How to Do SaaS SEO in 2024? A Tested & Tried Guide

Imagine having your product show up at the top of search results whenever a potential customer searches for a solution you offer.

That’s the magic of SEO – it’s like having a 24/7 salesperson working tirelessly to bring in qualified leads for your SaaS brand.

Sounds interesting?

No matter how simple and easy it may sound – the process of SaaS SEO turns confusing, irritating, and overwhelming at times because gaining that first spot on the SERPs is like navigating through a maze of relentless competition and ever-changing algorithms.

But the question remains – is dominating the organic digital landscape that challenging? 

Being the marketing manager of a company that is excelling in its organic search engine game, I can assure you with confidence that it surely isn’t. 

We are doing it, and so can you.

To all those who believe ‘SEO is dead’, I am here to tell you that it’s very much alive and evolving. However, it’s transforming into a more value-oriented practice than merely being a search engine pleaser.

So if you are a SaaS business owner, this article is for you.

But before I introduce you to our growth strategy, let us get familiarized with SaaS SEO and its significance in achieving consistent traffic and exponential growth – Organic, I repeat. 😅

Enhance your SEO project management practices with these actionable parameters.

What is SaaS SEO?

SaaS SEO is a specialized subset of SEO, that aims to optimize the website of SaaS businesses for increasing organic traffic, improving visibility, and gaining a stronger competitive edge over competitors.

The practice follows a combined approach of proven- on-page SEO and off-page SEO strategies to boost your online presence and prepare your website for the race of securing sustainable top rankings for a list of relevant keywords.

The top three key factors you need to work on to surpass the competition include-

• Creating a useful and topical authority content
• Gaining natural backlinks from authoritative websites
• Targeting relevant keywords

However, being one of its kind, the SaaS industry has its own unique set of traits and dynamics which differentiate it from technical SEO. This means you need to keep those parameters in mind before curating a SaaS strategy tailored to your needs for attaining optimal success.

SaaS SEO secures you the front-row seat in front of your potential customers who are –

👉 Seeking solutions and information – Here SEO for SaaS marketing gives you a better chance of capturing the attention of users looking for the solution to the specific problems that your software might be a solution to. Also, there are great chances of them being actively engaged and interested in consuming the content you create.

👉 Exploring options – These users know exactly what they are looking for in a particular niche, but are exploring different options. Here SaaS SEO strategy can give you an upper hand in ensuring that your unique value proposition stands out, making your product or service the most sought-after among the competitors. 

👉 Ready to convert – Here the searcher has already made up a mind and is probably looking out for the pricing details and discounts or deals.

👉 Looking out for you – Great there. Searcher already knows about you and is specifically seeking to know more about you and how you can address their pain points.

Remember, being in the top spots is crucial because customers are hardly inclined to venture beyond the first three SERPs.

Why SEO is important for SaaS companies?

If you look at the SaaS model, The global Software as a Service (SaaS) market is projected to grow from $273.55 billion in 2023 to $908.21 billion by 2030, at a CAGR of 18.7%.

That’s HUGE!! 😱

This means more competition for you, but it also highlights the importance of staying ahead of the curve and continuously optimizing your business strategies.

While many businesses gravitate their attention towards paid marketing methods for quicker results, savvy businesses rave about SEO, understanding the enduring value of time and effort for sustainable and impactful results.

So, what are these compounding results? And how can they impact your business?

➡️ Scales your growth

Trust me when I say that inbound marketing and SEO practices go way beyond any paid acquisition strategy. The more diligently you address your users’ problems and the more useful content you create for them, the more you gain their trust. (It will be a slow process, but you’ll definitely be there.) This way you gain targeted traffic (those are your potential leads) with a well-executed SEO practice.

Pro Tip – Here are some valuable guidelines we follow to rank #1 for our targetted Search terms. So, make sure to keep in mind a few things before you start carving out valuable content on your marketing canvas.

• Create more user focussed content.
• Make sure to show your experience, expertise, and authoritativeness to make people trust you. 
• Draft your content around topically connected keywords.
• Earn high-authority backlinks.

➡️ Attract targetted traffic

Big perk! When you invest in SEO strategy for SaaS, not only do you witness a significant increase in the volume of site visitors, but attract highly relevant and targeted online traffic. This means you are actively able to reach out to the users who have an actual interest in buying – probably they don’t know exactly what or probably they do. Both ways you are benefitting, because they are much easy to persuade into participating in the buying cycle. 

SaaS SEO draws precise and relevant web traffic.

Because targeting the wrong people will result in their consumption of your content, but not progressing further out in your sales funnel.

➡️ Reduce cost-per-acquisition

Compared to the rising costs of other digital marketing channels and paid acquisition methods, investing in SaaS SEO is the smartest and most strategic decision you can take to harness the cost of acquisition. After all, why would you want to drain your money paying for every single click when you can achieve enduring and scalable results cost-effectively in the long term? With Paid acquisition, 

You stop spending, you stop progressing.

However, the cost of customer acquisition with the evergreen content keeps on shrinking with every customer sign-up.

Great, right?

Read more: SEO vs PPC: Which Is Best For SaaS Companies?

➡️ Gives a competitive edge

SEO for SaaS companies gives them a competitive edge over their competitors, no matter at which stage of the sales funnel their potential lead is positioned. If you are addressing the concerns of your potential leads with your valuable content while catering to the needs of your loyal customers, you are lying the foundation of timeless success for yourself which surely will yield bright future benefits. After all, 

SaaS SEO ensures sustained visibility amidst evolving search trends.

Thus, by creating a stockpile of valuable and evergreen content, you not only attract organic traffic and potential customers but establish your authority and nourish your brand’s growth.

➡️ Draw in customers from other channels

SEO’s major investment in crafting a wealth of relevant keyword-enriched content isn’t just confined to achieving higher SERP rankings. Instead, by promoting this content on other social media platforms, you can amplify your social media engagement, enhance your email marketing initiatives, and fuel targeted paid traffic. Thus culminating its efforts in creating a comprehensive and effective customer conversion ecosystem. This way,

SEO unifies diverse user journeys. 

Your ultimate goal should be to get recognition in users’ perceptions, and once your credibility resonates across every platform, the more scope you have for fostering trust and expanding your reach.

Get yourself these Digital Marketing Apps for Team Success in 2024

Crafting your SEO strategy for SaaS

So, now that you know the significance of SaaS SEO, drafting an SEO strategy for your SaaS business is the next step to attracting your potential prospect. 

But, creating a successful SaaS SEO strategy doesn’t start with accumulating keywords, but understanding the buyer’s intent to look for the solution and their persona.

So, before you progress with your strategy planning, understanding that every user occupies a unique space in the buyer’s journey is crucial to tailor the strategy effectively.

✅ Top Funnel (Problem Aware) – Buyers in the top funnel have a problem. But, do they know the solution? No, they don’t. They are actively looking for a solution on Google that may alleviate their pain point. And if at that moment your content is there to provide them valuable insights, here you gain that brownie point and guide them into entering your sales cycle. 

Don’t forget!

They might not make the purchase right away but they are likely to be your future buyers. 

✅ Middle Funnel (Solution Aware)- Buyers in this phase of the journey know the solution to their problem. But what they are here for is to compile a consideration set of solutions for themselves. 

It’s not necessary that they may have followed any predetermined path of your top funnel cycle before landing at your content; instead, it could be a random search that may have brought them to be here. 

Remember, every problem has different solutions, and every solution provider will attempt to present themselves in a unique way. So, here is your opportunity to articulate what sets you apart from others.  

✅ Bottom Funnel (Product Aware)- Here come the informed buyers who are entirely conscious of their problems, their solutions, and even the products that may address them.

I know you might be wondering, that if they know everything, then what are they looking for while browsing? Comparison.

They are comparing their consideration set, and even if you are not on the list, by proving your superiority over others, you can make your way to their consideration and influence their decision-making.

P.S. – While the fundamental framework of the strategy remains the same, the sales funnel for which the strategy is being developed profoundly influences the customization of the SaaS SEO strategy to the slightest.

So, without further ado, let us just jump straight to craft the SEO strategy for your SaaS business. 

1. Define your goals

Before you start out on your venture to prepare a tailored SaaS SEO strategy, make sure to define your objectives and goals. Afterward, you can customize your strategy to align with your unique needs.

Is your aim to drive traffic, boost lead generation, or enhance sales conversion? Once you establish this, you have completed the initial step.

2. Understand your target audience

As mentioned above, your target audience majorly falls into three categories, which further define the marketing funnel you intend to focus on – top, middle, or bottom. Once you identify your target audience and comprehend their pain points and user personas, building relevant keyword-rich content becomes your second stepping stone to nail SaaS SEO.

3. Do keyword research

Here comes the point where you go through a deep research process to identify the keywords that your intended target audience will employ to discover their desired solutions. These keywords will become the foundation for your content strategy. Where Problem-Solution keywords will dominate the top funnel, Solution-Product keywords, and Product Comparison and Purchase keywords will govern the middle and bottom funnel respectively.

4. Create high-quality content

Since 85% of customers regularly seek trusted content to shape their decision-making process, building relevant, informative, and well-written content centered around your target keywords is crucial. Also, make sure to reoptimize your previously written article to generate value through your existing content as well.

5. Build organic backlinks

Next step is to assemble a compelling content set for your audience, getting quality and organic backlinks should be your next priority. Backlinks are crucial in determining your website’s authority to improve your website’s visibility and boost domain authority to outrank your competitors.

6. Use technical SEO best practices

There are a number of technical SEO practices that you can include in your Saas SEO strategy to broaden the scope of your SEO efforts. These practices include optimizing meta elements, crafting compelling meta descriptions, improving page loading times, implementing rich snippets, optimizing your images for the web, and fixing any technical errors on your website.

7. Optimize your website for mobile

Considering people’s hectic work and travel schedules, ensuring that your website design is optimized for smartphones and tablets showcases your productive outlook towards the situation. So, if you are accommodating and catering to the needs of mobile users, then you surely are undoubtedly positioning yourself for success.

8. Social media optimization

While promoting content on social media or through email marketing doesn’t primarily constitute the core of SaaS SEO practices, repurposing content enables you to get recognition on these digital platforms where a vast audience spends a significant amount of time.

9. Track your results

Lastly, make sure to track your SEO results to analyze what is working in your favor and what is not. Compile this data into reports, and compare your progress and performance over time. Some key SEO factors to consider are –

1. Organic traffic growth
2. Conversion rates and leads
3. User engagement and bounce rates

Pro Tip: Be patient. SEO is a long-term strategy. It takes time to see results from your SEO efforts. Don’t get discouraged if you don’t see results immediately. Just keep at it and you will eventually start to see results.

By following these steps, you can craft a SaaS SEO strategy that will help you attract more visitors to your website and grow your business.

Get to know the top SEO tools for digital marketers and take your strategies to the next level in 2024.

SaaS marketing trends for 2024

Google has made some drastic modifications to its Algorithms and every marketer is aiming to leverage it to the best. Let’s look at the most crucial of them:

➡️ Voice Search Optimization

With ever-changing search methods and the growing use of voice-activated devices, there is a rising interest in voice search -queries among users worldwide.

Google confirms the fact mentioning, 25% of people globally now use voice search on their mobiles.

A great deal of work for Siri and Alexa!

So, optimizing your website for conversational keywords (mid-tail and long-tail ), building comprehensive FAQ sections, ensuring mobile responsiveness, and enhancing your domain authority are the key strategies to prioritize in 2024.

➡️ AI-Driven Content

Let us start with the hottest talk of the town – Microsoft’s ChatGPT, and now Google’s Bard also makes its appearance on the scene. While the former has been the game-changing tool that took user experience to new heights, the latter has recently made its debut with promising features.

At ProofHub, we have utilized AI tools (specifically ChatGPT and Google BARD) to understand our user’s preferences and then curate content accordingly.

The major parameter where AI can benefit SaaS businesses is in getting the idea of a topic, identifying relevant keywords, and creating personalized content experiences, but how Google, Bing, and other search engines will react to AI-driven content and impact rankings is still skeptical.

➡️ Video Marketing

The one trend that you’ll see many businesses leaning towards, is establishing a face for their SaaS business. Many SaaS entrepreneurs are making the most of this strategy by promoting their products, content, and expertise via videos. It is a both B2C and B2B SaaS SEO practice, where businesses adapt to the new ways people consume content.

Customers prefer watching a short clip of a few seconds than reading out that content from anywhere.

Individuals require more interactive and personalized interaction (humor will add that extra touch) where they feel their problem is being addressed directly. This way you get more time spent on the site, backlinks, social shares, and improved engagement.

➡️ User Intent-Centric Content

The major objective of Google is to satiate users by displaying the most relevant information that they seek in search results. By inspecting the semantic meaning, Google prefers content that is more aligned with the user intent, positioning you as an authoritative solution provider.

So, when your content resonates with Google users’ intent, your ranking in Google searches improves. But is it that easy? No, it isn’t but it’s not invincible either.

It is all about understanding “Personas” and “Problems”.

That means you need to be fully updated on your customer’s personas and what problems are they facing. Make sure to address their concerns in your content, and become Google’s preferred source.

➡️ Focus on First-Hand Experience (EEAT)

While Google’s algorithms keep on updating with time, its recent upgrade demonstrates first-hand experience to be more crucial than ever. 

EEAT – which stands for  Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness is one of the key quality factors in Google’s Search Quality Guidelines that will decide your Google ranking.

Consider it that way!

Who would you like to learn to bake a cake from – a novice or a professional chef?

Later, right?

So, here is the reason why first-hand experience is integral to building a level of trust.

⚡ Start your journey to SaaS SEO success

Considering the continually evolving Google algorithms, Fooling search engines is impossible now. Hence, it becomes all the more important to have a SaaS SEO strategy that provides you with favorable results.

If you want to manage and run your next SaaS SEO marketing campaign smoothly, let ProofHub make it super easy for you. From planning to execution to tracking progress- ProofHub helps you do it all.

FAQs about SaaS SEO