SaaS SEO: How SaaS Companies Can Get 10x Faster SEO Results
- Published On:November 9, 2022
Last Updated:October 3, 2023
12 min read
Pradeep Savio
In this article, we will provide a comprehensive SaaS SEO guide and discuss the key considerations and tactics that SaaS brands should keep in mind when developing their SEO strategy.
The Global market share for SaaS brands is estimated to grow from USD 272.0 billion in 2018 to USD 628 billion by 2023 at a Compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) of 18%.
“Page one results attract a remarkable 95% of all the search traffic”
In this growing market and increasing competition, an estimated 92% of SaaS companies fail within 3 years despite growth and funding.
How can you avoid being one of them?
In order to avoid being a part of the 92%, you need to work up on your SEO, and to help you with—.
Here’s your complete Guide to SaaS SEO.
Ready? Let’s go.
SaaS SEO is a type of search engine optimization specifically for software-as-a-service companies. The goal is to increase visibility and organic traffic from search results. SaaS SEO includes on-page optimization, technical optimization, link building, and content marketing.
SaaS SEO is the process of generating more organic traffic from sites like Google, Bing, and Yahoo to your SaaS brand.
Githlab ranks for 3024 keywords generating an estimated 11000 sessions a month. All thanks to their SEO and organic traffic.
It’s estimated Google processes approximately 63,000 search queries every second.
People are searching for queries in order to get their problems solved. Solving their queries by providing value to them creates potential business opportunities. As a matter of fact, 68% of all online experiences start with a search engine.
So in order to attract the right traffic to your website is really important and SEO plays a major role in it. Right traffic gives you an opportunity to convert them into happy customers.
Especially for SaaS brands, SEO is ultimately important because there is a lack of physical products so the only way for you to reach out to people is through online channels.
According to stats SEO leads have a 14.6% close rate.
Source: firstpagesage
As compared to any other marketing method organic SEO generates the highest number of leads.
A higher number of leads decreases the cost per acquisition.
Valued at $174 billion and one of the most successful e-commerce platforms. Shopify grew its revenue by almost 110% in the first few months of 2021. Every month Shopify gets 3.5 million organic monthly visitors from Google and ranks for more than 1.1 million keywords.
This could be done because they follow the three fundamental pillars of SEO which are explained below.
Let’s get into each one of these parts in detail.
92.42% of keywords get ten monthly searches or fewer.
The relevance of the right keyword in SEO is as important as the role of marketing when building a greatly successful product.
Even if you build the best product in the world but if people don’t need it or know it then it’s a failure.
Start with 5 to 6 keywords related to your topic and then we will analyze whether those particular keywords are what people are searching for.
Targeting a volume of more than 1000 search queries per month could be a good strategy.
In the process, you will easily be able to find other related or suggested keywords that people are searching for.
0.78% of Google searches click on results from the 2nd page.
Since the traffic that goes to the second page of Google is so less. This means that most of the traffic lands on page one and this means that analyzing the right keyword according to your topic is really really crucial.
0.16% of the most popular keywords are responsible for 60.67% of all searches.
You can analyze this by checking how much search volume a particular keyword has on average over a month. Search volume with more than 1000 search queries per month is good to start with.
Different types of keywords have different search intents. In order to target the right kind of keywords, and satisfy the search, you need to understand the different types of keywords.
13.53% of keywords with ten searches per month or fewer consist of only one or two words
Source: semrush
70.87% of keywords with more than 10,000 monthly searches consist of only one or two words.
Source: semrush
Keywords are useful only when they’re accompanied by content. To create content that attracts the right kind of audience, and brings targeted traffic to your website, you need to understand certain things.
At Saaslinko, We start with following SaaS keyword research framework to get the maximum ROI in short time:
1) Alternatives to ‘X’ – You talk about alternatives to your competitor
2) Pricing of ‘X’ – You talk about alternatives to your competitor
3) Reviews of ‘X’ – You write reviews about your competitor by aggregating from various sites like G2, Capterra
4) Comparison posts: this framework objectively compares your product to your top competitors
5) Best product or service lists: this framework helps searchers discover the best products in the category they’re searching for.
6) Product or Service Use Cases: this framework helps searchers figure out how to solve a problem they have and presents your product or service as a potential solution.
After this, the articles that would be on page 1 and page 2 of google, we would re-write them (into the best articles on the internet) and secure more backlinks on them, so we consistently stay at the top.
These signups will never dry, even if we just get some backlinks. This is the Content Marketing for you. It scales slow but gives consistent results.
Content is one of the most important strategies or investments for a SaaS brand. People have problems and in order to solve them, they are looking for solutions.
Your role as a brand is to solve their problems by providing them value through your content. Educating them with your valuable content and gaining trust that your solutions and services are valuable.
It’s a way to make your audience believe in you and trust you.
After gaining trust and providing them value then you can think about a business transaction.
The only way to reach your ideal customer is through content.
Content can turn you into a SaaS giant as 98% of the SaaS giants create quality blogs.
Source:Neilpatel.com
Gusto is a role model to prove that blogging and long-form content are still relevant.
With metrics like,-
Blogging has been one of the driving factors of Gusto’s insane traffic. It gets around 1.09 million visits annually.
Gusto appears on rank #1 often.
E-A-T of Google can help you do the same.
E-A-T stands for Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. This basically means Google’s algorithm uses these parameters in order to rank a page to #1 .
In order to reach #1, you need to create content that matches E-A-T. This helps Google rank which website is more trustworthy or can better solve the queries of the searcher. In order to leverage this target your content around these three things.
According to QuickSprout, domain trust/authority represents 30% of Google’s ranking algorithm.
Creating authentic content leads to 97% more links to your website.
Here are some things you need to keep in mind while creating content.
Search intent is the probable reason or a problem with which a query is asked. Asking questions is one of the best ways to figure out the search intent of your viewer.
Think about questions like-
The buyer persona is a representation of an ideal customer through data, surveys, interviews, stats, and research. It’s done to understand your buyer’s pain points and thought process. It’s a way of targeting people who need your product, who are willing to pay, and who are capable of subscribing.
It’s one of the great ways to delight your customer so that the customer becomes a permanent user. A delighted customer brings in more people through referral and marketing.
Start with basics. Identify who your target segment is, demographic, age, countries, income level, industry, companies, occupation, education, pain points, needs, and interests.
With the help of data, stats, surveys, and talking to your real customer, you develop a general and broad idea of the customer.
‘Questioning is going to get you where beliefs can’t ‘
Free tools to get you started with creating a buyer persona.
We’ve already discussed how to incorporate keyword and content in your SaaS SEO strategy, it’s time to talk about Backlinks!
Backlinks act as a vote of confidence for your site. Backlinks are other sites pointing to your site which establish trust for your website. This not only establishes trust for your website but it helps your website reach #1 on Google.
According to stats, 43.7% of the top-ranking pages have some reciprocal links.
Some of the biggest SaaS giants have millions of backlinks to their blogs and that drives them immense traffic. Gusto has 2.3 million backlinks to their blogs and gives them $13M worth of organic traffic.
Source:contentwriters.com
The following chart shows you the more backlinks the higher the ranking on Google. Having more quality links to your websites establishes you as a domain expert and authority.
We at Saaslinko helps you in building relevant high authority backlinks with proven strategy.
These SEO tools will help you get started with SaaS SEO easily.
source:econsultancy
source:section
The three fundamentals are what companies like Gusto, Hubspot, Shopify, and many more use to rank #1 and appear on featured snippets.
For your SaaS website to rank #1, you need to follow these strategies but also execute them wisely.
SaaS SEO is a long-term game and will surely take patience. But once you establish your SaaS brand to #1 rank on Google there is no going back.
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Senior content writer, Pradeep Savio is a graduate of The British College Of Journalism. Having clinched an award for the best in class for journalism, he launched his career as an editor for online news magazines like Wired, Tech Brief and Digit Magazine. After 3+ years, he decided to pivot and focus on SEO content writing. Working as a freelance specialist in Saas SEO content articles. He is highly experienced and brings with him deep insights into the Tech industry and world of start-ups. Pradeep takes pride in content with in-depth research and results. Beyond content writing, he enjoys music and playing the guitar, sometimes even writing an occasional song or two.