Many software companies use SEO strategy for targeting the audience and directing them selectively to their websites. It is also seen that many SaaS companies are getting succeeded due to their correct SEO strategy. 

The key points to keep in mind while devising a strategy for SEO is to understand the important aspects to focus on and to find opportunities to target the selected audience.

So let's break down the SEO guidelines for SaaS businesses and see how it is different from others and also see how to rank high on google.

What is SaaS SEO?

SaaS SEO process is a method in which a SaaS(Software as a Service) company tries to earn top rankings for its website by increasing the traffic organically. A strong SEO strategy will guide many new customers to the website and thereby increase the traffic exponentially through organic searches. 

There are many other ways to divert traffic to the websites like using paid advertising, this might increase the traffic and divert new customers to the website but, once the paid advertising is reduced or stopped, the traffic is stopped drastically.  As a result, many are understanding that it does more harm than good.

How to increase SaaS organic traffic?

SaaS SEO helps in increasing the organic traffic by increasing the visibility to those customers 

1. Who are searching for the software that the SaaS company offers, the customer knows the existence of software like yours and would wish to know more about it.
2. The searcher would like to know the price details and even compare it with the other providers.
3. The searcher would like to know the details and purchase the software in the future but as of now, they would like to know more about the software.
   

Also, it is important to know that irrespective of the differences between SaaS SEO and other SEO, the factors that determine the rankings in google remain the same for different businesses and these factors are:

1. Content 
2. Rankbrain
3. Backlinks 
   

The importance of SEO for SaaS’s Success 

One must reduce the focus on performance marketing and shift focusing on increasing the growth through organic searches. So let’s see the need for a quality SEO strategy to drive growth organically.

SEO helps in reduction in Cost-per-Acquisition

CPA or cost-per-acquisition is a metric used to measure the aggregate cost one has to pay during a marketing campaign, to acquire one paying customer. In this case when new customers are acquired using a paid strategy or a paid campaign, one has to pay for every single click that directs one to their website.

What happens is that your cost-per-acquisition through paid channels goes up over time as the number of customers who are likely to get converted might be exhausted. Also, it is seen that there is a difficulty in maintaining a consistent cost-per-acquisition.

SEO can reduce the cost-per-acquisition overtime. The cost-per-acquisition is ordinarily high, to start with, but as development compounds, this will rapidly diminish. Whereas SEO costs do not increment with each tap as paid media does.

SEO helps in the Conversion of customers from other channels

A perfect SEO strategy requires quality content creation. Quality content with quality backlinks can prove more effective to drive in customers. Solid content doesn't only assist one to rank for the target watchwords. It can be utilized as a portion of your social media methodology, mail showcasing procedure, or indeed to drive paid activity.

These types of quality contents will earn more backlinks it. Hence more customers will be driven from other channels to your website and in turn, will help to convert these visitors into customers.

SEO helps in organic exponential growth

When SaaS SEO is done right it can help in exponential growth organically. Evergreen content can lead to content-led growth. More content leads to more traffic, and this is the technique used for increasing growth by most SaaS giants like Hubspot, Pipedrive etc, 

With the right strategy like promoting content to earn backlinks, creating valuable content using the right keywords, interlinking these content created, creating content to target specific age groups can help in increasing organic traffic. It will help in achieving constant traffic and get high rankings. 

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The right SEO strategy for SaaS

The right SEO strategy is critical for building inbound marketing that gets scaled up over time and generates organic traffic. Optimising the content according to the relevant search keywords can be a stronger SEO strategy. 

Let’s see a list of strategies that can be used for building a quality SEO strategy. 

Content Marketing Strategy:

The type of content provided can appeal to the attention of the target audience and the quality of content provided can make them purchase the product. Content must be placed and arranged in such a way that they increase user engagement. 

Placing the targeted keywords in incorrect places on the website can be a good content strategy. The creation of additional pages for the keywords not mentioned in the content so far created can help a lot too. A good content strategy must focus on building user engagement metrics. 

Being in constant touch with the recent happenings in the SaaS industry and creating content for the particular happenings can always make you stay on top of the competitive market and help you rank better. This might take a considerable time for the establishment but will always yield constant successful results. 

Incorporating social media, email marketing, creating backlinks and interlinking the articles can help a great deal in creating strong content marketing strategies.

Keyword research

The Internet is filled with many things, but knowing what keywords the users’ search for can be crucial for SaaS companies. The keyword research for SaaS companies consists of finding the keywords the users search about the SaaS product or solution the user is looking for.

A strong strategy can be created only by understanding the intent of the searcher. This is because one must know the expectations of a searcher when they search for a SaaS product or a solution. Also one must know why a potential customer might be interested in the particular SaaS solution if it targets a particular niche of customers. 

Tools like Google Ads keyword planner will help in understanding the right keywords, the competition involved in a particular keyword and the volume of searches performed with a keyword. Some Google searches must be performed to understand what Google thinks is the best content ranging from most engaging content to the content ranking well.

One must research the ideal keywords to be used, make a list, understand the keyword volume and difficulty and finish the framework using those right keywords. This can be perfected over time and this can prove to be a solid foundation for the right SEO strategy.  

The problem-solution keywords

Buyers' pain points and problems experienced by the consumers face concerning the SaaS products must be analysed and keywords planner must be built on it.

When a search for a particular problem is performed, the customer will be notified about the SaaS solution for the particular problem. These keywords might make up high volumes of searches, clicks and drive great awareness.

The solution-product keywords

Features that provide solutions to the problem searched are the type of keywords that has to be performed next. One has to showcase to the buyer the solutions being offered. These keywords can be based on product category, product feature, industry solution and integrations. 

The comparison type keywords

When the customer has made their mind to purchase the product, they have to compare it with other solutions provided. Comparison pages can generate traffic who wants to know about specific product-based solutions. Pricing comparisons, reviews, a list of competitors, comparisons between leading solution providers can be the type of keywords to be targeted. 

The technical structure of SEO

Keyword research is the foundation of technical structure in SEO. A flawed technical structure will create a negative impact on the links and the content created in the present and the future. Creating a strong technical structure will make the site stable and will stabilise the creation of quality content. 

A strong technical structure will determine how the users and Google access the content inside the website. A technical audit can be performed on the site to understand the strength of the technical aspects and thereby assessing the issues and impacts caused by these. 

Some aspects of technical structure can be the speed at which the pages load, the link architecture, the way your site handles CSS and JS files etc. In short, the fewer resources and time Google has to spend crawling and indexing a site, the faster it is likely to rank.

Summing it up

SEO is the key point to grow a SaaS business. The above-mentioned points could help in understanding the important aspects to be covered for SEO to work and get high Google rankings. These are a few strategies a SaaS company can deploy to build good SEO tactics. 

These solutions are specific to SaaS companies and can help a great deal to build a SaaS company organically creating unpaid traffic.

More Resources

- How to revamp website without hurting SEO

- Most popular SEO myths

- How to do SEO for SPA applications

- How to do SEO audit for SaaS website: A checklist