How Your SaaS Company Can Win Consistent SEO Success

The software-as-a-service (SaaS) market is thriving, but players face stiff competition. How do you stand out? By working with a capable SEO agency that knows your niche and can help you build a unique brand to truly maximize your business potential.

We outline the following steps that digital marketing firms use to grow a SaaS business, making it easier for you to collaborate, build value, and maximize your ROI:

1. Define Your Brand Well
2. Create Customer Personas
3. Pick and Classify Keywords According to User Intent
4. Use Topic Clusters to Build Authority and Display Expertise
5. Review Your Strategies Regularly

We will tackle each of these below. Let’s go!

Want to learn more about the Digital Authority Partners approach to SEO? Watch this video!

Here Is Your 5-Step Guide to Good SaaS SEO

If you are looking for a lucrative business, you are on the right path. Grandview Research said the global SaaS market could grow by over 10% from 2022 to 2028.

Happily, emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), have made it easier for brand-new startups to form and grow. Unhappily, that means more competitors are coming.

How do you set yourself apart from the crowd? One answer is to begin practicing SaaS SEO as soon as possible.  This process is all about one important thing: giving your customers solutions.

     1. Define Your Brand Well

In a sea sometimes saturated with similar products and services, branding matters. Consider these examples:

• Slack’s focus on fun and collaboration
• Zoom’s emphasis on simple conferencing solutions
• Salesforce’s correlation of success with customer relationships
• Asana’s dedication to getting work done better and faster
• Adobe Creative Cloud’s commitment to creativity

SEO keywords become much easier to identify when you have a strong brand identity since they will match up easily with your brand’s goals and message.

You can also use your identity to shape other parts of your digital marketing campaigns, such as who you are trying to reach and how you measure success.

As a SaaS company, defining your brand should be a group effort. Ask managers, employees, and customers for their perspectives.

With our focus on relating your branding to who you are and what solutions you offer to your customers, use these questions as your guide:

• What is our mission?
• What are the values that define us?
• What problems are we trying to solve?
• How do we plan to accomplish it?

     2. Create Customer Personas

Your products and services, no matter how awesome, are not for everyone. It is critical that you know who your buyers are because you do not have unlimited resources allowing you to reach everyone in every type of market.

In fact, if you are a new SaaS, you have to maintain a specific burn rate. Otherwise, it would be easy to “burn out” before you could even measure success.

How do you know your customers? You have easy options:

• Look into your competitors’ contacts.
• If you have been operating for a while, check your historical data.
• Create surveys and questionnaires.
• Analyze social media engagement and other online conversations.

Be sure to develop a buyer persona so you do not get lost in a mountain of data and your brand.

This persona is an ideal representation of your company’s target customer. It comprises the specific customer segment's demographic and psychographic traits, as well as their buying habits, preferences, goals, and motivations.

It is a highly specific model to help you narrow down keywords, content strategies, and other marketing efforts.

Check out this buyer persona for Zoom:

• A decision-maker in charge of implementing conferencing solutions at an enterprise level
• Between the ages of 35-55
• Tech-savvy with experience in similar software
• Looking for reliable conferencing solutions with features such as screen sharing and video conferencing
• Mainly concerned about price and reliability

     3. Pick and Classify Keywords According to User Intent

Now that you have a brand and a customer, you can get more technical with SaaS SEO, beginning with keywords.

The old-fashioned approach to keyword research is to have a broad keyword, look for medium and long tails, and combine them with related terms and phrases.

Those with high search volumes are chosen because they are the most popular or searched.

But this method has many problems:

• It is not specific enough to be effective.
• The keywords may have high competition, making it hard to rank.
• The words may not reflect user intent or match how people look for your services online.

A more effective strategy is to choose and sort these keywords according to user intent, which also reflects your customer’s journey or sales funnel.

Let us analyze the possible keywords for Zoom:

     4. Use Topic Clusters to Build Authority and Display Expertise

Now that you know what your keywords are, you can start writing your content.

Content marketing is broad, with many strategies and types to choose from. The best choice depends on many factors, such as your keywords.

• Long-tail keywords are ideal in product pages because they are more specific and even brand-centric.
• Short-tail keywords are best for blog posts that explain concepts in a top-down manner.

If you are new to SaaS SEO, the goal is to rank fast for several keywords. A practical technique is topic clustering.

Topic clusters are pieces of content grouped around a main topic. This serves three purposes:

• It helps with internal linking and SEO because each piece gives the other more support, helping your content rank faster.
• Clustering also builds authority and displays expertise on specific topics as can provide depth to a technical piece across several articles.
• It also enriches the user experience. It lets you break down complex topics so they are easier for your audience to digest.
• It lets you write content from different angles and perspectives, which helps make your content stand out from competitors.

Here is our extensive step-by-step guide on how to write topic clusters.

     5. Review Your Strategies Regularly

Topic clustering helps you hit many targets when it comes to your SaaS SEO strategies. Not only do you have content, but you have already started with off-page SEO, including link building.

Your plan does not stop there. The only way to know if your methods are working is by tracking and reviewing your progress.

Many AI tools can already help you in this aspect. Google Analytics 4, for example, is about to include several features of Optimize. This means you can experiment with your tactics and monitor your performance in real-time.

The same search engine is also introducing scrollend, which counts many non-scrolling activities such as when users have released touch from their screens or stopped using the keypress. The data is helpful in determining which content is engaging or where to put your calls to action (CTA).

What you should focus on are the metrics. What should you track? Here are some of the most important ones:

• Conversion rate
• Page views
• Bounce rate
• Average session time
• Traffic sources
• Time on page

You can take this further by relating these to business key performance indicators (KPIs), such as:

• Number of leads or sign-ups
• Sales revenue
• Customer retention rate
• Burn rate
• Customer lifetime value

Summing Up

SaaS SEO offers valuable opportunities for businesses to increase their organic traffic and conversions. The real key to success is having a clear plan of action.

This five-step guide helps pave the way. But these points are just the beginning. For more customized strategies, contact us today. We can help you understand your customers more deeply and create a plan that works for your business.