Download the SaaS SEO Guide PDF
Over 60+ page SaaS SEO Guide in PDF format so you can read it whenever you want!
Over 60+ page SaaS SEO Guide in PDF format so you can read it whenever you want!
Growing a SaaS business is a high-paced, exhausting cycle.
You are pressured to push more MQLs, close more SQLs, and grow revenue as fast as possible. In many circumstances you have to meet 5x annual growth multiples (at minimum) to even get funding in new rounds.
You've also probably heard that "SEO takes time", time that you don't have.
So what do you do? You invest heavily into PPC, affiliate, and partnership channels because you feel they're more direct response. These are all great channels, but you're leaving the most efficient, compounding, CAC-friendly channel alone, just because you think it will take too long to perform.
SEO used to take a long time, but it doesn't have to anymore.
We have strategies we use consistently to drive significant growth, quickly, for SaaS businesses at every stage of growth through researching, prioritizing, producing, structuring, and promoting content at scale.
The common difficulty we hear from SaaS businesses is just not knowing where to start, how to get their feet wet before diving in, and what to focus on to have the most impact in the shortest amount of time.
In this guide we want to share some of the real-world strategies and tactics that we have developed over our 15 years of helping SaaS businesses like Segment, JotForm, E*TRADE, Bitly, CrazyEgg, Gelato and many others grow their traffic and SQLs significantly through search, fast.
We will take the 80/20 principle, focusing on the 20% of actions that will yield 80% of your results so you can get started confidently before hiring an agency like us or scaling out your internal team.
In this guide we will cover:
Check in on the individual chapters too because we will include templates and checklists that you can download to immediately create structured action, faster.
Let's dive in!
Before we dive in to the technicalities of SEO, let's start with a primer. As you venture into this chapter, you'll be introduced to the concept of SaaS SEO, its significance, and why SEO differs for the SaaS business model.
SaaS SEO is an approach to SEO that caters to the unique needs and challenges of SaaS companies.
SEO is indispensable for SaaS companies because it offers them a cost-effective way to consistently attract potential customers in an increasingly digital marketplace.
With the majority of B2B buyers conducting online research before making purchasing decisions, having a strong online presence ensures that SaaS companies are discovered during this critical research phase.
Moreover, SEO drives high-quality organic traffic to SaaS websites, improving lead generation, conversion rates, and ultimately revenue.
The SaaS industry, in particular, presents a unique set of challenges and opportunities, which necessitates a distinct SEO approach.
Here are five primary factors that require you to tailor your SEO strategy to the SaaS business model:
1. Digital Delivery of Services
In a SaaS model, your product isn't something customers can touch, feel, or pick off a shelf. It's delivered and used entirely online. Your online presence, which includes your website, social media channels, and other digital touchpoints, should clearly communicate the value of your service. SEO is pivotal in improving your visibility, driving organic traffic, and optimizing these digital channels to communicate the right message.
2. Subscription-Based Model
SaaS companies build their business models around subscriptions. This means that acquiring new customers isn't enough; you also have to keep them. SEO strategies for SaaS must prioritize long-term relationships, focusing on generating useful and relevant content that engages existing customers and keeps them coming back.
3. Global Competition
Unlike brick-and-mortar businesses that compete with local or regional peers, SaaS businesses often have direct competitors worldwide. This necessitates a globally oriented SEO strategy that considers different languages, cultures, and search behaviors. It also means optimizing your website for international search engines, not just Google.
4. Rapidly Changing Industry Trends
Rapid innovation and changing trends characterize the SaaS industry. As a result, SEO for SaaS needs to be agile, focusing on keeping up with industry changes, frequent algorithm updates, and evolving customer preferences.
5. Targeting Decision-Makers
In many cases, the decision to subscribe to a SaaS product isn't made by an individual but by a team or an organization. SEO for SaaS should consider this, targeting keywords, content, and messages that appeal to these decision-makers. SEO should also ensure that your website ranks highly for the terms these key stakeholders will likely search for.
6. Targeting Varied Customer Profiles
Depending on the nature of the SaaS product, companies might target individual consumers (B2C), other businesses (B2B), or even businesses that serve other businesses and consumers (B2B2C). Each of these audiences has distinct search habits, pain points, and preferences.
Your SEO strategy must be tailored to resonate with these specific target groups, using relevant keywords, content types, and engagement strategies to effectively reach and persuade them. Understanding the nuances and specifics of SaaS SEO is the foundation for achieving online success in this competitive market.
As a basis of understanding your investment level in SEO, from our industry research in 2024 the average minimum spend on SEO in SaaS is ~8% of revenue or funding (annually) deployed toward SEO actions.
Those SEO actions include agency costs, team member costs, content asset creation, content promotion, design and dev work, the works.
If you're not deploying at least this budget you're likely under-investing in an incredibly lucrative channel (especially if your customers are problem and or solution-aware) and being left behind by competitors who are being more aggressive in their investments.
There have been significant improvements in the efficiency of cost associated with creating content due to AI, and the speed to understand prioritization and to do market research utilizing AI. We would be wary of purely AI generated content and prefer to recommend a human-in-the-loop, AI-assisted content creation process which is focused on making content that provides unique value to readers and potential customers at each stage in the buying journey.
We have a human-in-the-loop content system that performs extremely well while being 1/5th the cost of our old 100% human content from years ago and we're able to turn around finished content faster due to immediate utilization of brand guidelines, taxonomies, glossaries, tone of voice documentation, and other content already present on our clients sites. We recommend a similar approach with your own content if you do this in-house, not to use the overly under priced mass generation tools out there that will be a churn and burn strategy and not have long-lasting impact. For more information on our perspective of AI content creation read our in-depth article on the topic.
Another component to understand and takeaway is that SEO's CAC starts when you get your first keyword ranking high enough to get leads and close a customer from it, then it is constantly racing to zero as you invest additional budget to increase the amount of keywords ranking on the first page.
It won't (or shouldn't) ever reach complete $0 though because you constantly want to be injecting more budget into SEO to compound your growth by adding additional content assets, promoting content to rank higher, and adjust existing content to perform better over time.
The more leads you get from organic, the lower your CAC becomes and the investment in SEO has a compounding effect over time and staying power if you need to stop investing for a period of time.
SEO assets can also effect conversions at each stage of the buyer journey, from top of funnel educational content converting to email signups or directly to demos, all the way through to middle of funnel MQLs getting booked from homepages and high-level commercial pages, to bottom of funnel SQLs through core pain-point focused use-case pages and long-tail content targets.
Deciding whether to hire an agency or an in-house team is a more delicate discussion, but our general recommendation is to have some kind of base level understanding and experience with SEO internally prior to hiring an agency. The SEO experience you have could come from your founding team, using a resource like this one to get started with your organic growth journey, or an internal hire with more hands on experience with SEO that can either build out an internal team or manage an external agency team.
Our best projects have always been those where the main point of contact at our client's company understands SEO innately and has the capacity to implement recommendations or delegate them throughout an internal team to be pushed forward. If you have an internal team, agencies can be very helpful at providing objective guidance and scaling content creation and link building capabilities. If you have hired an agency already, internal hires can help amplify an agency's effectiveness by increasing the velocity of internal changes and recommendation implementation.
An internal team can also increase the velocity of an agency's capability to understand your customers and market, which is always an extremely crucial phase of any new SEO project.
These are all important factors to consider when seeking to start investing in SEO for SaaS businesses, but ultimately the easiest way to get started is just to improve a few things on your marketing site, write some blog posts, and build out your core commercial pages. Tactics we'll get into further into this guide.
As you transition from grasping the basics, get ready to delve deeper into the mechanics and methodologies of SaaS SEO in Chapter 2.
At its core, SaaS SEO is about understanding search engine algorithms and applying effective strategies to improve a company's website visibility, increase organic traffic, and, ideally, convert that traffic into paying customers.
This chapter will give you an overview of how Google Search works, how search engines determine which pages to rank, and how SEO addresses these ranking factors to increase your website's visibility.
Let's break this down within the context of the three critical stages of Google Search: crawling, indexing, and serving search results.
This is the exploratory stage where Google discovers what's on the internet. Google employs automated programs called crawlers (or bots) to travel around the internet, visiting pages and downloading their content, including text, images, and videos.
During this stage, your SaaS SEO efforts aim to ensure these crawlers can easily access your website and navigate through all its crucial pages. You can facilitate this by creating and submitting a sitemap to Google, maintaining a helpful robots.txt file to guide what crawlers can and can't access, and ensuring the website has a mobile-friendly design, as Google follows a mobile-first indexing strategy.
After downloading the content, the next stage involves indexing. Here, Google scrutinizes the text, images, and video files, understands what they're all about, and then stores this information in the Google index, a vast database.
For effective SaaS SEO, you must ensure your pages have high-quality, unique content that incorporates keywords relevant to your audience. Additionally, proper structuring of this content with the right HTML tags (title tags, header tags, etc.) helps Google get a better sense of what your web page is about.
This is where all the magic happens. When a user puts a query into Google, it pulls relevant information from its index to display as search results. During this stage, your SaaS SEO efforts must consider user intent, i.e., what your target customers will likely search for. Relevant long-tail keywords, question-based searches, and a well-optimized meta description can significantly increase your chances of getting clicked in the search results.
Google has a set of rules, known as ranking factors, that it uses to organize search results. When a website aligns with these rules, it has a better chance of being seen at the top of search results.
Simply put, ranking factors are like the rules or measures that help in SEO efforts. Think of them as the checklist that SEO uses to improve a site's position in search results. Below is a simplified list of these ranking factors.
While the specific strategies used in SaaS SEO might vary depending on the company and its target audience, the overarching goal is always to make the website as appealing as possible to search engines and users.
Having grasped how Google Search functions and the critical ranking factors in SEO, it's important to recognize the actual strategies that help a SaaS business capitalize on these insights.
A successful SaaS SEO strategy relies on four essential pillars. These are: Keyword Research, Technical SEO, Content Strategy, and Link Building.
If you think of Google's search algorithms as the rules of the game, then these four strategies are your game plan to victory.
Keyword research for SaaS involves identifying the specific search terms or phrases your target audience uses when looking for software services like yours. This process is crucial, as it forms the foundation of your SaaS SEO strategy. By understanding the terms your potential customers use, you can tailor your website's content to match their search queries, improving your visibility on SERPs.
For SaaS websites, this often includes the name of the product or service and queries related to problems the software solves or its specific features. You can use various SEO tools to uncover high-volume, low-competition keywords most likely to drive qualified traffic to your website. It's also crucial to consider search intent, meaning you should consider what users are searching for and why they're searching for it.
Competitor keyword research is equally important. It involves analyzing what keywords your competitors are ranking for and then creating a strategy to compete for those same keywords. This process will help you identify gaps in your content, which you can fill with high-quality, keyword-optimized material.
In-depth keyword research might lay the foundation for your SEO approach, but technical SEO for SaaS provides the necessary framework. This aspect is crucial for your SaaS website, as it paves the way for increased visibility and superior rankings on search results pages. To appreciate its importance, you should grasp the idea of "crawlability," which refers to how effectively search engine bots can access and traverse your website.
Technical SEO strategies facilitate these bots' efficient access to, crawling, and indexing of your website, thereby increasing its exposure to potential customers. Key components to focus on are site structure, loading speed, mobile optimization, and XML sitemaps. A coherent site structure and comprehensive XML sitemaps make it easier for bots to understand your site, while fast loading times and mobile optimization ensure a positive user experience.
Additionally, because SaaS products often involve complex topics, structured data can be crucial to your technical SEO strategy. Structured data, or schema markup, gives search engines more information about your site and its content, making it easier for them to understand what your page is about. This can result in more detailed search listings, potentially increasing your click-through rate and driving more traffic to your site.
Moving away from the technical side of SEO, let's explore the more creative and user-centric component of your SaaS SEO strategy—the content marketing strategy. Your content strategy weaves together all the pages on your website to tell a cohesive story about your product. The success of your content strategy relies heavily on a clear understanding of your audience's needs, search behavior, and a well-researched set of keywords.
Commercial pages, like features, solutions, integrations, industries, and product pages, provide vital information about your services. By aligning the content on these pages with your keyword research strategy and audience intent, you'll enhance your site's relevance to search engines and users.
This could mean optimizing existing pages with targeted keywords or identifying new keyword opportunities that call for creating new pages. All of this contributes to a solid SEO strategy tailored to the specific needs of a SaaS business.
Educational pages, such as blog posts, guides, and case studies, showcase your expertise and let you delve deeper into topics relevant to your audience, helping to address their queries and provide solutions. These pages come into play when discussing expanding your visibility and authority in the SaaS industry.
Again, keyword research plays a central role. It helps to shape your content calendar, allowing you to prioritize and create content that first targets the most impactful keywords.
By regularly producing high-quality, targeted blog content, you're serving your audience and sending positive signals to search engines about your website's relevancy and authority. This continuous influx of fresh, keyword-targeted content significantly enhances your SaaS SEO campaigns, driving organic traffic and fostering a strong online presence in the SaaS landscape.
A link building strategy is a fundamental element of SEO, particularly vital for SaaS companies competing in a global and highly digital marketplace. Simply put, a backlink is a link from one website to another. When a reputable website links to your content, it acts as a vote of confidence in your site's credibility and relevance. Search engines, like Google, view these backlinks as endorsements of your content's quality, leading to improved rankings in SERPs.
The function of a link building strategy is to earn these valuable links from other websites. You can achieve this through several means, such as creating high-quality, shareable content that others want to link to, guest posting on reputable websites, or building relationships with influencers and industry leaders who might share your content. Each backlink to your website increases your domain's authority, signaling to search engines that your website is a trusted and informative source.
Link building is particularly crucial for SaaS companies due to the industry's highly competitive and rapidly evolving nature. A solid backlink profile can help SaaS businesses stand out, improve online visibility, and attract organic traffic. More than that, backlinks can also increase brand awareness and credibility, helping potential customers understand and trust your SaaS solutions. SaaS companies strive to earn recognition as trusted and authoritative players, not merely seek visibility.
So far, we've identified the four pillars that create the foundation for successful SaaS SEO: Keyword Research, Technical SEO, Content Strategy, and Link Building. Each pillar ensures your SaaS company ranks higher in search engine results, drives more organic traffic, and converts visitors into paying customers. In the following sections, we'll delve into these pillars individually and provide a step-by-step guide for kick-starting your strategy.
Keyword Research identifies the terms and phrases your potential customers use when searching for software solutions like yours. This knowledge can then guide your content creation and overall marketing strategy.
Here's a step-by-step guide on how to conduct effective keyword research for your SaaS business:
Before you start hunting for keywords, you must understand your audience thoroughly. What are their pain points? What type of software solution are they looking for? What language do they use when describing their problems and needs? Gathering these insights will help you identify relevant keywords your potential customers will likely use in their search queries.
Pull together any data you have on your target audience and start brainstorming potential keywords related to your software services. We recommend brainstorming with your team because your target customers will search for you in numerous ways. Having multiple perspectives will be extremely beneficial.
Plan an hour or two for the initial process. Brainstorm keywords for your commercial pages and educational pages. Commercial keywords will focus on your product type, solutions, features, industries, clients, and integrations. Educational keywords will focus on your customers' questions and general information they are looking for related to your product.
Search intent is the reason or the "why" behind a user's search query on search engines. In simpler terms, it's the goal a person has when typing a search query. For instance, are they looking to buy something, find a particular website, get an answer to a question, or just explore a topic?
By understanding search intent, businesses can tailor their content to match what users are actively searching for, increasing the likelihood of attracting the right audience to their website.
Once you’ve built a good list of terms, analyze the top-ranking search results for each keyword. By analyzing the results Google has served as relevant to each keyword, you can understand the preferred content format and the kind of information users want (i.e., blog articles, product detail pages, competitors’ SaaS sites, etc.). Classify your keywords according to navigational, informational, commercial, and transactional intent.
After identifying potential keywords and understanding their search intent, you'll want to roll up your sleeves and delve into competitive analysis. Imagine it as a reconnaissance mission to see what your competitors are up to and where they might be leaving some opportunities on the table.
Here's how to do it:
While manual research can give you some insights, to really deep-dive into competitive analysis, tools like Ahrefs are invaluable. Not only will they save you time, but they'll also provide detailed data that can be the difference between an okay SEO strategy and a stellar one.
At this stage, you should have a long list of keywords with a good understanding of their intent, relevance to your company or product, and category. It’s time to start drilling down on keyword data to see what objective decisions we can make. Several tools can help you find relevant keywords.
Below is a list of free keyword research tools that can provide a good starting point:
For more advanced insights, paid tools like SEMrush or Ahrefs can offer comprehensive keyword data, including monthly search volume, keyword difficulty, and more.
Below are the main data points we prefer to include and the tools we use to source this data.
Researching keyword data is a complex but necessary part of the SEO process. It will provide valuable insights into your target audience's behaviors and preferences, allowing you to create a more effective and targeted SaaS SEO strategy.
With a well-researched list of keywords and a clear understanding of their value, implementing these findings into your content strategy is the final step. This involves weaving them into your website naturally and strategically.
Here's how you can go about this:
Remember, successful SEO is about more than just keyword optimization. It's about creating high-quality content that satisfies your user's intent and provides them with value. By doing this, you'll improve your search engine rankings and create a better experience for your users.
Once you've implemented your keywords, tracking their performance is essential. Use SEO tools to monitor changes in rankings, organic traffic, and conversions.
If a keyword isn't performing as well as you'd hoped, don't be afraid to adjust your strategy. SEO is a long-term game; adjusting your tactics is normal as you learn more about what works for your business.
Here are the key components of this step:
Monitoring and adjusting your keyword strategy is an ongoing process that helps you understand the effectiveness of your efforts and provides opportunities for improvement. Always be prepared to adapt and evolve your strategy in response to your results and changes in the search landscape.
With the abstract keyword research process out of the way, it’s time to look at and address your SaaS website’s technical structure.
A technical SEO audit is a thorough examination of the technical health of a website, identifying strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities for improvement. This process will happen repeatedly while building your site’s organic search traffic.
Here's a step-by-step guide on how to conduct a SaaS technical SEO audit:
Part of what makes the technical portion of SEO so easy is the tools you use for the job. You can use various tools to crawl your SaaS website, but there are a few we’ve been using for years and love. These tools simulate how search engines interact with your website and help identify issues hindering your performance.
First, your site's Google Search Console should be set up and configured properly. Google Search Console is a free tool provided by Google that allows website owners to monitor and manage their site's presence in Google search results.
It's a crucial tool for technical SEO, allowing you to submit sitemaps, see if Google has any crawl issues with your site, and even lets you know if there are any security issues or manual actions affecting your website.
Ensure you get the right www or non-www version of your site verified, and if it’s HTTPS (as it should be), you’ll want to verify that part properly too.
Next, pick one of the following tools (or even a few) and start a crawl of your site:
Regardless of the tool you use, you’ll need to know which issues are real concerns and which issues can be addressed down the road. There’s always a balance between cost and benefit when making technical implementations for SEO purposes. Still, some issues can be fixed easily and have a massive impact.
Here’s our top list of top technical issues to look out for, in order of priority:
After implementing some technical best practices according to this guide and your findings in your SEO tools, it’s time to re-crawl your site. This lets you see if your changes are live and if any new issues have popped up. You’ll also want to set up the crawling tool you’ve chosen to recrawl the site based on your chosen schedule.
If you’re moving many pages and making frequent changes to your site, you’ll probably want a more frequent crawl cycle. A more infrequent crawl cycle should also work if you rarely change the site or add content.
Over time, issues will inevitably pop up, and your goal isn’t to have zero issues on your site but to stay on top of the most critical ones and keep them in check so they don’t limit your performance as you add content and links later.
There’s so much more you can do to optimize your site than just address the issues we've listed here, but it’s easy to get stuck in the weeds and never make it into the world of high-impact SEO efforts, including content production and link building.
Let’s shift gears, and we'll show you what you can build on a site with a strong technical foundation.
Users ultimately look for content when searching on Google or any other search engine. A well-defined content strategy helps create a roadmap for communicating with your target audience.
Your content marketing strategy can be divided into three main stages: content organization, content production strategy, and content production plan. Let's take a look at what each stage entails.
Content organization on your website is a critical element influencing the user experience and search engine ranking. It refers to how your content, including commercial and educational pages, is organized and presented on your site. Like how you would logically arrange chapters in a book or departments in a store, users expect content to be grouped into meaningful clusters that make sense.
From a user experience perspective, an effective content organization makes it easy for visitors to find the information they seek. It also ensures they can easily navigate between different sections of your site without getting lost. This is especially important as Google’s algorithm heavily weighs user experience as a ranking factor.
Here's how to effectively organize your content, including both your commercial pages and educational pages:
Following these steps can help you achieve an effective content organization strategy that improves the user experience, enhances your brand identity, and improves your search engine ranking.
Once your content is organized, consistent and ongoing content production becomes the next hurdle. It's essential to answer questions like, "What type of content should we create?", "What should it be about?", "How long and detailed should it be?" and "Who are our target readers?". Address these questions by focusing on your product's various personas and use cases.
Here's a step-by-step process to design your content production strategy:
Understanding your audience is key. You want to create content that speaks to your audience and what they want. When planning your content, consider where your customers might be in their buying journey. Your content ideas should be tailored to the top, middle, and bottom of the funnel.
Whether you aim to attract more people to your website, convert interested visitors into sign-ups, or turn trial users into loyal customers, each piece of content should serve a clear purpose. By tailoring your content to the different stages of the funnel, you'll be able to guide your customers smoothly through their buying journey and grow your business effectively.
It's important to know what you want to achieve with your content. Setting clear goals can help guide your strategy and measure your progress. For example, you might want more people to know about your brand, visit your website, or sign up for a trial. Or maybe you want to turn people who are just browsing into customers or keep your existing customers happy so they stick around.
Distributing your content in a manner that addresses both immediate sales objectives and fosters long-term brand recognition is crucial. Some content should directly promote your product, helping to drive immediate conversions and boost sales. However, other content should take a more subtle approach, aiming to inform, educate, and engage your audience. This type of content is designed to build a deeper connection with your audience, establish your brand as a reliable source of information, and foster long-term loyalty. Balancing these two types of content effectively can lead to short-term and long-term success in your content marketing strategy.
Whatever your goals are, make sure your content is designed to help you achieve them. This will ensure your marketing efforts are always worthwhile and help you grow your business.
A content audit can help you understand what's working and what's not on your website. It's like taking inventory of what you already have. You can see which pages your audience likes and which might need more work. A good audit also helps you spot missing content—gaps where you could add something new and useful for your audience.
Your keyword research will help you prioritize your content calendar around topics that represent the best opportunity. The golden opportunities in keyword research are often keywords with high search volume but low competition. These are terms that many people are searching for, but not many websites are providing quality content for them. You can potentially attract significant traffic to your blog by targeting these keywords.
Plan out your content production for the upcoming weeks or months. This content calendar should outline the types of content you're creating (e.g., blog posts, videos, webinars), the topics to be covered, the keywords identified in your research, and the designated publishing dates. This schedule ensures regularity in your content production, which is vital for audience engagement and SEO.
Delegate each piece of content to a specific team member or external contributor. They must comprehend the objectives of the content, the target persona it's meant for, and the deadlines they must adhere to.
The process of creating your content can involve various players. If you have an in-house writer, they can take on this task, ensuring consistency of voice and a thorough understanding of your product and audience. Alternatively, you may outsource content creation to freelance writers or a content marketing agency. This approach could bring fresh perspectives and unique styles to your content.
Regardless of who creates the content, there are several best practices to follow:
Monitoring how your content performs is key to improving your strategy over time. You need to track specific metrics that align with your content goals. These might include the number of page views, average time spent on the page, bounce rate, number of shares, conversion rate, etc. Tools like Google Analytics can be very helpful in tracking these metrics.
A critical aspect of tracking is understanding when to optimize a blog post. If a post generates traffic but has a low conversion rate, it might be time for optimization. This could involve improving the call-to-action, adjusting the keyword usage, or updating the content to make it more relevant and helpful for your audience.
Remember, content marketing is a dynamic process. There's always room for iteration and improvement. You can continually refine your strategy and grow your SaaS business by tracking your performance and learning from your successes and failures.
These steps, when followed conscientiously, will assist you in creating a successful content marketing strategy for your SaaS business. Remember that content marketing isn't a one-size-fits-all approach, and what works for one business may not work for another. Therefore, consistently testing and modifying your strategy based on your unique audience and business goals is crucial.
Link building is a crucial yet often misunderstood component of an SEO strategy. Visitors who engage with popular inbound marketing sites like Hubspot witness the power of high-quality content. Yet, the behind-the-scenes magic of backlinking is equally pivotal in driving search engine results. Here's a step-by-step guide to help you craft a robust link building strategy for your SaaS business.
To kick things off, let's figure out which pages on your site will be your link building superstars. There are two main paths here: leveraging your existing pages or creating new ones. A balanced approach will likely give you the best results.
Just starting your SEO journey or got a relatively new site? No problem! Even if you don't have a ton of keyword-targeted content, you can still jump straight into link building. There are surely some pages on your site that are already popular with visitors, and these can be your initial focus. A tool like Ahrefs, with its backlink analytics feature, can give you the insights you need.
After you've closely examined your existing pages and picked out the top performers, decide which ones would benefit most from additional traffic. These will become your first targets for link building. Sometimes, these pages won't need any changes. Other times, you might need to give them a bit of a facelift by optimizing them for target keywords before you start building links.
Expanding your website with new pages doesn't just give your site a fresh look; it's also a great way to attract more visitors. The cornerstone of this approach is choosing the right keywords. Utilize your keyword research to identify the target keywords most worth your time.
When choosing target pages for your link building campaigns, knowing the difference between building links for commercial pages versus educational pages is important. Generally speaking, commercial pages are more difficult to build links to, making it more strategic to focus on educational pages, but that doesn't mean you should forget them entirely.
If your SaaS business doesn't have a keyword-focused blog, your home page or feature pages are likely the main attractions.
If your feature pages are already ranking well, this indicates that Google considers them relevant to your software product. In this case, building links to these pages may help boost their natural rankings. If these pages already rank well, it suggests that Google sees them as relevant to your software product. This is good news! Building links to these pages can help boost their rankings even further.
Remember, since these pages are more promotional than educational, not all sites will want to link back to them. However, if you’re competing primarily against other commercial pages, you may have more success.
Educational pages are the workhorses of most link building campaigns. These pages let you target specific keywords and build links that incorporate these keywords and related phrases. They're great because they offer valuable information to your audience while making your site more attractive for backlinks.
Your educational pages might include comprehensive guides on topics your audience cares about and shorter blogs, articles, or videos on more specific topics.
Sure, more content means more opportunities for links, but remember, this isn't just about quantity; quality matters too! Some of your content will naturally attract more traffic and should be a priority in your link building campaigns.
Now we're ready to move on to the next integral part of our SaaS link building strategy. It's time to delve into how to select an effective link building method. This decision significantly influences the type of backlinks you'll attract and, subsequently, the improvement in your SEO performance. So, let's navigate the various link building techniques and find the one that aligns best with your SaaS business goals.
Editorial link building is the number-one link building tactic to increase the rankings of target URLs surgically. It involves getting the editor of another site to link back to your site, in some cases because you are the editor or you have influence with the editor, and in other cases, because the editor saw your content and linked to you on their own initiative.
If you want to see your website rank for a specific target keyword, or group of keywords, and if you already have a relevant and optimized page on your website to target with link building, then editorial link building is the way to do it. This method creates a link between the linking site, your site, and your content. Usually, editorial links come from sites with medium-ranking authority.
When focusing on editorial link building, a set link estimate needs to be followed to build the requisite links to rank a webpage for a particular keyword. This is based on several factors, including keyword difficulty, the makeup of the SERP, the competing authority of other ranking websites, and your website's authority. If your website is in line with the authority of other websites, or if you at least have a more targeted content asset, then editorial link building can help move the needle.
Guest posting involves persuading the editor of another site to allow you to post on their site. This provides value to another business in exchange for a link to your website.
Guest posts are often arranged by pitching a topic relevant to the audience of your prospective host. Typically, guest posts link to your home page through your author bio rather than providing contextual links.
Guest posts and links may be arranged by offering mutual backlinks. The difference between these two tactics is that guest post exchanges involve posting new content, while link exchanges involve inserting external links into existing content.
Google tends to allow these tactics as long as both links are relevant. However, avoid irrelevant exchanges, which can result in penalties. Also, make sure the site you’re exchanging with is a quality site.
Authority link building is one of the more difficult ways to acquire tactical links. It involves getting links from high-authority domains such as educational, government, and news sites. For example, a news site might link to your site as an authority on a topic.
Such high-quality backlinks can boost your domain's rating and authority. However, they are unlikely to produce quick ranking boosts for target keywords. Authority sites tend to have higher editorial standards, making them unlikely to center on the content of your page in a promotional manner. Such sites also tend to give you nofollow links, which are useful but do not have a direct SEO benefit and should be avoided except where their PR value outweighs this drawback.
There are other link building strategies that SaaS companies can employ to achieve links outside of the typical PR approach. Some of them include:
Internal links are links that direct the reader to a target page on the same domain. Here's a more in-depth look at the role of internal links in link building and SEO:
Creating a solid link building strategy involves careful planning, a deep understanding of your website's strengths, and strategic partnerships. Following these steps, you can establish a robust backlinking portfolio to boost your SaaS product's visibility and search engine ranking.
Stepping into the world of SEO for SaaS can feel like a challenge, but equipped with the right tools and strategies, it can become a path to impressive growth and success. Our guide offers a comprehensive collection of these tools and strategies, prepared to help you optimize search engine visibility, increase organic traffic, and, consequently, expand your business.
Remember that SEO is not a one-and-done task, but a continuous commitment. The digital environment changes rapidly, and your SEO strategy needs to keep up. With the knowledge we've shared, you have a starting point for maintaining a solid online presence and making the most out of the digital age's opportunities.
Results from SEO may take time, but there are ways to speed them up by focusing on the right efforts at the right time, and they are long-lasting and absolutely worth the effort. As you continuously improve your SEO strategies, you lay a solid foundation for the long-term success of your SaaS company.
We appreciate your effort and time spent learning from our guide. We're confident you're now better prepared to tackle the challenges of the SEO world.
Should you need additional help to enhance your SaaS company's online visibility, SimpleTiger is at your service. Our SEO and PPC experts are dedicated to delivering real, meaningful results.
At SimpleTiger, we stand out for our 100% SaaS-focused approach. We leverage proprietary data intelligence, unique SaaS playbooks, and our specialized SEO strategies. Our in-house team handles content production and link building, guided by a fast-paced project mindset.
We believe in long-term partnerships fueled by our experience creating industry leaders, transparent project management, and 24/7 Slack access.
Don't hesitate to get in touch with SimpleTiger today to learn more about our SaaS SEO services. We're excited to collaborate with you, fuel your business growth, and unlock your online potential.
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.
Schedule a Discovery Call and see how we've helped hundreds of SaaS companies grow!
