Hi, we’re Atomic Digital Marketing, a digital marketing agency fueled by fact-based marketing combined with the right strategies for SaaS-based companies. We believe that business is driven by great digital marketing.
To accelerate the growth of your business, we’re providing a Comprehensive Guide for Software-as-a-Service Companies. With over 15 years of experience in growth marketing for SaaS companies, we saw a need for a Comprehensive SaaS SEO Guide. According to Forbes, the SEO Industry should reach approximately $80 billion by 2020.
Before we dive into SEO for SaaS, note that it’s imperative to have the right “digital strategy” based on a “competitive marketing analysis” as the starting point. The journey starts with why it’s essential to “be found” in the search engines, which happens when your content can “be relevant.”
Remember the saying “a fool with a tool is still a fool”? Regardless of which tools you decide to help you along the journey, understanding the clear goals and objectives, developing a digital SaaS strategy focusing on the right priorities ensures progress in the right direction. So, plan the SEO work and work the plan starting NOW.
The SaaS growth through the SEO journey starts with the ability to “be found”. This happens when you can “be relevant” with precisely the right content for your target audience.
The following is a definitive step-by-step guide to identifying the actionable tactics that will achieve SEO Growth for organizations needing to grow their Software-as-a-Service performance marketing. Whether you are someone wanting to gain a better understanding of how to gain the power of SEO for your SaaS business, or you’re an SEO expert or a content guru, this guide is for you. We’ll get started with why SEO is so crucial for SaaS-based products and services.
Why is Search Engine Optimization or SEO Essential for SaaS?
- 81% of online experiences begin with a search engine.
- Key Takeaway: This is why it’s critical to get more eyes on your website as almost all online experiences start with a search engine like Google, Bing, or Yahoo, with 75% of the searches within Google. With this information, it makes sense to focus on the ranking experience with Google, especially where resources are tight. (*Note: Bing makes up 10% and Yahoo only 3% of the search engine markets).
- 75% of users don’t even scroll past the first page of the Search Engine or SERPs.
- The first page of the website is undoubtedly the most important! It takes a lot of time to get placed on the first search page and in the top three rankings; however, there’s a strong return on investment. It pays to “be found” near the top and increases your conversion rates.
- Approximately 51% of all search queries consist of 4 words or more.
- Key Takeaway: Since half of the queries are longtail keywords, this means that your strategy has to discover and target the right term that people are searching for. If you skip longtail keywords, you’ll be missing approximately 50% of your audience as well as valuable potential leads. Keyword research is one of the most critical cornerstones of SEO conversion and serves as the foundation of the content, similar to the Lego building blocks’ base.
- 61% of website marketers cite SEO as their number one priority.
- Key Takeaway: If your site does not appear on the first page of a Google search, it will be next to impossible to harness digital marketing power. SEO optimization from an online, offline, and technical perspective is one of the first and foremost focus areas on your differentiated content for domain and industry authority.
- 14.6% is the conversion rate achievable when SEO is expertly implemented in online, offline, and technical SEO—more on this in an upcoming chapter.
- Key Takeaway: Most Software-as-Service Companies invest in SEO Marketing to increase their website views, which results in more conversions for sales. Having a channel of incoming leads for Sales is hugely beneficial, but it’s not like pressing a button or just the mere presence of an attractive website that predicts whether the sales leads start pouring in. There are many important factors, including:
- having the right digital strategy
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- traffic building campaigns to your website
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- relevant content for the B2C and B2B
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- for SaaS B2B, there is a longer “buyer’s journey” where much more content is needed than in the B2B space focusing on the relevant content at each phase or stage of the customer journey
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- In SaaS B2C, the broader social media channels will help drive website traffic
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- In Saas B2B, business social media such as LinkedIn, to acquire new targeted customers, can be optimized to drive more traffic, along with highly targeted messaging, events and campaigns
What’s Different about SaaS (Software-as-a-Service)?
Software as a service delivers centralized digital applications over the internet and typically as a service. SaaS applications are also called: web-based, on-demand, and hosted software.
What’s Different about SaaS-based Businesses?
Compared to traditional business software, which is installed on individual computers and must be maintained by the client, which consumes a lot of internal time and resources and make collaboration and updates much more complicated – especially in distributed environments with many end-users.
With SaaS, cloud computing provides everything needed, including the software, data, storage, and processing power available over the internet. Applications available through a website or app rather than installing on client devices are called “Software-as-a-Service.”
Besides, they typically come with affordable subscription pricing models where you can “pay as you go” with different monthly subscription plans. SaaS software is instantly and always available with no hardware or software installed, as long as there is an internet connection.
What are the advantages of SaaS (Software as a Service)?
SaaS SEO is a set of optimization considerations for a software as a service website. Common SaaS SEO strategies include creating key landing pages, rich content integration, and the most common challenges in SaaS SEO include competition from aggregator sites and limited search volume.
What are some of the significant differences regarding SEO for SaaS Growth?
Here are seven areas that we see as unique to SEO for SaaS:
- Because a SaaS is a digital product and not a brick-and-mortar, there isn’t usually a need for local SEO (related to physical geographical locations).
- While some industries rely heavily on search traffic for brand visibility, SaaS is very focused on bottom-line KPIs such as Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs), Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR), and Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) – to name a few.
- With SaaS business there is more focus on forecasting. Since B2B software companies often have a higher ability to measure just about everything, there’s more precision involved in setting a goal and working towards it in deliberate steps (rather than just doing ‘best practice’ SEO to complete an arbitrary checklist).
- The need for more targeted viewers, subscribers, and leads drives the Keyword research when the views, visits, and lead quality is the crucial goal. Especially if a SaaS organization is competing with a much larger competitor with a significant market share, it’s more effective to generate longtail keyword opportunities rather than going toe-to-toe on terms with higher search volume. Better to be a “big fish in a small pond” and be the most credible authority source in an area that will help grow your business.
- We find a more holistic cross-channel focus with B2B SaaS SEO than e-commerce, B2C, or local service businesses. If SEO traffic is not directly contributing to demo/trial signups, it is used as a driver for retargeting or PPC channels to earn those conversions ultimately.
- Technical SEO focus is more intensive, and sites built with javascript can lead to unique challenges to ensure they are fully crawlable and indexable. If they aren’t easily crawlable and indexable, it’s less likely that search engines will display your pages in search results.
- There’s more competition with indirect competitors (e.g., review aggregators like Capterra) than other industries. This changes some content focus as a SaaS has to be more aware of what content on their website can compete with these aggregators.
Wrapping up the SaaS
Growth Strategy
Steady Stream of Conversions for Long-Term Sustainability
Unfortunately, only approximately 4% of small businesses make it to their second year, and only 50% make it beyond five years. While there are many great business ideas out there, most startups and ramp-ups lack a robust growth plan to scale the business reliably.
The SaaS business is highly competitive so investing in the right strategies that enable rapid growth is paramount to business survival. You either need to “make dust or eat dust” when it comes to SEO marketing.
Growth marketing enables businesses to generate a steady stream of increasing conversions to sustain the long-term business. Paying for SaaS SEO experience and knowledge can yield a higher return-on-digital marketing investment. Often we see “interesting” websites and social media campaigns that are quite disconnected to the SaaS customer journey and with little to no planning.
Like a tailor measures twice and cuts once to be sure that things are done right the first time, most SaaS companies can’t afford the higher costs of wasted time and wasted marketing budget.
Branding, messaging, and positive communications through well-planned content are ways to boost conversions, accompanied by freemium offers such as product trials and giveaways, along with making it easy to try and buy for the target audience. In addition, a referral marketing program helps with viral growth through great customer references to generate new sales leads.
My Tips for Conversions
- Prepare a Marketing Roadmap with the right Marketing Mix aimed at growth and vet the roadmap with key stakeholders
- Chart out the applicable Go-to-Market Strategy and Go-to-Market Plan aimed at achieving the growth objectives
- Plan for acquiring customer acquisition and growth of the customer base
- Identify the right content and tools that will help to achieve the goals and objectives
- Measure the results and identify any gaps while “doubling down” on what works and eliminate what doesn’t
- Aim for continuous research, continuous measuring, and ongoing improvements
Why Does Experience Matter?
If you’ve never embarked on professional growth marketing, knowing where to start can be a daunting task.
Also, having blinders on and thinking, “we need a cool looking website” without focusing on all of the other aspects of SaaS growth marketing is sure to lead to disappointment in terms of results. In the Marketing Roadmap, the micro-level goals and initiatives are necessary to support the strategic objectives.
Experience has proven which types of SaaS SEO campaigns work best.
In the Analysis Phase of SaaS SEO Campaign development, the following are considered:
- How do you intend to meet your customers’ needs?
- What’s the best way to communicate the benefits of your products and solutions?
- What information do potential clients need at each stage of the customer journey?
- How should you price your products and services?
- Which of the social media and what types of campaigns best suit the target audience?
Personalization: The more you can ensure that you understand the client’s industry and specific needs, the more loyal the customer. Value over price is the name of the game so that clients stay with your SaaS subscription service instead of moving over to a competitor. Decide if you want to be the lowest price or offer the best value and which position will have more long-term sustainability.
Trigger-based email marketing is just one of the personalization areas that can work with SEO strategies based on where target profiles and phase of the customer or buyer’s journey.
Excellent Customer Service: I recently spoke with a SaaS company that is steadily losing conversions.
They want to attract international B2B clients; however, they have so many bad reviews from consumers who received a whopping bill after believing that they only needed to pay-per-use. The fine print was nearly impossible to find, and after a month or so, the customers realized that they had a 3-4x higher unlimited subscription.
The company refused to refund the money or make the billing terms more apparent, and this may continue to be one of the “dark clouds” impacting the company’s growth.
Since SaaS is Software as a Service, the propensity to attract and retain the right customers starts and ends with the quality of the service and its integrity.
Test all aspects of your customer service end-to-end and fix any potential issues. When things go wrong, own up to the problem and provide solutions to keep customers happy and thereby maximize the lifetime value (LTV) of each customer’s purchase.
How To Measure Organic Search Traffic?
According to Neil Patel, there are five important ways to measure and improve on SEO results using Google Analytics.
- In the Channel Grouping report, review the search results focusing on the Organic Search Results and click on the Organic Search Channel to see the detailed results.
- To measure improvements or any declines in traffic quality from SEO, review the Assisted Conversions Report. Set the date range to compare the previous. This provides a month-to-month comparison of the searches, including searches resulting in conversions and those who may have searched multiple times before converting. Create custom SEO Dashboards through the built-in Google Data Studio The series of Widgets enables viewing the individual reports into a single view with information that is easy to share and print with the key stakeholders. The right pie charts, bar charts, and other graphs make it easier to understand the SEO metrics, including the history and trends. Seeing everything at-a-glance provides the basis for recommendations on SEO Program success and then future actions needed.
- Next, using Google Search Console, assign a relative dollar (or euro, etc.) value to show how much the SEO conversions would have cost if Google Ads had been purchased. This demonstrates the monetarized value of SEO to conversions and looks at how much the keywords would cost if they had been purchased through Google AdSense This can be found in Acquisition/Search Engine Optimization/Queries.
*Note: Both Google Analytics and Google AdSense must be synced to Google Search Console to perform this analysis. Also, check out Google Analytics Mobile.
Identify the site pages that are slow to load, as this will definitely affect the rankings and your SEO success. Sitebulb, Google Insights, and GTmetrix are just a few of the tools that can be used to ensure an excellent user experience with fast page load times.
Create custom SEO Dashboards through the built-in Google Data Studio The series of Widgets enables viewing the individual reports into a single view with information that is easy to share and print with the key stakeholders. The right pie charts, bar charts, and other graphs make it easier to understand the SEO metrics, including the history and trends. Seeing everything at-a-glance provides the basis for recommendations on SEO Program success and then future actions needed.
The Wrap Up
Start by understanding the A to Z of a powerful SaaS Growth Plan. Professional sailors would not set sail without a compass, a GPS, or a map, and the same type of purposeful planning and navigation tools are needed for growth marketing. To stay current on the various SEO tools,
a. new Google algorithms/ranking requirements
b. proven methodologies
c. ongoing competitive analysis
outsourcing the SEO functions can save costs while delivering professional conversion results quickly. When it comes to SaaS SEO ranking, innovative marketing strategy and digital marketing experience are two of the keys to success.
What are the 5 Components of the SEO Foundation?
“Plan the work and work the plan” is an excellent way to proceed, but what are some of the aspects needed in a sound SEO Framework? Working together, the following are necessary for successful SEO:
- The right keyword research (TOFU) or top of funnel compared to the competition and user search criteria
- The right keyword mapping, for example, high volume, low difficulty, high CTR opportunity, high importance, high potential, and the overall scoring of these
- The right technical structure by optimizing Technical SEO, including crawling and indexing
- The right content strategy by optimizing On-Page SEO for what the potential customer is looking for
- The right link production by optimizing Off-Page SEO to improve website authority
Integrated SaaS SEO Plan
Below is a diagram that demonstrates how each of the elements of the integrated SaaS SEO Plan support the expert Content Strategy. It’s no longer enough to write short blog articles to enable the rankings.
Well researched competitive analysis, a fully optimized website, and the right links and content are all part of the formula for success. This is why many outsource the SEO function since it requires full focus and continuous adaption to the online marketplace.
These elements all need to work together to achieve powerful results for SaaS companies.
On-page SEO relies on crisp and highly relevant content that matches what users are searching for throughout different phases of the customer journey.
At the same time, off-page SEO or link building relates to getting other websites to link to your website to increase your site’s trust and integrity, which, in turn, increases the site’s ranking.
There are no clear boundaries between the different components, and they work together to achieve the optimal results. Improving the overall efficiency and effectiveness of technical SEO, on-page SEO, and off-page SEO are critical to attracting conversions and leads for SaaS companies.
Onsite Content for SEO
Onsite content marketing costs approximately 60% less than traditional marketing and generates about three times as many leads, according to DemandMetric. As a result, almost 86% of B2B marketers and 77% of B2C marketers invest in content marketing to increase their bottom line. Besides, content marketing improves brand awareness and boosts revenue.
Content marketing allows you to go to market in a way that captures and redirects existing demand for information, allowing you to capture demand even if your product is in a market where the need for it is not yet apparent.
Before building a go-to-market strategy for your business on a foundation of content marketing, you need to define what content marketing means for you in terms of your customers, company, and the competition.
The purpose of a go-to-market strategy is to deliver your unique selling proposition to the right audience in a way that effectively differentiates you from your competitors, or your market strategy will fail.
The added complexity is that your content needs to have its own “unique selling proposition” or USP. Your audience, the search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo, and the digital influencers need a reason to go to you for content rather than to competitors within your industry.
Content Production Strategy:
Here is a simple guide on Content Strategy for SaaS companies:
- Identify your target audiences
- Identify the corresponding platforms and influencers
- Identify top, middle, and bottom-of-funnel topics
- Get more granular by identifying specific keywords associated with these topics
- Identify unique content giveaways that your target audience would be willing to join an email list for
- Develop authoritative guides that demonstrate your knowledge and expertise
- Provide a strategy for bringing users from the top to the middle or bottom of the funnel (called TOFU and BOFU)
- Identify what Sales needs to consider the contact a “lead.”
Develop authoritative guides on your chosen subjects that naturally lead your audience toward attaining your list-building products. Work on capturing long-term attention and on building a customer relationship based on what the customer values.
When it comes to content, it’s all about creating something that readers will find useful while staying away from “infomercials.” If the posts and blogs are of value, more people will read and share them. It’s that simple, but of course, it takes in-depth product and industry knowledge along with expert writing and SEO skills. Blog posts can generate anywhere from 20-50% of website content.
Why is the Content Strategy so Important?
Content strategy is one of the essential aspects of successful SEO since content and links are among the top three ranking factors in Search.
Millions of blog posts are published each day, so SaaS content must be created that stands out and earns useful links.
Strategic content planning and execution involve:
- prioritizing lower difficulty topics and themes and focusing on trends
- layering content with optimal internal linking
- planning in the right links and identifying opportunities to outperform the competition
- regular upkeep and maintenance of compelling content to stand out in a crowded space
A successful SEO content strategy includes all of the above.
Many believe publishing blog post after blog post will lead to more links, higher rankings, and increased website visitors; however, you must be strategic to garner the attention needed for success.
How does Linking Help my Site?
For every search query, Google wants to offer its users the most relevant and authoritative websites. SaaS companies increase their value and the service they provide by linking to other relevant and authoritative sites. You are “the company you keep” is something to keep in mind when considering the Linking Strategy.
According to Blue Corona Marketing, “If linking to another website provides support…for the point you’re trying to make, provides genuine value for your readers, and makes you look good, you should link out to the website in question.”
Some of the evaluations to keep in mind for decision-making on link-building include:
- the current strength of the website’s authority
- number of current links to relevant and authoritative websites
- the current website rankings
- will linking provide more value to your target customers
Finding Prospects For Guest Posting
So far, we’ve been focusing on fact-based marketing, and Link Building is no exception. It starts by narrowing down the Search of blog posts that are highly authoritative and are focused on the same target audience with similar topics that would be of interest to your audience. Which online events do your target audience attend?
Which blogposts do they read? Who are the influencers in your industry, and where do they post? It all starts with the right Guest Posting research. Searching on keywords and “write for us” can produce the initial list of potential site posting.
Broken Links Strategy
The next step is to document these in excel and manually eliminate the irrelevant, broken, and duplicate links. This narrows down the target Guest Posting List to those that make sense and will be worthy of spending time and energy on to increase conversions.
Best Practices for Link Building & PR for SaaS
SEO Tools like SEMRush and others provide a thorough approach for Link Building and PR for SaaS companies. The best practices include performing a thorough analysis using a series of reports to identify the ripe areas for link building, PR, and other valuable content for the target audience.
Some of the top best practices include:
- Monitoring the Links Reports every two weeks to check the link building and viral PR campaigns, affiliate and partner programs combined with referral traffic from Google Analytics.
- Checking lost or removed backlinks and contacting the site owners to reinstate these
- Reviewing referring sites to your competitors’ websites to see which sites they are linking from and to (should be a similar size company and website)
- Finding out which competitor pages draw the most traffic and consider investing in content that will drive more traffic to your site and result in higher conversions
Of course, SEO is not so simple —beyond content and links that influence rankings, the SaaS content must build strategic buyer funnels to build relevant traffic sustainably. Close collaboration with Sales, spending time on competitive research and analytics for continuous improvement are ways to achieve growth goals. SEO campaigns are steady and not discrete. Many clients lack the internal resources to focus on the constant monitoring, improvements, and research needed to excel in SaaS SEO.
Long Tail vs. Generic Keyword Strategy
While there are literally thousands of tools available that are extremely helpful for optimizing SEO to ensure SaaS Growth, here are a few of the categories. Note that we don’t endorse any specific tools and can work with any tools that our clients have in place, as well as provide tool recommendations or managed services for the different tools and reporting. For each category, here are a few of the popular ones.
Analytics and Monitoring Tools help monitor the current position, the improvements, and the effects of the online and digital marketing efforts, including the SEO ranking and Ad and communications resulting from digital marketing efforts.
Why is the Right SaaS Keyword Research so Important?
While Google keeps us on our toes with all the algorithm updates, they continuously roll out, what remains constant is that digital marketers are looking to optimize their websites for keyword research.
Keyword Research Data
SaaS keyword research involves finding and analysing search terms that people enter into search engines looking for information, often for search engine optimization (SEO) or general marketing.
Keyword intent and researching
The process can uncover queries to target, the popularity of the queries, their ranking difficulty, and much more. It provides valuable insight into the questions and terms your target audience is searching for on Google. This insight serves as the basis for successful keyword planning and ranking.
Keyword research shows the exact topics people care about and how popular those topics are among your target audience. By researching the SaaS keywords that receive a high volume of searches per month, you can identify and sort into highly relevant content creation topics. Next, you can use these topics to dictate which keywords you look for and target. Research is needed regarding the popularity, search volume, and general intent so that the content can be matched to address your viewers’ questions and needs.
Brainstorm and gather the right keyword ideas
The keyword research process starts with brainstorming and can help to deliver the list of longer or Long Tail terms that bring more targeted inquiries to your site. Establishing and executing a strong keyword strategy allows brands to get found for the search terms that are the most relevant.
Step 1 is creating a list of the important, relevant topics based on the strong points of the business and its offers. 5-10 topic buckets are often typical, and these would be addressed in the editorial calendar of the blogs and other content needed. These reflect your buyer personas and the topics that each type of buyer would potentially search for.
How To Target Your Keywords
Step 2: Figure out which short tail and longtail keywords your website is already getting found for using powerful website analytics software like Moz. Take time to drill down into your website’s traffic sources, and review your organic search traffic bucket. Identify the keywords people are using to arrive at your site and reassess your content topic buckets in Step 1.
Categorise Your Keywords
Which terms do your prospects and customers use, and which common questions do they have that your offering can address?
Step 3: User intent affects keyword research and is a critical factor to rank well on search engines like Google. Today, it’s more important that your web page addresses the problem a targeted searcher intended to solve than simply carries the keyword the searcher used. Here’s where longtail keywords can help fulfil the user’s quest for information that matches their need and intent. Extra care is taken in interpreting the keywords being targeted.
Keyword Target List & Mapping
The main factors in selecting great keywords to attract the right visitors, including:
Relevance – try to have the best resource for content out there for the query so that Google ranks your content higher. In other words, it provides more value than other content on the web.
Authority – More ranking weight is provided by Google when it comes from an authoritative source. This means having helpful, exceptional content and promoting the content on the right distribution channels with linking and backlinking. “Content is king, and distribution is Queen.”
Longtail Keywords and General Keywords – Head terms are the keyword phrases that are typically shorter and more generic than Longtail Keywords. Typically they are one to three words in length. By comparison, the longtail keywords are keyword phrases, usually containing three or more words. The right mix of generic and longtail keywords ensures a well-balanced SEO keyword strategy.
In the SaaS Market, this delivers short-term wins and provides progress towards the long-term SEO goals and objectives. Don’t forget that premium content means it should be among the most valuable in the industry, including the mix of head terms and longtail keywords, such as with Blog Posts and eBooks.
Keyword Target List & Mapping
To successfully execute a proper SEO campaign, invest time in making a plan of action before beginning. Keyword mapping is the critical process of linking keywords to specific website pages. The overall goal is to provide a framework of where you want certain keywords to reside on your website.
To avoid what’s known as “keyword cannibalization,” it’s important that your web pages are not competing for the same keywords. It’s important to have a content plan for each page based on the right keywords for your business. There are many free ways to search for highly relevant content, including the use of the “People Also Ask” section of Google and then clicking through each of the relevant questions for examples of SEO content that may add value for ranking and conversions. Internal anchor text with 1-2 words should also be implemented.
“Once you map out the initial keywords with your money pages and your pillar content (pages that are meant to convert or bring in traffic), you’ll want to map out the long tail variations of your keywords.”
Best Keyword Research Tools for SaaS
Google’s Keyword Planner helps to optimize the Keyword List. Consulting with Google Trends in Keyword Planner, the volume and traffic indicators provide the basis to choose the right keywords based on the quantitative data. The trend history and projections show in which areas you might want to invest for future higher returns. Which keywords are trending upwards is an excellent indicator of where to focus the SaaS marketing content for the growth plan.
SEO Keyword ranking is hard work! Ideally, the keywords should be evaluated every few months but at least once a quarter. Some highly competitive businesses research their keywords monthly or as new competitors and products, and market changes occur. By gaining more authority in the SERPs, more and more keywords will be added to your lists to maintain the current website presence and grow in new strategic areas and geographies.
How do you know if your website is technically sound for SEO?
Technical SEO is the process of ensuring that a website meets the technical requirements of modern search engines with the goal of improved organic rankings. Important elements of Technical SEO include crawling, indexing, rendering, and website architecture.
Why Is Technical SEO Critical for SaaS-based Companies?
Excellent content won’t rank well if the technical SEO is not excellent as well. This is often one of the reasons why high-quality websites don’t end up ranking well since the search engines like Google need to find, crawl, read, and index all your website pages, and there are specific rules to follow.
For example, your site should be fully optimized for technical SEO. The website pages need to be secure, optimized for mobile, free of any duplicated content., mobile-optimized, fast-loading, and very easy to read. It should comply with many other factors that are all part of technical SEO optimization. In fact, the easier you make it for search engines, like Google, to access your excellent content, the better the chance of ranking and improving the ranking.
While the list is quite long in terms of the deep topic of technical SEO, here’s why having experienced technical resources will accelerate the SEO initiatives and make a SaaS company’s products and services look professional. After all, if the website needs extensive optimization, this can be a reflection of the perception that prospects will have of your products and services.
To improve your site’s technical optimization, here are some links to achieving the best practices:
- Specify a Preferred Domain
- Structured Data
- Duplicate Content
- Thin Content
- Optimize Robots.txt
- Optimize Your URL Structure
- Navigation and Site Structure
- Breadcrumb Menus
- Implement Structured Data Markup
- Canonical URLs
- Optimize 404 Page
- 301 Redirects
- XML Sitemap Optimization
- SSL and HTTPS
- Website Speed
- Mobile Friendliness
- Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)
- Pagination and Multilingual Websites
- Register your site with webmaster tools
This list is used to carry out a detailed technical SEO audit. It serves as the basis for the technical SEO Roadmap and a list of open issues for improvement to close any technical SEO Gaps.
Off-Page SEO with Backlinks to Accelerate Ranking
What is Off-Page SEO?
“Off-Page SEO” are those activities performed away from the website to raise the ranking of a page with the different search engines. Link building is just one of the many off-page SEO strategies with backlinks from search engine optimization.
Backlinks accomplish three important objectives, including:
- serving to build long-term relationships with other sites
- obtaining referral traffic
- building brand awareness within the industry
How Does Linking Help My Site?
High-quality backlinks to your site can help to boost its domain strength as well as the overall ranking potential. Consider both the number of links you want to gain and from which credible and authoritative websites you want to link from.
Understanding the target market and the industry is a definite advantage when it comes to website linking.
Backlinks are created when a website or blog, or article mentions another website on their site and links to it. It’s the process of making connections through the right external websites. These backlinks are essential to a SaaS business since they determine your page’s authority. A domain with high authority is critical as it helps you appear in more relevant search results.
Just like a personal reference can open more doors for individuals and build trust.
The same is true when you gain backlinks. An increase in the right backlinks serves as a symbol that other websites endorse your content as a relevant authority. If Google sees that several high-authority sites link back to your pages, it will assume that you have relevant content that’s worth linking to for other websites. If it’s worth linking to, Google determines that it’s worth ranking higher in the search results so more people can find it.
Backlinks also determine the relevance of the pages as well. Backlinks help determine that the site is relevant and authoritative. They also determine the individual pages that are referenced by outside links as well. This is an effective way to improve ranking.
Building backlinks is all about quality—the number of links you have is a great litmus test for your content’s popularity. Fewer and more authoritative links yield better results in the long run. Look for the specific websites you want to gain backlinks from. Be sure to dig into the content to see what they typically link to and see if it fits with your target audience and goals.
Links on pages are actually votes of trust, credibility, and authority. The more links appear on a page, the more views they are receiving, which improves the overall ranking. This goes for Blog articles as well.
Blogs are the most frequently updated website content. Still, no more than approximately five internal and external links per one thousand words is the general rule of thumb for high quality
How To Measure Backlinks Results For SaaS Rankings
There are some excellent tools that measure backlink results, which directly affect website ranking. In addition, there are some helpful ways to figure out which competitors use backlinks and how many authoritative backlinks are needed to outpace your competition. We love to outpace the competition.
Leading SEO Tools can be invaluable in helping to beat the competition, track multiple competitor websites at once for comparisons, and to find out who’s linking to competitor sites. With these tools, you can see the links that point to your different domains and the quality of those links by conducting a detailed “Link Analysis.”
Some of the valuable content for planning which links would be the most helpful include checking incoming links, reviewing the domain authority of the links, finding which anchor text was used for the links, viewing the URLs and titles of the linking pages, and knowing where the links came from including which geography. Technical uses include the identification of broken links that need to be fixed.
Backlinks accomplish three important objectives, including:
- serving to build long-term relationships with other sites
- obtaining referral traffic
- building brand awareness within the industry
When you’re thinking about this goal, it can be helpful to look at which links refer to the most inbound traffic as well. That helps you understand which URLs provide authoritative link equity and which URLs are sending the most traffic.
On-Page, SaaS Audits to Identify any SEO Gaps
Knowing the current state of technical SEO is a huge first step in identifying the gaps on the path to higher conversions. Like a car tune-up, there are guidelines on the best ways to check the technical health of websites for SaaS growth.
Organizing the Audit is a lot of work, which also requires some background business knowledge, including:
- What are the overall business and channel goals and objectives?
- What is the target audience by market and solution?
- Which business partnerships exist?
- How often is the site updated?
Which Steps are Needed for Technical audits for SaaS:
- Begin by crawling the SaaS website to find crawl errors, indexing, hosting problems
- Review the Sitemap for best practices
- Check each of the browsable versions of the website
- Check each of the internal links on the site
- Test the site speed from different locations
- Check the HTTPS content
- Deploy Google Analytics and other SEO tools to compare site metrics to competitors’ sites
- Perform a Backlinks Audit
- Critical Priority Technical Issues
My Suggestions for Crawling Tools and other Technical Tools
While there are literally thousands of SEO and website tools out there in the market, here are a few suggestions that may be helpful.
- Screaming Frog
- Sitebulb
- SERANKING
- SEMRush
- BuzzSumo
- DeepCrawl
- Copyscape
- Google Tag Manager
- Google Tag Manager Chrome Extension
- Google Search Console
- Google Analytics
- Google AdSense
- Google Analytics Mobile App
- Bing Webmaster Tools
- Ahrefs
- Yoast
Recrawling & Maintaining Proper Technical Structure
Some of the findings of Recrawling are to find out how to discover and fix significant technical difficulties that are obstacles to improving ranking and conversion growth.
Critical Priority Technical Issues
The top priority problems are those which affect ranking and conversions, and these are uncovered in a deep technical audit.
Duplicate Site Content
Eliminating duplicate content by rewriting content that is highlighted in the Duplicate Pages Report is one of the top priority ranking problems. While the content is being rewritten, the tagtag can be added to the page so that the page is ignored by Google or the search engines until the content can be fixed.
Common duplicate content errors include:
- meta titles and meta descriptions
- body content from tag pages
- content across multiple domains (ex: your website.co, yourwebsite.com)
- subdomains (ex: jobs.yourwebsite.com)
- pagination pages
Fixing the duplicate content includes rewriting the site content for the copy and the metadata, adding the correct canonical tag to identify the preferred site URL, and ensuring no incorrect URLs in the robots.txt.
https://wordpress.org/plugins/google-analytics-for-wordpress/
Measuring SEO Performance
What are the Key Goals of SaaS SEO?
As an overview, let’s say there are primary and secondary goals. For sure, one of SEO’s primary goals is to increase the number of product pages in Google SERPs and increase the number of the right visitors and the right leads. For SaaS companies, this means that content must fit the target customer’s pain points with ranking words. In this way, the SEO Strategy considers the competition’s ranking strategy and digital lead acquisition approach to lead quantity.
Some of the top SEO Metrics and KPIs that help to achieve the critical goals included:
Increasing organic traffic by X%, improving the number and quality of backlinks, strengthening the domain authority, maximizing the page speed, diversifying traffic-leading pages to support the target customers along with their decision-making or “customer journey,” decreasing the page bounce-rate and increasing on-page visit time and conversions.
What are the Secondary Goals of SaaS SEO?
The secondary goals of SaaS SEO can be thought of in a nutshell of avoiding the “unwanted effects of wide net digital marketing.”
What I mean by this is to avoid having many visitors and conversions who do not meet the target customer or potential customer or partner profile. Some examples include: reducing the leads from low-budget customers or those for which there is no appropriate solution, or too much education and not enough focus on lead generation, reducing the number of customer support calls, etc. What are the secondary goals for your SEO initiatives?
Organic Search Acquisition Report in Google Analytics
Here’s an example of how a blog post has performed so far. Checking for the best content practices will help to improve the overall views, click-throughs, and conversion. Increasing your organic traffic for your target audience is one of the most important SEO goals.
3. Strengthen Your Domain Authority
The main component of domain authority is directly related to the quality of the content on your website. The more visitors read, share, and interact with your content, the better your chances of increasing your score.
First, check on which content is currently bringing in the most valuable traffic. Next, analyze why you think it works, and apply those learnings to your content creation strategy and editorial calendar.
Just remember that building backlinks is all about quality—the number of links you have is a great litmus test for the popularity of your content, but fewer, more authoritative links will help you more in the long run. As you’re setting this goal, look for the specific websites you want to gain these backlinks from. From there, you can dig into their content to see what types of content they typically link to and then look for commonalities.
Remove any broken backlinks or those that will have a negative impact on your authority and brand. Quality assurance of the website is a must.
If the content of a page makes someone want to share the information, it indicates authority, credibility, and/or trustworthiness. Links on pages are like votes of trust, credibility, and authority. The more backlinks a page gets, the more views they are getting, which can improve its ranking.
Conclusion
Wrapping up the SaaS Growth Strategy
SaaS companies wanting to scale their business for growth and provide more robust services to their customers may outsource Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Two of the top SEO outsourcing advantages are the ability to save money and achieve the results faster by having a scalable team available.
Just keeping up with the changes to Google ranking metrics like Google Core Vitals, Google Mobile Analytics, and SEO requires dedicated experts focused on achieving the results. Just dabbling in SEO in a highly competitive marketplace is not worth the effort.
When considering SEO for SaaS Marketing, it’s crucial to make decisions leveraging fact-based marketing. Understanding the key desired outcomes through the lens of customer needs that drive sales and conversion growth is vital. Keeping up with the steady stream of content needed to outmanoeuvre the competition also takes the right SEO knowledge and experience. It takes focusing on all of the areas of SEO that contribute to higher rankings and successful SEO.
While most SaaS firms have an incredible amount of technical expertise, they may not have the experience when it comes to generating the right types of customer conversions and leads for sales through SaaS-specific SEO for growth. In addition, internal technical resources are often constrained and in high demand for software releases. The sheer volume of SEO tools, along with the expertise needed to keep up with Google changes, calls for SaaS SEO experts who know how to quickly optimize digital marketing.
Also, internal technical resources are often constrained and in high demand for client software, which is the company’s bread and butter. Many SaaS and technology-based firms outsource their SEO Strategy and Operations to focus on their core competencies.
One of the methodologies ensuring that the SaaS SEO efforts are as effective as possible involves focusing on the customer and potential customer. Here we can use a modified Jobs-to-be-Done or JTBD approach with a framework that focuses on:
- the customer’s ultimate purpose
- design and esthetics, and
- the overall user experience
- the competition and the strategy to win
Check out the free Excel Template The Insider’s SaaS SEO Mapping here.
If you need long-term growth with a steady stream of conversions and don’t have the expertise, we can help.
Connect with our team at contact@atomicdigitalmarketing.co.uk, and let’s launch.
For our other digital marketing services:
“If you want a successful and sustainable future,
The time to invest in SaaS SEO is right now!”
