SEO for SaaS: The Complete Guide

Your approach to marketing as a whole is supposed to be heavily impacted by the nature of your product. For instance, you have a different approach in a one-purchase industry (chess sets, exercise equipment, etc.). You’re not considering post-sale follow-up, which is crucial in other industries.

The SaaS industry is completely the opposite. Your current users and old buyers are equally important, and your traffic differs greatly. Most visits to your site come from current users (those who are already subscribed to your services).

There’s also a constant need to improve your value, target your audience with an upgraded offer, and prove that they’ve made the right choice (by choosing you and not the competitor).

Does this affect your SEO? Yes! Quite a bit. Here are some tips and pointers that should help you craft the most effective SEO strategy for SaaS.

Adjusting to long sales cycles

In a lot of other types of industries, sales cycles are short. We’re talking about impulse purchases and quick checkout processes. Sure, one can impulsively subscribe to your SaaS, but this system has flaws.

• First, in their minds, people know this is a long-term commitment. So, even if the initial cost is low, they’ll still be more hesitant to commit. With a simple purchase, it’s quite easy to handle these things. You make a purchase, and you’re done with it.
• Second, it takes a second to cancel this purchase at any time. If they think they’ve made a mistake and canceled, your re-engagement chances are not great. This is true even if both of these decisions were equally unfounded.

With this in mind, you must adjust your SEO strategy to longer sales cycles. In other words, you must emphasize nurturing leads more than just closing the deal. You don’t want them to approach you; you also want them to stay.

This is also one of the most important tasks of your SEO team is to participate in customer onboarding. Even after they join your SaaS platform, they’ll still be an integral part of your SEO audience.

Penetrate new markets

The thing with SaaS is that, eventually, you’ll deplete your market. Keeping your subscribers is a priority, but you must attract more people to grow. The simplest way to do this is to penetrate new markets.

Now, different types of people look for different things. One of the critical tasks of your SEO teams is to find suitable keywords and strategies for all of these markets. You might need more than one SEO strategy to get the maximum value.

While SEO always relies on the same principles, different industries require different approaches. This is why hiring a specialized SaaS SEO agency yields great returns. Doing so gives you access to the invaluable niche experience that would take years to develop if you decided to work with generalists.

Link building

Guest posting on relevant sites has always been a staple of link building; however, the scope of relevant sites for a SaaS service is quite broad. To get there, you need to make a customer profile and find out exactly who (and for what purpose) is using your platform.

There’s also a huge potential behind unlinked mentions. With so many people working on your platform, they’re bound to mention or reference you repeatedly. By finding these unlinked mentions and asking to add a link, you’ll gain a massive boost in visibility without actually having to produce content. This is an incredible boost and something you should never ignore.

However, just because you have a link doesn’t mean your job is done. You want to identify and immediately fix broken links. This can be automated, but even with optimal automation, it will require a watchful eye of a link builder.

Accent on unique selling proposition

The next thing to consider is the importance of making a good selling proposition. You want to draw people in, and since you’re asking them to make a long-term commitment, you need to offer them something of value in return.

People care about what you can do for them, not what you can do for them, so unless you’re willing to talk about how they can get the maximum value for their money, they’re not likely to listen to you very closely.

Just making a good USP is not enough. You need to format it into well-written content. This is another thing that a great content team will bring to the table – SaaS content writing. Also, your content shouldn’t be in writing or on a single platform. What about your YouTube marketing? What about social media posts? All of this matters. All of it counts.

Focus on social Proof

As we’ve already mentioned, subscribing to a SaaS is a bigger commitment than purchasing. It’s basic human psychology. Subscribing for a three-month plan of $20 is the same as buying a $60 product, but it doesn’t feel the same.

This is why people are more likely to research before committing to your SaaS. This is why your SEO activity needs to emphasize generating all the social proof it can get. You need to start by doing reviews and earning testimonials. These are the first pieces of content that your audience will encounter.

Here, you need to generate content that’s as genuine as possible. The bulk of this will depend on the competence of your copywriters. Writing a stellar review about how everything is peachy and giving your platform 5/5 stars on each review is incredibly suspicious. Instead, you want to be more unbiased-looking (that’s right, unbiased-looking, not unbiased).

As for the user testimonials, edit them to improve the format but don’t stage them too much. The main objective is to keep them feeling authentic.

Wrap up

The visibility of your SaaS determines the position that you take in the industry. Assuming one of the first few positions, you’ll be seen as more credible, and there’ll be no talk of your authority in the field. Also, your traffic will drastically increase since 33% of people just click on the first result by default. Finally, you’ll drastically improve your appeal to your new and old audiences.