SaaS SEO is the process of optimizing a Software as a Service company’s website and online presence to improve its visibility and attract relevant organic traffic.

SaaS SEO differs from traditional SEO in that it targets different stages of the customer funnel that are unique to SaaS companies. This includes targeting keywords and focusing on content that correspond with potential customers’ awareness, consideration, and decision stages as they choose and use a SaaS product.

SaaS SEO, in contrast to traditional SEO, also focuses on optimizing pricing pages, free trials, demo sign-ups, and other conversion-oriented elements to entice users to perform desired actions, like making a purchase or engaging with the software.

SEO for SaaS businesses is fairly unique compared to other businesses: the sales cycle is surprisingly fast, with an average of just 40 days for SaaS products priced below $5,000. Meaning you don’t have a lot of room to nurture your prospects.

The biggest challenge in SaaS marketing, however, is arguably about SaaS lead generation. SaaS SEO remains one of the most effective ways to generate more SaaS prospects, and in this guide, we will learn how.

First, we will discuss the right mindset in implementing SEO for SaaS.

 

Building 7-Figure Companies With SEO

Learn how founders, CEOs, execs and thought leaders use SEO and Content Marketing to grow B2B, SaaS, technology and startup companies from zero to 7 and 8-figure revenue.

How Incapsula Doubles Their Business Year Over Year With SEO, Content Marketing and CRO

Content Marketing and SEO are the main customer acquisition channels that helped Incapsula achieve:

• Market Capitalization: $1.5 billion
• Protects: 5,000,000+ websites
• #1 customer acquisition channel: Content Marketing and SEO
• Year over year growth: 100%

Learn more

How Content Marketing and SEO Helped BuildFire Become a 7-Figure ARR SaaS Company

Content marketing, the first page rankings on Google and SaaS SEO helped BuildFire to grow to where they are at right now:

• Revenue: 7 Figure Company
• Customers: 1000, Powering over 10,000+ apps in the App Store
• Main customer acquisition channel: organic SEO
• Organic Traffic: 140,000 visitors/month

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How SEO Helped Time Doctor Become a 7 Figure SaaS Company and Generate 20,000 Trials Per Month

SaaS SEO and content marketing are the only lead generation channels for Time Doctor and helped them to generate:

• Revenue: 7 Figure Company
• Customer Acquisition: 20,000 trials/month, 7000 customers/month
• Main customer acquisition channel: organic SEO
• Revenue growth: 10% MoM

Learn more

 

Content is Definitely King, If Not Everything

For SEO in the SaaS industry, focusing on producing content with compounding effects over time is essential. Long-term benefits can be significant for businesses that consistently create valuable and relevant content. Content development is essential if it is to meet readers’ long-term needs as well as immediate SEO requirements. This strategy makes sure that even when search engine rankings change, the content will still be interesting and helpful. SaaS companies can built a loyal audience over time and establish themselves as reliable information sources by investing in persistent efforts in content creation.

First, we have to emphasize that nowadays, SEO is all about a good, if not excellent, SaaS content marketing strategy.

In the past, we can get away with aggressive optimizations like keyword stuffing, SEO cloaking, and other tactics to rank in a matter of months, if not weeks.

Nowadays, however, both Google and the customers are getting smarter: Google, with its various algorithm updates and especially the Google RankBrain can now better recognize content that will be valuable for the respective audience—and those that simply won’t—. Rankbrain, Google’s A.I. machine learning software, can learn which content that is bounced immediately, and the ones that are actually consumed with significant dwell time.

On the other hand, customers are also smarter. They can immediately recognize content that is not professionally made and sound scammy. With so much information and content available on the internet, some of your visitors can even recognize duplicate content.

So, to succeed in SaaS SEO in 2024, there’s no shortcut to actually having relevant, valuable content published regularly. Both quantity and quality are equally important here. While this might mean bad news for some of us, this will ultimately create a better environment for everyone: the ones that actually know about their niche wins, while those who are only looking for quick bucks will be naturally eliminated.

Thankfully, content is already an integral part of the SEO strategy for SaaS companies. However, this will also mean that you will compete with more content.

 

Even then, simply publishing good content regularly won’t cut it. There are over 4 million blog posts published daily. So, it’s getting harder and harder to get noticed nowadays. Think of good, relevant content as a prerequisite to successful SEO for SaaS companies.

On the other hand, if our content didn’t get noticed, we can’t get backlinks, which are also a very important ranking factor in any SaaS SEO campaign. Promoting our content is just as important as the content development process, if not more important.

The SEO SaaS tactics and strategies we will discuss below will be based on these facts: publishing good content regularly and promoting them properly.

 

Important Ranking Signals in 2024

To be successful in SaaS SEO, we have to understand the SEO ranking factors and adjust our tactics to leverage this knowledge.

Google’s search algorithm is always evolving, and thus the ranking signals have evolved over the years.

However, it’s important to understand that Google’s (and the other search engines’) main aim is to provide better results for the audience. Understanding this fact can help us understand that SEO is ultimately about optimizing our SaaS site for the human audience, and not for the search engine bots.

With that being said, here are 5 of the most important ranking signals in 2024:

 

1. Technical Factors

There are three key technical factors that are especially important for SEO: secure and reliable site (including HTTPS utilization), mobile-responsiveness, and optimal site load speed. In short: having a site that is up to par with today’s standards.

This is fairly basic, but also very important. If your site isn’t perceived as secure by Google, you won’t rank. If you get a high bounce rate because your site is slow to load, you also won’t rank and your SaaS SEO strategy won’t be successful.

SEO performance depends on optimizing websites for Google’s crawling and indexing, as this has a direct impact on how search engines perceive and rank your website. Here are a few reasons why this optimization is necessary:

1. Improved visibility: Potential visitors can find your website more easily when search engines efficiently crawl and index it. Search engines can more easily display relevant results to users when your site is properly optimized. This is because search engines can better comprehend the content and structure of your website.

2. Enhanced user experience: A website that has been optimized for accessibility makes sure that users can find what they’re looking for with ease. You can give your visitors a seamless experience by making technical improvements to your website, such as optimizing the speed of your pages, making them mobile-friendly, and using proper URL structures. Increased conversions, longer visit times, and greater engagement can result from this favorable user experience.

3. Better search rankings: Search engine results pages (SERPs) display your website’s ranking based on Google’s crawling and indexing process. Through the optimization of technical elements such as robots.txt files, canonical URLs, structured data markup, and XML sitemaps, you can inform search engines about the quality and relevancy of your content. This can increase your website’s exposure and search engine rankings while driving more organic traffic.

4. Indexation of all relevant content: Search engines will properly index all of the important pages and content on your website if you optimize it. Your online visibility may be limited if certain pages or sections are not crawlable or accessible. As a result, they might not show up in search results. You can improve your website’s chances of having all of your important content indexed and ranked properly by making technical optimizations.

5. Future-proofing your website: Search engine algorithms are likely to place more weight on technical aspects as they develop. You can stay ahead of these changes and keep your competitive edge by actively optimizing your website for crawling and indexing. Maintaining a high search engine ranking and being able to adjust to algorithm changes will require regular technical monitoring and improvement.

 

2. Domain Age and overall authority

Yes, age matters. More than 55% of the sites that are ranked on the top 10 spots of Google SERP are at least three years old.

Obviously, there’s not much you can do about this if your site is fairly new, besides probably purchasing an old domain and make it your own.

You can, however, optimize other rankings factors like having more high-quality backlinks to improve your authority.

 

3. Content Optimization

We have discussed content and its relations to SEO for SaaS above, and how optimized your content is both for human readers and for Google’s algorithm will be an important ranking factor. Keyword optimization still matters, although Google is getting smarter in detecting keyword stuffing. Generally, if you use your keywords naturally and use semantically-related keywords, you are good to go.

The content must also be relevant according to the user’s search intent. Different keywords will relate to different intents:

• Navigational: the user is aiming to find a specific site, often related to brand keywords
• Informational: the user is looking to get an answer to a specific question.
• Investigational: the user is comparing different products or searching for a product
• Transactional: the user is looking to make a specific purchase

We have to develop content for each of these search intents.

The goal of content optimization is to provide better information for the human audience: focus on being relevant and valuable, and include your keywords naturally. Also, focus on being a thought leader for a certain topic.

 

4. User Experience

User experience metrics are now important ranking signals, thanks to the introduction of Google RankBrain. With the A.I.-based algorithm, Google can recognize whether a search result is relevant for the users. For example, top-ranking content that is not getting a high enough click-through rate (CTR) will be deemed irrelevant, and thus demoted.

There are three main user experience metrics to focus on while optimizing SEO for SaaS:

• Click-through Rate (CTR): how many people are clicking on your link when it appeared in the search results.
• Bounce Rate: the number of people who immediately exit your site after just a few seconds. This will be perceived by Google that your site is not relevant to the search query
• Dwell Time: how long the user stays on your site after they made the visit. This will often be related to the relevancy and quality of your content.

 

5. Link Profile

Yes, backlinks are still very important for SaaS SEO in 2024, although some things have changed. In a nutshell, when a site links to your site, Google will perceive your site as more relevant.

However, while in the past it was more about quantity: the more links, the merrier, nowadays it’s more about quality. Google will check whether your site is linked by sites that are:

1. already relevant and
2. related to your niche and keywords.

For example, if you are a site about digital marketing, getting a link from a high-quality golf site is deemed irrelevant.

An efficient way to increase backlinks to your website and establish its authority is to incorporate “link magnets” into your content. Infographics, white papers, and in-depth guides are examples of high-value, link-worthy resources that readily draw backlinks from other websites. You can establish yourself as an authority in your industry and entice other websites to link back to your content by creating and sharing these valuable tools. This raises your website’s search engine rankings and attracts high-quality backlinks that can increase website traffic.

6. Social Signals

While Google themselves have declared that social shares are not counted as inbound links—and thus not a direct ranking signal—, the more people that share your site, the higher the chance of getting these links.

We can see that the top-ranking pages on Google usually have a lot of shares, so getting more social shares can significantly help in improving your ranking.

 

How to Develop a SaaS SEO Strategy in 2024

Based on the factors discussed above, here are the key optimizations we should focus on to succeed in SEO as a SaaS business:

 

1. Optimizing Your Content

The first step in developing a robust SaaS SEO strategy is optimizing your content. To find high-volume, relevant keywords that your target audience is searching for, you must conduct keyword research. You can raise your website’s organic traffic and search engine rankings by carefully choosing which keywords to use in blog posts, landing pages, and product descriptions.

As we have discussed above, the most important key to success in SaaS SEO is your content— both in quantity and quality. Here are the key areas to focus on when optimizing your content for SEO:

• Above all, focus on optimizing for the human audience: delivering value and relevance. Don’t focus solely on pleasing the search engine algorithms
• Proper keyword research is very important. In general, you should aim for three things:
  • Keywords that are relevant for both your SaaS business and your audience
  • Keywords with high enough search volume (will vary depending on your industry’s size, etc.)
  • Keywords with manageable competition
• Use the topic clusters approach, where a more in-depth, longer “pillar” page is targeting the main keywords, and other, shorter content pieces are covering related keywords. All these pages are linked to the main page. For example, the pillar page can be in-depth content about “digital marketing”, while smaller articles can cover “SEO”, “social media marketing”, and more. This approach can help in building your credibility and authority over a certain topic, which is Google’s preference nowadays.
• When approaching keyword density, the important thing is to include your keywords naturally for the human audience. This will include using semantically-related keywords (LSI keywords) to develop more natural content to help your SaaS SEO strategy be more effective.

Here are some tips for creating interesting, informative, and visually appealing content that will effectively optimize your content:

1. Conduct thorough keyword research: Determine the relevant keywords and phrases that members of your target audience are probably going to search firstly. To find low-competition, high-volume keywords to include in your content, use keyword research tools.

2. Create valuable and readable content: Focus on producing content that provides genuine value to your audience. Offer in-depth information, insights, and solutions to their pain points. When it comes to creating readable content, you should avoid using complex jargon. Instead, use words that are commonly known to readers. Doing so, if you face any difficulty, then consider getting help from an AI reworder to quickly simplify the content.

3. Craft compelling headlines: Grab attention with catchy and compelling headlines. Your headline should be concise, clear, and provide a glimpse of what readers can expect from your content. Incorporate relevant keywords naturally to boost search engine visibility.

4. Optimize meta tags and descriptions: Pay attention to optimizing meta tags and descriptions for each page or blog post. These elements provide a brief summary of your content to search engines and users. Include relevant keywords while maintaining readability and enticing users to click through.

5. Focus on user experience: Ensure your website is user-friendly and easy to navigate. Optimize the site’s loading speed, ensure mobile responsiveness, and improve overall user experience. Search engines prioritize websites that offer a smooth browsing experience.

 

2. On-page Technical SEO for SaaS

The second step in developing a robust SaaS SEO strategy is focusing on on-page technical SEO. To make your website more search engine friendly, you should optimize its headings, meta tags, structure, and URLs. Improved user experience and higher search engine rankings also depend on using schema markup and making sure your website loads quickly and is mobile-friendly.

On-page technical SEO for SaaS involves optimizing various elements of your website to make it more search engine friendly and improve user experience. Here are some key areas to focus on:

1. Optimize headings: Use relevant keywords in your headings (H1, H2, etc.) to help search engines understand the content and structure of your pages.
2. URL structure: Ensure that your URLs are concise, descriptive, and include relevant keywords. Avoid using dynamic parameters or unnecessary characters.
3. Website security: Implement HTTPS encryption to secure user data and improve trustworthiness. Regularly update software and plugins to protect against vulnerabilities.
4. User experience optimization: Focus on providing a smooth and intuitive user experience. This includes optimizing navigation, improving readability, and ensuring clear calls-to-action.
5. Conduct regular website audits: Use tools like SEMrush, Moz, or Screaming Frog to perform comprehensive audits of your website. These tools can help identify technical issues, broken links, duplicate content, and other areas for improvement.

There are two main goals of technical SEO for SaaS:

• Optimizing your site so that it’s easily crawled and indexed by Google and other search engines
• Improving your site’s user experience from mobile responsiveness to fast loading speed to other factors that will keep your audience on your site longer.

Technical SEO optimization for SaaS can be a very broad (and deeply technical) subject, but this checklist by Search Engine Journal—designed for non-technical marketers— can help you.

In the SaaS niche, technical optimization is arguably even more important, since all your competitors are already tech-savvy with properly functioning websites.

 

3. Optimizing For Rich Snippet

The third step in developing a robust SaaS SEO strategy is optimizing for rich snippets. Rich snippets offer extra details, like star ratings, images, or price information, in search engine results. These details can improve the visibility of your listing and increase click-through rates. Search engine optimization and the use of schema markup can help to improve the likelihood that a rich snippet of your website will show up in search results.

Relatively new to Google is how they now include rich snippets in some queries. According to SEMRush, almost 12 % of all search results are now feature-rich snippets.

Rich or featured snippets are positioned above the top ranking position and can steal a lot of traffic. So, how can we get featured as a rich snippet? There are three main factors:

1. The keyword itself must feature a rich snippet. Tools like Ahrefs can show keywords with rich snippets opportunities.
2. More than 99.5% of rich snippets are from pages that already rank on the first page for the keyword.
3. The page is properly formatted with structured data markups, which is essentially assigning attributes and properties to all the elements on your page.

Find opportunities for rich snippets, and optimize your page accordingly. This guide by Backlinko might help you further in this aspect.

 

4. Link Profile

The fourth step in developing a robust SaaS SEO strategy is building a strong link profile. Getting high-quality backlinks from authoritative websites in your industry is required for this. This can be accomplished by creating high-quality content that will naturally draw backlinks, like comprehensive guides or infographics. You can further improve your link profile by contacting influencers and relevant websites about collaborations or guest posting opportunities.

SaaS SEO is not only about backlinks—or inbound links—, as there are three key components of your site’s link profile:

• Internal link: links within your domain from one page to another. A good internal linking structure will allow Google an easier time indexing your site, among other benefits.

• Outbound link: Links from your site pointing to other sites. This will help Google in perceiving your authority over a certain topic/niche, as well as helping with overall indexing.
• Inbound link: backlinks coming from other sites to yours. The more backlinks coming to certain pages and content, the more relevant the content is.

However, it is true that backlinks remain one of the most important ranking signals in any SaaS SEO campaign, and here are some effective tactics in getting more backlinks:

1. There’s no shortcut to actually having good content. Good content will naturally get linked, and bad, irrelevant content will have a hard time just getting one link.
2. Remember that the quality of the inbound links matters more than quantity. Build relationships with relevant sites and influencers of your niche. Guest posting is the common—and still effective— approach here.
3. Building backlinks—quantity-wise—is still an effective SaaS inbound marketing tactic. We just have to be careful in getting backlinks from spammy websites that can be counterproductive for your SEO results and can compromise your SaaS SEO strategy. Integrate all your content promotion tactics with getting backlinks. That is, besides aiming to get more traffic by promoting your content, aim to also get links. For example, when implementing influencer marketing, you can also ask the influencer to link your content.

 

5. Voice SEO for SaaS

The fifth step in developing a robust SaaS SEO strategy is optimizing for voice search. Getting your website optimized for voice search queries is essential, especially with the rise in popularity of voice assistants such as Google Assistant, Siri, and Alexa. In order to do this, you must comprehend how users formulate voice search queries and include long-tail, conversational keywords in your content. You can also increase your presence in voice search results by concentrating on local SEO and making sure your website is listed in relevant directories.

More and more people are using voice search today, where more than 40% of adult users perform one or more voice search every single day.

It is worth noting, however, that most voice search queries are done in searching for local businesses, and it can be hard to implement this in the SaaS environment.

We can, however, still find opportunities for voice SEO for SaaS by targeting conversational search queries or Q&A queries, and there are three important factors:

• Google tends to feature voice search results from content that already ranked in the top 3 spots, so follow the usual SEO optimizations
• For keywords that also feature-rich snippets, generally the rich snippet is also featured as the voice answer
• Focus on questions that are commonly asked in your niche, and include this question in the content (as a subheading or in the middle of the content). Attempt to answer this question better than your competitors, and aim to get featured as a rich snippet.

 

End Words

To reiterate, your content quality and quantity remain the most important factors in building a successful SaaS SEO strategy. This is even more true in the SaaS environment where content marketing is already a very important aspect. So, work on your content game, and the rest of the SaaS SEO strategies will be far easier to implement with better results.