Enterprise SaaS SEO strategies are those that target highly specific customer personas who have firm understanding of their own pain points and needs. Enterprise SaaS SEO is different from traditional SEO in that it aims at raising awareness for a brand and driving [typically] omnichannel marketing for prospects to fill out forms and schedule demonstrations of software and solutions.
Key Takeaways
- The best enterprise SaaS SEO strategies come at your marketing channel from multiple angles, aiming to raise awareness for the brand, share thought leadership, and motivate prospects into filling out demo schedule requests.
- The best enterprise SaaS SEO strategy for startups is to address unanswered questions that ICPs (ideal customer personas) put into Google and other search engines. And build up a large content hub of addressing very specific questions and being an incredibly helpful resource.
- Motivating Users to request demonstrations usually requires thinking about how you represent the brand or team as “experts” in the field. Enterprise customers want to buy from teams and not from landing pages.
Enterprise SaaS SEO Strategies
Enterprise SaaS SEO strategies don’t different too much from B2B SaaS SEO strategies. However, where they diverge is in the way you execute them. And the way a SaaS business integrates other marketing channels to motivate high-contract value leads.
Prior to Starting Your Strategies
Here’s a simple checklist of what you should start with before you begin execution:
Step 1: Determine your KPIs
It’s important to determine your KPIs before you begin enterprise SaaS SEO. It can get costly to start executing, thinking the channel doesn’t work, only to later stop your investment into the channel and uncover it actually was working.
Your KPIs should be something like the following:
- Keywords you rank for: The number of keywords you rank for is a great leading indicator to what will be clicks and visitors.
- Traffic: Impressions should lead to clicks and ultimately lead to the number of qualified visitors coming to your enterprise SaaS product.
- Scheduled Demos: Whether it’s scheduled demos or filling out contact forms, it’s important to have a KPI that lets you know organic search is working for you.
- Attribution of scheduled demos: How many of your scheduled demos turned into ‘closed won’ accounts? And how many of those came from organic search?
Step 2: Determine your competitiveness
Your enterprise SaaS SEO strategy is largely based on the size of business you are. If you’re a new SaaS business (as in your domain is a very new one), it’s important to set realistic targets and strategies that will pay dividends.
As an example, an enterprise product like Deel is quite large. Meaning, their SEO strategy is going to encapsulate many different types of ‘layers’ of SEO work. If you’re a large organization, with a decent budget, know that you have an open ocean of what to go and attack.
If you’re a smaller sized startup, it’s important to get highly strategic about what keywords, what topics, and what customer personas you start to go after. It’s a question about the best use of you and your team's time.
Step 3: Agree on your set strategy
Using the below strategies, pick one and choose an investment picture. Often, enterprise SaaS companies make the mistake of shifting gears too much. As a result, it becomes unclear what the true attribution of the work can be.
Try to choose one strategy for at least 6-months. Once you begin any SEO strategy, it’s going to take at least 3-months to fully mature (this is the time it takes Google to truly discover, index, and rank given pages) and then 6-months for you to see any type of insights that draw larger correlations in the cohorts.
Enterprise SaaS SEO Strategy 1: ToFu, MoFu, and BoFu
Larger SaaS organizations with more substantial budgets (let’s say in the $30,000 to $150,000 annual allocation range) can get away with trying to target more wider range sets of keywords and audiences.
In general, this type of a strategy is going to be trying to do a few things:
- Raise brand awareness: By a prospect “continuing to see the brand” in the multiple places they visit online (like LinkedIn, Google, industry news, and more), the brand elevates in the prospects mind. The result is a type of, “Oh, X is an expert in Y.” Raising brand awareness with SEO works in combination with other marketing channels.
- Competes against highly competitive terms: In the example we’re doing to use below (Deel.com), we can see that they’re competing for keywords like “What is a 1099” and “W9 Form” which are obviously highly competitive terms as you might expect government resources to show up on those SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages).
- Includes BOFU terms as a result of raising awareness: The result of much of the above (mostly the omnichannel marketing) is increased brand searches into Google. People searching “Deel Payment” or “GetDeel” as another example. These BoFu terms are where an enterprise prospect is aware of the brand and knows their solutions, then looks for them specifically.
To execute the strategy, it’s fairly simple. Here’s a general overview of how it’s done:
- Buyer persona research: It’s important to know who your buyers are and where they are in the buying process before beginning any execution. By doing some type of buyer persona research we can identify their specific pain points, problems, and decide how we might place our solutions right into that visibility path.
- Identify ToFu, MoFu, and BoFu keywords: Next, it’s critical to bucket the various keywords into their own cohorts. Not only will this help with attribution it will assist in determining how to get the right material out to prospects and target them.
- Determine appropriate page intent: Each keyword cohort may have various page intent requirements. Some keywords may require informational execution (a blog post), while others are more suited for a service page. Catalog which keywords align to which types of page intents.
- Develop an SEO roadmap: Lastly, start developing your roadmap for execution. This should include copywriting, web team help in creating new service pages, and more.
Enterprise SaaS SEO ToFu keyword examples
In the example for Deel.com, we can see that they’re raising awareness for their brand (in the HR and employment space) by targeting some of the following ToFu keywords:
- W9 Form
- Schedule I Form 1120
- EB2 NIW
- 1099 vs W2
- 1099 NEC
You can see that from these keywords themselves, Deel is probably not going to be converting customers directly. This is because Deel isn’t a “forms” company. They don’t charge someone to download forms.
However, with these keywords, they start to gain exposure to employers. Which is their target market. As a result, an employer who lands on this page might discover Deel solutions and decide to take a bigger look. ToFu keywords, as a byproduct of this, typically have lower conversion rates.
Enterprise SaaS SEO MoFu keyword examples
Still using Deel.com as an example, middle-of-funnel keywords are those that have slightly more pain points associated with them. For example, since they’re targeting employers and companies, it would be a keyword that shows the company has a specific problem.
Here’s a few example of their MoFu keywords they targeted:
- Work Performance Measurements
- HR Sourcing
- Direct Compensation
- Global Mobility Program
These are going to have greater chances of them being employers with specific problems that are looking to get addressed. For example, direct compensation may lead to payroll services.
Enterprise SaaS SEO BoFu keyword examples
Lastly, bottom-of-funnel terms are going to be targeting brand-specific terms. For Deel.com, thanks to their omnichannel efforts, we can see a number of people searching for solutions related directly to Deel.
Keywords like the following:
- Deel
- Deel Inc
- Deel Login
- Deel Pricing
“Deel Pricing” as an example, is a great BoFu term since the prospect is fairly aware of what Deel offers (as an assumption) and is looking to know something highly specific. SEO can still play a big role in getting these types of questions answered.
Wrapping it up
Larger enterprise SaaS organizations can carry out bigger campaigns like this. They’re highly effective because they both nurture new prospects by being visible in more places. And address questions continually, down the buying decision funnel.
It requires a more substantial budget simply due to the competitiveness of some of the terms that are being targeted and what’s required to “compete” against other players that might be in the SERPs. It’s not recommended for newer enterprise SaaS companies because a strategy like this is a very long-term one. Requiring usually 3-4 quarters before seeing any substantial results.
Enterprise SaaS SEO Strategy 2: Newer startups
Let’s say you have a brand new startup. How do you compete? How do you start bringing in qualified visitors in a way that will motivate and accelerate demo schedules? It comes down to getting creative. However, there’s a way!
The best enterprise SaaS SEO strategy for newer brands is to think about unanswered questions that are in Google or other search engines. And also match your ideal customer persona (ICP).
Let’s say for example, you’re in the employment or HR space. There are so many unanswered questions that would get you in front of employers.
Here are just a few keywords:
- How to calculate overtime pay for commissioned employees (10 MSV)
- How to pay employees cash legally (100 MSV)
- How to pay overseas employees (60 MSV)
When you look at these keywords, they’re extremely specific. And no this isn’t a “long tail SEO strategy.” This is simply thinking about unanswered questions that you could do a better job of answering.
Here’s a general idea of how to execute the strategy:
- Identify unmet questions in search: Using tools like Ahrefs of SEMRush, you can uncover keywords that maybe don’t have great answers to them. As a result, you can develop a roadmap of terms that are probably going to be informational (blog posts).
- Make incredibly good resources: Put your team's face or your face all over these resources. Don’t worry so much about the monthly search volume. Just create incredible resources that help people with very specific problems.
- Do this at scale: The reality is that many of these unmet questions in search and Google are often fairly easy to execute against. Meaning, it won’t take a significant amount of time to “compete” in the SERPs. As a result, you can execute more at scale. Which not only shows Google your expertise (key part of EEAT). It can start to bring in qualified traffic rather quickly.
Ensure that you’re thinking about verticals of questions or topics. As this will help build your EEAT profile within Google. For example, in our keyword list above, it’s all around payments. Build out a content hub around payments first. Then move onto something else. Like potentially taxation (again, if you’re in HR).
By “block and tackling” your content roadmap, it can not only make it easier to execute, you can compound the way that Users perceive you as an expert in the field.
Other SaaS SEO Resources
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October 19, 2024
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