There is no shortage of SaaS products and services available in the market today. With so many organizations looking for quick deployments of productivity solutions for their business and helpful cloud-based applications for their clients, the SaaS industry has seen tremendous growth over the years and growing competition among suppliers.
As a SaaS provider, knowing how to stand out in this crowded market is critical to ensure sustainable revenues and recurring subscriptions from customers. Having a strong online presence and a regular source of website traffic is one way to help ensure this.
However, when approaching SEO (Search Engine Optimization) as a B2B organization, there are some important things to consider and some practical tips you can follow to help maximize your exposure and increase your leads.
Understanding B2B SaaS SEO
Many people may view SEO as a catch-all term for creating more visibility for their business websites. While many SEO techniques are universal regardless of the type of niche you’re in, B2B markets have much more unique marketing requirements than traditional B2C (business-to-consumer) SEO methods.
B2B SaaS SEO stands out from other methods in a variety of distinct ways, including:
Targets very specific decision-makers within an organization rather than a broader audience
Takes into consideration longer sales cycles typically seen when dealing with business buyers
More specific and industry-focused keyword choices
Utilizes content marketing approaches designed to portray thought leadership in the industry
Considering these distinctions, businesses need to adapt their SEO approaches so that they can capitalize on buyer interests and ensure higher returns on their marketing investments.
Why having a Dedicated B2B SEO Strategy is so Important for SaaS Companies
For many businesses, SEO planning and execution is usually an afterthought to web design work and sales outreach programs. However, having a well-defined B2B SEO strategy is vital when operating a business in a highly competitive industry.
Even though SEO is typically looked at as just a method of helping your website rank higher on search engines, it actually has much more value than that. The foundation of B2B SEO is built on helping an organization establish a level of authority to search engines and viewers that builds credibility and trust.
Whether focusing on your content development plans or link-building strategies, having a clear SEO strategy can help give your other marketing initiatives more purpose. This creates a much more holistic approach to gathering new leads and leveraging various digital marketing techniques to help close more business.
Keyword Research for B2B SaaS
Before you can begin any B2B SEO initiative, you need to identify the keywords and phrases that you’ll want to try to rank for. This isn’t as simple as guessing what your potential customers search for when looking for products and services like yours and will require a more comprehensive approach.
Identifying Your Target Audience
The first step in identifying your SEO goals is to understand your target audience. Most businesses start this process by creating customer personas explaining the type of businesses and individual stakeholders they want to engage with.
Once your personas are outlined, you’ll want to understand them more deeply by looking into the behaviors that define them. This can include the types of websites or industry reports they typically subscribe to and the common reasons why they may be able to benefit from a SaaS solution like yours.
Finding High-Value and High-Intent Keywords
It can be tempting to target as many keywords for your business as possible. However, the important thing to consider is that “less is more” when it comes to keyword selection, especially when beginning a new SEO campaign.
The other thing you’ll want to consider is that while you may already have specific keywords in mind when trying to rank your website, it’s essential to remember that not all of these terms may have the correct user intent associated with them.
For example, while broad terms like “project management software” might have a high search volume, targeting longer terms like “best project management software” with a lower search volume may convert more business since the word “best” represents purchasing intent.
Tools for Keyword Research
If you don’t already work with a dedicated B2B SEO agency, you’ll have a number of free and paid tools available to help streamline your keyword research. Some of the most common tools businesses lean on for this process include SEMrush and Ahrefs.
Both of these solutions help you create new keyword campaigns for your business while giving you valuable insights into the search volume and relative ranking difficulty of each term. While many quality keyword research tools will require some investment, you can also use Google’s Keyword Planning tool to unlock certain insights for commonly used search terms by category and audience type.
Analyzing Competitor Keywords
The great thing about running a business in a competitive industry is that you can learn a lot from your competitors when establishing your SEO goals. Your competitors' listings can provide valuable insights into how they’re bringing in web traffic and the referral sources they’re using to generate new leads.
Using the same tools you used for your keyword research, you can also research the terms used by your competitors while also identifying potential gaps in their marketing approach that you can take advantage of.
Evaluating Keyword Difficulty and Search Volume
Once you’ve short-listed all of the keyword terms you’ll be targeting for your SEO campaigns, it’s important to understand their relative volume and ranking difficulty.
You’ll want to ensure you find the right balance of searchability and rankability. Although some keywords can lead to a lot of organic web traffic if you can get on the first page of search results, many times, these terms will be difficult to rank for.
Focus your efforts on trying to rank for low to moderate-difficulty keywords with reasonable search volumes while making good use of long-tail phrases.
On-Page SEO Best Practices
All of the techniques you use to modify elements of your website to improve its ranking potential are referred to as “on-page” SEO. This can include:
Optimizing Title Tags and Meta Descriptions
When a user enters a query on a search engine and is provided with a list of results, the titles and descriptions they see are customizable by site owners. These are considered title tags and meta descriptions, and they can have a major impact on ranking for certain keywords or phrases.
There are character restrictions that you’ll want to be mindful of when creating your meta descriptions and titles. Your titles should ideally be under 60 characters in length, while your descriptions can be up to 160 characters. Use the opportunity to incorporate your keywords when creating these meta tags whenever possible.
Creating High-Quality, Relevant, and User-Centric Content
One of the most important elements you can incorporate into your website to help its rankings is high-quality, user-centric content for your audience. This involves:
Understanding Your User’s Search Intent - You can reference the type of keywords your audience uses to better understand their search intent. You’ll want to ensure the content you create directly addresses this intent, whether providing helpful answers to frequently asked questions or more in-depth content like user guides or tutorials.
Optimizing Content With Keywords - The content you create gives you a great opportunity to weave in the keywords you’re looking to rank for on your website. Use your chosen keywords naturally throughout your website, but avoid keyword stuffing, as this can cause your site to become penalized by search engines as it will be looked at as spam.
Making Your Information More Engaging - Modern-day consumers' attention spans have gotten much shorter over time. This means it’s important to consider a variety of different formats for the information you create, including videos and infographics, to make it easier to digest and more engaging for your audience.
Choosing The Right Distribution Methods - You’ll want to avoid only creating content for your website or blog. There are plenty of opportunities for you to generate and distribute your content across multiple platforms to increase brand visibility. This includes social media feeds, email campaigns, and working with different product influencers.
Technical SEO for B2B SaaS
The technical SEO elements of your website are just as important as the forward-facing ones, like your website’s content and navigation structure. Some of the areas you should be focusing on when addressing technical SEO issues on your website include:
Improving Site Speed and Performance
Search engines value website owners who put their users first. This means providing a seamless browsing experience that’s uninterrupted by slow loading times or poorly configured scripts. Optimizing your website using a dedicated content delivery network (CDN) and minimizing the size of image files helps avoid high bounce rates on your site while maximizing your lead conversion opportunities.
Ensuring Mobile-Friendliness
Now that the majority of Internet users are relying on mobile devices instead of PCs, website owners need to ensure that the website experience they provide is consistent regardless of the screen size used when visiting the site. You can use the Google Mobile Friendly test to evaluate your website's performance on smaller devices and get insights on areas you can modify to help improve the experience.
Implementing Schema Markup and Structured Data
When creating the content for your site, you’ll also have the ability to implement structured data into each of your posts. This uses schema makeup in your HTML code that makes the content you create more organized and easier to understand by search engine crawlers.
This approach results in improved click-through rates when users discover your website through search engines. Additional helpful information, such as rich snippets and graphs, will be used to give additional context to your page titles and descriptions.
Content Marketing Strategies
Content marketing can be a highly effective tool for helping your business improve its brand visibility and engage with a wider audience. The great thing about content marketing strategies is that they can be customized depending on your business’s needs and be a great addition to your other SEO initiatives.
Common content marketing strategies include:
Blogging and Long-Form Content - Creating blogs and long-form content is a great way to provide helpful information to your website visitors. Over time, this content can be a great way to help your site rank highly for certain keywords and increase your organic web traffic.
Creating In-Depth Guides, Whitepapers, and Case Studies - Whitepapers and case studies allow organizations to create more comprehensive, in-depth content that can be distributed on various industry websites and social media channels. They are a great way to bring in referral traffic and can help generate new leads.
Utilizing Video and Interactive Content - Video content is becoming a more preferred format for sharing and digesting new information. Search engines like Google place a high value on websites and platforms that use video in their marketing, and it can be a great opportunity for organizations to add more personality to their brand and additional context on the value of their products and services.
Link Building Strategies
Another important component of all successful SEO strategies is link building. Having other reputable organizations linking back to your SaaS website can be a powerful signal to search engines like Google that you are a reputable brand worth ranking higher on results pages.
Building High-Quality Backlinks
The important thing to remember about gaining backlinks is that having more links doesn’t necessarily equate to having more trust. In fact, having too many spammy links from questionable websites can come across as spam and can have a negative impact on your site’s rankings.
Instead, focusing on gaining backlinks from highly reputable websites in your niche will give you the best results.
Guest Posting and PR Outreach
Although backlinks can start to occur naturally the longer your website is active, there are ways to expedite building your domain's authority without following black hat SEO practices. Guest posting, for example, is a great way to share your content with other websites and blogs in exchange for a reference link back to your site.
By proactively reaching out to other web owners in your industry, as well as accomplished bloggers and journalists, you can uncover a number of opportunities to bring more attention to your site and gain additional high-quality backlinks.
Networking with Industry Influencers
Reaching out and connecting with industry influencers is another great way to promote your SaaS solutions and reach a much larger audience. However, not all influencer relationships may be the right fit for your organization.
When contacting various influencers on social media or through their websites, ensure they are relevant to your industry. While all influencers can help brands see a larger but temporary surge in their web traffic, those with credibility in your industry will lead to your receiving more qualified leads.
Measuring SEO Success
It’s important that over time you’re able to gauge the effectiveness of your SEO efforts. It’s not uncommon that you’ll want to shift your focus after a certain period of time or discover more important areas that need your attention. In order to do this effectively, you’ll want to regularly monitor and track your SEO initiatives.
At the outset of your SEO campaigns, it’s important to establish certain KPIs (key performance indicators) that will help you ensure you meet your organization’s marketing objectives. These KPIs can vary from your organic traffic volume throughout the month to bounce rates from your website or the number of lead conversions.
When you track your KPIs regularly, you can understand the overall effectiveness of your digital marketing approach. You can also use tools like Google Analytics and Google Search Console to see real-time metrics for your site and potential areas of improvement that are needed to maximize your ranking results.
Common SEO Challenges and Mistakes
While SEO can provide organizations with many opportunities to increase their brand awareness and discover new revenue sources, there are still challenges that businesses will need to work through. Some of these roadblocks include:
Navigating Competitive Markets - B2B markets are highly competitive and often mean many companies will be trying to rank for the same keywords and looking to attract the same audience. This is why it’s important not to lock yourself in a marketing bubble, and put more focus on targeting niche long-tail keywords with less competition.
Overcoming Technical Barriers - Depending on the size and complexity of your website, your technical SEO requirements might require a lot of time and resources to manage. In this event, working with a dedicated SEO agency can help you effectively address your site's important underlying technical components while focusing on other initiatives.
Keeping Up with SEO Trends and Algorithm Changes - B2B SEO is highly dynamic, which means that while certain tactics may be effective today, they will not have as large an impact tomorrow. It’s important to stay as up-to-date as possible with the latest SEO tips and advice to ensure your campaigns use relevant methods to attract more web traffic.
Over-Optimizing for Keywords - Even though using keywords in your content and throughout your site’s navigation structure, it’s common for businesses to over-optimize their sites and negatively impact their rankings. While having a balanced blend of keywords on your site is helpful, the main focus businesses should have is creating valuable and informative content for their audience.
Make Your SaaS SEO Strategy a Success
Creating a successful B2B SaaS SEO campaign involves addressing a variety of variables that impact your website's performance and engagement level. However, by following the tips and strategies provided, you’ll be able to drive more organic site traffic to your business over time, helping you gain new leads and convert more business.