persona clearly defined. This will guide your content team to create content that helps you attract audiences, and build a pool of loyal customers while increasing your chances of ranking on search engines.
While you’re creating BOFU content, make sure you’re always evaluating and measuring the success. The success of an SEO roadmap depends on how often you measure your content goals and tweak your plans according to them.
Focus on MOFU Content while creating software pages
MOFU Content helps you attract an audience at a large scale but with less purchase intent. The keywords that you’ll target here will help you attract more traffic but lesser conversions. It’s the best time to increase brand awareness and attract more people.
Use your SaaS product pages and link them with the BOFU blogs. This will help you transfer traffic from one page to another while making your target audience aware of your SaaS. You can educate this audience with the help of guides, how-tos, and other types of educational content and push them further down into the funnel.
Factors Essential for the growth of your SaaS
Now that you have a SaaS SEO Roadmap ready to implement, here’s a list of factors, or key points that you should pay attention to while developing your own plan.
- Set Clear Goals and KPIs that you’ll measure
- Work on your existing brand assets before creating new ones
- Do competitor gap analysis and your content analysis
- Build a link-building plan to accelerate your SEO efforts
My 2 Cents
When it comes to SaaS SEO, there’s no one-size-fits-all game plan. The strategy that worked for us might not work for you, black and white.
Experimentation and flexibility are key when it comes to SEO success. So don’t forget to measure your goals and strategies and be ready to tweak them through the 12 months.
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