SEO for SaaS: The Definitive Guide for 2023

SaaS businesses face a unique marketing challenge: how to attract potential customers for free in a business that requires long-term contracts and recurring revenue. Businesses that offer subscription-based online services are working in a highly competitive environment, especially when it comes to online marketing. As most of their competitors use SEO in their marketing strategies, they need to keep up with them to maintain their position on inbound marketing channels. 

While there is no magic formula for SEO, it is important to put a strategy behind your optimization efforts. Your SaaS SEO strategy should correspond with the goals and priorities of your overall business. In this complete guide for a solid SEO strategy, we will discuss several ways to effectively optimize your B2B SaaS website to attract more targeted leads, increase conversions, and decrease overall marketing spend.

SaaS, or Software as a Service, is cloud-based software that is typically subscribed to by a business on a monthly basis. Each month, the customer pays for the software and has access to the platform from various locations and devices. Meanwhile, search engine optimization plays a crucial role in determining the overall success of your SaaS business. 

Search engine optimization is the process of improving your website’s presence in search engines, enabling it to rank higher in relevant searches, and attracting your target audience. However, many things should be considered when optimizing a website for search engines, such as increasing traffic, growing organic leads, generating brand awareness, and much more. 

Without strong SEO, signups for a SaaS product may be limited to your personal network – especially in the early days. If you don’t get traffic, you won’t have any leads to convert into customers. In other words, if no one sees your SaaS landing page, then there are no sales to make. Marketers have started to realize the enormous effect page SEO has on their conversion rates. The product itself is typically pretty good, but without a proper SEO strategy, the traffic you need to grow your business vanishes into thin air. The story runs much deeper than using SEO to boost sales numbers — SEO is a competitive weapon that can also be used to outmaneuver your indirect competitors.

Many people mistakenly believe that SEO is only about on-page elements, and use this assumption as an excuse to cut corners on user experience. This 'trade your users for search engine rankings' approach is both short-sighted and dangerous, particularly as search engines take a hard line against poor quality and user-hostile practices. If a user can't find their way around your site — if they struggle to identify where they are and what to do next — you could lose them altogether and lower your ranking. 

To rank well in search engines, it's best to think of your website as a whole instead of its individual pages. That is why it's important to focus on technical audit fundamentals like having a user-friendly site, having an optimal URL structure, and keeping your website up-to-date. In SEO, we need to keep up with all the latest changes because Google updates its algorithm frequently, and it is important to keep your website functioning well for both users and search engines.

The first and most essential step of doing a technical SEO audit is to know your website as a whole. The SE Ranking website audit tool is an indispensable diagnostic tool that provides you with a detailed analysis of your website’s technical health and defines all issues that can harm your performance. It evaluates crawlability, mobile-friendliness, the user experience, including Core Web Vitals, etc. All the detected issues are sorted out based on their importance. The tool also offers you some tips on how to resolve each problem. You should perform an SEO audit regularly to identify changes you can make to improve your site over time.

If you want to succeed in ranking well on SERPs, it is important that you target relevant keywords. Most SaaS companies don't just sell software. They also provide their users with useful information that helps them be more efficient with the product. For example, let's say you are building a CRM for healthcare professionals. You will provide them with information on how to create custom fields and access certain pages where they can easily change things like the company logo and other profile data. In any case, you will be selling your product and providing valuable informational blog content that is related to it. 

If you can rank high in search results pages when people look for these keywords, they will be able to find your brand and then drive traffic to your site by sharing it. Moreover, transactional keywords are searched for more often and are more competitive than informational keywords. While some website owners may want to go after the most competitive keywords for their websites, others may want to focus on informational keyword phrases instead.

As a business owner, you want people to check out your products and services. Your website is eye-catching, attractive, and easy to navigate. You even use multivariate testing on landing pages and forms to find out what works the best. But there is another important aspect that can help people find you on SERPs. If you want to be found online, it's important to create well-optimized content that meets the search intents of your audience. 

Thanks to keyword research, you can define what your customers are looking for and the intents that stand behind their queries. When you have a keyword list, you can start to create relevant content around them or update your existing content. The job of an SEO is to understand what business problem your client is trying to solve and then use appropriate keywords in your content written specifically for them while also educating those who are looking to solve a business problem. 

Creating content using multiple keywords around the targeted intent of the page results in improved rankings. However, your content should be high-quality, unique, relevant, and meet E-A-T principles. Otherwise, you will diminish the value of the SEO strategies for SaaS.

Back in the day, the more links you had pointing to your website, the more likely you were to rank high on the SERPs. Today, Google's algorithm punishes websites that try to cheat the system where backlinks are concerned. But that's not to say they are irrelevant. Link building is still an important aspect of SEO, but it's more important to think about how to get those backlinks and not just how many you have. 

The principal purpose of backlinks is to build awareness and promote your SaaS company as an expert in its industry. For example, getting interview links on popular blogs will generate buzz and increase the number of visitors to your website. By publishing educational content on various channels, promoting the content to preferred partners, and providing links to your website where appropriate, you are building awareness for your brand while achieving many other objectives. Backlinks are still a valuable ranking signal, and techniques such as guest blogging on high-authority websites yield results.

Software-as-a-Service companies face significant challenges in SEO. With their products being some of the most complex to explain and advertise, providing solutions to these issues is critical for a successful marketing strategy. But with all the challenges these companies face, they also have many opportunities that involve keywords, optimized content, high-quality B2B links, a user-friendly site, and more. The quick steps above will help you rank your site for your targeted phrases and capture organic traffic. Having the right SaaS SEO guide can make the customer acquisition stage of your sales funnel much easier and more efficient.

Time is the most valuable resource for business today. Almost half of it is wasted on routine tasks. Your employees are constantly forced to perform monotonous tasks that are difficult to classify as important and specialized. You can leave everything as it is by hiring additional employees, or you can automate most of the business processes using the ApiX-Drive online connector to get rid of unnecessary time and money expenses once and for all. The choice is yours!