For SaaS companies, a functional website is very important as a digital storefront to showcase the SaaS company and products to the target customers. A website can be the SaaS company’s best lead generation device, but no matter how good the website is, it won’t bring your business any value if your ideal audience can’t find it.
This is where SEO, as the most effective way to promote your website comes in.
SEO—Search Engine Optimization— is the process of optimizing your website and its content so it can rank higher on Google’s SERP.
Although the concept of SEO is simple, it consists of many different elements and can be quite confusing in its practice. This is why we will share some actionable tips you can use right away to optimize your SaaS website, starting with the first one.
1. The Only Principles in Your Keyword Research
Keyword research is inherently simple but can be confusing and might lead to procrastination instead. So, how should we begin?
In general, there are only three main principles in finding the right target keywords for your business:
- The keyword must be popular and relevant for your target audience. You can find out about this by measuring the keyword’s monthly search volume.
- The keyword must be relevant for your SaaS product and your business in general. Not all keywords that are popular for your target audience would be relevant for your business.
- Depending on your budget and timeline, the competition for the target keyword must be manageable.
Also, when it comes to finding your target keyword, it’s generally better to go more niche with long-tail keywords since they are less competitive but can also drive more qualified traffic that has a higher chance of converting.
This is highly related to your SaaS product itself: the more specific and niche your product is, the more effective you can target your specific audience. So, understanding your target audience, their behaviors, their needs, and their pain points are very important not only for your success in SEO but also in your SaaS marketing in general.
2. Look for Topics, Not Solely Keywords
The idea behind implementing SEO to your content is to ensure your content is seen and read. This is why we’ve discussed how keyword research is very important and should be an important benchmark for your content marketing in general.
However, it’s also important not to focus too much on keywords, as we’d have to consider whether you can create meaningful, valuable content from the target keywords. We know how so many websites are covering the same thing over and over again to target the popular keywords, oversaturating the keyword, and lowering its value instead.
So, after we’ve considered the three important factors of a target keyword—as discussed above—, figure out your target audience’s search intent for the keyword: why the audience actually conducts the search for the specific keyword, and how you should satisfy this intent with your content.
Always try to understand the search intent, and figure out whether you can discuss a meaningful, valuable topic from the keyword itself.
3. Content Creation for SEO
A very important thing to understand is that there’s no shortcut to SEO besides actually having valuable, relevant content that Google and the other search engines are going to recommend.
However, we all know that creating high-quality content can be easier said than done. So, what should we do about this?
Above, we have discussed how we should find our target keywords. So, by now, you should have a list of your potential target keywords. Now, what you should do is to do a quick Google search for these target keywords and check the top-ranking pages. SEO by nature is a competition to rank higher, and these pages are your competitors to beat.
There are two ways you can beat these other pages:
- Creating a significantly better content than the others: bigger (more words), more in-depth, more optimized, and so on.
- Taking a different angle and cover the content from a unique way.
Remember that if you can’t beat your competitor by being better (i.e. if the top-ranking content is from an established website with a lot of data-driven information), then you can always aim to be different.
The goal is to have truly valuable content and get more authoritative websites to link this content. This is how we can effectively build high-quality backlinks in the long run. Remember that your content should highlight your SaaS product’s unique value proposition (UVP) in general.
4. Optimizing Your Site’S Technical Aspect
While technical SEO can be a pretty deep subject on its own, it’s very important to understand that in optimizing the technical aspect of our website, our aim is to:
- Improve our web visitor’s experience. This should be the most important objective
- Making sure our website can be indexed properly by Google (and the other search engines)
- Making sure Google and the other search engines can understand all the elements of your website and/or content properly
So, here are some important areas to focus on according to these objectives:
- Eliminate crawl errors: Use Google Search Console to check whether there are any crawl errors and any general errors on your website.
- Faster load time: very important. Since 2016, more than 50% of website users exit a website that loads more than three seconds. Google also takes account of a high bounce rate as a ranking factor, so this is very important.
- Mobile-friendliness: make sure all your pages are mobile-responsive. And test your site in as many devices possible
- Optimize your navigation: ensure your site is easy to navigate even on the smallest mobile screens to maximize user experience.
End Words
As a SaaS company, your website will serve as a resource to prospects and customers about the value of your software and service. So, implementing SEO should be a priority in your SaaS marketing plan, to maximize incoming organic traffic to your website.
Although SEO can be intimidating, the secrets behind SEO success are fairly simple: great content that is linked by a lot of people, and ensuring your site is performing properly.
