To ensure you’re publishing and releasing pages or pieces of content that will perform best for SaaS SEO, you should always consider the alignment of what you’re discussing in accordance with the software buyer’s journey (top-of-funnel, mid-funnel, and bottom-of-funnel) and their expected needs (or questions).
Key Takeaways
- The SaaS SEO checklist items should be: alignment of the content to target keywords, ensuring new insights are getting brought to the table, speaking to the customer in terms of where they are in the software buying journey, and ensuring the page is accessible by web crawlers.
- Some of the best ways to optimize your content (or copywriting) for SEO is to include more relevant topics, questions, and answers into the page copy. Avoid making a list of headlines that are the exact questions Users type into Google. Rather, write down a list of common User or customer questions and ensure your page answers them.
- The biggest mistake is creating page types that don’t align with the target keyword’s page intent type. For example, informational/commercial/navigational/transactional. To ensure you’re presenting the right page type—Google or search your keyword and visit every website on Page 1.
Simple SaaS SEO Checklist:
Here’s a very simple SaaS SEO checklist for any type of page copy (from blog posts to service pages and more):
- Align your content to where the buyer is in their journey
- Solve a real customer need with your copywriting
- Optimize your meta title and description
- Ensure the page intent matches your keyword targets
- Create clear headlines and page structure
- Create a fast loading page with optimized imagery
- Add a very clear CTA (call-to-action) at the top of the page
- Build EEAT through additional topics and internal links
- Make sure your page can get indexed by crawlers
Easy SaaS SEO Checklist to Make Revenue
SaaS SEO really only has one major goal: make more money. That money either comes in the form of bringing in highly qualified MQLs/SQLs (leads). Or by bringing in software demonstration requests or free trial signups.
No matter what type of SaaS business you are, B2B, consumer, enterprise, or otherwise—this is going to be your primary goal. The following checklist is designed to help you meet those SaaS SEO KPIs that matter.
Checklist Item #1: Ensure your content aligns with the audience
Before you even think about SEO. Think about how well your content is going to help the User that’s reading it. Whether it’s a blog post, a service page, or a white paper that you’re publishing. What’s the core problem that a User in your industry came to the page to find out?
Make sure that you’re determining which step of the buying journey that they’re in. Are they at the top-of-funnel of their journey, meaning they are looking to dig into the subject matter from the fundamentals.
Are they in the middle-of-funnel in the journey, meaning they have a firm understanding of a problem that they have and looking for ways to solve it.
Or are they in the bottom-of-funnel, meaning that they both know what problem they have and are familiar enough with your brand to look for you specifically.
From there, it’s far easier to create helpful and human-oriented content (which happens to follow Google’s guidelines).
Checklist Item #2: Solve a real problem
Yes. Be original. And be unique. That’s definitely key. However, it helps even more if you can solve a real problem for your customer. What better way to build trust around the software solution that you have than by showing a prospect that you can solve a real problem for them?
Make sure that your content and keyword strategy is all based around this. Whether it’s a tutorial that you’re putting together. Or a price comparison that shows pricing when one’s aren’t freely available online.
The point is to have empathy and craft content that solves a real need they have all originating from the keyword that you chose.
Checklist Item #3: Optimize your meta title and description
Funny enough, optimizing your meta title and meta description can be easy and fantastic ways to ensure that you have highly relevant pages that match target keywords.
For example, let’s say you’re trying to target “inventory management software” and you have a page title that looks something like this:
- Inventory Management Solutions: 10 to Choose From
That's great. However, that might not actually match very well with Google’s systems. It’s important to remember that Google and other search engine systems are still machines and computers doing calculations. And so, while something may look obvious to you. It’s not to a machine.
Instead, adjust it to something like this:
- 10 Best Inventory Management Software Solutions
It’s a very simple change but can go a long way in ensuring that your pages start to rank. Do this same practice for your meta description. Both the meta title and description are still very heavily perceived as “ranking factors” or “weighted factors” when it comes to relevance (BERT processor in Google).
Checklist Item #4: Ensure your page intent matches
When I say page intent, it can sometimes be slightly confusing. Starting from your keyword, you should be able to determine what page intent types Google is looking for. As an example, here are some keywords and the types of page intents that might show up:
- Transactional Intent: Keywords like “payroll services”
- Informational Intent: Keywords like “what are payroll services”
- Navigational Intent: Keywords like “payroll services near me”
- Commercial Investigation Intent: Keywords like “payroll services in New York”
While many of these seem very nuanced and small. It’s important to search the keyword that you’re trying to target and investigate all of the page structures that are appearing in common search engines.
Look at what’s displayed on the page and how the page is displayed. If it’s a blog post, which is the easiest to identify, it’s informational intent. Make sure that you’re creating and publishing a page structure that matches the intent that Google and other search engines are looking for.
You could end up writing the perfect content and simply not have the right type of page layout to match what Google thinks Users want to see.
Checklist Item #5: Heading structures and readability
If you have a page that looks hard to read, most likely it’s going to actually be hard to read. Google and other search engines have begun to look at User signals to get a better sense of how helpful a piece of content (or a page) is for their visitors.
Think of Google as a giant Q&A machine. Most Users put in questions and want to get answers back. As a result, Google wants to see that a page it’s serving up to visitors is actually answering that question.
If your page is structured improperly, meaning there’s plenty of errors or bad use of H2/H3/H4 headlines, it could make it hard to read. Even if you have the best content, making the content hard to read would cause the User to want to “bounce” or go back to the search engine.
This process of “going back” actually gives the page and the website/domain a negative score for that keyword. Marking it as a “doesn’t solve the need” for the User and the keyword match inside Google’s systems.
Make your page beautiful. And Users will want to read it. And as a result, search engines will want to rank it.
Checklist Item #6: Make a fast loading page
Optimizing your imagery and ensuring that you have a mobile-friendly page are great ways to also help with readability. Users who can load your website quickly won’t “go back to Google.”
By optimizing images, compressing your CSS, or serving up your content from cache, it can make it so that pages load very quickly. If a User is in a low cell signal area and loading up the website from their mobile device, there’s still a great chance that they get frustrated with the amount of time it takes to load the page and go back to Google.
Checklist Item #7: Have strong calls to action
You’re here to convert a visitor, right? If you’re writing the right kind of copy, then you should have a very easy ability to make a strong call-to-action. This would encourage the visitor to take an action based on what they’re reading.
Most commonly, people put calls-to-action at the bottom of blog posts or pages. However, I find it more useful to include it in the middle of the page or even at the top of the page. If you have a very nicely structured page that solves the Users question or issue quickly (at the top of the document). Then the call-to-action becomes better placed toward the top of the page.
Additionally, most Users are probably not going to keep reading after their problem is solved. Meaning, putting calls-to-action at the bottom might not be the best way to see conversions (like in GA4 or Hubspot) from the page itself.
Checklist Item #8: Build your EEAT score up
E-E-A-T stands for Experience, Expertise, Authority, and Trust. This is the act of showing to search engines that you have industry-specific knowledge about the area that you’re contributing to. The best way to build this is by showing to search engines that you have extensive knowledge on a subject.
You can do that by simply discussing all of the relevant topics on a particular entity or thing. For example if you’re going to be talking about project management, you might want to talk about:
- Costs of project management software
- Benefits of having custom project management solutions
- Project management tools
- Project management mistakes
These topics can and should all be put ito their own individual thought leadership pieces of content. If you have service pages (like solutions), then you should do the same thing, however, you might want to target a specific use case or ICP (Ideal Customer Persona) for each page.
Whether the term has monthly search volume or not, you need to bring new insights to the table around every subject matter that’s related to your space or industry. As a result, Google and other searchh engines will start to build a complete picture of “who” knows the most about “X.”
Make sure that you link together relevant topics and subjects using a simple internal linking strategy. By doing this, you’re showing Google's machines and processors that you know that X is related to Y. And that Y has many Z questions related to it.
Checklist Item #9: Ensure our page can be indexed
This seems like an obvious one. However, it’s a common mistake. You should ensure that your page can be accessed by search engine crawlers. You can do this by checking that your robots.txt file isn’t blocking crawlers. Or that your page doesn’t have a no-index tag on it.
Here’s a simple way to make sure your page can get indexed:
- Go into Google Search Console
- Put the exact URL of your page into the search bar
- See whether the page is accessible to crawlers
- Request the page to be indexed (if it doesn’t already say that it’s indexed)
This robots.txt file tester is another great tool to use to make sure that certain URLs (like subfolder paths) are able to be accessed by crawlers.
Other Simple Checklist Items
Items that are easy to follow but beneficial:
- Make sure that your content addresses most of the common questions that your competitors aim at answering or addressing.
- Ensure that your page doesn't have any spelling errors, grammar issues, or other simple mistakes.
- Check to see that the page is easy to understand by having an editor or outside party read the page and repeat back what they think it's describing.
Other SaaS SEO Resources
Written by Joshua Davis
VP of SEO
September 9, 2024
