How To Construct a Winning SEO Strategy for Your SaaS Business

Who wants to win in the search engine optimization (SEO) game? The answer is everyone. That is why any software-as-a-service (SaaS) team should consider working with an SEO agency that can help design a strategy that attracts targeted traffic and increases website visibility.

Dominating the search results is a collaborative effort. This article focuses on the top three tactics you can integrate into your SaaS SEO campaign:

• Know your brand and audience by heart
• Get smart with keyword research
• Be strategic with content

Are you ready to dig deeper? Let’s go!

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

1. Know Your Brand and Audience by Heart

SEO remains one of the most effective digital marketing techniques for generating traffic and increasing visibility. Both are your gateways to help you scale and convert prospects into customers.

However, every plan needs a north star. Otherwise, you end up with techniques that will never work because:

• The message does not resonate with your target audience.
• You rank for the wrong keywords, preventing you from touching base with your ideal market.
• You cannot generate great backlinks and build domain authority (DA) because you do not have an effective outreach strategy.
• Your overall SEO plan fails to emphasize the unique value of your product or service.

What is your north star? How do you figure that out?

Your ultimate guide for any digital marketing campaign, especially SEO, combines branding and target audience. Both should be specific or well-defined. This way, you can easily determine your optimization goals, write content that engages the right people, and know your metrics to measure your progress.

Crafting your brand identity and target customers can begin with a series of questions. Call up your core team and use these queries as your inspiration:

• What are the values that define your company?
• What culture do you maintain in your workplace?
• Who is your ideal customer?
• What problems are you trying to address? How do you plan to solve them?
• Who are your competitors? What are their unique selling propositions (USP)?
• How can you position your SaaS product so that it becomes a better option for your target customers?
• Why are you creating the product and service?

2. Get Smart with Keyword Research

Winning SaaS SEO means speaking the language of search engines: keywords. Unless you can match the phrases or terms your prospects use, they can never find your website. Or you drive the wrong audience to your page. Either way, you cannot convert.

You can explore many keyword research and optimization approaches. But we would like to recommend two tactics that can deliver the most optimal results:

• Find and use keywords based on user intent.
• Chase long-tail keyword opportunities.

Let us go over each one.

     a. Find and Use Keywords Based on User Intent

What is user or search intent? It is a person’s goal when they type in a query on Google or other search engines.

Intent matters because search engines want to provide the best answer to a question. So if your content matches the context, it will rank it higher.

Most of all, user-intent keywords often match the different phases of your buyer’s journey. In other words, you give your business a chance to convert at all stages.

Many keyword suggestion tools can already dig for the best phrases and terms for your SaaS company and even identify the user intent, which can be informational, navigational, transactional, or commercial.

A reliable SEO agency can also do the job for you and ensure the keywords make sense in your overall keyword optimization plan.

     b. Chase Long-Tail Keyword Opportunities

Wouldn’t it be great if you could rank for broad keywords, say “billing software” or “EMR platform”? Unfortunately, with so many targeting the same terms, it is a tough climb to the top.

You can be more efficient with your SaaS SEO keyword research by going after long-tail keywords, especially the low-hanging fruit.

Long-tail keywords are more specific phrases, such as “best billing software for small businesses” or “EMR platform for hospitals.” They work because:

• They may have fewer searches than the general terms, but they closely match user intent with less competition. This way, you can achieve better search visibility.
• You can quickly boost your conversion rates since they deliver targeted traffic
• When done right, as in a topic cluster, they can help you rank for higher-traffic, broader keywords.

3. Be Strategic With Content

Content makes the SEO world go round for many reasons. Writing the right copy means:

• Attracting the right audiences to your website
• Engaging them enough to stay and even take action
• Increasing brand trust and authority
• Keeping search engines informed of your expertise, which, in turn, can help secure higher rankings
• Strengthening your link-building strategies, especially getting backlinks

Gone are the days when you could simply pepper keywords all over an article and call it a day. Search engines now have billions of pages they can offer to users, so your content marketing approach must be more strategic to receive preferential treatment.

We suggest three:

• Pay attention to your competitor’s content.
• Write for humans, not search engines.
• Match the content with the search intent.

Let us break them down here.

     a. Pay Attention to Your Competitor’s Content

One of the simplest methods to rank high for your targeted keyword and even place first is to check out your rival’s content.

• How are they using the keywords?
• If they appear on the featured snippets, what answer did they provide?
• What visuals are they using? Can you provide something better and more engaging?
• What keywords have they been targeting?
• What is the tone and writing style?
• What are the content gaps? Did they miss a certain angle, perspective, or tip you can provide in your article?
• When did they publish the copy? Can you find new information that they have not covered yet?
• Who is linking to them?

The answers to these questions help you develop better content than what the others have provided.

     b. Write for Humans, Not Search Engines

The latest Google algorithm updates tell you to write for humans.  What does that imply? Many points.

• Do not manipulate the system through spamming techniques, such as keyword stuffing, cloaking, or backdoor pages.
• The content should display your authority, knowledge, experience, and expertise in your niche.
• Your audience should be able to trust your content. In other words, it helps them solve problems, provides them with the right information, guides them in making decisions, and does not put them in harm’s way.
• You can use artificial intelligence (AI) SEO to improve your rankings, but you should customize content to make it relevant, original, and data-driven.

     c. Match the Content with the Search Intent

Search engine algorithms are getting smarter by the minute. So when a user types in their query, they expect to get what they came for:

• Do they want information only?
• Do they want to purchase something?
• Do they need directions or contact information?

If you can match the content with the search intent, you can make your pages more relevant and offer a better user experience, thus helping to enhance your rankings. Consider these examples:

• Blog posts are good for educational and informational searches.
• Product pages are great for purchase-related queries.
• Knowledge-based articles help provide support searches.
• Videos and images can answer visual searches.
• Directory pages supply contact information, store hours, locations, etc.
• Reviews aid comparison or evaluation queries.

Summing Up

Seeing the results of your SaaS SEO efforts takes time. You can minimize the wait with a customized strategy.

These three tips above can help you get started. But you can supercharge them with an SEO agency that understands your business goals. Contact us today and let us talk about how we can make your website more visible and attractive in the search results.