SEO Strategies for SaaS Companies – The Ultimate Guide

As a SaaS company, it’s crucial to drive revenue through various channels, especially in times like these where everything is becoming more expensive, including advertising. While traditional marketing methods can still play a significant role, incorporating SEO as a strategy can lead to long-term, sustainable growth. 

However, with the ever-evolving algorithms and best practices, it can be challenging to stay ahead. That’s where this guide comes in. By providing actionable insights and tips based on data-driven research, we aim to give you the knowledge you need to make informed decisions about your SEO strategy and ultimately drive more revenue for your business. 

In this article, we’ll cover what SaaS SEO is, why SEO is essential for SaaS Companies, how to create a successful keyword strategy, and lastly, our 10-step guide to building a converting SEO strategy. 

Whether you’re a seasoned SEO expert or a new SaaS company just starting out, this guide is for you.

What Is SaaS SEO? 

To kick things off, let’s briefly explain what SEO means for SaaS companies. 

SEO means increasing the amount of organic traffic to a website by earning high rankings on the desired keywords on a SERP. 

Traffic can be increased by performing performance marketing instead, such as social ads, PCC, and more. However, paid advertising in all forms can be very costly, and increased costs decrease your returns. 

An efficient SEO strategy allows you to drive consistent traffic to your website exponentially, and put your solution in front of your ideal customers. There are significant differences in SEO strategies between different types of industries. 

However, the search engines’ main ranking factors are pretty much the same, with the quality of content and backlinks being the biggest ones.  

3 Reasons Why SEO Is Crucial for SaaS Companies 

If you’re not already convinced why you need to create an SEO strategy for your SaaS business, you can see three practical reasons why SEO is crucial for SaaS companies in this list: 

1. SEO Creates Exponential Growth

When you create high-quality and search engine optimized content, you can experience exponential growth in your business.

Many of the world’s leading SaaS businesses, like HubSpot, utilize this in their strategy. Simply put, the more content you create, the more traffic you drive, and the search engines like you even more. 

But with that said, you shouldn’t just post new content all the time. Instead, you need a quality SEO strategy that lets you analyze published content to make future content even better.

In short, your SEO strategy should contain the following parts:

• Take advantage of your content’s generated data to optimize it.

• Create excellent content targeting a specific group of keywords related to your business.

• Promote the content to earn backlinks and achieve top SERP rankings. 

2. SEO Content Converts Prospects from Other Channels

Any successful SEO strategy involves heavy content creation. What many don’t think about is that you can use that content for other marketing efforts, such as an email marketing strategy.

This means that the return on your investment increases, as the same amount of content can be used to drive even more traffic. 

In some cases, simply promoting your published content on social media is a great investment, since it strengthens your brand and allows you to earn more backlinks, resulting in better rankings and more organic traffic.

3. SEO Can Lower Your Customer-Acquisition-Costs 

Every single click means a cost when driving traffic and acquiring customers through paid media like PPC or paid social. Not only does this mean that your returns won’t grow faster than your costs, but it often leads to higher costs over time as you exhaust the audience.

SEO strategies do the opposite, meaning your CAC decreases over time. The cost-per-acquisition is often high to begin with, but as you scale and improve your content bank, the costs decrease.

One example of why SEO is one of the cheapest revenue drivers available is that a single well-written article, which usually isn’t very expensive, can help you land plenty of high-quality customers from that one investment, instead of having a high CAC on every one of them. 

If you combine paid advertising and SEO investments in a cross-channel effort, you can cancel out the increasing paid acquisition channel costs by increasing SEO traffic, resulting in a stable and predictable CAC. 

How to Create a Successful Keyword Strategy 

Creating content that ranks high and is enjoyed by the readers is of no use if it’s not attracting the right audience. To ensure that your readers are actual prospects, it’s crucial to get your keyword strategy right.

Using the most effective keywords means optimizing your content for where your ideal readers are in their buying journey. This includes specific keywords for the top, middle, and bottom of the funnel. 

To give you a concrete example of what type of keywords you could use for your keyword strategy, we’ve listed examples of how a company like HubSpot does this.

Top of the Funnel SaaS Keywords  

Top of the funnel prospects (ToFu) are people actively searching for a way to fix their problem. However, they might not know that a software like yours exists, so you need to keep that in mind.

For HubSpot, top of the funnel SaaS keywords could be the following:

• Follow up sales 

• Sales scripts 

• Managing sales processes 

These keywords are not directly targeting a CRM, yet the people searching for them are probably close to the ideal customer who works in sales. Blog content is the best example of what ranks well with these keywords, but they usually have the lowest conversion rates since they’re the least targeted. 

Middle of the Funnel SaaS Keywords  

Keywords for prospects in the middle of the funnel target someone who has a problem, knows that a solution exists, but has yet to spend the time to figure out their options. 

This type of prospect will often search keywords that help them find a possible option, like these:

• CRM for sales 

• HubSpot sales help 

• HubSpot management software 

With all of these searches, there’s a clear intent to purchase, either directly from you or from a competitor that does a better job persuading the prospect. That’s why gaining visibility here and ranking for differentiating and feature pages is crucial.  

Bottom of the Funnel SaaS Keywords  

Prospects at the bottom of the funnel are making their final decisions of whether to move forward with purchasing your solution or not. These potential customers know how to fix their issues, as well as who can do it, meaning that the decision comes down to who fits their needs the best.

Here, your keywords need to be optimized for searches about your product and why they should choose you, including these for HubSpot:

• HubSpot prices 

• HubSpot vs competitor 

• HubSpot reviews

You need to convince the prospect that your company will benefit them the best. To do that, you need to rank on the things that the almost-persuaded prospects are thinking about. 

The 9 Steps of Building a Converting SEO Strategy 

Now that we’ve covered the basics of SaaS SEO, its benefits, and how to construct keyword strategies, it’s time to go into the 9 steps of building a converting SEO strategy for your company. 

1. Set Your Goals and KPIs

If you don’t have goals, you’re essentially working in the blind, unknowing of where you’re going. That’s why having clear goals with relevant KPIs is crucial for any SaaS SEO strategy. 

Many marketers make the mistake of setting broad and undefined goals such as “increase inbound lead generation” or “increase ARR generated from inbound.” These types of goals are not very inspiring and don’t create clarity.

For SaaS businesses creating an SEO goal, we recommend something in the likes of:

• Generate $100K of ARR from inbound leads in 12 months.

• Increase traffic to our website by 100% in 12 months. 
• Get the number one ranking on Google for our specific solution.

Once you’ve set your goals, you also need a way to measure how you progress. This is best done by key performance indicators, where every goal is attached to a single or multiple KPIs. With these, you’ll understand how effective your SEO efforts are and how to adapt accordingly. 

Examples of KPIs for SEO are organic traffic, search visibility, search rankings, and bounce rate. You can also use more company-wide metrics to measure your goals, including MQLs, MRR, CAC, and ARPU. 

2. Define Your Ideal Customer Profile 

To succeed with your SaaS SEO strategy, you know exactly who you’re targeting. This is done by knowing what problems your solution solves and finding people with those problems, or vice versa.

The better you understand your ideal customer, the better content you can create for them, making your SEO efforts more valuable. At the start of every SEO strategy, no matter what industry you’re in, you need to build a clear picture of whom your marketing efforts are targeting. 

When simplified, there are two ways to go about doing this: 

• You can start from scratch and build an ideal customer profile. This is a step-by-step process that can be quite lengthy, but it will serve you well.

• If you already have satisfied and paying customers, you can skip the first way and only analyze your existing personas. 

The marketing department should never build out an ICP independently, as their knowledge probably doesn’t stretch over the entire organization. Instead, they should involve sales, product, and CX in every part of the critical decision-making. 

3. Identify Your ICP’s Problems 

When you’re building your SaaS SEO strategy, you need to identify your ICP’s problems or challenges and build your strategy around that. Earlier, we reviewed the different keywords targeting different stages of the customer journey, and generally speaking, you should focus on top of the funnel keywords. 

For example, if you’re selling employee engagement software, a typical challenge for your ideal customer is how do I get my employees engaged? Or how to improve employee engagement for remote workers? 

Since these are the problems, your keyword strategy should be built around those. Once you’re able to rank for these queries, you can reap the benefits of attracting a purchasing-ready audience.

To find suitable keywords to create content on, we recommend asking yourself the following questions:

• What are the main problems or challenges of our target personas? 

• What questions are they asking about different solutions? 

• What are the best-related topics that the audience shares and engages with? 

When you’ve answered these questions, you can use SEO tools to find specific keywords and analyze their ranking difficulty. 

4. Map Out and Analyze Key Competitors 

An often overlooked part of a keyword strategy is analyzing key competitors. To truly succeed with your SEO, you should know the ins and outs of your competitors’ performance. You can use SEO tools to find how many visits a competitor has, what keywords they’re ranking on, and what their best landing pages are. 

This can inspire you on what you can replicate or should do differently. To give you an example, it’s perhaps not wise to invest heavily in targeting a much larger competitor’s top-ranking blog posts.  

Instead, finding overlooked keywords that your direct and indirect competitors have missed or ignored can be much better. This way, achieving a top ranking on the SERPs is easier.  

5. Optimize Your Landing Pages for SEO and Use

Everyone has, at one point or another, found a link on Google to a website thinking that they have what they’re looking for, but immediately after going to their landing page, they get overwhelmed by a poor design, making them exit the page. 

Many companies struggle with keeping a valuable visitor on the website, but you can improve your chances vastly by creating a converting landing page. All your platform’s landing pages should be easy to skim through, so the visitor can get a general idea of the value. 

Then it’s crucial that the prospect knows what to do next if they enjoyed what they read. One way to go about doing this is to have clear call-to-actions on every landing page, such as “book a demo.” 

You also need to optimize the SEO of your landing pages to attract prospects far down the sales funnel. To do this well, you need to think about what someone that’s close to converting is searching for. Some examples of this are:

• Best Free CRM 

• CRM for Small Businesses 

• Fintech CRM 

If you rank high on these types of deep-in-the-funnel searches, and have attractive and understandable landing pages, you will significantly increase your chances of driving organic traffic that converts. 

6. Build a Keyword Strategy Based on Comparisons

When it comes to SaaS businesses, chances are that competitors are offering a solution that solves similar problems. That’s why a great SaaS SEO strategy should include comparisons between you and key competitors.

When you build out SEO by mentioning competitors, you can actually rank when someone searches for them. And if your platform truly is superior, and you convey it well, you can get a new customer who might have never heard about you before.

Being transparent about your and others’ solutions also establishes a deeper level of trust, and allows you to show a prospect if they’re a good fit. There will often be cases when your offering isn’t suitable for a prospect, and when that’s the case, you should tell them right away. 

7. Create Outstanding Content 

The most critical part of SaaS SEO success is creating outstanding content. Because at the end of the day, SERPs recognize this and generally rank the best content the highest.

Every page on your site and every blog post needs to be better than your competitor’s if you really want to run past them regarding organic traffic. Better content is in some ways subjective, but when simplified, it can be shortened down to these 3 qualities:

• More comprehensive – length and depth matter. 

• Better formatting – the content should be easy to read and understand. 

• Images and videos make users engage more with the page, which SERPs love. 

To create the best content possible, you should start with finding the search intent. Then when you have that figured out, you can look at what your competition has done, and then do it better. Feedback from users and experts is a great way to differentiate yourself in a meaningful way. 

8. Nail Technical On-Page SEO 

Creating great content that’s optimized for your target audience is the biggest part of a SaaS SEO strategy. However, if your on-page technical SEO isn’t also optimized, you’re being held back from reaching your full potential.

Websites with technical issues or are slow to load won’t attract SERPs as much, leading to lower rankings. The best way to find out if the tech is holding your site back is to run an SEO audit, which many platforms offer. 

9. Promote Your Content and Grow Your Audience 

Even if you create the best content out there, there’s a risk of not attracting many readers if it’s not properly promoted. 

This is especially the case for competitive keywords, and that’s why earning backlinks needs to be a fundamental part of your SaaS SEO strategy. 

You should have a link-building strategy to earn many valuable backlinks and allow your content to prosper. We could talk for hours about how to do this the best, but here are some examples of effective tactics:

• Guest posting on other platforms or blogs 

• Resource links building 

• Digital PR 

There are many ways to go about earning backlinks, and you need to find what works best for you. 

Bonus: Celebrate and Repeat 

Congratulations! You’ve just finished, or at least read, all the 9 most crucial steps to building a converting SaaS SEO strategy.

Now when you know what to do, you simply need to take action and get to work. Remember that SEO isn’t a quick fix to lower your CPA, but rather a long-term investment that your business can reap the benefits of for years to come.

It’s also essential to realize that SEO isn’t something you finish with, but something you need to constantly work on and improve, as that’s what your competitors are doing.

Creating valuable content based on the needs of your ICP and promoting it properly will always have to be done, but as you build up your content base, the organic traffic growth will scale exponentially and the CPA will decrease significantly. 

Summary 

SEO is a great way for SaaS companies to drive organic growth and lower their long-term CACs. A well-put-together SaaS SEO strategy enables buying-ready prospects to find their ideal solution – you. 

Many things go into creating a successful SEO strategy, and in this article, we’ve laid out the foundation you need to get started. 

The nine steps to building a converting SaaS SEO strategy are:

1. Set Your Goals and KPIs
2. Define Your Ideal Customer Profile
3. Identify Your ICP’s Problems
4. Map Out and Analyze Key Competitors 
5. Optimize Your Landing Pages for SEO and Use 
6. Build a Keyword Strategy Based on Comparisons
7. Create Outstanding Content 
8. Nail Technical On-Page SEO 
9. Promote Your Content and Grow Your Audience 

When creating your SEO strategy, it’s also crucial to know the different types of keywords and what type of person they attract:

• Top of the Funnel Keywords: These kinds of keywords are searched by people having a problem you can fix, but they’re not sure of what solutions there are. Here, you need the prospect to find your company and offering.

• Middle of the Funnel SaaS Keywords: Middle of the funnel keywords are typically searched by prospects further down the funnel than the top, but they’re still unsure what to think. They’ve often heard about the solutions available, so you must make yourself seen and persuade them that you’re the fix to their problems. 

• Bottom of the Funnel SaaS Keywords: When someone searches for a bottom of the funnel keyword, they’re almost ready to buy and likely making a final decision. These prospects know about their problems and how to fix them, and they also often know about the different solution providers. That’s why your focus needs to be on how you differentiate yourself from others, and why you’re the best fit.

Lastly, you need to remember that SEO is a long-term growth strategy, which will likely take at least a few months to start paying off. 

However, once you’ve set the motion in play and have a large content bank to build from, things will take off fast, and you won’t have any regrets.