Startups have one big problem they’re dealing with daily: get to product-market fit. That’s the concept that they have a product, a market, and they see traction. If you’re a founder, you already know this. SEO, specifically for SaaS startups, still works in 2024 and it’ll work into 2025 and beyond.
Key Takeaways
- SaaS startups can see ROAS (return on advertising spend) in SEO with as little as $4,000 to $8,000 per month in budget.
- SEO can work quite well for most SaaS startups. The more hyper focused your software solution is, the lesser chance that competition will be in the SERPs (search engine results pages) making it easier to rank, get traffic, and generate leads.
- The top five SaaS SEO strategies we deploy include producing competitor reviews, generating highly specific use case service pages, filling content gaps or unmet questions in Google, and targeting long-tail terms that use page relevance as a way to outrank competitors.
Does SaaS SEO for Startups Work?
Yes. It does. Personally, I’ve seen companies scale to more than 5,000 monthly trial sign ups (varying degrees of how much these trial signups mean to you in terms of value) with less than an $8,000 monthly budget in an SEO campaign.
Thinking that’s too much? It’s not. On average, larger SaaS organizations are going to be spending anywhere from $30,000 to $130,000 per month on this channel (organic search or “SEO”). Think about it: it’s still a marketing channel.
And what CMO’s typically understand about this channel is that it has the opportunity “growth stack.” That’s the concept that as the channel expands, the brand awareness rises, and all waters begin to rise. In addition, the channel itself begins to widen beyond audiences that would otherwise not be accessible through paid channels.
SaaS SEO Strategies for Startups
Here’s the biggest mistake that I see founders or early-stage companies make. I hear the founder say something like, “Well, we need really good content if this is going to work. So, I should write the content.”
Don’t do that. First of all, that’s not the best use of a founder's time. Second of all, it’s not just about writing content to make SEO work. This is truly one of the biggest mistakes I see. And then the founder says, “that didn’t work, time to move on.”
There’s usually a couple of factors that we have to consider before starting any startup SEO strategy, which is something like the following:
- Limited budget. The company most likely has limited budget and wants to see quick signs of traction or quickly see lead generation start to occur.
- Limited domain authority. Most likely, not a lot of money to spend on building a brand or increasing the overall press mentions of a company right away.
- Limited time. Wanting to see “rank” fairly quickly to prove out the channel and determine if there’s an audience that will buy the SaaS product (i.e., sign up for a demo or a free trial).
That’s why it’s best to go to the professionals. These are some tough waters to navigate. And comprehensively thought through strategy is key (think: ToFU, MoFU, BoFU needs of your campaign).
Here are some professional SaaS SEO strategies that we deploy for startups:
1. Competitor reviews
Part of the marketing funnel: middle of funnel
Reviewing competitors and talking about their features, pricing, drawbacks, integrations, and other key points of interest for prospective customers is a great way to penetrate the market. Often, the SERPs (search engine results pages) are fairly light when it comes to highly specific competitor brand names. As a result, it’s far easier to win a rank position with lesser domain authority. And, it’s easier to know that your ideal customer persona is “in-market.”
Assuming the competitor had a name like Sonar, we might start to produce highly informative pages around some of the following terms:
- Sonar Reviews
- Sonar Pricing
- Sonar Alternatives
- Sonar vs. [Insert another competitor]
This is a great way to ensure that your competitor's customer persona lands on your page and considers your very similar offering. Especially if we target pricing keywords when our solution is priced lower.
2. Highly specific use case service pages
Part of the marketing funnel: bottom of funnel
Let’s say we have attorney software. Well, not all attorneys are in the same space. Some deal with white collar crime. Some deal with mass tort cases. Some deal with family law. As a result, we can start to target in-market personas that are looking for something extremely tailored to them.
Often, our software buyers aren’t going to be looking for any solution that isn’t an exact match to their needs. Meaning, they’ll be putting into Google and other search engines something that’s extremely specific (or potentially “long-tail” if you want to think about keywords).
Here would be some examples of keywords we might find:
- Mass tort law case management software
- Family law case management software
- White collar crime case management software
Some of these terms might not have any monthly search volume to them (which is why it’s best to not always rely 100% on tools like Ahrefs or SEMRush). However, it’s still very important that we execute against these pages.
The reason? It’s simply a bullseye fit for our solution. Let’s say we find 10 keywords that all have 50 monthly searches on them. However, these searchers, from the keyword itself, show that they have incredible alignment to our solution. Then the likelihood that we start to generate leads (5% of 500 visitors = 25 leads or demo’s per month).
If we assume that each demo is worth $200, that’s already $5,000 in value getting created in a short time period. In addition, since these keywords are fairly “long-tail” in nature, there’s an even greater chance that there’s space (meaning positions) in the SERPs open for our future pages.
In short: easier to win terms that generate more leads.
3. Content gap filling
Part of the marketing funnel: middle of funnel
One of the other bigger mistakes I often see the “move over let me do the SEO” people make is that they try to recreate everything they’re competitors are doing. However, think about it, your competitors spent all this money getting their marketing footprint out there. Yet, we want to spend less and rely on what we say to do the work for us? It’s not going to work.
However, identifying key questions that are not getting answered in the SERPs is a great way to rank. And it’s a great way to rank against some really big audiences without having to spend a lot of money.
Here’s how it works. Let’s say you have a core topic, in this case, we’re going to use SEO. The topic is SaaS SEO. Well, you’re here, aren’t you? See, the strategy was to talk about SaaS SEO for startups. This, at the time of writing this, was a fairly untapped search term.
We found the keyword, we looked in Google, determined that there wasn’t really a great page (or result) for Google to display. This is a type of way of using relevance to our advantage.
Google and other search engines are going to serve the most relevant page up in the SERPs (search engine results pages). And when there’s not one to serve, that’s when Google (in particular) will break down all other rank factor walls and serve up the most relevant page.
At the end of the day, Google is a question and answer machine. And when it fails to have the answer, it’ll find one no matter what (meaning, your new page).
4. Long-tail terms
Part of the marketing funnel: middle of funnel
Very similar to the above, it’s the idea that we can win at SEO by being more specific. Which is true. However, when we think about our SaaS product, this can be extremely useful, because there might be opportunities to align with our ideal customer persona by being specific as well.
Let’s take a mass tort lawyer as our ideal customer persona. Our startup SaaS solution helps them manage case files through AI (artificial intelligence). But the keyword “mass tort software” is too competitive. We don’t have the domain authority or the budget to get there. What are the options?
We’d start to look further down the keyword list. For example, we might find something like this:
- Mass tort software buying tips
- Mass tort software pricing
- Mass tort free software
Some of these would be extremely applicable for us since they’re still targeting the mass tort lawyer, however, get more specific. This is the same method of using Google’s relevancy factors to our advantage. However, shifting what we produce. In this case, these would most likely be informative (search intent wise) pieces of content written with authority.
5. Authority building
There’s no real part of the marketing funnel for this one. However, it’s incredibly effective. It’s the concept that if we combine multiple strategies from above. And if we align our topic and focus area, we can use EEAT (expertise, experience, authority, and trust) to our advantage.
How does that work? Well, the more new insights that we bring to Google, the more they’re going to reward us. There’s no doubt, Google looks at User signals. Things like click-through from the SERPs. Bounce rate when the User clicks through. And how much time that the User spends on your page.
The only way to get these metrics is to be extremely helpful, unique, insightful, and bring something truly engaging to the internet.
By stacking up more and more of these pages that do that, Google builds an overall “score” of your domain (outside of backlinks). Meaning, they want to bring up your (or our) pages more in the SERPs because there’s a greater chance it will serve the Users end need (Google’s value proposition).
Top Tips for Startups Looking to Break Into SEO
Here are some of my top tips:
- Let the professionals do it. Don’t try to attempt to do this on your own. If you’re the founder or an early stage business, focus on something that’s more important than this.
- Don’t expect overnight results. Unfortunately, there’s no way to force Google to do anything. We can influence the machine, however, we can’t force it. If you need overnight results, this isn’t the marketing channel to go after.
- Avoid cheap services. There are plenty of people who might spout that they comprehend what was discussed in this article, however, most of the cheap services won’t be able to write authority editorial that actually gets a customer to convert.
- Write with authority. If you’re in SaaS, you’re going to have to produce content that resonates with your customer. There’s no way to do that with “cheap content writing services” that you might see on Fiverr.
- Avoid using AI. AI writing, unfortunately, remixes much of what’s already out there on the internet. As a result, it gets flagged by Google quite quickly. Don’t listen to what you hear on YouTube channels, AI content doesn’t “work” for Google.
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Written by Joshua Davis
VP of SEO
September 27, 2024
