SEO for SaaS Startups: The Complete Guide

What is SaaS Digital Marketing?

SaaS digital marketing is the use of digital channels such as websites and social media to generate leads and acquire customers. It includes a range of activities, including pay-per-click advertising, email marketing, social media marketing, search engine optimization (SEO), and various forms of content marketing.

SaaS digital marketing is unique. Conversions such as signups for free trials are given a lot of weight. In other industries like e-commerce, companies care about direct sales.

As an example of the unique nature of SaaS marketing, in SEO for startups, getting more traffic and signups to a newsletter can be an appropriate goal. This is because it gives the startup a chance to educate prospects about its products and gradually nurture them down the buyer’s funnel.

What is Unique About SEO for SaaS Companies?

SEO is important for most companies. However, for SaaS startups, it is vital. Most SaaS companies offer unique products or services. Such products are usually disruptive, meaning that people aren’t exactly looking for them, probably because they don’t know they exist.

SEO for tech startups usually involves considerable awareness building. A good way to do this is to create content for topics that people are already searching for. Then, you should find a creative way to incorporate helpful content that’s related to your product, which helps create awareness and demand.

And once you’ve created the content, SEO will make it more easily discoverable on search engines, thereby making your efforts worthwhile.

SEO for SaaS: The Roadmap to Success

Optimize Technical SEO First

Technical SEO is the foundation of any SEO strategy, especially for SaaS. If your technical SEO is badly done, every SEO effort you take is bound to fail. Technical SEO involves the submission of pages to search engines for indexing, checking for duplicate content, and taking care of broken links.

Google Search Console is the most important tool when doing SEO. It gives you important insights into your site’s health, helping you take relevant corrective action.

The best thing about Search Console is that it’s free, which comes in handy in SEO for startups that might have to make do with a tight marketing budget.

Do Proper Keyword Research

The whole point of keyword research is to find out how people search for the SaaS products that you offer. Without keyword research, you’d have to rely on guesswork, which isn’t very efficient. This is because people are surprising and sometimes, how they search for products doesn’t make sense.

In addition to searching for keywords that are directly related to your product, keyword research helps you identify keywords that are only loosely related.

Such keywords can be informational, rather than product related. Let’s consider an example of a company that provides marketing SaaS products. In addition to product-related key phrases like “marketing software,” the company could identify informational keywords such as “digital marketing tips.”

Creating content based on informational keywords will come in handy, as shown below.

Create High-Quality Content

After you’ve done your keyword research and identified the keywords that you should aim to rank for, create content around them.

In SEO for Saas, it can be difficult to rank for product-related keywords such as “marketing software.” Additionally, since such keywords are highly specific, they usually have lower search volumes. On the other hand, informational keywords such as “digital marketing tips” may have higher search volumes and may be less difficult to rank for.

While creating content, the best approach is to have comprehensive articles that are high quality and deliver unique value to readers. Having a comprehensive article helps you be ranked for more queries. It also improves user experience as the user is more likely to find what they are looking for.

Finally, ensure that the content you’ve created is optimized for the keywords you identified.

Build Your Site’s Authority With Backlinks

Every SEO strategy for startups should include a plan to get high-quality backlinks. Without backlinks, regardless of how high-quality your SaaS content is, you won’t rank for any keyword that’s competitive. High-authority sites will always outrank you.

There are multiple approaches to getting backlinks. Guest-posting is one of the most common. Here, you create valuable content for other sites and have them link back to your site.

Publishing original data and unique content is another way to go. This usually requires you to carry out research that hasn’t been done before or figure out another way to generate original content.

Another way that’s particularly suitable for SaaS businesses is offering free tools on your website. You can use your knowledge to develop a useful tool and offer it for free. The more people use this tool, the more backlinks your site gets.

Getting high-quality backlinks can be tricky, which is why it is advisable to get a SaaS SEO agency to help you out.

What SEO Practices Work Well for SaaS Startups?

Segmenting Customers

Knowing which customers, you are dealing with and tailoring content for them helps you market more efficiently. It’s an effective SEO strategy for startups.

Customers can be segmented according to whether they are B2B or B2C clients.

Selling to B2B clients takes longer because more stakeholders are involved in the decision. However, for SaaS startups, these are likely to bring the most revenue. Content for B2B clients needs to be based on facts and should be professionally written. For B2C clients, however, emotional triggers can be used to increase sales.

Targeting Low-Competition Keywords

As a startup, it will take time for your website’s domain authority to grow. You’ll have to put in a lot of work to accumulate backlinks, a process that will go faster if you get the help of an SEO agency for startups.

In the early stages of SEO, it’s a good idea to target keywords that have a relatively low difficulty to rank for. These include long-tail keywords and informational queries.

That way, there’s a good chance you’ll rank on the first page.

Preventing Keyword Cannibalization

This is when multiple pages from your website rank for the same keyword. It can have disastrous consequences.

Search engines can decide not to serve any of the pages for that keyword. It may also appear like you are spamming search engine algorithms, which would result in a decrease in the overall ranking of your site.

A good way to avoid keyword cannibalization is to ensure that each page on your site targets only one keyword. Regular SEO audits can also help.

Using Internal Linking Blocks

Linking blocks are groups of links to important pages on your website. They are usually arranged in an aesthetically appealing way. They might be in your website footer or at the end of blog posts.

Linking blocks look better than single links in the text and readers are more likely to click on links in such blocks.

They help increase the page rank of individual pages as well as the total time spent on the site.

SEO Hacks for SaaS Startups

Optimizing Images

A wide range of hacks should be employed, and each of them makes a difference. One such hack is ensuring that your images are optimized for SEO.

To start with, images contribute significantly to the page load speed. Load speed is an important factor in user experience. If your page loads slowly, your bounce rate will be higher and your website will rank lower in search results. Images can be optimized for fast load speed by compressing them and using certain formats, such as the ‘WebP’ format.

Additionally, the alt text and title tags of your images should provide enough relevant information to help search engines understand what the images are about. This will have a positive effect on your ranking.

Modeling Content That’s Already Doing Well

Rather than trial and error, you can learn from other successful players in the SaaS industry. All you have to do is look for the best-performing content in your niche. But don’t copy from it. Instead, assess what they were going for and deliver even better content.

You can identify areas that they missed and add your unique and helpful insights. The point is to create content that’s better than the existing, top-performing content.

Content Clusters and Pillar Pages

Think of this as a hub and spoke strategy, where you have several hubs. Each hub is a thorough article that gives an overview of the main aspects of a topic. The hub will be connected to multiple spokes. Each spoke is a page that gives in-depth coverage of a specific aspect of the topic.

Implementing this strategy increases the authority of the main page, the hub. As a result, this page will rank higher in search results.

In addition, between the pillar pages and the associated content clusters, you are likely to comprehensively cover a topic, which gives you mileage both with users and search engines.

If you approach a SaaS SEO agency, this is one of their favorite strategies because it’s highly effective.

Optimizing for Featured Snippets

Featured snippets appear at the top of a search results page, even above the first-ranked page. They attempt to answer the searcher’s query by providing relevant information on the results page.

Owning featured snippets in your niche comes with a host of advantages.

For starters, your brand receives more recognition.

Additionally, the content in a featured snippet is a fantastic way to show potential visitors that your website is worth visiting. Such snippets increase web traffic.

You can increase your chances of landing featured snippets through several optimizations. These include using long-tail keywords, using structured data markups, having sections that answer specific questions, and including videos in your content.

Repurposing Content into Video

Once you have content in the form of a blog post, it can easily be repurposed into a video. This video should then be included on your page. This has multiple advantages.

First, there are users who would rather watch and listen to a person speaking. Second, having a good video on a page increases the time spent on your site, which is a good signal to search engines. The more time people spend on your site, the higher your site will be ranked.

5 Ranking Factors for SaaS Startups

In SEO for tech startups, ranking factors can be described as the characteristics of pages and websites that rank well. Here are the top-ranking factors for SaaS startups.

Content Length

Generally, long-form content ranks better than short-form content. It is therefore advisable to publish long-form posts that are high-quality. A long-form post is more comprehensive and there’s a better chance that your visitor will find what they are looking for. Satisfied users are good for your overall SEO health.

But long-form content has even greater significance in the SaaS industry. The longer your post is, the better you can educate visitors about your product, and the more conversions you’ll have.

That said, your posts shouldn’t be long just for the sake of it. Every extra paragraph should provide unique value to visitors. Additionally, the longer your content is, the easier it should be to navigate to sections.

Keyword Distribution

To rank well for a certain keyword, it has to be well distributed throughout a page. It should be included in the title of the article, in one or two section headers, and several times in the paragraphs.

Your keyword density should be determined by the length of the article. Past a certain frequency, it might appear to search engines like you are stuffing keywords, which could lead to penalization. You can find out the optimal keyword density by analyzing posts that are already ranking well in your niche.

Inbound Links

The more other websites and pages link to a page, the more authoritative that page appears to search engines and the higher it ranks.

You can increase the number of inbound links to a page by linking to it on other pages of your website. Additionally, you should implement a backlink strategy to get links from other websites, preferably those with high domain authority.

Anchor Text

The position of a page in search results is influenced by the number of links to that page. Additionally, the anchor text on the links matters.

If you are trying to rank for the keyword “marketing software” and most of the links to your page have the anchor text “marketing tips,” you probably won’t rank highly.

The more the anchor text to a page matches the keyword that the page is trying to rank for, the higher the page will rank.

Accessibility of A Page from the Home Page

How many links does it take to get from the home page to the page that you want to rank for a certain keyword? The more the links, the lower the ranking, and vice versa.

The Key Takeaway

Beneficial purpose.

That’s one of the most important factors in getting your SaaS content to rank highly. Always make sure that each page on your website has a clear beneficial purpose. Then, give your best to ensure that the page fulfills its purpose and that it gives the user the best experience possible.

The more your page fulfills its beneficial purpose, the more the time users will spend on your site, the more your content will be shared, and the more other websites will link to it. Everything just falls into place.