SaaS Technical SEO: The Ultimate Guide to Boost Your Rankings(2023)

Technical SEO helps improve search engine visibility and user experience for SaaS companies, leading to more qualified traffic and conversions. Here’s how to do it + checklist.

The first five organic results account for 67.6% of all the clicks, a report by Zero Limit Web declared. That means if you’re not ranking on the top five search results for a query, you might get more impressions but no traffic. 

To get more traffic, you need to work on 3 things, On-Page SEO, Off-Page SEO, and Technical SEO. Most SaaS brands optimize their website for On Page, and Off-Page SEO, but often forget the third aspect of an SEO strategy. SaaS Technical SEO. 

If your website isn’t prepared for Tech SEO, your visitors will come and leave your blog giving you an increase in the bounce rate. To reduce this bounce rate, and get actual traffic, SaaS Technical SEO is important. 

In this ultimate guide towards increasing your traffic and ranking with Tech SEO, you’ll get the best tips and practices to improve your rankings, and get better results.

Why Technical SEO is important for SaaS brands 

Technical SEO for SaaS is different from SEO for other business models. Let’s first see the difference between SaaS SEO and traditional SEO. 

SaaS SEO focuses mostly on goals and revenue. The customer cycle of SaaS brands is longer and requires more funnel-related content to meet its target audience and then take them further into the funnel. The goal of SaaS brands is to nurture and generate leads for their product.

Creating long-form content, across the sales funnel, to win the trust of their target audience is the key differentiating factor between SaaS SEO and other brands’ SEO. SaaS brands don’t just target keywords that are general, the keywords targeted by them are specific and searched by only their target audience.   

But when SaaS brands don’t optimize the technical p[art of their website, they lose out on traffic and leads as most of the visitors leave if they’re unable to navigate through the website, or if the page shows a 404 error, etc. That’s why it’s important to focus on Tech SEO as well.  

Technical SEO Elements List + How to optimize them to maximize traffic 

We’ve compiled here a list of all the elements you need to keep in mind while optimizing for Tech SEO.

Page loading time

Your website’s page loading time directly impacts your UX and conversion rate. If your website doesn’t load between 1 to 3 seconds, then the chances of that visitor leaving your site increases by 32%. The higher your page loading time is the higher will be the bounce rate which will lead to a lower ranking. 

To improve your page loading time, then first hop on to Google Page Insights and enter your website URL to check its speed both on Mobile and Desktop. The average load time for a mobile-optimized website is 15.3 seconds, but most of your visitors will leave only after 5 seconds of clicking on the URL. So, how do you make the visitors stay?

You can improve your page loading time by changing your hosting provider, compressing and optimizing your images, and reducing the number of redirect pages you have. To read more on improving your page loading speed, go here 9 Quick Ways to Improve Page Loading Speed. 

Web design and responsiveness

You might be wondering why web design and responsiveness made their way to the list. Web design might not be a direct ranking factor, but Google has time and again stressed its importance. 

Responsive Web Design means creating a website that’s well optimized for many devices, like mobile phones, tablets, and computer screens. Most buyers make a purchase on their mobile phones, so it’s important to create a website that caters to all devices and audiences. 

Google gives preference to sites that can make a visitor stay for long. This clearly implies that in order to rank on SERPS, you need to create pages that are easily navigable, have a clean design, and are optimized for mobile first.  

Schema markup

Schema Markup enables Search engines to analyze and understand the content on your pages easily. Schema is just HTML that contains a vocabulary of structured data. 

As you can see, these pages have a snippet that shows the visitor the information they’ll get inside the blog. 

When you use Schema for SEO, you start featuring snippets of your blog. If Search Engines are able to understand your content, then you might get featured for snippets that show a part of your content is the answer to a searcher’s query. This increases your chances of that visitor clicking and viewing your page. 

Link building strategies

Internal and External Links are a great way to boost your rankings. But links from reputed and relevant sites will only help you achieve that. 

Internal Links are the links you add to your content, like a blog post. While external links are other pages linking back to your page. Both of these link-building strategies will help you boost your rankings as Google considers them to be a sign that your site is credible. But how do you build those links?

There are various ways to build credible links, one of them being outsourcing to a Link Building Agency. We at SaaSLinko help you build credible, relevant, and reputed links that build your authority in your niche and help you increase your organic traffic significantly. You can read our case studies here and book a free strategy call with our team of experts. 

Now going back to saas link-building strategies. There are multiple ways of building links- 

• Guest Posting
• Expert Quotes
• Featuring on Podcasts
• Creating trend reports 
• Product Embeds, etc. 

Strategic link building can do wonders for your website if done correctly. You can try out these link-building methods, or book a call with our SEO team today!

Meta elements

Title tags, and Meta Descriptions, are an important part of your Tech SEO strategy. 

With Title Tags, you just have 55 characters to make a difference, make sure you’ve your primary keyword inserted. To change/find the title page of an existing page, click on Page Source by right-clicking on your mouse, and searching for this <title> </title>, or by simply checking the title of your page in the SERPs. Make sure you stay within the character limit to positively impact your SEO rankings.    

Meta Descriptions affect both your Click through rates as well as your SERP rankings. Meta Descriptions are descriptions that you see after the title tag or in some cases URL of a blog. It generally contains your main keyword, along with some LSIs to improve your chances of ranking. This description can contain a small snippet of what your post is about or can have the main bullet points discussed on the page. 

How To Audit your website for Technical SEO issues

Why an SEO Audit is important + Which Tips to keep in mind

“A technical audit ensures that search engines can crawl and discover – and crucially index and rank your most important pages. What you’ll want to ensure is that when a search engine is crawling your SaaS site it knows and understands what the most important pages to you (and your users) are.” Kyle, Common Ground 

A technical Audit is the first step you should consider conducting on a regular basis. For SaaS brands, a technical audit means an in-depth analysis of your website’s performance and security. By performing an audit, you can easily identify and work on any weaknesses or threats that can harm the security of your website, and ranking potential. 

A technical audit also helps you understand where your efforts are lacking, and how you can improve them.  A technical SEO audit is an excellent way to start your SEO project on the right foot with an understanding of your website’s current position. The information you gather from a technical SEO audit can help you improve your site’s rankings and traffic faster by identifying opportunities for optimization. 

The results of a technical audit can help you make improvements that are likely to have a significant impact on your website’s performance and rankings. 

Factors to consider while performing a Technical SEP Audit

“While there are many different factors that can be audited, some key points that SaaS brands should pay attention to include website speed, uptime, and security. By taking the time to conduct a thorough technical website audit, SaaS brands can ensure that their site is performing at its best and take corrective action if necessary.” Jamie, Director of Straight Up Search.

While performing a Tech SEO audit, you need to keep in mind some key factors that are often missed by SaaS brands. Factors like,-

• Website Speed
• Uptime 
• Security 
• No -indexed pages 
• Broken Links
• Poor UX
• Tags, and Backlinks
• Outdated Content 

“The advantage of a technical audit is finding and solving the errors that affect or could potentially affect the website’s SEO. Brands should pay attention to technical factors including whether the tags are appropriately assigned, external links are directed to healthy websites, internal link structures are intact, and outdated content is dealt with.” Mariusz Michalowski, Community Manager at spacelift.io 

Tips to Make the best out of a Technical SEO Audit 

SEO is not complex, but a single mistake can cost you the total efforts you put in. So, here are some tips you can implement while conducting an audit.

1. Hire a team of qualified SEO experts to make the most out of your SEO audit. 
2. Make sure that you find out all the outdated content present on your website, and replica it with fresh, useful, and relevant content.
3. Use a Content Analysis tool like Semrush to audit your website content and pages.
4. Make sure your internal and external links are relevant, and search engine friendly.

Important Elements of a Technical SEO Audit 

• Duplicate Content

When Google finds content similar to some other content on your website, it becomes unable to crawl these pages. This leads to confusion as to which content on yours should be placed higher on the SERPs. 

To avoid this type of confusion, make sure you remove all the un-useful and duplicated content on your website that harms your rankings. 

“While you work on the duplicate pages, adding a no-index, or no-follow meta tag will stop search engine crawlers from indexing that page–helping you save some valuable ranking juice for your key pages and buying you time to regroup.” Kyle, Common Ground.

• Pages Missing Canonical Tags 

Canonical Tags are used to differentiate between original and real sources of the content present on your website. It’s a meta tag that search engines like Google give you to control the number of duplicate pages on your website. 

Canonical Tags are sometimes automatically added to the blog or need to be added to the blog by the author itself. This becomes true in the case of Medium, where canonical tags are automatically attached.  Add canonical tags to content on your website to avoid duplication and repetition, which can harm your SERPs. 

While conducting an audit you need to check, if- 

• The Canonical Tags used are correctly, or not? 
• The tags are confused or mixed up between different pages
• Similar pages have also been indexed or not. 
• Robots.txt

“There’s a lot that goes into creating and maintaining a successful website, and one important aspect is ensuring that search engines can properly crawl and index your site. This is where the Robots.txt file comes in – it’s a text file that tells search engine crawlers how to behave when visiting your website.”  Mariusz Michalowski, Community Manager at spacelift.io 

Robots.txt files are created to tell the spiders how to crawl your website. If the search engine crawlers aren’t able to index your site properly, then your chances of ranking decrease to a significant level. 

Robots.txt files need to be handled with care, and there are some very common mistakes SaaS brands often make, that you should avoid,-

• Robots.txt files can often block all access to your site. This means that the spiders aren’t able to index your site at all. This can negatively impact your rankings.
• Brands don’t update these files often. If your website is changing or updating, then these files need to be changed or updated as well. 
• These files have a very specific format, and wrong formatting can often lead to you losing control of the action that takes place on your site.
• Brands often use the wrong root directory. 
• Robots.txt files don’t often contain all the necessary information like your URL, Content, type of site, etc. 

“Some brands do have internal documentation to help the marketing team navigate the robots.txt code, but most ignore it. One person creates the file, and everyone goes with it, which is a disaster in making when that person quits the organization.” Mariusz Michalowski, Community Manager at spacelift.io 

“In addition, the negligence toward case sensitivity and the ignorance to block the crawlers from accessing the staging site are common mistakes I have observed during the years in the industry.” Pushkar Sinha, the acting Digital Marketing Manager at FirstPrinciples,

• Sitemap

“Google has stopped obeying NoIndex rules in the Robots.txt file and I still see that a lot. Also, it’s common best practice to include a link to the XML sitemap – again all about illuminating the most important landing pages.” Kyle, Common Ground

A Sitemap tells Google about your priority pages aka which pages you want to rank for early on. You can add in your indexed landing pages a Sitemap to ensure that they show up for the optimized keywords. 

• Alternative Text

Alternative texts are the best way to increase your chances of ranking on Google, as you can optimize your images for certain targeted keywords a week. Alt text was first used as a way to help visually impaired visitors understand the intent of the image or the purpose of the image, but right now it’s also considered a ranking factor. 

Bonus Trick to improve your websites Technical SEO

Now, we’re at the end of the blog. It’s time to arm you with our bonus tricks that the team at SaaSLinko uses to bring more traffic to our client’s website. 

1. Make sure your website is Mobile Optimized.
2. Use E-A-T to create content for higher rankings and conversions.
3. Make sure there are no blocked pages, and your site can be reached via the sitemap.
4. Make sure your URLs are consistent

Here you’ve at your control a whole Technical SEO guide that will help you optimize your website and get higher rankings on search engines.