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SaaS SEO basics: Before getting started
If your digital marketing team has thought about implementing an SEO strategy for your SaaS business, you may already know some of the well-known best practices. But you may not know that there’s some groundwork to cover before you jump in with optimization. Here are some things to know and execute before getting started with SaaS SEO.
What is SaaS SEO?
SaaS SEO is the process of tweaking and optimizing your company website to boost visibility on search engines like Google, Bing, and ChatGPT. The main goal is to bring in more organic traffic, leads, and conversions for your SaaS business.
The process involves strategizing and implementing several SEO best practices, including:
Keyword research
Link-building
Domain authority and backlinks
The audit and strategy implementation could take anywhere from a few weeks to several months, depending on your current ranking positions and competition in your niche.
Why SaaS SEO is essential for scaling your business
Organic growth
The whole point of SEO, really, is to grow organic growth for your SaaS business.
Organic traffic is traffic that comes to your website through unpaid search results. Organic traffic is valuable because it represents potential customer visits from people who are actively interested in the topics related to your business. The higher you can rank on the search engine results page (SERP), the more organic traffic you’re likely to get.
The more high-quality SEO content you make, the more search engines will reward you for being a trusted source of information, and the higher you’ll be ranked.
Reducing paid ad spend
We’d bet your marketing team also has a healthy ad budget. With better SEO, you can reduce your customer acquisition costs (CAC) and boost your customer lifetime value (CLV). CAC is the money you’d spend (on ads, in most cases) to gain a new customer, and CLV is the money your business earns through the entire customer relationship.
With paid ads, your traffic stops the moment you stop paying. But SEO is the opposite. Once you begin seeing ranking results, you can gain new customers without spending anything, reducing your CAC and improving CLV.
Multi-channel conversion
Boosting your SEO doesn’t mean you have to give up on all of your other marketing efforts. SEO can actually complement and enhance your other marketing strategies, like email, social media, and paid ads.
SEO gives more opportunities for prospects who might recognize your business to interact with you. You can use SEO to boost traffic to landing pages built to convert. These prospects may have seen your social media posts or paid ads in passing, and through your SEO efforts and their organic search, they might be more encouraged to click.
Three things to do while crafting your SEO strategy
1. Use customer personas to guide you
Getting people to click on your search result is one thing, but getting them to resonate with your product and make the purchase is another. To get people all the way down the funnel, you need to identify what your ideal customer profile (ICP) looks like.
To do this, think about your current buyers and identify:
Demographics: Location, education level, department, and seniority.
Psychographics: Attitudes, personality, lifestyle, hobbies.
Behavior: Preferred content types, channels, and topics of interest.
Needs: Motivations, problems, aspirations, and business goals.
Once you’ve narrowed down exactly who is most likely to buy, you know who to target with your broader content and SEO strategy.
2. Providing product-led, valuable content is rule #1
The product-led content you make to improve your SEO has to be valuable. Product-led content is about writing on a topic that highlights your product as the solution for your ICP’s problems, while matching the search intent.
A great way to start is by conducting keyword research and writing blog or landing page product-led content that targets those phrases. By doing this in valuable, repeated ways and interlinking your content together, you’ll rank higher and provide your prospective customers with content they can actually use or learn from.
3. Your SEO strategy needs to mirror the marketing funnel
You put a lot of effort into developing content for your marketing funnel, and your SEO strategy needs to be embedded in each part of it. Parts of the funnel to incorporate SEO content include:
Top of the funnel (ToFu): This is where a web visitor becomes aware that your product can solve a problem they might have. This is the awareness stage.
Middle of the funnel (MoFu): The middle of the funnel is where the visitor explores multiple solutions to solve their problem.
Bottom of the funnel (BoFu): The bottom of the funnel is when a prospect decides on a solution (ideally your product) for their problem
Why it takes a team to get the results you want
Once you implement the major SEO changes and work optimizations into your ongoing efforts, SEO can be lower maintenance. But that doesn’t mean it’s a one-and-done initiative.
As search engine algorithms change and advancements are made in the space (hello, ChatGPT), your SEO strategy has to be agile and ready to pivot to whatever that looks like.
In this case, you’ll want to partner with a professional team. Not only will the right SEO team conduct an in-depth audit, but they’ll also take the time to understand your business goals and build a tailored SEO strategy to get you there. Then, they’ll conduct continuous performance monitoring to ensure that the work you do together is always in good standing with the ever-changing algorithms.
Placeholder SEO has your SEO needs (and more!) covered
At Placeholder SEO, we’re not just SEO advisors. We’re a full-suite content marketing and SEO agency dedicated to building you a broader strategy that suits you long term and drives results.