Modern SaaS SEO strategies are actually quite important to SaaS businesses. More than ever, paid advertising and omnichannel marketing are starting to reach engagement plateaus. Meaning, there are just far too many options in the market for your prospective customers to choose from. As a result, there’s a craving for something new, fresh, insightful, and different.
Key Takeaways
- The top SaaS SEO strategies include going after competitor keywords that contain variations such as “alternative,” “comparison,” “price,” and more. These modern strategies aim to capture a lead when the customer persona is “in-market.”
- Top-of-funnel SaaS SEO strategies shouldn’t be ignored. While they have a high investment cost and can have lower conversion rates, they can assist in developing brand awareness and audience retention that can get recirculated into other marketing channels (an omnichannel approach).
- SaaS SEO strategies should always get modeled out based on the traffic potential, cost of investment, and LTV. This creates a basic “CAC” formula that executives can use to see ROAS (return on advertising spend).
5 Modern SaaS SEO Strategies to Fuel Growth
Here are a few highly unique SaaS SEO strategies that we use to fuel growth. Some are obvious, while others are uniquely designed by us. It’s important to note that before we get into these strategies, they are not ranked by impact.
Each SaaS business is going to need to go through its own strategy evaluation to determine the best pathway for success based on a number of factors, including budget, industry/space, competitiveness of the space, and more.
BoFU, MoFU, ToFU Preface
Before starting any of these SaaS SEO strategies, it’s important to understand some of the fundamentals of how keywords match the marketing funnel. In particular, you’ll want to make sure that you manage both your own expectations and stakeholders' expectations about what those results will be.
For example, ToFU (top of the funnel) keywords are going to have the least amount of conversions related to them. While BoFU (bottom of the funnel) keywords will have the most. However, if you’re a newer business, you might not have any BoFU demand (meaning people searching for those terms) yet.
Generally speaking, here are the types of keywords that you’ll come across (ranging in all of the ToFU, MoFU, and BoFU classifications):
- Branded Searches: A prospect knows who you are and is looking into what you offer.
- Attention Searches: People who don’t know your solution exists, but have a pain point, "how to sell my life insurance policy for cash"
- Awareness Searches: People know the solution exists, however, don't know what you exist, "project management tools"
- Consideration Searches: People know the solution and your brand. So they use modifiers, "project management tool + [your brand]"
- Conversion Searches: Something like, "basecamp alternatives" or "freshworks alternative"
Strategy 1: Competitor comparisons
Most likely, you have some direct SaaS competitors. Most SaaS companies are feeling the saturation in most of their markets. However, B2B or enterprise SaaS businesses may not be one of those. In particular, this strategy is best suited for trial-based SaaS businesses or consumer and “close to consumer” like SaaS businesses.
Conceptually, most of your competitors are going to have brand awareness. However, when customers are unhappy with their solution, they start to look for alternatives or start to think about comparing two pieces of software.
G2.com mostly took this strategy. You’re going to want to target terms or keywords that include things like:
- Reviews
- Alternatives
- Competitors
- Pricing
So if we take an example SaaS company, let’s call it Clue (a fake SaaS business), we’ll end up with keywords like the following:
- Clue Reviews
- Clue Alternatives
- Clue Competitors
- Clue Pricing
If you think about it, we’re already doing a pretty great job of targeting our ICP (ideal customer persona) because we know that the customer is informed, in-market, and looking for a solution. Making it a really ideal strategy.
Most likely, you’ll end up creating informational-style articles that break down what the searcher is looking for. Including comparison modules (easy ways to stack feature sets against each other) will also go a long way in helping you rank.
The key to this strategy is to bring unique insights to the table. For example, when a Google user is looking for “Clue Pricing” it may mean that the software solution they’re looking at doesn’t include pricing on the marketing pages (a fairly common tactic to get customers to schedule software demos). By uncovering the pricing (maybe by performing a demo yourself), you can fill that gap in the SERP (search engine results page).
Because of how helpful you’re being to the end user, this strategy is highly effective at then promoting your own similar products or software solutions.
Strategy 2: Competitor questions
Similar to the strategy above, many of your direct software competitors will forget to regularly audit search engine keywords for what their customers need help with. As a result, they’re missing out on key help desk articles or tutorials.
Some of these themes of keywords to start to look at would include some of the following:
- How to
- Unsubscribe
- Cancel
- Import
- Export
- Integrations
These types of keywords and more are usually existing customers who are looking for help. There’s a great chance that your SaaS competitor doesn’t know that these questions exist.
Using our same fake SaaS competitor called Clue, we might see keywords like the following:
- How to Export Users in Clue
- How to Unsubscribe from Clue
- How to Cancel Clue
- How to Import Users into Clue
- How to Export Users from Clue
- Clue Integrations
Once again, you’ll need to do some “investigative journalism” to figure out the answers to these questions. In particular, you may have to become a User or subscriber of your software competitor to get a better understanding of how to help Users.
However, once you do that, you’ll have both the advantage of learning a little more about product marketing your own SaaS product as well as being able to produce these competitive articles that bring in highly qualified traffic.
Strategy 3: Tutorial writing
Whatever type of SaaS solution you have, there’s a pretty good chance that your buyer persona is out there looking for ways to solve problems that they have. What’s great about this strategy is that you do not necessarily need to keep it focused on a digital solution that needs to be solved either.
For example, let’s say you’re a tax solution SaaS company, writing guides about how to form an LLC would still be applicable, right? Because once that company is formed, they’re going to need tax solutions. And there’s a good chance that if the buyer landed on your page looking for help—and you helped—they’re going to be more inclined to use whatever software solution you have.
When thinking about tutorials, think about some of the following:
- Topics that are somewhat related and relevant to your space. Let’s say you’re an inventory management solution, then creating helpful guides on hiring warehouse employees or managing warehouse employees would still be applicable and appropriate.
- Topics that are coming from your buyer. It’s important to think about who the person is that’s going to be searching that topic. In the same example above, we know that a warehouse manager or a logistics company owner might be looking for ways to hire warehouse employees.
It’s okay to get into digital topics, as well. Especially if you have a highly technical tool. However, this becomes the biggest challenge when outsourcing your SEO work. And one that we help with quite a lot. You’ll need an SME (subject matter expert) to really write that tutorial.
Let’s say you are trying to write about using AI in programming. Well, it’s going to be best to have that written by an actual programmer. Using a generic copywriter that doesn’t provide that “unique insight” a programmer is looking for—simply won’t work.
The strategy may work to rank in the SERPs, however, it might not actually bring in leads (or trial sign-ups) if you’re not bringing something unique to the table and compelling the reader to take an honest action.
Strategy 4: Informative content hubs
Probably the most ToFU example out of the bunch. However, if you have a larger SaaS organization, this shouldn’t get missed. Often, SaaS companies want to steer away from ToFU strategies in SEO. However, it’s important to really understand how impactful they can be.
As an example, Betterteam.com is one of the best SaaS solutions that took writing job description samples to extreme levels. They created this incredible content hub that’s bringing in more than 1.5M qualified visitors.
When it comes to ToFU content strategies, it’s really a matrix of these types of things that need to be considered:
- The cost to produce content: If you can’t reach scale for the cost of each article, it might be hard to completely realize the benefit of the work.
- The total addressable market of the keyword cluster: Will it bring in larger quantities of eyeballs that can then convert at lower percentages, but higher figures?
- Your total LTV and conversion metrics: Similar to the above, it’s important to model and forecast out what your conversion metrics are and whether larger quantities of traffic converting at lower rates will still equal a profitable channel.
We still highly recommend going after ToFU SaaS SEO strategies. They help to both build authority for other key pages and raise brand awareness (more key in today’s landscape). As a result, your omnichannel marketing starts to work together, resulting in a net overall win of lead volume.
Strategy 5: Service pages
I left this until last since it's the most obvious. However, it’s really critical to think about your ideal customer and how they’re finding key solutions. For example, let’s say you have a SaaS business that’s around inventory management. The question becomes, which industries do you serve? Take that list and write that down.
From here, it’s important that we start to think of a combination of industry and service offerings as a combination. In the case of inventory management, here’s some keyword ideas that we might be looking for:
- eCommerce Inventory Management
- Warehouse Inventory Management
- Logistics Inventory Management
Creating designated service pages that speak to each of your customer persons and how your solution fits their needs is not only great for generating leads (because, of course, you’re speaking to the customer in the language they understand), but it’s also great for SEO and search engines, too.
This strategy is more MoFU (middle of the funnel) than the others, however, can work extremely well. It’s key to avoid looking at monthly search volume as an indicator of which personas to target. Instead, just think about your solution, and who it can fit, and start producing well-thought-through service pages (or landing pages) that are heavily tailored to them.
Clio.com does a great job of this. Showing legal specialties and how the software solution can fit into each one. They put this under a “practice areas” tab on the website, making it easy for search engines to access those key pages. As well as making sure they don’t combine all of those industries into one giant and unfocused landing page.
Top Tips to Get SaaS SEO to Convert
Look, at the end of the day, you’ve probably given up on SEO because you’re not seeing it convert. What I can tell you is that execution is key. There’s a good chance that if you had a true expert write an informative article that truly helped someone, it’ll perform (meaning generate more sign-ups or scheduled demos) far better than when you don’t.
Here are some of the top tips:
- Be unique. Say something that’s actually going to resonate with your reader and your audience. If they don’t feel like you understand them or their problems, why are they going to sign up for you solution?
- Don’t go cheap. If you’re going to go after SEO as a channel, recognize that there are too many players in the water. Much like with paid advertising, you’re going to have to out spend your competitors to get quality execution.
- Be comprehensive. It’s best to combine multiple SaaS SEO strategies into one holistic campaign. Don’t pick one or the other. Combine informative content hubs with service pages. And execute in a holistic way.
- Pick a few industries or focus areas. If it’s e-Commerce you’re going after, then really go after it. Be extremely comprehensive about all things e-Commerce in your space. Not only does this help with EEAT (Expertise, Experience, Authority, and Trust), it also helps when visitors land on your software solution and realize you truly are the expert.
Add video or other material. Get personal with the approach. People buy software from other people. Not from machines. Make sure that you’re not just thinking about the SEO but also thinking about making extremely human-first content (in all forms that you can).
Other SaaS SEO Resources
Written by Joshua Davis
VP of SEO
September 27, 2024
