How to Develop an SEO Strategy for Your SAAS Company

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Over the last couple of years, SAAS (Software as a Service) sector went through a drastic surge scoring an incredibly healthy 18% year-on-year growth. According to the same sources, at the end of 2022, 99% of companies of all scales, sizes, and locations used at least one of the SAAS services.

This incredible growth means SAAS has outgrown traditional marketing channels and needs to reach out to a wider number of more diverse customers.

As always, the solution to this problem can be found in the good old SEO that has, historically, proved to be one of the most efficient ways of breaching new markets and appealing to different audiences. Let us take a look then at a couple of tips that should help you develop an effective SEO strategy and put your SAAS business on the map.

Nail down personas and problems

The entire SAAS industry is built around creating solutions for very specific problems encountered by a niche audience. If you want to create a sustainable and effective keyword strategy, you need to spend enough time getting to know your audience as well as learning how they think and phrase their queries. Mastering these nuances will allow you to use more versatile long-tail keywords and, ultimately, lead your future clients deeper down the sales funnel and other points of engagement. Finally, getting to know the buyers’ personas will also help you create more meaningful, engaging, and digestible content.

Use informational keywords

If you are not familiar with the term, informational keywords are the terms or phrases people use to look up information. Some of the examples would be ‘how to do taxes faster’, ‘habits of effective leaders,’ or ‘productivity tips for students.’ Even though these keywords may seem too broad, we have to remember that in the SAAS most of the clients you are aiming for are not aware of your product or that software for their issues even exists. With that in mind, we can agree that Informational keywords can serve as an excellent way for speaking to people with less knowledge about the SAAS industry.

Speak to the local audience

Due to their very nature, SAAS products are very location-agnostic. On the other hand, the strategies you should use to crack new markets should be everything but. Even if we put aside the fact that the English language features various regional differences (e.g., Australia has a very distinct language variety), local crowds simply use different terms and phrases for searching the web. The best way for solving this problem lies in hiring local talent. So, if you are, like in the previous example expanding to the Australian market, the professional SEO Sydney services will do the best job of appealing to the local audiences.

Rely on relevant metrics

Any kind of SEO strategy should rely on different metrics to measure how successfully they are rolling out and what kinds, of course, corrections need to be made. Speaking in terms of SAAS SEO, these three metrics groups should be your priority:

• Link metrics – They are used to assess the traffic produced by linking another domain to your own or by internal liking strategies (page authority, domain authority, etc.).

• User engagement metrics – The SEO experts use these metrics to assess how well the visitors engage with the site, how much time they spend there, and, ultimately, are they are finding the content they came for (bounce rate, time spent on site, etc.).

• Content metrics – Essentially, these figures describe how well the content is aligned with the latest SEO standards.

Create a keyword funnel

Since the SAAS industry features such a loose customer base, getting people to make a purchase won’t be possible with a single keyword or even a group of similar keywords. That is why we suggest that you develop a full-scale keyword funnel that will lead the future audience from broader queries to more precise branded hits. Ideally, the funnel should be split into three groups:

• Top of the funnel (keywords addressing business process or the problem)
• Middle of the funnel (keywords describing the type of product, industry niche, or features)
• Bottom of the funnel (product information, long tail branded keywords, product comparisons, etc.)

Keep up with trending terms

Last but not least, we would like to point out that some keywords have a habit of gaining traction without any sensible reason. The consumers simply start searching for some specific term until they no longer do. But, these brief periods of fame do give marketers an opportunity to piggyback their way to higher conversions if they are capable of keeping a close eye on what’s going on in the web space. The good news is that the platforms like Google Trends and pro-level keyword research tools like SEMrush do an excellent job of making this challenging task much easier so try leveraging this effective approach.

We hope these few examples gave you a general idea about the SEO strategies you can use to put your SAAS company on the map and make sure your product reaches the consumers who are not necessarily aware that the software solutions for their grievances even exist. This is by no means an easy task and you will have to spend a lot of time and resources along the way. But now, you at least know where to start.