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SaaS SEO Guide
SimpleTigerSimpleTiger
SEO
·
1/24/2020
·
 min read

The Most Effective SEO Strategy for SaaS

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The Most Effective SEO Strategy for SaaSSEO
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I'm going to give you the most effective SaaS SEO strategy and some tactics you can implement right away.

While I've written a comprehensive guide for SaaS SEO, the purpose of this article is to give you a short, sweet strategy you can implement to start delivering SaaS SEO impact right away.

We'll get to the strategy in a moment, but you need to know something first.

While most people think SEO is just technical optimization, it isn't.

You probably knew that.

You've also probably heard "content is king," but is that still true?

To an extent, it is but not the way content used to be king.

What about links? Aren't those spammy?

Not always, but they also aren't the single most important ranking factor anymore.

So what's working in SEO nowadays? What makes a SaaS SEO strategy different from any other type of SEO strategy? Why is it so hard to get your SaaS company to grow using organic traffic when you've built a technically sound website, have good content on your blog and had it featured on a few good sites?

It all comes down to the most important thing to Google, and that is user engagement.

Think about it; all the major search engines and social networks want more user engagement. Facebook, Instagram, Amazon, Snapchat, the list goes on. What does user engagement mean to them? Revenue.

So, what type of revenue does user engagement provide to Google? Ad revenue.

In 2018 over 70% of Google's revenue came from advertising.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers


Find more statistics at Statista

Google uses AI and its highly-developer machine learning aspects of the core ranking algorithm to monitor how users interact with websites so Google can decide which ones should rank better in the search results.

You're probably starting to catch my drift now.

If Google can continue delivering users content that keeps them engaged, users trust Google more and use it for all their searches.

So what does this mean for your SaaS SEO strategy?

Create user engagement.

Let's get into how Google defines user engagement while looking at sites individually.

User engagement is determined by how well users interact with your site in regards to specific measures you may be familiar with in Google Analytics such as:

  • page views
  • dwell time
  • bounce rate
  • exit pages
  • pages per session
  • page scroll depth
  • unique visitors
  • new vs. returning visitors
  • conversion rate
  • abandonment rate

Google gathers this data by monitoring what users do through Chrome, which is by far the most popular web browser.

Browser Usage

  • Chrome
  • Safari
  • Firefox
  • Other

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers

Several things improve user engagement, and most of them are pretty traditional to SEO practices that have been around for decades.

Here is a quick breakdown of our favorite SaaS SEO Strategy for improving user engagement:

Keyword Research

Your SaaS SEO strategy must begin with keyword research. You have to know what keywords to target to build your strategy, so we'll start here like we do for all our SaaS clients.

We've written a guide called Guerrilla Keyword Research, which offers a unique SaaS SEO strategy for uncovering high-converting target keywords.

Without getting too deep into an effective SaaS keyword research process, here's a quick overview:

Keyword Explorer.png
  1. Open a spreadsheet and begin typing out keywords related to your product in a column labeled "Keywords."
  2. Make a column labeled "Category" and start organizing your initial keyword ideas into the categories which we'll be using later.
  3. Research your keywords by plugging them into Ahrefs's Keywords Explorer and generating more keyword ideas.
  4. Filter keywords based on several metrics such as search volume and keyword difficulty, which are data points provided by Ahrefs.
  5. Export your list of keywords into a spreadsheet along with your site's rankings for those keywords so you can see where you're already showing up.
  6. Filter and trim your keywords down based on how relevant you think they are to your SaaS product or solution. This process may require that you search some keywords in Google to see what the results are.
  7. Prioritize keywords based on a combination of search volume, difficulty, where your site ranks, and how relevant the keywords are to your SaaS business.
  8. Finalize the list and add those keywords to a ranking tracker, which will monitor the rankings on an ongoing basis. Doing this will help you see how your efforts affect your SaaS site's rankings.

Now we're ready to take some action that will start to deliver results.

Content Structure

More SaaS companies are coming to us recently with poor site content structure, which is different from technical structure and doesn't mean there are technical issues or anything broken on their site.

Content Structure means the way you've organized content on your site and how you've linked it in your site's overall menus, navigational elements, and deeper page link structures.

One of the first things we address for all clients that launch a project with us is to break down their site's existing menu and navigational structure to show them how their target persona may view the menu and engage with it. Why is this important?

Google knows the first several links in your menu are critical for users who are trying to find specific content on your site.

One of the most significant issues we see with the SaaS sites we work on is that they try to keep their sites too simple. By this, I mean they seem to think less is more in regards to the number of pages and links in their menu. While I understand the idea, the problem is their users don't feel the same way.

Most users interact with a menu on the site multiple times before leaving. The fewer pages you offer them, the less they will interact with the menu and your site overall.

Of course, this doesn't mean you should overhaul your menu by adding tons of links, as this will only create another problem; dilution.

Instead, you need to structure your menu around a few standard things customers are looking for when analyzing a product like yours to meet their needs. You should base these on your Keyword Research, so you know what users care about the most.

There are some default options here for SaaS websites such as drop-down menus for each of the following:

  • Features - Think benefits when you're listing features.
  • Use cases - How will people use your product in different ways or for different business needs they may have?
  • Customers or Industries - If your product serves multiple different segments of customers (personas) or entirely different industries (verticals), then list those out.
  • Integrations - If your software connects with other software out there, even if it does so through a Zapier integration, it's good to list out those integrations somewhere so users can get creative at solving their problems using your tools.

One of my favorite ways to figure out what's working is to search a client's high-priority keywords in Google and see what results come up first organically. Then you can start figuring out what kind of content structures users prefer because that data is being fed into Google and driving the rankings your competitor is getting.

Another mistake we consistently see our SaaS SEO clients make is relegating their blog to a small corner of their site, tucked out of the way.

There are several reasons this is a problem, but here are the main takeaways for why this impacts your rankings:

  • Topic Coverage - Your blog covers keyword topics more thoroughly than any other part of your site, which means you shouldn't hide this content away or make it hard to get to for users. We sometimes see sites with a link to the blog in the footer and nowhere else. Move this link up to your header navigation.
  • Blog Structure - Just like the structure of your site's main content that sells users on your SaaS product/solution, your blog needs a well-thought-out structure also. A handful of categories that directly reflect elements of your SaaS product should suffice. On these category pages, I recommend writing a sentence or two explaining what this category is about and then linking to a few essential pages on the site such as the feature page relevant to this category, or a related lead magnet. You can see an example of this in action on our Content Marketing blog category page to get the gist. This part of your SaaS SEO strategy better integrates your blog into the overall structure of your site, creating a stronger ecosystem of content relevant to each keyword you're targeting.
  • Authority - Because your blog covers topics with such depth and offers more value than any other part of your site, most likely, you'll receive more links pointing at individual blog articles. What this means is that Google will be able to assess the authority of the content on your blog by seeing how users link to that content. While the authority on blog articles builds, you'll naturally spread that authority to the other parts of the site so long as the menu, navigation, and links surrounding and within your article are well-structured.

Two clients of ours recently implemented our proprietary SaaS Content Structure recommendations shortly into their respective projects, and the day after implementation, they saw the results roll in.

The first one offers a solution to the real estate industry for brokerages. They implemented our recommendations on January 14th.

organic traffic.png

The second client provides a highly customized enterprise suite of software for Fortune 1000 corporations.

They implemented our recommendations on January 12th. Check out their ranking improvements immediately afterwards.

rankings improvement.png

Content Completeness

Next, apply the Skyscraper Technique.

Skyscraper Technique.png

In short, the Skyscraper Technique is the process of analyzing all of the top-ranking results in Google to pick on the theme of what your competitors are writing, the length and focus of the content, and then combining everything you find into a more comprehensive overview of the subject.

Google wants to see content that covers a topic thoroughly.

After you know what keywords you want to target, you need to produce content that covers the topic of your keywords completely.

You have to go deep and write comprehensive content on a subject until you feel you've covered every possible angle on the matter. Write more extensive pieces of content beyond 1,200 words, and a great way to figure out the amount of content you should write on a topic is to Google multiple related variations of keywords and analyze the top-ranking content for word count. You can take the average with a more substantial weighting towards the top-ranking pages, and then you'll know the number to beat.

Now, we don't want to write something like Moby Dick, where your prime focus is just to produce word count. Remember, this content still needs to engage your users.

So how can you write lengthy content while also making sure you engage the user? Here are a few tips that help keep users engaged on longer pieces:

  • Formatting - This is critical, especially towards the beginning of the article, where you only have a few seconds to capture the user's attention. Think about breaking apart paragraphs into separate lines, provide some bold statements, and some bold statements as well as quotations, numbers, and bulleted lists like an overview of the article.
  • Imagery - A picture is worth a thousand words, and sometimes it's just the trick to keep someone moving through your content.
  • References - These can be useful for showing the user there's more to this topic than I'm explaining here, and you'll have to dig deeper to learn more. Kill two birds with one stone, break up the monotony of the text, and provide a link opportunity for users to increase their pageviews and dive deeper into your site.

Look at your content production efforts as something you'll have to invest in over the long term. Eventually, you'll have written enough content to consistently rank well and drive plenty of organic traffic back to your site.

Repair Technical Issues

Most SaaS SEO strategies talk about technical optimization as one of the key things to drive rankings, but in my opinion, this subject is over-hyped.

Technical structure is fundamental, but I usually find SaaS businesses are doing better in this area over content and links.

Regardless, I want to run through the most significant technical issues we consistently see for our SaaS clients:

GSC Mobile First Indexing.png
  1. Site load time - Make sure your site loads very quickly. The main reason is that most searchers are actively using mobile devices on cellular networks, and downloading your site's content can take a while to load if your site's load time isn't well optimized. Google issues updates through Google Search Console to let you know if your site will be crawled through a mobile-first consideration. Use a tool like Google PageSpeed Insights or Pingdom's Website Speed Test to determine what's wrong with your site's load time and how to fix it.
  2. Broken pages - Pages that deliver anything other than a 200 server status code can spell trouble for your user engagement. A 200 is when a page loads just fine, and the server had no issue handing it to the browser. Server codes you want to avoid are 4XX or 5XX errors such as 404 and 500 errors. When Google sees URLs that generate a 404 error, the clock begins ticking before the page disappears from the index. Initially, the page will start dropping in the rankings. Ideally, build your site with a good URL structure that you never anticipate changing. If you do need to change the URL structure for some pages, then implement a 301 redirect to the new location. Don't string together too many 301s, though, because this can spell a new problem with user engagement where several redirect "hops" cause a lengthy load time.
  3. Duplicate Content - Poor use of tags or categories on blogs such as in WordPress usually cause duplicate content issues. Duplicate content is one of those areas that's both content and technical in nature. How you structure your site's content can have an impact on your SaaS SEO strategy as well as cause duplicate content to appear confusing Google on what pages you intend users to consume for any given keyword.
  4. JavaScript inhibiting usability - Sometimes, we see client sites that have a menu built entirely in JavaScript, or essential parts of the page require JavaScript to be read by the browser. While Google is getting smarter about indexing content in JS, be careful not to overuse JavaScript or else you run the risk of inhibiting usability, hiding content, and breaking user engagement.
  5. Titles & META Descriptions - While these are easy to discover in technical crawls and analyze in an audit, fixing issues with page titles and META descriptions usually requires more manual effort. One of the most important things to consider here is the length of the Title tag (ideally between 50-60 characters) and the call-to-action in the META description. What you're trying to do here is drive the searcher to click on the listing in Google, which is one of those user engagement metrics that drives rankings as a part of your SaaS SEO strategy. Also, you want to use your target keywords at the beginning of your title tag and usually no more than one keyword phrase per title tag, so you don't dilute what Google thinks the page is targeting.

You can use Ahrefs's Site Audit tool to pull back a comprehensive site audit and determine what issues need repair on your site, including the problems I've mentioned above.

Technical Site Audit.png

Link Building

Now that your site has a proper content structure, you've addressed the major technical issues, and you're adding to your blog frequently in a way that completely covers each topic, you're ready to start link building.

Links have played a significant role in most of the SEO industry's lifecycle, starting with the Google PageRank algorithm back in 1998.

Google PageRank Algorithm.png

Google attempted early-on to determine the quality of a page in search results based on how many authoritative, relevant sites linked to the page and domain overall.

The inspiration for this method of determining quality came from the difficulty of getting other sites to link to a piece of content if you don't control those other sites. Doing this allowed Google to put public trust high on the list of ranking factors with link-based metrics ruling the top of the list for almost two decades.

User engagement eventually outpaced link metrics according to a June 2017 analysis by SEMrush on over 600,000 keyword analyses. Here are their findings:

Source: https://www.semrush.com/ranking-factors/
Source: https://www.semrush.com/ranking-factors/

Notice that first factor?

Direct website traffic.

That's an odd one I might not have expected, but it makes complete sense why it would be a factor.

If a user visits your site directly, meaning they typed your website address into the URL bar of their browser, then they must be dedicated to engaging with your site.

While Google has openly admitted they do not consider direct traffic as a search ranking factor, you can see why people would regard it as one.

It's also helpful to learn how to listen to Google when they make public statements about what affects search engine rankings. Sometimes, listen and apply. Other times remain skeptical.

I digress.

Back to this list of ranking factors by SEMrush, after you get through the first few, which are all user engagement metrics we already covered in this article, you'll find a handful of metrics that are all link-based in nature.

So how do you build links and do so in a way that they serve to promote your site in the rankings, don't waste time and don't end up hurting your site's rankings in the long run?

Easy, PR.

For as long as Public Relations has been around, link building has been around, which means link building predates SEO generally speaking.

While PR has evolved and morphed over the years, the core concept that lends itself to SEO is still true; What the public says about something is important.

So should you hire a PR agency for your SaaS company? Not necessarily.

Why not? It's expensive and may not do the trick from an SEO point of view.

The way traditional PR agencies deliver value is they work with clients to produce content with a newsworthy angle that they can promote to publications to gain media exposure. While this sounds well and good and in many cases delivers a real marketing impact, it doesn't mean the effort will fold neatly into an SEO campaign and deliver the results needed by improving your site's rankings.

Enter the modern era of digital PR, which is less about press releases and more about connecting with content creators for blogs and publications respected by your industry.

By using tools like Cision or Prezly, you'll be able to build a list of contributors at various publications based on your industry and then outreach to them directly through the software.

If you'd instead take a more guerrilla approach to build your outreach list, you can always leverage a tool like BuzzStream (what we use) to find contributors, get their contact info, and begin outreach.

Here's what the typical link building process looks like in summary:

  1. Research contributors and build a list in one of the tools mentioned above for performing outreach.
  2. Begin outreach by using proven methods of getting through to contributors at various publications.
  3. Create the content necessary to satisfy the contributor. In some cases, this may be content the contributor wants you to create, or in other cases, it's content the contributor will create. Your goal is for the contributor to cite your content as resourceful to a piece they're writing.
  4. Once published, you have a new link!
  5. Move on to other publications and repeat the process. Eventually, you can circle back through to get more links from the same domain, which will only strengthen the integrity of your link profile, but getting links from various referring domains earlier is better.

One tip we always recommend for performing contributor outreach is to start with the smaller publications and bloggers first since they'll be more hungry and likely to link to a smaller-authority website first.

The more influential contributors are highly unlikely to link to completely unknown resources, so it's better to save them for later.

Eventually, you'll be able to use social proof when performing outreach to new publications by showing them where other significant publications have cited your research and content.

Now we've completed the full cycle of an effective SaaS SEO strategy, so what's next?

Analyze & Iterate

Since I'm talking to SaaS founders like yourself, it may help for me to break down the SEO strategy workflow into terms that are common to developing a SaaS product.

Using Agile vs. Waterfall methodologies, it's easy to categorize certain activities into one side or the other while a complete SEO campaign may not be wholly agile or completely waterfall. Regardless, you can implement everything we've covered here in whatever way your company works best.

Some things, like Keyword Research, happen in a waterfall style where one single effort occurs during a full workload. Other things link content production or link building, or even fixing technical issues on your site might happen in a more agile way where items are completed piece by piece and over a continuous period.

In both cases, it's best to continually monitor your site's rankings, traffic, and conversions to see what's working and what isn't.

We recommend using the following for tracking your KPIs to make sure your efforts are generating the results you want to see:

  • Rankings - We love Ahrefs for monitoring rankings, but since we're an agency and have more intense needs from each of our tools, we like to use AgencyAnalytics, which gives us much more reporting control. We love looking at our clients' rankings daily, even if we only report results to clients monthly. Monthly reporting keeps clients' emotions from overruling logical decisions that would otherwise help them achieve their goals.
  • Traffic - It's pretty tough to beat Google Analytics for an all-in-one analytics tool, especially since it's free. Get used to drilling into the Acquisition > All Traffic > Channels section so you can see how your organic traffic is growing in relation to your other traffic channels. By doing this, you will also see how your organic traffic is converting versus other channels.
  • Conversions - The most crucial KPI for SaaS SEO strategies are conversions, and this typically means different things to different companies. For example, you may have a good onboarding process from free trial to paid users, so converting visitors to free trials may be your goal. For other companies, free trials aren't even an option, but booking a demo with a sales rep is an ideal goal. Whatever a conversion is worth to you, make sure you track it in a tool that allows you to attribute the conversion back to the source, so you know what's working and what isn't.

By looking at all three of these metrics, you'll be sure to know what's going on with your SEO campaign.

An important takeaway from looking at all of these metrics is that you shouldn't get too focused on any one of them in isolation.

For example, a common occurrence that doesn't seem ideal on the surface, but makes sense once you dig deeper is the fact that sometimes a SaaS client's site may experience a drop in traffic, but simultaneously see an improvement in conversions with no change in rankings.

What does this mean?

It's usually the case that we helped a client rank better for longer-tail keywords we weren't tracking rankings for (hence the lack of ranking change), which meant lower overall traffic, but higher quality traffic that converted better.

If you just looked at traffic or rankings in isolation, then you would've missed the big picture and likely considered the SEO effort a failure or even detrimental to your goals. Ultimately, you were looking for conversions in the first place, and seeing all three metrics at the same time allows you to grasp the results of your SaaS SEO strategy fully.

Now that you know what works and can see the impact in your KPIs of rankings, traffic, and conversions, you're ready to iterate and continue improving the way your SaaS business grows through an effective SEO strategy.

Conclusion

I think the best piece of lasting wisdom I can give you in regards to an SEO strategy for your SaaS company would center on the philosophy of knowing what's most important to Google over time in general, and then seeing what that's made up of specifically.

As of the time of this writing, user engagement is driving Google.

I don't think that'll change any time soon, but I do believe user engagement overall will evolve, and Google will follow.

When possible, consider the user in everything you do on your site and make them the center of your site's universe.

Google will see if a user feels they're at the center of your site's universe, and Google will reward you handsomely for years to come.

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SimpleTiger
SimpleTiger
Jeremiah Smith
Jeremiah Smith
CEO

Jeremiah is Chief Executive Officer at SimpleTiger, responsible for high level vision, team growth, partnerships, and revenue generation as well as sometimes consulting clients directly.

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