B2B SaaS SEO Agency: Proven Tactics | Growth, Visibility & More
Tried everything, but you’re barely getting results? This might be because you left SEO out of your strategy. More and more SaaS businesses are turning to digital marketing strategies to stay competitive, making it crucial to succeed today. But how do you get started and see actual growth and visibility?
Discover everything there is to know about SaaS SEO right here! This article shares what it is, different SEO SaaS tools, strategies like technical SEO for SaaS, a checklist, the best SaaS SEO consultants, and what type of services you should be looking for.
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MotherTyperWhat is SaaS SEO and Do You Really Need It?
SaaS SEO refers to the practice of improving your website so that it looks more attractive to search engines like Google. SaaS businesses offer software through the Internet and often with a subscription model, which is why traditional methods are ineffective. It requires a distinct SEO approach that focuses on driving traffic and generating qualified lead conversions. The goal is to make it easy for potential customers to find your SaaS product when searching for solutions to their problems.
But do you need it, or is it more of a personal preference? You definitely need SEO for B2B SaaS for a few reasons.
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Increased Competition:
New companies launch daily, so the market is crowded. Without a strong SEO strategy, your business could get lost in it all. -
Targeted Traffic:
SaaS SEO brings in visitors looking for a product like yours. This means that not only will you receive traffic, but these individuals are also more likely to become paying customers. -
Long-Term Results:
SEO works overtime. While it would take a lot of time and effort for an SEO company for SaaS, the results are continuous, meaning that the traffic will just keep rolling in. This saves you money as you won’t need to pay for ads constantly. -
Improved User Experience:
A big part of SEO is making your website easy to navigate and use. It ensures your visitors are happy and that Google ranks your content well. -
Cost-Effectiveness:
It’s much more affordable than paid advertising. It may take some time to build, but in the end, there is a big difference when it comes to the financial side of things.
Best SaaS SEO Tools
Tools can help you efficiently manage all optimization aspects, from technical audits to creating content that drives results. This makes them one of the essentials when you’re dwindling in the SEO pool.
Here are the tools that SaaS SEO consulting agencies often use:
- Google Search Console: Helps identify indexing, crawling, or site performance issues.
- SEMrush or Ahrefs: Provides comprehensive features for keyword research, backing analysis, and competitor tracking.
- Screaming Frog: Helps identify technical SEO issues like broken links, duplicate content, and missing metadata.
- Yoast SEO or Rank Math: This plugin simplifies on-page optimization and schema implementation.
- Surfer SEO: Analyzes top-ranking pages for your topic keywords and provides action suggestions to improve your content.
- Moz Pro: Offers tools for keyword research, rank tracking, and site audits.
- AnswerThePublic: Identifies as longtail keyword opportunities and understanding user intent.
- PageSpeed Insights by Google: Identifies website performance issues that could affect load times and offers suggestions to improve user experience.
- Hotjar: Provides heatmaps and user behavior insights so that you can optimize site designs.
- BuzzSumo: Helps identify trending topics and create shareable content.
- Schema Pro: Simplifies the implementation of structured data for your SaaS business.
SaaS SEO Strategies that Work
You have the tools – now all you need is the right strategies to drive those results you have been looking for. Let’s dive right into them!
1. Understand the SaaS Customer Journey
To create an effective SEO strategy for SaaS, you must first understand the customer’s journey. But what does that mean? The path potential customers take from when they have an issue and start to Google until they purchase a solution. Every stage has a name and means something in the SaaS and SEO world. The different stages include the following:
Potential customers realize that they have a problem or a need here but might not fully understand the issue or what kind of solutions are out there. These individuals often search for general information or educational content.
They often ask about the issue or how they can improve a specific process. For example, a team leader may search for “how to improve team collaboration for remote work”, “why isn’t my team communicating effectively”, “what tools can help streamline project management”, etc.
At this stage, your goal is to create awareness around your SaaS product. This means helping users understand their challenges and introducing potential solutions with informational keywords and top-of-funnel content. It has been shown to be a fantastic way of drawing in traffic and boosting exposure.
- Create Educational Blog Posts: Address common pain points around topics related to your products, like “5 Signs Your Team Needs a Project Management Tool”.
- Target Informational Keywords: Use keywords that start with “how”, “what”, and “why”.
- Leverage Thought Leadership: This is about establishing your SaaS company as an authority by creating and posting guides, whitepapers, or industry reports.
- Optimize for Search Intent: Users don’t want a hard sell at this point. They are interested in insights and education surrounding their topic. So, it’s best to avoid overly salesy content.
- Use Multimedia: Sometimes, all a complex topic needs is videos, infographics, or a podcast. It not only makes it easier to understand but also more engaging.
Users are now aware of their problems and looking for solutions. This means they are searching for different types of software, features, and approaches to determine which one is right for them.
Because they are now wondering which is best and how available products can solve their problems, they might be searching for the “best time-tracking tools for freelancers”. Search terms can still include “how”, “why”, or “what” but it is framed differently – more around solution exploration rather than problem awareness. For instance, “how to choose the best time tracking tool” or “what features to look for in time tracking software”.
The focus is to help users weigh their options and show them how your SaaS solution fits right in. This is the middle-of-funnel (MOFU) content, and it should balance education with product benefits.
- Comparison Pages: Showcase how your product is different or better than competitors by creating content like “Which Project Management Tool is Right for You?”.
- Use Cases and Featured Pages: Dedicate a page to addressing specific pain points like “How Our CRM Simplifies Client Management”.
- Case Studies and Testimonials: Share success stories from your current customers to build both trust and credibility.
- Target Transactional Keywords: Interrgate keywords into your content that contain words such as “best”, “review”, “pricing”, and “feature”. This usually signals that something is being compared.
- Internal Linking: To provide more information and build authority, link to the awareness stage content you created.
Users are often ready to commit to a solution at this stage.
These potential customers want to know if this is the ideal product, how much it costs, and whether users are satisfied. Searches may include “pricing for top email marketing software”, “customer reviews for the software”, “free trial for top CRM tools”, “best subscription plan for [product type], etc.
The goal is to drive conversions. How exactly? Emphasizing your product’s unique value and encouraging users to take action. This is any type of action like signup up for a free trial, booking a demo, or purchasing.
- Landing Pages: Product and landing pages should be optimized with conversion-focused keywords. For example, “affordable CRM for startups”.
- Call-to-Actions (CTAs): These drive potential customers to take action. Add at least one CTA to a page or content piece that aligns with the decision-making process.
- Customer Reviews: Showcase the positive reviews your company has gotten either on your own website or third-party platforms like Capterra and G2.
- Comparison Tables: To make the experience easier for users, include visual aids like tables and charts to compare plans.
- Retargeting: Analyze SEO insights so that you can adjust where needed for even more results. Look for pages with high traffic but low conversions, keywords driving visitors who leave without taking the desired action, and bounce or exit rates on critical pages.
This process doesn’t end once someone made a purchase. You have to retain customers and turn them into advocates!
The customer wants to know more about the tool that they bought. So, they’ll search for “how do I get the most out of this software?” and “how can I solve [specific issue] using this tool?”.
Focus on content that helps customers maximize the value of your product, subscribe, or recommend your software to other people.
- Knowledge Base and Help Center Content: Create detailed guides, FAQs, and troubleshooting articles so that they are easy to find.
- Customer Training Materials: Offer tutorials, how-to videos, and even webinars to showcase some of the product’s advanced features.
- Community Building: Engage with your audience through forums or social media so that customers can share their insights and feedback.
- Loyalty Incentives: Encourage your customers to bring in new users by offering referral programs or loyalty discounts.
2. Keyword Research for SaaS
The type of keywords you will be looking for depends on the customer’s journey stage. This can be directly linked to the different search intents. The different stages include the following:
They are and include:
- Navigational: The user is searching for a specific website or brand.
- Informational: The user is looking for information to solve a problem or learn more about a topic.
- Transactional: The user is ready to make a decision.
Once you have identified which keywords to look for, start with a seed keyword. They are core terms like “project management software” or “SaaS CRM.” Then, with the use of tools, start expanding your list. Look for keywords with moderate search volume and low competition (to start with).
Last but certainly not least, analyze competitor keywords. This gives you insights into what’s working and potential gaps you can target to rank better.
3. Content Marketing for SaaS SEO
SaaS SEO businesses should always focus on educational and solution-driven content. This way, you are meeting the needs of your audience, ranking well, and creating awareness around your product. Remember that SEO takes time - a single post might not lead to something, but the right strategy certainly can.
Here are some formats that work well for SaaS businesses:
- Blog Posts
- White Papers and E-books
- Videos
- Webinars
- Infographics
But make sure that you post a mix of evergreen and time-sensitive content. What does that mean exactly? Evergreen content refers to topics with lasting relevance, like beginner’s guides or common industry FAQs.Timely content is trending topics that might not be relevant in a day, week, month, or year.
This, however, is only half of the battle. You also need an effective distribution strategy. For instance, you can share content across different social media platforms, send newsletters, engage in SaaS-related communities or forums like Reddit, run ads, and partner with third-party platforms to republish your content.
4. SaaS Technical SEO
Does your website seem laggy? That might be an indication you need to optimize your site. As much as 40% of website visitors typically abandon a site that takes longer than 3 seconds to load, making this strategy an absolute must for SaaS businesses [Shopify]. But that’s not all. The content might not rank well, images might not be displayed because search engines have a hard time understanding the content, etc.
Here’s how to avoid all of that:
- Site Speed Optimization: Implement lazy loading, reduce server response time, and optimize images.
- Mobile Optimization: Google uses mobile-first indexing, so test your tool and content on different devices.
- Structured Data Markup: Use schema markup for SaaS products, reviews, and pricing so that search engines can easily understand your content and feature it in rich snippets.
- URL Structure and Navigation: Ensure URLs are both descriptive and clean.
- Crawlability and Indexing: Audit your website regularly to ensure that the pages are crawlable by search engines. This includes fixing issues like broken links, managing redirects, and ensuring that pages aren’t blocked by robots.txt or noindex tags.
- Security (HTTPS): Get an SSL certificate and HTTPS for your website because Google prioritizes secure websites.
5. On-Page SEO
The SEO on the page is just as important as technical SEO. It involves optimizing your content by incorporating keywords, using title tags and meta descriptions, internal linking, etc. This is everything that you have control over - what you put out for the world to see.
Here’s a breakdown of the on-page SEO:
- Keyword Optimization: Keywords must be integrated naturally within title headers (H1, H2, etc.), meta descriptions, and throughout the body. However, they need to reflect the user’s intent at various stages of their journey.
- Title Tags and Meta Descriptions: Titles should be kept under 60 characters, and meta descriptions under 160 characters. Both need to be attention-grabbing and include the primary keyword as they impact click-through rates.
- Internal Linking: Add links from your website in the content to deepen the user journey and increase dwell time.
- Content Quality and Length: In-depth content is crucial for SaaS SEO. So, make sure that you provide long-form and well-researched articles.
- Optimized Images and Alt Text: When you upload pictures, add alt text that describes what is going on and compress them to improve page load speed.
- User Experience (UX) Design: Your site should be easy to navigate with a clean design and clear CTA’s. A positive UX improves engagement metrics, which are factors in ranking algorithms.
6. Backlink Strategy
This is an incredible way to boost authority, increase organic traffic, and even improve search engine rankings! This strategy involves earning high-quality backlinks. Do the following to get solid backlinks for your SaaS business:
- Building Relationships with Industry Influencers: Reach out to industry leaders, bloggers, and influencers to share content and build backlinks from authoritative websites or do guest blogging.
- Content Partnerships: Work with industry websites to create content that links back to your SaaS platform.
- Directory Listings: Submit your business to reputable industry-specific directories and business listings.
- Broken Link Building: Identify broken links on authoritative sites in your industry and offer your content as a replacement.
- Resource Pages: Reach out to helpful resources or tools in your industry and request the inclusion of your software.
- Content Linkability: Create linkable assets so that others can link it in their content. Examples include case studies, infographics, and comprehensive guides.
7. Local SEO for SaaS with Global Reach
Did you know that implementing local SEO can significantly boost visibility even if your SaaS company operates globally? [Smartclick] Yes, that’s right.
Focus on these aspects to strengthen your presence in key markets:
- Google My Business (GMB) Optimization: Create a Google My Business profile for each of your service areas. Be sure to keep it updated with all relevant information like name, address, number, and operating hours.
- Local Keywords: Include location-based keywords, meta tags, and service pages in your content. For example, “project management software for teams in south africa”.
- Localized Content: Create content that is tailored to specific regions.
- Location-Based Landing Pages: Dedicate landing pages to specific cities or countries with relevant content and keywords.
- Local Reviews: Encourage customers to leave reviews on Google My Business and local review sites as it builds trust in the market and enhances local rankings.
- Citations and Directories: List your business in reputable directories for each country or region that you are targeting. Just make sure that citations are consistent across platforms.
8. Leverage Customer Reviews and Testimonials
Do you trust brands that have no reviews or any feedback from customers? Well, neither does anyone else. They play an important role in building trust, influencing purchasing decisions, and improving local SEO.
What you need to do:
- Collect Reviews Regularly: Make it easy for users to leave a review by providing a direct link to your review platform, using a review widget, adding it to the CTAs, offering access to exclusive content or an entry into a giveaway for completing a review, and automating follow-ups.
- Highlight Positive Testimonials: Add them to your website, product, and landing pages. They can be very persuasive!
- Do Case Studies: Showcase how your product has helped customers achieve success. A great SaaS SEO case study can be “How [SaaS Product] Helped [Client Type] Save X Hours Per Week”.
- Incorporate Reviews into Marketing: Kills two birds with one stone by using positive reviews in email campaigns, social media posts, or paid ads.
- Respond to Reviews: Respond to all your reviews, whether good or bad, and address any concerns. It shows transparency and builds trust!
B2B SaaS SEO Agency
So, you’re looking for an agency to do all the grunt work? That’s a great idea. SaaS SEO agencies have years of experience, which means it’s second nature to them, and they can do it much faster. This allows you to focus on what you are really good at and see the results you want without years of finetuning and second opinions. A real package!
Speaking of packages, SaaS SEO services need to include a few things. They are in-depth keyword research, technical SEO audits, on-page optimization, content creation and marketing, backlink building, conversion rate optimization, ongoing performance tracking, and regular reporting. This ensures that every aspect is covered to drive targeted traffic, improve rankings, and increase conversions.
Conclusion: SaaS SEO in a Nutshell
SaaS SEO can be an absolute game-changer for your business. It not only ensures growth and visibility, but it provides real results. So, what do you need, and how do you get started? All you need is the right strategies like understanding the customer journey, doing keyword research strategically, creating engaging content, using technical and on-page SEO, having a backlink strategy, using local SEO where needed, and putting customer reviews to good use.
This process is that much easier when you have a SaaS SEO checklist to work off of, as you’ll have a clear mindmap of what’s next and avoid leaving anything out that’s important.
If you’re tired of low website traffic, little to no conversions, high bounce rates, poor website user experience, or anything related – connect with MotherTyper. We, as an SEO company for SaaS, can help you achieve the results you deserve. Just simply reach out and watch it unfold in front of you!
Introducing Our Success Stories
We take pride in delivering exceptional results for our clients! From boosting website traffic and improving search rankings to driving meaningful engagement, our tailored strategies have consistently exceeded expectations. Below are some of our most successful achievements that showcase the power of effective SEO and digital marketing. Let these results inspire what we can achieve together!
Pia Vosloo
CEO | Founder of MotherTyper
