SaaS SEO
Software as a Service or SaaS has revolutionized how businesses and people are able to access software and power productivity. Over the last decade alone, sales, marketing, and operations have looked ahead toward cloud-based operations to help teams collaborate and scale services. Overall, SaaS spending per company increased 50% in 2020 compared with 2018 according to a Blissfully SaaS trend report. In an evolving landscape, SaaS offerings are competing for market share and exposure. Learn how SaaS SEO is helping accelerate traffic and leads for established and new products.
Key characteristics of SaaS are what drive interest. With flexible payment options, accessibility, security, quick updates, increased collaboration, growing productivity, and overall scalability provide businesses and people with the opportunity to capitalize on what was once expensive and inaccessible software. SaaS companies and firms are looking for digital marketing solutions that can provide more opportunities to increase discovery for interested buyers.
The Brandsmen is a leading SEO agency assisting SaaS companies with creating and implementing an SEO strategy for their organization. We drill into analytics, keyword research, and other data mining activities to gain clarity and perspective on how to execute SEO that yields new leads and converted sales. Contact our digital marketing experts today to discuss your SaaS SEO strategy.
Achieving Organic Results for SaaS Offers
Growing industry influences buying behavior. As more users become educated with product comparison and solutions review, SaaS companies are looking to get in front of potential buyers. While the wave of advertising and social media consumption fluctuates, there are other digital media methods that provide an opportunity for businesses to gain exposure.
Reality shows that it’s getting more expensive for SaaS firms to acquire new customers through advertising. With the collapse of third-party cookies, companies are also finding it increasingly difficult to assess viable advertising platforms and measure success, or track performance to help businesses scale consistently. An average SaaS business also spends about 92% of its first-year revenue on customer acquisition. The verdict is that costs for customer acquisitions (CAC) continue to increase.
In short, CAC via advertising is producing what it used to.
What Is SEO for SaaS?
With SaaS, it’s imperative that even established organizations are aggressive in their efforts to grow and thrive subscribers. SaaS is one of the most saturated industries. With so many options available for customers, companies have to work double to help distinguish themselves in the marketplace.
While advertising offers a way to purchase visibility, it also isn’t sustainable long-term. Other digital media and marketing can offer a more stable solution. SaaS SEO drives results through search engine queries. The idea is that if a SaaS firm can build unique content with which to rank for keyword results, organic standings can help influence and drive new subscriber counts.
Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, at its core, is content creation that helps achieve organic placement in search results pages. As more people look to Google, Bing and other search engines for answers, SaaS companies should take the opportunity to create content that can help answer searchers’ needs.
How Does SEO for SaaS Work?
In 2021, there were approximately 15,000 software as a service (SaaS) companies in the United States. By 2026, Financial News Media estimates that the global SaaS market size will hit $307.3 billion, with a growth rate of 11.7%. In summary, a SaaS website is one out of thousands that must compete for visibility. Further, 87% of all shoppers start a product search online before they move toward purchasing.
SEO summed up is achieving keyword rankings for your website in order to appear in the top results for an online search.
In order to create a SaaS SEO Strategy, firms must establish a working set of core, competitive keyword terms for which they wish to achieve standings. It can be difficult to build out content around these core subjects, but with optimization, companies can reduce overhead advertising costs and focus on lead generation through organic searches.
Good News About SaaS SEO
The future of SaaS and cloud solutions is bright. In a traditional software model, resellers spend exorbitant amounts on customer acquisition and perpetual licensing. Through SaaS solutions, however, when new customers are acquired, resellers can continue to earn recurring revenue without having to reinvest in customer acquisition.
With steady streams in revenue, business planning is much easier and navigable. That’s a major reason that software companies continue to look toward pivoting into the SaaS space. Some of the leading providers of SaaS are companies most of us know and care about using on a regular basis including Microsoft, Salesforce, Zoom, and Slack to name a few.
SaaS inherently solves business and even personal obstacles using technology that can now be accessed from anywhere. The good news about SaaS SEO is that it requires content creation that revolves around answering these day-to-day operational problems.
Creating Content for SaaS
An analysis provided by CoBloom on the world’s biggest SaaS companies revealed that the top 10% of SaaS blogs brought in an average of over 45,000 organic search visits. Content marketing is a powerful lead generation tool as it helps customers:
- Understand SaaS product
- Highlights key benefits
- Provides comparison details to other offerings
- Answers specific pain points for interested potential buyers
Using tried and true strategy, SaaS companies can begin creating content that helps to answer the who, why, what, and how questions of their specific SaaS product.
The importance of content in digital marketing cannot be understated. SEO involves content creation that provides a clear-cut method for helping companies reach target audiences. If your product is the answer to a trending concern or issue, it should be discoverable across search engines. While SEO takes a consistent approach to content creation, its evergreen standings can help achieve long-term results that advertising does not.
Knowing How To Create Content
With SEO Strategy, every opportunity begins with research. Formulating a sound approach to content creation is step one. Top SEO Agencies will provide due diligence in analytics investigations, market trend research, keyword research, and identifying technical problems that could hinder content growth and standings.
With SaaS SEO, marketing professionals should evaluate and establish unique selling points to help distinguish the product or service. It will also mean understanding key audience members in terms of:
- Strengths
- Weaknesses
- Opportunities
- Threats
A SaaS product should be answering select questions for possible buyers. Establishing a content plan that delivers these answers is the core of content marketing for SaaS. Questions SaaS companies should ask are:
- How does this product solve my buyers’ problem?
- What does the target audience member care about most?
- Why does this SaaS offer a pertinent solution
- Who can benefit from this SaaS?
These questions can illuminate cluster topics that SEO experts can build on.
Promoting SaaS Using SEO
SEO is all about showing Google that a specific website is a best-recommended solution to offer to the user searching.
To appear at the top of search engine results pages (SERPs), a website must outperform all the other options Google crawls. To decide this, Google monitors and takes into account hundreds and hundreds of factors about your website, including factors like:
- Page load times
- Site functionality
- How long do people spend on a site
- Quality of content found
- Errors and technical components on a website
- Site organization and flow
- User experience
- Content updates and consistency
- Keyword optimization and targets
SEO drives the marketing strategy to help situate a website to adapt to set rules and structure in order to outdo competitive sites. The components are broken out as follows:
Keyword Research
As previously mentioned, keyword research is essential for SaaS SEO. However, as best practices evolve, less emphasis should be placed on achieving high standings for the most competitive terms on the market. Instead, a clear evaluation should consider other, more important factors such as:
- Search intent – do the keywords align with the buyers’ focus. Would it translate well for a purchase?
- Search Volume – how often are keywords being searched on a regular basis
- Long-tail terms vs short-tail terms – is there lower hanging fruit to establish framework and standings through long-tail queries as opposed to focusing on competitive, short-terms?
- Competitors – who is currently ranking and can they be outdone through a specific content strategy?
Technical SEO
One of the most overlooked components of Search Engine Optimization is the technical side. Here, things can really go awry.
Consider this: Google is likely to recommend your site because it’s providing optimized signals and content that many searchers are inquiring about online. However, when users happen upon your site, they’re experiencing drastic load times, formatting issues, and non-loading visual assets like video or photos. Those users are not likely going to stick around very long. When a user bounces off of a site (also known as your site’s bounce rate), Google considers this a signal that it’s not a good indication that the user found a match for their query.
The point is, if technical components aren’t sound, it won’t matter how great the content is if the user isn’t having a good experience once browsing.
Websites should be set up to address:
- High speeds and load times
- Effortless navigation
- Easy search functions
- Clear formatting and readability
- Structure that leads the user from one page to the next
The longer a user spends on the site, the better.
On-Page SEO
Probably one of the most well-known aspects of SEO is optimizing content. Digital marketing experts may discuss items like inserting headings and visuals for blog posts and pages. This helps break up long content and provides jump points for readers. In addition, on-page SaaS SEO can include:
- Adding meta tags like titles & descriptions that search engines crawl routinely
- Creating internal links to help readers stay on-page or continue to a new page
- Providing external links within the content to help support assertions and to help search engines understand key linked entities and common subjects
- Improving user experience to help them find exactly what they’re looking for
All of these components of SaaS SEO should be considered when creating a strategy.
Develop Your SaaS SEO Strategy with The Brandsmen
At The Brandsmen, we specialize in creating, executing, and perfecting an SEO strategy, cycled around content that will help your SaaS company grow with more traffic and ultimately more conversions.
Whether it’s a simple consultation or a full-fledged marketing strategy, we know SaaS products and we know how to help get you more inbound leads through content creation and site optimization.
Contact us today for a free consultation.