SEO is one of the most challenging forms of marketing. This is because Google is one of the largest and most widely used information platforms on the Internet, and SEO involves manipulating their ranking on Google for certain keywords that are relevant to their business. To do this, companies need to beat the Google algorithm, which is difficult but certainly not impossible. However, due to their ‘always online’ nature, SaaS companies have a lot to gain from stepping up their search engine optimization efforts. On the one hand, optimizing a website for specific keywords can help SaaS companies make more informed decisions about what features to implement and how to better define their buyers. Additionally, SaaS companies can also create rich content to better define their software and their brand, with the ultimate goal of encouraging new users to try out their SaaS products through a free trial or monthly subscription.
However, in order to do this, SaaS companies need to develop an SEO strategy that is specific to the way that SEO SaaS works. As such, it should be specific to their software product and include comparative keywords, integration-related keyword, and information-related keywords. This is challenging for a number of reasons. On the one hand, many people looking for solutions to their problems are actually business owners and managers in their companies and not just ordinary users who may want to casually use a software.
For example, if you have a B2B SaaS business targeting enterprise businesses, then a conversion will be very valuable to you and could represent a huge chunk of revenue depending on the size of the enterprise and how long that conversion lasts. For this reason, it is important to target the keywords that have conversion potential, rather than just those based purely on requests for information. That being said, SaaS companies can often do well with using information-based content as a part of a broader content marketing strategy, so it is important to find a balance here.
If you look at huge SaaS companies like Hubspot and Salesforce, you can see just how much they have invested in SEO-oriented content marketing. However, in order to compete with them or other large SaaS companies in your SaaS niche, you’ll want to focus on keywords where you can really compete. To do this, you’ll need to perform keyword research against your SaaS competitors and find the top keywords that you can actually compete with. These will likely be more niche and targeted, and probably won’t have the same search volume as broader keywords. However, the idea here is to create targeted content or website pages that are niche enough to slice off a piece of market share from your biggest SaaS competitors.
After you create targeted content, either conversion-oriented or informational, combined with a competitive but attainable keyword for your SaaS business, it’s time to start reaching out to websites to attempt to get links to that content. Link building is the least understood part of SEO, which already an opaque type of digital marketing. For SaaS companies, the best way to build links is by taking a data-driven approach and making sure the links they build match the content on their website.. For example, a SaaS company trying to promote a CRM for event planners help should take steps to avoid gaining links from websites that primarily have content centered on supply chain and logistics, unless there is some compelling reason that the event planning CRM can be related back to those topics.
In general, SaaS companies need to make use of an SEO strategy in order to promote their SaaS product. The good thing about SEO as a marketing strategy is that it can also help SaaS businesses to refine their own product and add functionality based on what potential users are really looking for. Given the data-driven approach for both SaaS and SEO, there is a great crossover potential between both that should be leveraged to acquire more leads and gain more conversions.