Growing your SaaS company might be challenging, and investing in SEO might be even more challenging, particularly with the numerous SEO agencies that self-proclaim themselves but cannot deliver the best services. However, many strategies can help you grow your SaaS company organically through search engine optimization.
This article will look at the importance of SEO to your SaaS company and the strategies of doing excellent SEO to make your SaaS company’s website rank higher in search engines.
Importance of SEO for Your SaaS Company
- It helps your website rank higher in search engine results; thus, most people know your SaaS business.
- It helps drive traffic to your website. A higher ranking means more people will be compelled to click your website, thus getting more traffic, especially from your target customers.
- It helps your SaaS business outwit the competition.
- Your website appears higher with effective SEO; you will have more target customers visiting your website, thus having more customers buy or subscribe to your software.
- It helps reduce your company’s dependency on paid marketing campaigns for you to rank higher.
1. An Overview of SaaS SEO framework
SaaS SEO framework has various constituents essential for producing measurable results over time for SaaS companies. We will look at SaaS companies’ business models to understand the relationship between SEO and its application to SaaS companies.
SaaS business model
It is one model that charges SaaS customers for access to a software tool, a suite of tools, or a product for a specific purpose. SaaS companies’ products are unique since they have limited use and are not tangible.
They can modify, update, improve, or pivot to suit different industries and cases. They can also add new superior features to create new categories and markets that give them the chance to contest with SEO in the organic search space.
SaaS SEO ranking factors
Many factors influence any website’s ranking with search engines in the SEO world, and they keep on changing. Below are some of these factors that impact how your website ranks on these search engines.
1. Link metrics
SEO professionals use these metrics as one of the most efficient ways of increasing a website’s ranking. The use of link metrics employs strategies like:
- Knowing the domain authority of the page, you are linking a domain to
- Having knowledge of your site’s domain authority and its different pages.
- Choice and relevance of the anchor text that points to your website
- Internal linking to your site
- Linking another domain to your website’s domain
- Nature of the followed links vs. no-follow links, their placement on the source page, and how these links point back to your website
2. User engagement metrics
This shows your visitor’s dwell time, interaction with your content, clicks, page views, the pages they exit through, and if they click on the back button or the time, they bounce from your website. It is the most critical metric that search engines use.
If you have higher engagement quality, it means that your content is relevant, well written, and appealing, making it easy to find through a search engine search.
3. Onsite content
It includes some crucial factors, such as:
- Your title tag’s target keyword
- Your site’s page optimization for you target keywords in the website’s header navigation
- Your content’s length
- Keyword positioning in your content
- Cross-linking of website’s pages to other relevant pages
- Use of relevant keywords
The above factors are crucial to how your site ranks, and it is advisable to incorporate them.
4. Usability and technical structure
Your website’s usability and technical structure influence how search engines crawl, index, and rank your website. Ensure that you have fewer resources and quick loading pages to minimize the time that search engines crawl and index your website to increase its chances of ranking higher and faster.
2. Keyword research Strategy
Research is the most crucial part of SEO. To determine the correct keywords, you must first define your customers’ personas, the keywords they are likely to use, and their intentions. Below are some top strategies for researching the most relevant keywords.
Collect and Brainstorm keyword ideas
First, put together any relevant data that you possess on the customers you are targeting. After this, you can now brainstorm your ideas. It is advisable to brainstorm with your team members to expand on your ideas.
Start by identifying and creating categories that can help you group the keywords you will discover. These categories include the product type, solutions, service or product features, clients and industries, competitor alternatives, and integrations.
You can begin by taking keywords from all the available sources like previously targeted paid keywords, Google Search Console, ones that your team members have thought of, search tools, among others. Arrange the keywords in a different order depending on some situations; they might carry various search intents.
Besides, you can try the singular and plural versions of your discovered keywords. Do not include misspellings in your keywords, as the search engine’s superior AI will take care of the spelling mistakes.
Research search intent manually
Once you have your ideal keywords list, search for them in search engines. Ensure you use encrypted browsing to eliminate browser and local details influence on the results. Analyze the top results to get an idea of what search engines offer their users.
You can use the search intents for particular keywords such as research, awareness, or transactional to develop better keywords that your target customers will most likely search.
Long tail and general keywords
Long-tail keywords are the ones that have more terms, and you target them to what your target customer will search for, while general keywords only have few terms and are broader in what they can imply.
It is advisable to focus on the long-tail keywords first, as they tend to drive conversion. Besides, you can create a content library under a more generic term.
Research keyword data
Here, you dig further to have an idea of the type of objective decisions you can come up with. It is advisable to include the following main data points to source the keyword data. They are the search volume of a given keyword in a given time, difficulty, ranking, ranking URL, and rich snippet result.
Organize your keyword data
Here, you organize your keyword data into relevant categories. You can do this by using a spreadsheet and organize it into categories.
Target keyword list and mapping
At this stage, you run through the keywords and choose those to keep and those to get rid of. Remove those that you feel are irrelevant or those that are almost the same in the same category.
Keyword usage
In this step, you decide where you will use your ideal keywords on your website. It is advisable to put them on the structural and content pages.
Categorize the keywords
It is a necessary step as it helps you find good targets and make selections. Use an outstanding category, then create subcategories that allow you to choose some keywords for your main category.
Mapping the keywords
Here, you complete the keyword research process by mapping out the relevant keywords you will use on your website. Map them to the right pages on your website, giving more weight to the pages you wish to be fully optimized; then, you examine your website’s search engine ranking based on the various keywords for your website.
META, page titles, and headings
Carefully produce and manage your page titles as they are very crucial on on-page ranking in SEO. Add a target keyword before your title tag. Ensure you keep the text on the title to a minimum to minimize dilution chances.
Choose meta descriptions and titles with a short number of characters as they increase your chances of ranking. Make sure that you include a target keyword organically in the page heading.
3. Technical Structure Strategy
Here, you should crawl the website, testing all the functionality features, and check for bugs or any other issues that might not be working. After determining them, find an appropriate way to solve them.
Crawling tools
There are many tools for crawling your SaaS website that is available and makes the crawling work easier. These tools include DeepCrawl, Scream Frog, and Ahrefs, among others.
Top priority technical issues
Knowing the most common issues that must be fixed immediately and those that can be fixed later is very necessary. The issues that you should begin with are those that block the functionality of your website.
These top issues include 404s, loading time, responsiveness and flexibility with different devices, duplicate content, thin content, JavaScript-blocking navigation, missing Sitemap.xml file, and missing Robots.txt file, among others.
Re-crawling and maintaining an appropriate technical structure
You need to check if all the changes you have made are live and if there are new issues that have come up, so re-crawl your website. While re-crawling, ensure that you maintain a relevant website technical structure.
4. Content strategy
Your visitors are ultimately seeking content, so it is very important to provide content that will bridge your SaaS company’s service or product and the visitor. An excellent content strategy forms the roadmap that allows you to communicate on a deeper level with your target customers.
It is vital to know the content that your site’s visitors will be looking for. Here, we will look at how content can help you improve your search engine optimization strategy.
Below is a content strategy functional framework that will greatly help you optimize your content and rank higher in search results.
Content Organization
How you structure and organize content on your SaaS website is very crucial for your visitors. Every user expects your site to have well-organized content. Many search engines rely on user engagement as a factor to rank search results, meaning that if your content is well organized, the search engine will reward you with a higher ranking.
Content production strategy
After ensuring you have well-organized content on your SaaS company’s website, there is still the need for content production regularly. Ensure you employ tactics and strategies that will allow you to produce relevant content for ranking higher and provide value to your target audience.
Content production plan
It is a plan that allows the SaaS company to decide and select the best content that they need to publish on their website in a systematic order that gives priority to the most important content. It is advisable to create content that contains the long-tail keywords first as they rank easily. As you gain ranking, you can then incorporate the other keywords.
As you continue to produce relevant content over time, the search engines will note this and reward you with a higher ranking in search results. Another way to realize the most searched keywords is by using paid marketing ads as they show you the most searched for keywords. You can then use these keywords organically when producing your content.
5. PR and Link Building Strategy
In every SEO journey, link building is the most difficult to do efficiently and is often the misunderstood part. You can use many strategies to build useful links that will increase traffic to your website. They include:
Strategic partnerships
If your platform fails to integrate with other tools directly, you can opt to use them together with other tools for the site’s visitors to have a great experience. Create amazing content for similar companies, then reach out to them and propose that they include your site’s link in the article you have created and post it on their social media platforms.
Integration partnerships
If your services or products integrate seamlessly with other tools, it would be wise to reach out to your tool’s companies. You can then propose that they add your services or product for integration with their directory.
Your site’s main blog is great for this strategy as you can include many links to your site’s pages. When you interlink these pages to your main blog, these pages rank better when building links to your blog articles.
As we have seen above, these are the main strategies that most SaaS companies employ to help their sites rank better. If you employ these strategies effectively, you will get rewarded with a higher ranking in search results, gain more traffic, convert your visitors into customers, and ultimately achieve success in your SaaS company.
John Novak
Tiga Creative
