SaaS lead generation is also quite unique due to the nature of the business: in SaaS, you are not selling any physical product, and so your audience has more time to compare your product with other alternatives online. Also, the length of the SaaS life cycle can vary a lot, some can be very short, and some can be really long, which can complicate the lead generation process.

So, planning a proper SaaS marketing strategy is very important for any Saas business: you’d need to attract a lot of people to your SaaS website, capture their information and capture them as leads, and nurture these leads until they are ready to purchase.

In this guide, we will learn all we need to know about effective SaaS lead generation strategy. By the end, you can use our actionable tips to develop your own lead generation campaign and start generating more prospects.

Let us begin at the very beginning: the concept of SaaS lead generation.

SaaS Lead Generation

Lead generation, in a nutshell, is the process of introducing your business to strangers and converts them into leads or prospects. A lead, on the other hand, is someone who has indicated an interest in your brand/product/service.

In the SaaS industry, SaaS lead generation is the effort made by a SaaS business to attract more website visitors and capture their contact information (mainly email address). When a website visitor willingly provides their email information, they have converted as a lead or prospect. SaaS application services play a crucial role in providing the necessary infrastructure and tools for managing and optimizing lead generation campaigns.

The idea is that although these people might not be ready to buy immediately, they have shown an interest in your brand (by willingly giving their information). So, they might be looking for a SaaS solution in the future, and you’d have to nurture this lead until they are ready to purchase.

In general, SaaS lead generation consists of three core stages:

• Attracting people to your website

Before anything else, you’d need to attract visitors onto your website. It’s also possible to get the person onto other platforms (like your social media profile or an app), the idea is to get them somewhere where you can provide a form to capture their contact information.

However, a website that matches their needs and their search intent is generally the most effective.

• Engage and encourage them to take an action

This is typically done by engaging your audience with content (and keeping them as long as possible on your site) and then offer a compelling call-to-action (CTA) so they can convert into a prospect.

This is mainly done by offering a lead magnet: an attractive offer related to your content that can add further value for your audience. The most common form of a lead magnet is a gated content (a downloadable content like ebook or whitepaper that is related to the initial content), but we can also use other CTAs, as we will discuss later on in this guide.

• Convert visitors into leads

Your lead magnet and/or CTA should drive visitors into a landing page (or provide an opt-in form) which will capture their contact information. If it’s a landing page, you can also provide more detail into your lead magnet offers.

After you’ve successfully captured the required contact information (mainly email address), you’ve successfully converted this visitor into a prospect.

That’s it.

However, although the lead generation process is fairly simple, the details can be very complicated, as we’ll discuss in the rest of this guide.

Common SaaS Lead Generation Mistakes

Before we continue with our step-by-step guide to creating a lead generation strategy, let us discuss some common mistakes and misconceptions in developing a lead generation strategy:

Focusing on Quantity over Quality

While it might seem obvious to generate more and more leads, it can actually be counterproductive in the long run. Generating leads cost money, and nurturing these leads will also cost more money and time. As a result of this, generating and nurturing low-quality leads can be a major waste of your time, money, and resources.

On the other hand, when a lead has a poor experience with a certain solution, they might also tell this bad experience to other prospects and customers, which can hinder your future lead generation campaigns. A low-quality lead might actually convert, but they will also have a higher risk to churn.

Different businesses might also have different criteria to determine lead quality. The basic principle is, the closer the prospect is to your ideal audience (your buyer persona), the higher their quality as leads.

Also, your marketing and sales teams might have different definitions of “qualified leads”, and this is why we often differentiate between sales-qualified and marketing-qualified leads. In this case, make sure to bring your sales and marketing teams together so they can discuss their definitions properly.

In general, your sales and marketing teams should consider the prospect’s fit and interest. A higher fit means a particular lead more closely resembles your ideal audience (or buyer persona), as we’ve discussed above. However, even if a prospect is already a great fit, it won’t automatically mean they are interested in your product, and this is why it’s important to measure interest.

Measuring fit and interest will be directly related to our next point below.

Not having a full understanding of your ideal audience

One of the biggest and the most common mistakes in lead generation is ignoring the importance of identifying your ideal audience and buyer persona.

A buyer persona is a model, a profile of your perfect fictional buyer based on data and research. By properly creating a buyer persona, you can understand who your ideal prospects are, their behavior, their purchase habits, and so on.

A well-defined buyer persona is very important if you want to achieve success in lead generation—both in quantity and quality— because by knowing your audience, you can better create targeted content to attract and convert them.

So, do your homework: conduct your market research, study your competitors, and develop a proper buyer persona.

Ignoring SEO

We have discussed how content is the core part of any lead generation strategy: we use content to attract prospects to come to our website or platform where we can capture their contact information.

However, no matter how good your content is, it won’t bring any value and won’t capture leads unless your audience can find this content. This is where working with SaaS SEO services or agency as the primary means to promote your content is extremely important. Simply put, if you ignore SEO in your lead generation strategy, you’ll fail.

In fact, SaaS SEO should be the foundational basis of your whole lead generation strategy from keyword research to optimizing your content to aligning your content with your buyer personas.

Fear of failure

No matter how well you plan and execute your lead generation strategy, there’ll always be room for improvement.

It’s very important to test everything and constantly work on improving your website, your content, your opt-in form, and any other elements of your lead generation efforts. It’s very important to realize (and embrace) the fact that you can fail in your lead generation efforts, and in many cases, being wrong in lead generation is far more valuable than being right.

Also, it’s important to be objective in your tests and trials: we often limit what we test in a way that will skew the data to help us reach a certain conclusion (circular reasoning), and in most cases this will be counterproductive.

So, it’s okay to be wrong, it’s okay to fail, what’s important is to keep improving and optimizing your lead generation strategy.

Looking at the wrong KPIs and metrics

One of the most common mistakes in lead generation and marketing, in general, is that many marketers are looking at the wrong metrics.

Before anything else, your team (or teams) must have a consensus on what a lead is and what a qualified lead is, as discussed above. Your entire organization must understand the objective of your lead generation process, and how to measure each of their performances according to these objectives.

For example, if the main lead generation objective is to capture email addresses, then we must measure the conversion rate for email newsletter sign-up. It’s also important to look at the number of return visits, which indicates that a lot of potential leads are coming back (and you should devise a way to capture these leads).

So, don’t underestimate data and information: define your KPIs and metrics, and set up a system where you can capture and analyze this data effectively.

How To Develop a SaaS Lead Generation Strategy

Set your Lead Generation Objective

Before we can start developing a lead generation strategy, you’d need to first figure out the objective(s) of your lead generation effort.

While you can have various objectives depending on your business goals, in general, your lead generation objectives must be:

• Specific: that is, your objective must be clear enough for your whole team and stakeholders. The easier they are to understand, the better.
• Realistic: it’s always better to have attainable, realistic goals. This is useful to maintain your team’s morale (and yours) by producing a sense of achievement. If you have a big objective, you can break it down into smaller milestones.
• Measurable: you should be able to measure whether you’ve achieved the objective by monitoring metrics and assigning KPIs.

To properly figure out your objectives, here are some key considerations you should have:

1. What is it that you want to achieve according to your marketing and business objectives? List all possible objectives and their priorities
2. Define the KPIs and Metrics for each objective. Set benchmarks and milestones for each goal to let you know that you’ve achieved this specific goal.
3. Discuss and brainstorm all objectives with all stakeholders, to ensure that these objectives are agreed upon
4. Decide the timeline of each objective. This is very important so you don’t spend too much time on your efforts and can adjust your strategy when necessary.
5. Assess whether you have the resources (human, technology, financial) to achieve this goal.

With that being said, here are some common lead generation objectives you might consider:

• Website traffic: for example, increase website visitors by 1,000 per month by next February
• Generated leads: generate 10 marketing-qualified leads per month by next January
• Lead conversion ratio: the percentage of website visitors that convert to leads/prospects. For example, we can have an objective of reaching a lead conversion ratio of 2% by January next year.
• Social media followers: also important nowadays, for example, to increase LinkedIn followers by 100 next month
• Social media engagement: for example, having your blog posts shared at an average of 10 times in six months
• Email open rate and CTR: for example, hitting an email open rate of 30% and/or click-through rate of 10% by the next quarter

Obviously, these aren’t the only objectives out there, but they might inspire you in finding out the best possible lead generation objectives for your company, according to your marketing and business goals.

Let us move on to the next step.

Figuring Out Your Target Audience

Before you can reach your target audience with your lead generation efforts, it is very important to first specify who your ideal audience is. If you are a B2C SaaS company, then you’d need to figure out what kinds of consumers are going to need your solution or service. If you are a B2B business, then you’d need to figure out who are the ideal companies/organizations that might need your solutions.

For example, it might not be appropriate to target huge enterprises if you are a brand new startup (unless you have a really innovative/game-changing solution). Generally, you’d need to have big brands in your existing clientele before you can start aiming for these big potential clients.

Finding out the right audience is very important if in lead generation, and to do this properly, you’d need to have reliable data. Unfortunately, more than 40% of surveyed SaaS companies admitted that they are not confident of their abilities in segmenting their target audience.

Here are some common ways you can segment your target audience:

• By location/geography. Due to the nature of the SaaS business, this is pretty uncommon but is still possible
• Based on industry/vertical, pretty effective if you are a B2B SaaS business with a specific software product
• Targeting very specific companies (account-based marketing). This is a pretty effective approach if you are in a relatively narrow niche/vertical
• Based on the target audience’s online activities. Pretty common for B2C SaaS companies

And so on. This step can be very simple or very complex depending on your niche/industry. However, the key is to collect as much data as you can. You can do this using survey templates, or via focus groups, interviews, competitive analysis, and/or other approaches.

Define Your Lead Generation KPIs

Based on the objectives you’ve defined above and your target audience, we should first define and start tracking our KPIs.

KPIs, or Key Performance Indicators, are essentially metrics to help you check your performance of your lead generation efforts and whether they’ve achieved their objectives. What KPIs you should observe would depend on your objectives, but here are some important ones to consider:

• Organic traffic

You can’t generate leads unless you have incoming traffic to your website, and organic traffic (traffic coming from organic search) is the best type of traffic for lead generation because they are already showing an interest (by actively searching for information).

The higher your organic traffic is, the higher the chance of your lead generation success.

• Conversions

No matter what your main objective(s) is, you need to know how many conversions are generated by your website. If your number of conversions aren’t as desired, then you might need to check the other KPIs on this list to figure out what went wrong.

However, don’t only analyze your failures. If you are learning a lot of conversions, then you should also examine what you are doing well so you can use this data for future success. Remember that even

• Conversion Rate

Obviously your conversion rate is related to the number of conversions on your site. Our overall conversion rate is the percentage of website visitors who convert into prospects. However, we can also measure the conversion rate of different pages.

Your ideal conversion rate would depend on many different factors, however, in most cases, we can consider 5% and above as a healthy conversion rate. If your conversion rate is too low, chances are you aren’t giving your visitors the value they need and remember that it’s likely that they are leaving your site for your competitors.

Check your pages as a whole, and identify areas where you could improve them.

• Average session duration

Average session duration is the average time a visitor spends on your site as a whole (or a specific page). If the session duration is low, your visitors might not find what they are looking for on your site and they might check out your competitors’.

Low session durations would usually affect conversion rate and are usually related to bounce rate and exit rate (which we will discuss below). However, if your page is fairly small with just a small amount of content, then a low average session duration is expected, and it could mean that your content is user-friendly (which can actually lead to high conversion rates).

However, if your content is long (say, more than 1,000 words), then an extremely low average session duration would mean that something is off. Check how you can improve their session duration and dwell time.

As you can see, average session duration is in most cases not a standalone metric, but you’d need to compare it to other metrics and factors on your site.

•  Bounce rate

Another important KPI related to average session duration, bounce rate is the number of people that leave without visiting other pages of your site. Ideally, you’d want them to visit other pages on your site for a higher session duration so you’ll have more chance to convince them to convert. So, the lower your bounce rate, the better.

• Exit rate

At first glance, exit rate is similar to bounce rate, but it is only relevant to one page on your site. So, measuring the exit rate is important to determine your most popular pages and less popular ones (which might be bad for your conversions).

• Cost per lead

Also important. This metric tells you how much you invest to get one single lead, and this should include human resources costs, technology, advertising, and other costs you’ve spent to generate one lead. Measuring this is very important if you want to maximize the ROI of your lead generation campaign.

Developing a Working SaaS Lead Generation Strategy

In its most basic form, a lead generation process would involve the following stages:

1. A stranger is attracted to visit your website. This can be done in many different ways: they might stumble upon your advertising, they might search for something and click on your content, or they might learn about your website on social media, among other ways. The stranger consumes your content and becomes a website visitor.
2. A website visitor then clicks on your call-to-action, which can be a link, a button, or an image.
3. The CTA would take this visitor to a landing page, which includes a form designed to capture their contact information. You’d offer something in exchange for their contact information.
4. Once this visitor fills out a form with their contact information, they have been successfully converted into a prospect.

To summarize, a stranger comes into your site and turns into a visitor. This visitor would then click on a CTA that takes them to a landing page where they would fill out a form with contact information to get something valuable (your lead magnet). After this, they become a lead.

So, in creating a lead generation strategy, there are two key questions to answer:

• How would you attract strangers to your website?
• What kinds of lead magnets would you offer that might interest them?

We can use various promotional channels to answer these questions and put all of these elements together:

Content marketing

As we’ve repeatedly discussed above, SaaS content marketing is one of, if not the most effective way to attract strangers to your website and eventually to a landing page. The most common practice here is to provide visitors with free but valuable information, which is made visible via SEO.

A great thing about using content to generate leads is that it’s pretty versatile. You can include your CTAs anywhere in your content: at the beginning, in the middle of the post, at the end, and so on. Also, you can tailor your whole content to meet your lead generation objective and to align with your lead magnet offer. For example, if your offer is an ebook about SEO strategies, then you can write content that is also related to SEO, which would make your CTA and lead magnet highly relevant.

The more valuable your content is for your visitor, the more likely they are to click your CTA and convert.

Social media marketing

A great thing about social media networks today is that it’s now very easy to include CTAs in your social media posts. Although they aren’t as versatile as a website or a landing page, you can use the swipe up option on Instagram (if you have a business account with more than 10,000 followers), short URLs on Twitter, and other approaches as CTAs.

Social media is certainly where your audience is nowadays, and so it’s a great place to reach a lot of potential prospects.

Free-trial

This is a very important aspect of SaaS businesses: offering free-trials can allow potential prospects to try your SaaS product, and once they’ve registered on your free-trial program, you can nurture these free-trial registrants with additional content and offers to encourage them to purchase the full version.

Advertising and Remarketing

Your paid option. A key advantage of using advertising and remarketing (retargeting) campaigns is that you can generate results in a fairly short term compared to organic efforts. Make sure your landing page and what you offer are properly aligned with the promise in your ad, and make sure that the actions you want these prospects to take are clear enough.

While ads are very effective in generating results, they can be very expensive if you are not careful. So, the key here is to balance your ad campaigns with other organic channels (above) so maximize cost-efficiency and ROI.

Referral marketing

Also known as word-of-mouth marketing, referral marketing is useful in various aspects of lead generation. Essentially, when a happy customer recommends your brand/product/service, there is a higher chance these people might become your prospects.

Your Lead Magnet

Here, our focus is on how we can convince our website visitors to click our CTA, fill our opt-in form, and convert into a prospect. This is where your lead magnet comes in.

A lead magnet is, in a nutshell, a valuable offer that you’ll give for free, in exchange for the site visitor’s contact information (typically an email address). After the visitor fills an opt-in form ( a lead generation form) with their contact information, they can access this offer.

A lead magnet can be anything as long as it’s valuable for your user. A discount coupon, for example, can be a lead magnet. In-depth content like ebooks, research reports, and whitepapers are also common lead magnets, and you can also offer free access to your software, and so on. Basically there are only two rules in creating a lead magnet:

1. It has to be related to your product (and even better if it’s directly related to your content)
2. It has to be perceived as valuable by your target audience, or else you won’t be able to attract them

Although the subject of lead magnet is pretty deep, here are a few tips:

• Keep lead magnets as targeted as possible

While it might seem like common sense to try to capture as many different people as possible, a lead magnet has to be very targeted to work properly. If your offer is not very specific, you might end up collecting irrelevant and low-quality leads, which can be a major waste of time and money.

So, make sure your offer is highly targeted, and as relevant to your business as possible.

• Alignment between content and offer

This is very important, use your content as a glimpse for your lead magnet. Tell your reader how your lead magnet can provide more value for them, and show it through your content’s quality. If they feel that your content is informative and valuable, they’d also perceive that your lead magnet will be even more amazing.

Provide an elaborate description of your lead magnet on your CTA, and list out the benefits your audience can get from your offer. For example, tell them how the lead magnet can help visitors improve their objectives clearly and directly.

Remember that a lot of people are offering ebooks and PDFs as lead magnets these days, and unless you can communicate that yours are going to provide immediate value, it won’t be so attractive.

• Design a lead magnet with repeated usage

The more a prospect interacts with your brand, the higher the chance they are going to convert into an actual customer. However, many people might opt-in for your lead magnet, interact it once time (if, for example, it’s an ebook), and they’ll forget about your brand the very next day.

We can certainly nurture and remind them via email marketing, retargeting campaigns, and other means, but if your lead magnet has repeated usage, you can dramatically improve its results.

For example, if your site is about digital marketing, you can offer a free guide on how to implement SEO in 30 days (with one actionable step for every day) while they can also use your 30-day free-trial period at the same time. This way, you have a full month to interact with and convince this prospect.

End Words

Lead generation is essentially about communicating your brand’s value to your potential prospects and convincing them to provide their contact information.

In today’s very saturated digital marketing, it’s obviously very tough to get noticed, and the key here is to provide immediate and (if possible) everlasting value with your content, your lead magnets, and your product, more than what your competitors are offering. You can also work with SaaS marketing consultant and SEO expert if you want results faster.

Also, a key to a successful lead generation is a proper understanding of your target audience and their needs, so you can offer something that is going to provide immediate value for them.

The post How To Develop SaaS Lead Generation Strategy To Grow Your Company appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.

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

Learn more

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, 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.

Source: Hubspot

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

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:

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:

Source: Karcher Group

• 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, 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

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.

Source: AdsTriangle

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.

The post SEO for SaaS: How to Create an Effective SaaS SEO Strategy appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.

However, how can we actually implement the inbound marketing methodology to our SaaS business? While we can be all technical and answer it with complex techniques, SaaS inbound marketing is actually quite simple. Here, we will learn all about it.

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 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

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

Before we begin, however, let us discuss a bit about the inbound marketing concept so that we will start on the same page.

What Is Inbound Marketing?

There are two main ways to attract anyone: push or pull. You can “push” out information about your business, product, and/or service to as many people as you can, or, you can create something attractive and “pull” people towards you.

This idea of push-pull marketing is probably as old as the history of marketing itself, and in this modern digital era, we have new jargons that are technically replacing the term “push” and “pull”: outbound and inbound.

Inbound marketing, in its purest sense, is about creating attractive content to pull your audience inwards. While some might argue that inbound marketing is not exactly pull marketing, the basic idea remains the same, it’s about attracting your audience inbound.

Most of us are more familiar with traditional—pull or outbound— marketing: TV advertising, billboards, or even more recently, ads when we are watching YouTube. However, in this age of modern internet and social media, traditional marketing is now facing various challenges:

• The costs to place your advertising are continually increasing. Even if online ads are generally more affordable than, say, TV ads, they are getting more expensive.]
• On the other hand, people are getting more resistant to advertising. Even if they are not using Ad-blockers (which now comes built-in in some smartphones), there’s a thing we call banner-blindness, where users actively ignore advertising all the time.
• People trust their peers on social media more than advertising. Even when you spend billions on advertisement, when a major influencer spoke badly about your SaaS product, it’s going to be a tough battle.
• Influencer marketing, a relatively new outbound marketing tactic that was once thought to be the next holy grail, is also getting more expensive and the effectiveness reduces. People nowadays understood when an influencer is paid to promote, and thus resist the message.
• Nowadays, if you overspent on traditional advertising, it can be counterproductive. Ever stumbled upon an unskippable ad on YouTube over and over again? Did the brand annoy you? Would you buy from the brand? If the viewer is not already loyal to your brand in the first place, most likely the answer is no.

This is where inbound marketing fills in: since you are “pulling” customers with attractive things—and especially content—, there will be less resistance.

The focus of inbound marketing is to provide value with each interaction, establishing relationships and trusts, and in the end, converting the audience into actual customers.

There are four pillars of inbound marketing:

1. Your Website
2. Third-party platforms where you can publish your content: blogs, YouTube, Spotify for podcasts, etc.
3. Google and other search engines, which will be the main way to promote your content through SEO
4. Social media platforms

The Marketing Funnel

To truly understand how inbound marketing works, we must understand the concept of a marketing funnel.

The idea of the marketing or sales funnel is that the buyer’s journey the process every audience went through until they become your customers will resemble a funnel shape: there will be more people in the previous steps, and fewer people will actually buy the product/service.

Typically there are three, or four, major stages in a marketing funnel, especially for the SaaS industry.

• Awareness: the prospect becomes aware of a product/service, or becomes aware that they have a specific problem and in need of a solution.

• Research/consideration: the prospect considers the different options available on the market. The prospect might also research for possible solutions for their problems.

• Decision: self-explanatory, the prospect finally decides on a solution and purchase a product or service.

• Delight: technically, the purchase decisions happened in the third stage and the marketing funnel is done. However, there can be a fourth stage where the customer is delighted with your brand and is converted into an advocate.

Inbound marketing is based on this funnel, where the inbound marketing methodology is designed to attract customers at each stage.

Inbound Marketing Methodology for SaaS

One of the uniqueness of SaaS marketing is the relatively short sales cycle.  For SaaS products priced below $2,000 annually, the buyer’s journey from where they are aware of your SaaS product until they made the purchase typically lasts only 14 days.

This is why inbound marketing and SaaS are like a match made in heaven. With inbound methodology, we can effectively engage prospects during each stage of the funnel.

For example, let’s say we are a SaaS company selling productivity software. In this case, these are the inbound marketing efforts we can try for each stage of the customer’s journey:

• Awareness stage: we provide content about productivity, so when people realize that they have productivity issues, they might stumble upon your content. You can also offer content on how your service can help solve their productivity problems.

• Consideration stage: content like “what to consider when looking for SaaS productivity software”, content comparing your software with your competitors’, etc. The idea is to inform users of the unique benefits of your product.

• Decision stage: case studies, facts-rich content can help convince your prospects to make the purchase.

• Delight stage: how to use your software better, various tips on productivity, etc. The idea here is to offer continuous support and service excellence to encourage loyalty.

As you can see, implementing inbound marketing for SaaS doesn’t need to be complex with a simple basic idea: provide content pieces that are going to be valuable for your audience. Below, we will discuss how to effectively plan and execute an inbound marketing strategy for your SaaS business.

SaaS Inbound Marketing Strategy

SaaS inbound marketing can be very complex with all the technical jargon involved. However, it is actually relatively simple, and will only involve three key areas: content development, content promotion, and conversion rate optimization of your content. Below, we will discuss them one by one.

1. SaaS Content Creation

Content in SaaS inbound marketing must be customer-centric. Meaning, they are developed according to the customer’s—or prospect’s— needs, problems, and behaviors.

To do this, the first essential step is to understand your audience.

SaaS User Research

The most common—and effective approach— here is to develop a buyer persona(s). A buyer persona is a hypothetical model of your ideal audience, and there are two key questions to answer:

• Who do you think is your ideal audience?
• What are their problems that my SaaS product can solve?

For example, let’s use the example that you are a SaaS company selling a keyword research tool. Then:

• Who do you think is your ideal audience? SEO experts, digital marketers, marketing manager
• What are their problems that my SaaS product can solve? Keyword research, topic suggestions, SEO tactics, etc.

With only these two questions, you already have a basic buyer persona. Then, ask more questions, conduct more research using various tools, and confirm the validity of your buyer persona based on your existing customer database (whether your hypothesis is correct). You can use this guide by Search Engine Journal for more about this aspect.

Keyword Research

There are two main ways we might stumble upon a content: via Google (or other search engines) search, or when someone else shared the content via social media. Here, we will address the first.

To make sure our content is discoverable, we have to target the right keywords so people can find the content on the search engine.

We can use various tools to help with this aspect. There are free tools like Google’s Keyword Planner or UberSuggest, or there are also paid, more advanced options like SEMRush (also check SEMRush alternatives) or Ahrefs.

There are only three key principles to a proper keyword research:

• Find keywords that are relevant and valuable for both your business and your audience.
• Find keywords with high enough monthly search volume, yet manageable competition (some keyword research tools might display this as “keyword difficulty”)
• Find keywords that you can expand into a topic, and thus an actual content.

Social Media Trends Research

By developing content according to topics that are trending in social media, you can improve its shareability. Tools like BuzzSumo (and BuzzSumo alternatives) can help with this aspect, and the basic principles remain similar to that of keyword research above:

• Find trending topics that are also relevant for your business. You can combine this with keyword research above. For example, you can check whether a target keyword has enough buzz on social media.
• Make sure you are able to develop relevant, valuable content out of the topic.
• Always check whether the competition is manageable. If it’s too saturated, it’s probably not worth pursuing

Developing High-Conversion Content

First, we have to make sure our content is discoverable by the audience, and the easiest way to answer this is to observe the market. That is, what’s currently ranking on the search engines.

Check how the content was developed: its structure, its content, keyword optimization, etc. This content is your competition, and there are two different approaches you can try:

1. Making a better content: bigger, more in-depth, updated with newer information, better user experience, and so on.
2. Taking a different angle and be unique: you can approach the keyword from a different angle, and be unique.

In most cases, being unique is the easier approach (but it’s not saying it’s easy). For example, if your target keyword is “digital marketing strategy” and you can provide a totally unique (and working) strategy that has not been covered anywhere else, you have a better chance to rank and get more readers.

Getting your content discovered is one thing, but your content must also be able to deliver value, engage the audience, and persuade them to convert. To do this, there are three different approaches:

1. Appeal to the audience’s logic

By providing solid facts and evidence, you can provide value for your audience and establish trust. The challenge with this approach is that your content might get boring, but when done right, can be very effective. This is especially useful for B2B SaaS companies where technical content is expected.

2. Appeal to the audience’s emotions

By relating to the audience’s problems, you can effectively persuade them to trust you. For example, if you are selling a productivity SaaS tool, you can address common productivity issues and provide actionable tips. Generally, more effective for B2C SaaS products, but not always.

3. Using our credibility

If we are already a trustworthy brand, it’s easier to engage and persuade our audience. However, even newer brands can use this approach, for example by using user testimonials and case studies.

You can combine all of the approaches above within one content, or focus on just one or two.

Utilizing Various Mediums

Content is not only limited to textual form, as there are also images, infographics, videos, and even podcasts.

There are two ways you can utilize various forms in approaching your content marketing game:

1. Combining various forms within one content: can be effective, depending on the type of content. For example, images like charts and infographics can help explain facts and data. Videos can also be effective for certain content.
2. Releasing various content forms in various channels. You can, for example, re-use textual content as a video. This approach can be effective to address various stages of the buyer’s journey. For example, a short video about your product might help in the awareness stage, while a more in-depth textual content about the topic can be more effective in the consideration stage.

2. Content Promotion

How you promote the content is just as important as the quality of the content. Remember that no matter how good—or unique— the content is, there’s no use if no one is actually reading it.

Above in the content creation section, we have briefly discussed the importance of SEO. Indeed, SaaS SEO services will be the primary content promotion method in inbound marketing.

SEO Optimizations

SEO by itself is a pretty broad subject, and you might want to check out the SaaS SEO guide.

However, there are several key areas to focus on when optimizing your content for SEO:

• Make sure the page is mobile-responsive and is fast enough to load (3 seconds on standard 4G connection is your upper limit)
• Use your keywords naturally, and combine semantically-related words. Don’t overthink this and focus on developing content that is natural to read for human audience.
• Make sure your content is well-structured and free of typos and grammatical errors.
• The key to SEO, however, is backlink. It’s important to note that nowadays, the quality of the inbound link is more important than quantity. In fact, getting too many backlinks at one time—even if they are authoritative—, can get you penalized. Aim to get 2 to 3 high-quality backlinks each month.

Aiming for more backlinks will be the core of your content promotion strategy. That is, with every other content promotion effort, you should aim to get high-quality backlinks.

Social Media Promotion

There are two different aspects of content promotion in social media: organic and paid. Organic, is when you grow your own social media followers—and thus, your organic reach—, so when you share your content in your social media profiles, you’ll reach a lot of people.

Paid, as the name suggests, is when you invest in social media advertising. For example, you can use Facebook’s Boost Post feature to promote content you’ve posted on Facebook.

This is the case of cost VS time: organic efforts are affordable—if not free—, but you will need to invest months or even years. On the other hand, paid options will guarantee quick results, but can be very expensive. The key is finding the balance.

Email Marketing

Sending your new content to your email and text blast subscribers can be very effective, especially in the consideration stage for lead nurturing content. How do we build a growing email list in the first place? Also via content, and we will discuss this further below.

Influencer Marketing

When an influencer—or a reputable site— recommends your content, you can reach their followers. The key here is finding the right influencer according to your SaaS niche, and find ways so you can get them to mention your content.

For example, you can mention (or even link) an influencer’s content within yours, and then reach out to the influencer that you’ve mentioned them. In some cases, they might be willing to share your content to their followers (assuming your content is high-quality).

Sometimes, however, an influencer outreach email is all it takes.

Guest Posting

When done right, guest posting is still a very effective way to promote your brand, your content, and get those valuable backlinks. Reach out to reputable sites and blogs in your SaaS niche, and pitch a guest post idea.

The key here is building your credibility (through your content), and build relationships. Sometimes, you will need to pay some money to get these opportunities, but it can be worth it in the long run.

Content Syndication and Content Community

Content syndication is essentially re-publishing your content on third-party sites. So. it’s quite similar to guest posting but you don’t have to create brand new content.

When content is syndicated to another site, it can be published as it is or slightly edited (usually to a shorter piece). But, wouldn’t syndication get us penalized due to duplicate content? You might want to check out this article by Neil Patel on the truth about duplicate content penalty.

There are also content community sites where you can share and promote your own content. For example, Hacker News is a community to share tech-related content. This can be a good place to share your content, but don’t be too self-promoting. Engage with other users, promote other’s content, and build relationships.

3. Optimizing Conversions For Your Content

Now that you’ve got a lot of readers/viewers to your content, how can they bring value to you? The answer is conversion.

Let’s go back to the marketing funnel discussed at the beginning of this guide:

• Attraction: here, our aim is to convert content readers into leads
• Consideration: we filter out marketing-qualified leads (MQLs), nurture them,  and convert them into prospects
• Decision: we convert prospects into customers
• Delight: we convert loyal customers into advocates

As you can see, it’s all about conversion.

However, your content readers won’t usually convert by themselves, and they will need a little push. More specifically, here are the common conversion steps in SaaS inbound marketing. Again, let’s use the example that you are a SaaS company selling productivity tools.

A user, Mr.X, realizes he had productivity issues, and went to Google to search for productivity tips. He stumbled upon your content “Top 10 Tips To Increase Productivity Without Willpower”. In the middle of the article, you offer him an ebook for more in-depth productivity tactics that he can download for free in exchange for his email address. He went on to download this ebook.

Let’s pause a bit. The ebook here is an offer we call a lead magnet, which essentially, something valuable that we give for free in exchange for their contact information. When they gave their contact info (mainly email address), we effectively converted them into a lead.

Now, we can follow-up with an email marketing campaign to nurture Mr.X as a lead. Email marketing is an important aspect of inbound marketing as a lead nurturing effort.

Let’s say that Mr.X continued to consume your content (which he became aware of via your email newsletter), and now he’s aware of your SaaS product. He researched for your product and stumbled upon your competitors’. After comparing his options, he decided to sign-up for your free trial. Here, we effectively converted Mr.X from a lead into a prospect.

During the free-trial period, we continued to send email newsletters, but now we sent tutorials about our product, tips on how to use our product, and other product educational content. We also offer customer service excellence during this period, as an attempt to turn him into a purchasing customer. Finally, he decided to purchase the product, and now he is effectively converted as a customer.

However, our job is not yet finished. We continued our inbound marketing efforts by sending more content and continue to provide great service. We do this to prevent customer churn, so that Mr.X won’t cancel his subscription, and also to turn him into an advocate. Turns out he is very happy with our product (and service, remember that service is an important aspect of SaaS), and he started recommending our product to his peers. Finally, he is converted into an advocate.

As you can see, your content should be optimized for conversion according to the various stages of the buyer’s journey. The most important factor, however, is having strong lead magnets to convert readers into leads. You might want to check out this huge list by OptinMonster listing 60+ lead magnet ideas.

End Words

Marketing for SaaS, software, IT and Tech companies relies on three key points: developing high-quality and relevant content, figuring out strategies to promote the content, and optimizing your content for conversions.

If you can do all three properly, you are set with your SaaS inbound marketing strategy, and start to build a long-lasting, sustainable source of leads. The key here is consistency in both quality and quantity.

The post Inbound Marketing for SaaS Companies: Your Ultimate Guide appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.

Let’s carefully consider three factors:

• The number of people using search engines is increasing at a rapid rate, each and every year. There are over 3.5 billion searches being made daily.
• The search engine results page (SERP) has significantly improved since the early days of the internet. In the past, we only get website results, but now we can get various “rich” and interactive results from featured snippets to embedded results from Google Maps,
• The search engines—and especially Google—is now a very important aspect of our lives. It’s now one of our main ways to find information—besides social media—. It is also one of the primary ways we learn about new brands, products, and services.

So, SEO is obviously very important for any industry nowadays, an effective way to get noticed in this very saturated market where everybody got their voice (or rather, noise).

With that being said, SEO is even more crucial in IT and technology companies due to several reasons:

First,  in the IT niche, more of your competitors know about the technicalities of SEO and already have a strong online presence.

In short, you are in the big leagues and the competition is even tighter.

Next, your prospects—or leads— are generally tech-savvy. They expect more from your content, and you can’t use gray-hat SEO tactics to get your shallow content to rank. They will notice when your content isn’t well-developed and will be quick to jump to your competitor’s.

Last but not least, especially if you are a B2B technology company, SEO is an important but risky tactic that can make or break your business. According to Junto back in late 2017, 57% of B2B marketers stated that SEO for IT and technology companies generate the most leads. On the other hand—as mentioned above— if your content isn’t powerful enough, these leads simply won’t convert.

Building 7-Figure IT and Tech Companies With SEO

Learn how founders, CEOs, execs and thought leaders use SEO and Content Marketing to grow IT, 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 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

Learn more

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

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

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The Future of SEO and The Importance of a Right SEO Mindset

Seemingly each and every year there’s always a piece of news or two stating the death of SEO—like this one.

Here’s the deal, if you think of SEO for IT and technology companies as a tactic, it will always die every couple of years or so.

Think about it. SEO used to be all about keyword stuffing back in the early 2000s. The practice is now mainly dead ever since the introduction of Google’s Panda algorithm update back in 2011, but there are still many marketers and “SEO experts” that are still focused on keyword optimizations and keyword density.

What about link building? Yes, backlinks are still important, but nowadays it’s more about the quality rather than quantity. Think about it. Is there any tactic or strategy that can let us consistently get links from high-quality websites and relevant influencers? None, besides actually producing high-quality content and build your credibility. So, link building as a strategy is also dead.

Thus, before anything else, let’s first change our mindset: SEO for IT companies is not actually a strategy, but rather, a philosophy.

A very common—and dangerous—mistake is to think of SEO for IT and technology companies as a way to “beat” the search engines, as we treat Google and the search engines as the enemies we must defeat.

Instead, a better mindset is to treat Google as a partner, and the job of SEO is to align our online presence—our website, our content, and even our social media presence— with Google’s and the other search engines’ goals.

So, here comes our next focus: what actually is Google’s goals?

What Google Actually Is About?

Let us be clear first. Google today has expanded tremendously as a company, encompassing several different industries outside the search engine focus, from its Android OS to hardware production (Google Home, Pixel Phone, etc.)

Here, we are solely focusing on Google as a search engine.

According to Google Search’s mission statement, we can summarize that their main focus is to: create a better search engine that can deliver the most relevant, reliable, accessible, and useful for the human searchers.

We tend to forget that the end aim of SEO is the human audience, not the search engine algorithm.

Also, we can see again in that mission statement that one of Google’s goals is to help creators succeed. Don’t forget that the search engine algorithm is being updated and perfected not to give SEO marketers a harder time, but on the other hand, to ensure that the best, most relevant content and the best content creators will be the ones found by the searcher/user.

So, to reiterate, don’t treat the search engine algorithm as the enemy you must beat, but a friend you must embrace—or even a lover—. This way, think of SEO for IT and technology companies not as a strategy to help beat this enemy, but as a dating guide to help you get this girl.

Let us finally begin.

Step-By-Step Guide to Building SEO for IT and Technology Companies

Now that we’ve established a better mindset to approach SEO, it’s finally time to start developing our SEO strategy for IT and technology companies.

Although we can always use the complex technical lingo and jargon to describe the process, SEO for IT companies is actually a pretty simple concept—as we’ll learn together—. So, below we’ll break down the process into a simple, step-by-step guide, starting with the first one.

Step 1: Define Goals, Assign KPIs, and Define Ways To Achieve These Goals

In short, have a working strategy. Above, we have stated that one of the most common mistakes is to treat SEO for IT and tech companies as a strategy to beat the search engines, but it’s surprising that even many of these people actually have no working strategy at all.

First, and arguably the most important. Define your SEO goals.

Wait, isn’t the goal of SEO is obvious already? To rank higher in the SERP?

Here’s another common misconception: SERP ranking—and even ranking #1—, is not the end goal of SEO, but rather, a means to an end.

You can, for example, rank #1 on an unpopular keyword quite easily, but that won’t bring any value for your business since you won’t get any traffic, right?

Instead, here are the common objectives of IT and technology SEO:

• Organic Traffic: simply put, getting more people to click the content and visit your website.

• Lead Generation: we go a little further from just “traffic for the sake of traffic”, and aim to get some leads by converting some of them into prospects—and in turn, customers

• Sales Conversion (eCommerce or affiliate marketing): convert those who consume the content to purchase our product/service (or others’ through affiliate marketing)

• Brand Presence: improving our company’s online presence to increase awareness and perceived credibility

• Online Reputation Management (ORM): manage your online reputation, for example by preventing negative reviews to rank higher for your branded keywords (and let your own content rank on these positions)

• Reaching to a Specific Target (Consumer or Company): Difficult, but possible, mainly by targeting keywords that are searched by specific customers. We call this Account-Based Marketing

• Customer Service: optimizing content that can provide useful information and answer your customer’s specific questions. This can be effective in building continuous engagement with your prospects and customers.

You can define specific goals for all of these objectives. For example, x % increase in traffic, y% increase in lead generation, specific goals in brand awareness, and so on. Or, you can focus on just a select few, or even just one of them.

Nevertheless, make sure to define at least one goal that is:

• Specific: that is, clear and well-defined

• Realistic: achievable. If the goal is too big or too long-term, break it down into smaller, more realistic milestones

• Measurable: fairly straightforward, you should be able to measure the performance by measuring a specific metric tied to a KPI. (i.e. measuring the number of social engagements instead of abstract

Next, develop a clear strategy on how you can achieve these goals. For example, if your goal is to increase organic traffic by 10% in a year, how can you achieve it? Should we develop new content to target a new audience? Should we create new landing pages or even a new site altogether?

No matter the strategy or tactic you choose, the core of any SEO tactic for technology and IT company will revolve around the target keyword(s), so this will be the focus of our next step.

Step 2: Proper Keyword Research

Above, we have established that today’s SEO is no longer about keyword stuffing, but it doesn’t mean keyword optimization is no longer important—we just need to approach it differently, as we’ll learn together further below—.

Keyword research remains one of the most important steps in developing an SEO strategy, and here are some key considerations:

• The first and most important thing here is to define and understand your audience properly, based on the goals we’ve established above. Conduct market research and develop a buyer persona, and the key here is to especially find out your ideal audience’s search intent.
• In a nutshell, search intent is the reason behind any search query: why the audience is making the search in the first place. The idea here is to align these potential search intent with your SEO objectives—as discussed above—. For example, if your SEO objective for your IT or technology company is to increase traffic, you might want to target keywords related to informational intent. Similarly, you might also want to target keywords related to transactional or commercial intent. You might want to check out a brief guide on the different types of search intent here.
• Based on these possible search intents, find your target keyword by following these important principles:
  • The keyword must be relevant to your audience. This is commonly identified with a high monthly search volume.
  • On the other hand, the keyword must be relevant to your business. Fairly obvious, but often neglected.
  • The competition for the keyword must be manageable according to your budget and timeline. Some keyword research tools will display “keyword difficulty” or similar metrics to assist with this.
  • Last but not least, after the keyword fulfilled all the three criteria above, is it possible to expand the keyword into a proper content—or better, topics you can create several content pieces from—
• Use as many keyword research tools as possible (according to your budget). You can use tools like Spyfu to check your competitor’s target keywords, Buzzsumo to search for trending keywords—and topics—, or SEMRush and Ahrefs, among others, for more traditional keyword research. (possible affiliates here)
• However, even with all the available tools and technologies, sometimes going with your guts and trusting your instinct (and experience) is a better approach. For example, keywords like “slam dunk” might be obvious for us as humans if we are targeting the basketball-related niche, but it might not be noticed by the basic keyword research algorithms.

Make a list of your target keywords and divide them by SEO goals and user intents (as we have discussed above), and divide them by priorities.

Step 3: Starting a Content Marketing Plan

Let’s reiterate what we have discussed further above: as the search engine’s algorithm getting smarter, there’s no shortcut to SEO for technology and IT companies besides actually having high-quality, relevant content that is valuable for your audience.

So, planning how you will approach your content marketing ahead will tremendously help you in the process. We’ll always start, however, with why, which is the searcher’s intents, that should be the main driving force behind the content creation process.

In general, here are several key steps in developing a content marketing plan:

1. Decide ahead on who is/are going to work in the content development process, which can possibly include:
   • You yourself (if you are willing and have the time, you can do it yourself)
   • Content writer
   • Videographer/filmmaker
   • Voice artist for podcasts
   • SEO marketer and/or strategist
   • Graphic designer
   • Programmer (for web design, technical optimizations of SEO, etc).
2. Examine the keyword list you’ve made above and expand it into a topic list. If you’ve already published content in the past, you can include them and mark them as (done). In the future, you might decide to update or re-use them in one way or another, so having them on the list might help. Again, structure the list according to objective/search intent, and priority. This is the what.
3. Decide on possible publication channels—how you are going to distribute the content—, or, the where:
   • Your blog
   • Guest posting opportunities
   • Medium.com and other similar publication sites
   • YouTube
   • Other video sharing platforms (Vimeo, etc.)
   • Email newsletter
   • Podcast publication
4. Determine the when: when to publish the content, how frequent, and so on.
5. Also very important, but often neglected: how are we going to promote the content (we’ll further discuss this one in the backlinks section here.)
6. This is where we can develop an editorial calendar using all of our decisions above. You can create a basic spreadsheet containing:
   • Publication date
   • Who’s going to work on the content (creator/author)
   • Tentative title or just the topic name
   • Target keyword(s)
   • Description
   • Goal(s) for this specific content
   • Planned publication/distribution channels
   • Call-to-action (if any) and lead magnet (if any)
   • References/resources/ideas
   • Development/publication status
7. Execute, monitor, and evaluate the workflow of your content marketing. This process will include maintaining consistent communication with your team members (if any) about:
   • Your overall marketing goal(s), content marketing goal(s) and SEO-related goal(s)
   • Whether the content is developed with the right tone, whether the quality is up there and whether it’s up to your standards. For SEO purposes, the main benchmark here is whether your content is better than the ranking competitors.
   • Make sure your team member understood your content marketing plan and can use the content/editorial calendar properly
8. If necessary, adjust your content marketing strategy based on your evaluation, including and especially evaluation on SEO performances (more on this further below, or here)

In SEO for IT and technology companies, the phrase “content is king” can’t be any truer. On the other hand, however, the IT and technology niche is a sector with a lot of opportunities to develop various forms of content from technical tutorials to the latest news in technologies to actionable tips and tricks, among others.

An important thing to consider here is not to focus too much on keyword optimizations. Include your target keywords naturally, use synonyms and semantically related words. Focus on delivering relevant and valuable content for the human audience.

Remember that how good your content is will ultimately be the main factor in deciding the results of your SEO campaign.

Step 4: Proper Link Building

Further above, we have mentioned that today, the quality of the inbound links—backlinks— is significantly more important than quantity.

So, how can we determine the quality of a backlink? While there isn’t any one-size-fits-all approach to answer this, in general, the main thing to consider is that a backlink’s quality is directly proportional to the source website’s authority.

We can use various analytics tools—both free and paid—, to check website authority, for example, Moz’s famous Domain Authority metric, and Ahref’s Website Authority Checker, but there are also various free alternatives available.

The point is, getting backlinks from any high-quality, authoritative sites is going to be difficult, unless you are already a big website or brand in the first place—most of us simply aren’t.

So how can we do it? The answer lies in your content. If it’s any good, someone will link your content sooner or later, especially when your content is a good source of reliable data or unique information.

With the quality of your content as the prerequisite of proper link building, there are still several tactics you can use to amplify the results:

1. Deliberate add something linkable in your content but make sure it’s natural and relevant

What’s our most common reason in adding an external link to our content? It’s to back-up relevant data or to provide information about something—that is indirectly related to our content and usually too long to discuss.

For example, in this article, we might not want to provide the definition of backlinks but it might be useful for you—the readers—, so we can add an external link to content that specifically discusses inbound links/backlinks.

Another common reason is to add references to the data presented in the content to give it some weight. For example, if we make a claim that 50% of B2B technology companies are using Linkedin (it’s just an example), we can link content that provided the original claim.

We can add these kinds of data and information to our content—let’s call it a link hook— in various forms such as:

• An original research report or case study (white paper, ebook, etc.)
• Infographics, images, and well-taken photos (makes sure to optimize these images properly so Google can index them as valid inbound links)
• Data roundup content like this one will always attract a lot of backlink opportunities when done properly
• Unique information, how-tos, and interesting content will always attract links

Be creative, and don’t be afraid of trial and error. Thankfully in the IT and technology niche, there are plenty of ways to include data, actionable tips, and technical facts in our content. Meaning, many opportunities to get these valuable inbound links.

2. Promote your content to get backlinks

Here’s the deal: we’ve discussed how the quality of your content is very important in getting these backlinks. However, no matter how good your content is, it won’t bring any value unless someone actually notices and consumes the content.

This is where promoting your content has twofold importance:

1. Getting more organic traffic to the content (which will bring various benefits for your website in general)
2. Getting more backlinks in the process, which in turn will improve your SEO ranking, generate more organic traffic, and produce even more backlinks. This will create a long-term ecosystem where you can continuously generate traffic and backlinks.

Promote your content using all the available channels, and always aim to get both traffic and backlinks within each promotional channel. Always build relationships with business partners, influencers in the tech industry, and even your competitors. Be generous and link their content first, and they can be valuable sources for your backlinks in the future.

The good news is, you don’t really need to be aggressive in your link building effort.

In fact, building a lot of links too fast might be counterproductive and might get you penalized by Google—especially when you get a lot of low-quality links—. Instead, just aim to get 1 or 2 high-quality links per content, and you should be good to go. You can also check my link building services and consulting if you want to work with a professional.

Step 5: On-Site SEO Optimization (Technical Optimization)

Now that your content has (hopefully) performed accordingly, it’s time to optimize the technical factor and any other aspects of your website.

Optimizations are done outside our site, especially content promotion, and backlinks building, are often called off-site optimizations. Here, we will focus on on-site optimizations, both technical and non-technical.

Non-technical on-site optimizations mainly involve content optimizations like keyword usage, the readability of your content, and so on.

Technical SEO, on the other hand, can be really complex and cover various different areas from improving your website speed to structured data markup.

You might want to check out our previous guide covering a technical SEO checklist here for a better picture. But first, there are two main objectives in attempting technical optimization:

1. Ensuring Google (or other search engines) can index and understand your website (and all the included pages properly
2. Providing the best possible user experience (UX) to keep visitors on our site for as long as possible. UX metrics like bounce rate and dwell time are now both indirect and direct ranking factors.

Based on those two objectives, here are some important areas to focus on.

• Mobile-responsiveness (or at least, mobile-friendliness) of your site. You can use Google’s mobile-friendly test tool to check your site’s current condition.
• Page load speed. Some studies have suggested that 50% of visitors will leave the website immediately if it loads in more than 3 seconds (standard 3g connection).
• You can follow this guide by Neil Patel for a series of steps to ensure proper and instant indexation of your site.
• Implement structured data markup properly. This will allow your site to be viable for featured and rich snippets. You might want to check out this guide on how to implement structured data markup for SEO.
• Optimize the website’s interface (navigation menus, layout, etc.) to ensure your visitor can get the best possible experience—to maximize dwell time—.
• Optimize all the different elements in your content, including videos and images.
• Test everything regularly, and test on as many different devices as possible.

Technical SEO optimizations are generally not a one-off thing, but a continuous process where we might need to readjust our approaches and reoptimize different aspects. This is where our next (and last) step comes in.

Step 6: Evaluation and Re-Optimization

This last step is about establishing a system where we can audit and monitor our website and specifically, SEO performance.

SEO for IT companies is—it’s important to note— a long-term strategy where commonly we’d need to spend 6 to 12 months before we see our site on the first page of Google’s SERP. This is why maintaining consistency and performing regular evaluation is integral.

We can use various tools to assist us in this step, from the free Google Analytics to premium tools like Ahrefs/SEMRush/Moz Pro to HubSpot. However, knowing what metrics to track is more important than simply using the most advanced tool out there.

Here are some of the most important performance metrics to pay attention to in an SEO evaluation:

• Technical side
  • Whether the search engine can index your website properly
  • Loading speed (you can use Google’s PageSpeed Insights for this)
  • Mobile-responsiveness/mobile-friendliness
  • Title tags and meta descriptions on all pages, and whether they are properly optimized
  • Alt text on images
• Content aspect
  • Whether your content is free of grammatical and spelling errors.
  • Check the relevance of the information, and whether there’s a more up to date data. You might need to update your content otherwise.
  • Proper internal linking structure
  • Whether the content has fulfilled the intended objective/catering to a specific search intent
• Performance metrics
  • Traffic from organic search
  • Referral traffic
  • Pages that have relatively low/no traffic
  • Improvements/negative changes in rankings
  • Backlinks profile and its improvements over time
  • Best performing and least performing content
  • Content conversion rate

Based on these metrics, make the necessary adjustments to your SEO strategy for IT or technology business to improve the results.

Schedule a regular evaluation of your overall SEO strategy, and dedicate time to update and leverage existing content according to their performance—as this is often the most time-consuming aspect of the whole process.

End Words

Voila! Your technology company’s SEO strategy is set and ready to execute.

To reiterate, it’s very important to understand that SEO for IT and tech sites is a long-term game and you will need to invest at least 6 to 12 months before you see significant results from SEO services for IT and technology companies. Once your SEO strategy is well established, however, you will get a sustainable source of traffic and prospects that can generate revenue for years to come.

As we can see from the step-by-step guide above, there’s no secret tactic and holy grail strategy for improving SEO for your IT or technology company: it’s all about consistency both in quality and quantity. The quality of your content and quantity in publication. The quality of your backlinks and consistency in growing your backlinks profile naturally, and so on. It’s a marathon, not a sprint.

Everybody can certainly attempt and execute SEO, the hard part is to stay consistent until the finish line.

The post SEO For IT and Technology Companies: Your Ultimate Guide appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.

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 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

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

1. First, Know Your Metrics

Unless you enjoy throwing money down a dark hole without ever really knowing what becomes of it, you’ll have to get to know some basic metrics. Without measurement, marketing is just a guessing game driven by hunches and whim.

Before dipping your toes into the vast, icy waters of SaaS marketing metrics, it might help to understand why they’re the backbone of every successful SaaS marketing strategy.

Without metrics, you’ll never really know how effective your SaaS marketing strategies are. That’s pretty obvious. But perhaps more crucial, for any company that wants to grow, is that metrics can reveal areas of opportunity. Whether it’s new markets, new customers, or new products, moving forward requires looking back at your metrics. Here are a few of the most important marketing metrics for SaaS companies:

1. CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost). CAC is a measurement of how much it costs to convince someone to buy. Combining sales and marketing expenses for acquiring visitors, then measuring how many of them become leads, and in turn measuring how many of those leads become customers, you’ll arrive at CAC.
   Yes, there’s a bit of math involved. But in the old days, all companies could do was ‘spray and pray’, relying merely on how many leads they got to tell them whether their campaigns were working. Thanks to data-driven advertising campaigns that use tracking codes and powerful data-crunching tools, companies have this great new metric to help them assess their SaaS marketing efforts.

2. LTV (Lifetime Value of a Customer). Hopefully, you’ll have repeat customers, which brings us to LTV. There are all types of customers, and hopefully, through careful targeting and constant mindfulness of customer satisfaction, your business will attract the ‘good’ kind — the kind that sticks around for a long time. The more of those you have, the better your LTV metrics will look.
3. ROI (Return on Investment). The most elemental metric of all, the classic ROI. Simply put, it’s the benefit of your investment divided by the cost of that investment. This metric is versatile, simple, and beloved by SaaS marketing experts since the beginning of time. It’s also a bit rudimentary, which is why it’s best used when combined with other metrics like LTV and CAC.

2. Now, Dig In and Study Your Competitors

Now that you know what to measure, here’s some actual strategy. This first plan of attack is used not just by marketers, but by anyone attempting to win at anything: study the greats. Want to play guitar? Study Slash’s technique. Want to rise to political power? Look at historical figures who’ve made it.

In our case, we’re studying the competitors — especially the really successful ones. We’ll be looking at:

• Get familiar with digital marketing strategies they use for their startup
• How strong their social presence is
• Their organic rankings
• How many backlinks they have
• Whether they run AdWords ads

Ahrefs.com will help out a lot here, showing data on organic ranking, backlinks, and Adwords.

3. Then, Create an SEO Strategy

If SEO marketing for SaaS companies seems dull to you, then perhaps it’s time to adjust your perceptions. True, it’s different from B2C because you’re targeting a narrower, more specialized audience — buyers and business owners. Both groups are generally more knowledgeable than the mass markets that B2C companies deal with. Business buyers are already well past the half-way point on the buyers’ journey by the time they’re ready to engage with an SaaS company’s website.

But that doesn’t mean they won’t respond to engaging content.

Marketing your SaaS company is, in some respects, just like marketing any product to a general consumer audience. Try and provide content that’s useful and which engages your visitors, and then you can start thinking about conversion. This technique, known as content marketing, generates triple the amount of leads when compared to outbound marketing techniques like trade shows and cold calling.

It also helps to have content that’s actionable, and that doesn’t just sit there. If your whitepapers aren’t doing the trick, or if your self-promotional blog posts aren’t converting, it’s time to reassess your SaaS SEO strategy.

To do this, map keywords to the buyers’ journey and create your content accordingly. For example, did you know that 94% of B2B buyers research their purchases online? That right there is a very strong case for putting out some fantastic whitepapers to capture those buyers at that stage of their purchasing journey.

Begin by using keyword planner tools and ahrefs.com to come up with keywords suggestion. Then, create landing pages for each set of keywords you come up with. Finally, support those landing pages with a series of on- and off-site blog posts on the same topic. If you need help you can always reach out to SEO consultants to get professional help on ranking your website on the first page.

4. Next, Optimize Your Website For Conversion & Capture Emails

By now you sense that just having a pretty website is not enough. To capture leads and convert them to subscribers, you’ll need your website to work harder and capture emails for you. Then, once you know as much about your prospects as possible, hit them with stunning emails that reach them at the right time in the buyers’ journey.

Maybe they responded to a whitepaper download CTA. Or maybe they subscribed to your blog after reading a particular post. It’s that sort of information you’ll need to study in order to know where they are in the buyers’ journey.

That will set you up nicely for generating effective nurture campaigns for all those emails you collected. Different prospects will receive different series of emails, depending on how they came to you. Some of your emails will serve to convert prospects who didn’t subscribe to your software, for example. Others may target people who have let their free trial of your SaaS service expire.

Others will be nurtured along the buyers’ journey differently — there are dozens of touchpoints at which you can create opportunities for conversion. Sending the right email is key.

5. Don’t Forget to Submit Your Profile on Review Sites

Just as general consumers turn to Yelp to help them decide where to eat and shop, business software consumers turn to review sites as well.

There are plenty of SaaS directories for listing your business and, since online customer reviews are growing in influence, it’s essential that you check these directories out. Some of the biggest names include:

• Trust Radius
• Capterra
• GetApp

6. Finally, Run Ads

Identify your ideal customer, run paid campaigns and target them on Adwords, Linkedin and Facebook. One thing to keep in mind, so that you don’t bust your budget, is to remember your long tail keywords.

This is especially true for SaaS companies, who may be up against some very stiff competition. Let’s face it, there’s always a big dog who’s all but cornered the market in SaaS products and services.

Then, if you want to up your SaaS marketing game, you’ll want to also set up remarketing campaigns on all platforms and social media sites.

One Final Word…

Now you’ve got your six steps and your work is cut out for you. Better get cracking, since gone are the days when marketers could get by without knowing about metrics, buyer’s journey, keyword-driven content, email nurturing campaigns, and all the ways to use powerful data to run targeted ads.

If you’re feeling a tad overwhelmed, or if you feel your SaaS company can never compete in SEO, think again. SaaS businesses of all sizes are making steady progress with all these techniques I’ve outlined for you here. It’s a matter of studying your customer, learning your metrics, and working with experienced SaaS marketing consultants that fit your SaaS business to a tee.

The post 6 Steps to a Complete Marketing Strategy for SaaS Companies appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.

We will divide this guide into three big sections: keyword research, content development, and content promotion. All three are equally important for a successful SaaS content marketing campaign, and let us begin with the first one.

Keyword Research for SaaS Business

1. User Intent

Your target keywords should be relevant to your business, or else it won’t bring value. Although there can be many different factors, arguably the most important one is whether the keyword can meet your audience’s specific search intent.

Here are some common user intents in the SaaS space, and some examples of the keyword implementations. For these examples, let’s assume we are selling a cloud computing SaaS product:

• Informational intent: the user is not specifically looking for a SaaS product, but looking for information/answers related to their needs or problems. For example, they might be looking for information about automating their database, and so you can target keywords like “database automation” here.

• Product research: here, the user is interested in purchase and is currently researching their options. You can target keywords like “your brand name vs your competitor’s name”, “cloud computing tools comparisons”, etc.

• Navigational intent: the user probably has heard about your product from a colleague, and so is currently searching for your website specifically. Here, you can target branded keywords

Remember that the user’s intent will evolve according to their stages in the buyer’s journey. The key here is truly understanding your audience, figure out all possible intents, and target the proper keywords.

2. Search Volume

Search volume here refers to how many times a target keyword is actually being searched over a time period, usually in a monthly basis. Tools like SEMRush or Ahrefs can effectively analyze search volume, and generally you should target keywords with above 500 searches/month.

3. Keyword Difficulty

Keyword difficulty is, in a nutshell, how difficult it will be to compete for a certain keyword. The more popular the keyword is, obviously the more competitors you will face. Keyword research tools like, again, Ahrefs and SEMRush usually display Keyword Difficulty (KD) in percentage. The higher the percentage, the more difficult to rank for the keyword.

4. Finding The Balance

Here is the thing: we all want to target relevant keywords with high search volumes. However, the more search volume a keyword has, generally the higher its keyword difficulty.

There are only limited spots on that first page of Google search result, and so, the key here is finding that delicate balance between the high search volume and manageable keyword difficulty.

The more you understand your niche and your audience, the better you can find these keyword opportunities.

SaaS Content Development Checklist

Now that we’ve compiled our list of keywords, here are some key areas to focus on during the content development process:

1. Length

The longer your content, the better. However, maintaining engagement will be more difficult, the longer the content goes. Again, the key here is finding the right balance.

According to a study by Backlinko, the average length for top-ranking textual content is 1,890 words. That can be a good benchmark to start. For other content forms like podcasts and videos, this guide by MiniMatters can give you a clearer picture.

2. Uniqueness

When talking about content uniqueness, we are not only talking about passing CopyScape or other plagiarism checker tools. Instead, your content should also be unique in the eye of human readers.

Especially since the SaaS niche is a pretty “small” one, your audience can notice when you are rewriting another site’s content, even after you’ve polished it. Instead, you need to provide a well-researched content with original idea and information.

3. Optimizing headlines and descriptions

Most of us find and consume content through a Google search. After we searched for something, we will glance upon the different results and then click on one that gets our attention.

What usually made us clicked that specific content? Generally, it was the headline and/or the snippet. This is why it’s very important to optimize these two aspects.

Your title should include the target keyword naturally. Putting your keyword up-front generally produces better results, SEO-wise. However, your main focus here is to write an interesting and engaging title for your human readers.

We should also do the same with the META description: make sure it is engaging for human readers, and include your keywords naturally. You might want to check out this guide this guide to learn more about this aspect.

Content Promotion

No matter how good your content quality is, it won’t bring any value to your business unless you have an audience consuming it.

With that being said, content development is just half the job done, and content promotion is arguably even more important than the development process.

Here are four key areas to consider when promoting your content:

1. On-site Technical SEO

Google and other search engines are still the primary way of how people are finding their content. So, SEO is obviously very effective in promoting your content.

Although SEO for SaaS is a very broad subject, there are three main areas to focus on:

• Optimizing your content for the target keyword(s)
• Getting more backlinks, which we will discuss again further below
• Optimizing technical, on-site SEO aspects

For technical, on-site SEO, here are a few key areas to consider:

• Mobile-friendly, responsive design
• Fast loading speed
• Headline, META description, images and videos optimizations
• XML sitemap
• internal linking

You might also want to check with SEO experts if you need help with on-site SEO.

2. Backlink Building

One of the most important aspects of SaaS SEO (and inbound marketing) is building backlinks.

However, while in the past the quantity of backlinks is the most important factor, that’s no longer the case nowadays. Nowadays, having backlinks from high-quality sites is more important, even when you only have 4 or 5 of them. You might want to check out this guide by SEO Mark on determining backlinks quality.

Aim to build 5 to 10 high-quality backlinks consistently.

3. Using off-site promotion to gain traffic and build backlinks

When promoting your content off-site, there are two benefits to aim for: getting more traffic through these promotions, and build more backlinks as we have discussed above.

Here are some effective channels to promote your content, and how you can use these channels to get more backlinks:

• Influencer marketing: influencer often has their own sites

• Social media marketing: the more people who engaged with your content through paid and organic social media marketing, the higher the chance of getting more backlinks

• Advertising: similar benefits as social media marketing

• Guest posting: an effective way to get more backlinks while promoting your brand on high-quality sites

Conclusion

SaaS content marketing is not solely about pushing the sale of your product, but nurturing your audience through every step of the buyer’s journey. So, the key to a successful content marketing in the SaaS space (and any industry) is a thorough understanding of your audience: their needs, behaviors, and problems.

A proper content marketing strategy can effectively generate and nurture leads, as well as encouraging purchases in a SaaS business.

The post How to Effectively Implement Content Marketing For SaaS Businesses appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.