The Best SaaS SEO Checklist for Creating Optimized Content
11 strategies for your SaaS SEO checklist to help turn casual website visitors into high-quality leads.
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Schedule a callSEO is one of the most effective channels to invest in for your SaaS. Itâs highly scalable, and in the long-term beats payback periods of other channels, such as PPC or outbound marketing. As SaaS moves from growth at all costs to sustainable growth, SEO is a must for driving new biz MRR.
Search Engine Optimisation isnât just about reaching #1 or seeing a huge increase in website traffic- itâs also about real-world impact on your business. We see this every day with results for the SaaS brands we work with, like:
If youâre looking for a scalable way to increase SQLs, activations, and long-term SaaS growth, SEO is the way to go. Thatâs why we created this guide, complete with actionable techniques you can use right away.
But first, letâs cover the basics:
SaaS SEO is aimed at helping Software as a Service brands create a recognized customer growth engine. It combines various techniques such as the four customer awareness stages, growth loops, jobs-to-be-done framework, switch moments, and more.
You want to drive new MRR through SEO, not just vanity metrics like clicks or rankings. SEO is probably the best channel you can invest in for long-term ARR growth for your SaaS, for a multitude of different reasons.
The efforts you put in today will continue way into the future. This is different to investing in paid ads because once you stop investing, you stop getting the benefit.
Take a look at the graph below. SEO starts slow but exponentially gets better, both in terms of more customers and a lower Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC), whilst PPC ramps up faster but has a CAC and number of customers glass ceilingâitâs finite.
Long-term âinvestorsâ are those who win the market they are operating in over time.
You donât need a huge amount of capital investment to start your SaaS SEO channel compared to other activitiesâlike investing in paid ads.
For example, one SaaS we work with is investing over $400,000 per month in Google Ads, and they achieve the same results for less than 5% of this cost through SEO. As a result SEO has the lowest payback period.
The content you create to build an SEO growth engine can be repurposed for other channels.
For example, you can share the same content on social media, via email marketing to your user base, on online communities, repurposed into other types of content like YouTube videos and infographics.
The biggest benefit of investing in SEO is that it compounds over time, and outweighs the possibility of spending millions on paid advertising.
SaaS SEO is different from other types of SEO for many reasons. Here are a few that stand out in my experience.
First, SaaS has 3 different key go-to-market motions:
You need to prioritize one and build your SaaS SEO strategy based on your go-to-market strategy. If not, you risk creating a frankenstein content strategy with ambiguous leading success indicators.
For example, going after Enterprise deals is not the same as going after freelancers.
Second, compared to other industries like ecommerce, there are longer sales cycles, so the way you attribute success is differentâand the type of content your produce needs to support the entire sales cycle, from lead generation to influencing opportunities in the sales pipeline.
Normally, there is also a larger top of the funnel that can be opened, vs. content just focusing on transactional search intents, so you can focus on the key pain points of your target audience.
Depending on your go-to-market strategy, generally there are two funnels: AARRR funnel (pirate), and a sales GTM funnel. Each one has different lagging and leading indicators of success.
đĄ Learn more about the different SaaS funnel types in our comprehensive guide here.
Third, people are using your software with a job-to-be-done. You really need to map your product features and benefits to the JTBD framework to understand the jobs people have (AKA use cases), and which of these jobs correlate to higher ARPA and lower MRR churn rates, and thus higher LTVs. This will enable you to focus on jobs where you have better PMF and can therefore grow faster and more efficiently.
Check out the jobs to be done canvas:
Fourth, people buying SaaS are often switching from one solution to another. It can be from a cloud or non-cloud based solution.
For example, a cloud-based solution could be Google Sheets, or it could be another SaaS software they are looking to migrate away from. A non-cloud based solution could be using paper, and we want to convince people they should instead be doing this in their computer browser.
Want to learn more about switch moments? Jump right to the relevant section here
Hopefully youâre now convinced that investing in SEO for your SaaS is an important pillar of your got to market strategy.
Where do you get started?
Hereâs a few basic steps you can take in order to kick-start building your SaaS SEO growth channel.
Align internally on which go-to-market motion you are primarily focusing on : self-serve, SMB, or Enterprise. It will directly correlate with your ACV. This changes your whole approach so you need to align on this first.
You can also use this to set the correct SEO metric. E.g. Are you aiming for qualified signups and activations, or qualified pipeline and closed won deals?
Interview customers to understand how they are currently using your product. Gather as much data as possible. Work with your product team, PMM, sales and data teams to establish the most important use cases.
đĄ Pro tip: check out yours and your competitorsâ G2 profiles and read customer reviews. More often than not, theyâll tell you what jobs they are trying to get done, and the different use cases that they value.
đĄđ„ Pro, pro tip: analyze product metrics for each use case and track the E2E funnel so you can analyse ARPA, MRR Churn and ultimately LTV by use case/job to be done.
đĄđ„đ Pro, pro, pro tip: Take it even further and track sales velocity to create exponential revenue growth by focusing on the right topics.
Map out content ideas based on your research using the customer awareness framework. Product aware, solution aware, problem aware, and problem unaware (ICP content).
This keyword research will form the basis of your SEO strategy and content roadmap.
You can do this in a multitude of different ways, such as:
đĄ You can check out different SaaS keyword research methods in our free guide.
Based on our experience here at Skale, Google ranks topics and not keywords. This is key to driving sure-fire growth through SEO because you canât easily rank singular keywords. Figure out which topic makes the most sense in relation to product-market fit, ease, and KPI potential.
Here youâll want to outline all the possible pages that can be made, their traffic potential, awareness stage, map potential conversion to demo rates, and referring domains needed to rank each topic.
Now augment with ICE prioritisation by topic in order to prioritise where you first put efforts for the biggest MRR upside.
Part of your content marketing strategy should include digging into the top results in Google. Spend at least 2 hours on each page understanding concepts such as search intent, content structure patterns, NLP keywords, featured snippet & schema opportunities, etc.
You can do this by interviewing experts in your niche and working with top-league SaaS-experienced content writers. Hereâs how Maze is doing it:
Donât cut costs on content creation at allâit’s a core part of growing a long-term SaaS SEO channel.
You need to build authority to the content youâve published, by having other websites link back to yours. Without links you will not be able to build a scalable SEO growth engine.
Weâve proved this a multitude of times at Skale by securing 1000s of links to a myriad of different SaaS brands. Check out how we managed to get a âŹ1 cost per signup for HappyScribe through strategic SaaS link building.
Hereâs some SaaS link building tactics to get you started:
đĄ Want the full list? Check out our SaaS link building guide here.
Get inspired by a SaaS link building success story
Discover the strategy we used to help Attest 8.5x organic product signups year-on-year
See hereThis step is critical, because if you donât have a strong foundation to build upon, then you wonât be able to scale your SaaS SEO channel. Alongside improving on page SEO and pff page SEO, you need to work with a Technical SEO expert and get your website into serious shape.
A few things you can do are:
đĄ Lucky for you weâve put together a technical SEO guide for you to get this job done. Take a look at it here.
This is important because your marketing budget is being scrutinised and itâs finite. You need to prove to your CEO or the Board that not only can you drive positive results, but that the payback period or CAC:LTV ratio is within an acceptable range.
Once youâve hit this, itâs then about ramping up. This said, do understand that on average with every SEO action there is a 3-month lag to it impactingâso keep this in mind when measuring your SaaS SEO channelâs ROI.
đĄ You can learn more in our guide here.
Well, thereâs a few steps to get startedâbut in reality there are many more things that you need to do. So below weâve put together 7 SaaS Growth Tactics you can start considering today.
Weâre working with some of the biggest names in SaaS to drive serious growth through SEO, and weâre going to let some secrets out of the bag.
Here are 7 things to keep in mind if youâre serious about using SEO as a business growth tactic.
Psst, keep them a secret! đ€«
Donât simply spend all of your time creating content for problem-aware and problem-unaware audiences. Ensure youâre also building out content for solution-aware audiences who have an almost-immediate need to use your SaaS product.
These pages will not just have high signup rates, but the signup-> customer conversion rate will be higher both in terms of rate and velocity.
Examples of types of keywords you can include:
Keyword types | Examples |
Maker/Creator/Builder | Survey makerForm builderPresentation maker |
Templates | Social media templatesSign up form templateEmail templates |
Software/Tools | Generative design softwareEmail marketing toolsOKR software |
As mentioned before, the only way to seriously grow a customer acquisition channel is to design a growth model. So you need to do the same for SEO.
How? Hereâs the simple version:
đč See how to conduct a full SaaS Keyword Research here.
Now you have the growth model built, you can find where the growth opportunities lie by selecting which topic is the easiest to rank, has the biggest upside, and is most closely related to your product (ensure high signup and signup->customer conversion rates). You can use some basic statistics on the data set you just created.
Pro tip: you can automate the model so itâs up to date through different Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and Ahrefs data connectors.
Thereâs no point reinventing the wheel or failing for the sake of failing. Get a head start by digging into competitor strategies through tools like Ahefs, SEMRush, and Google itself.
Here are a few questions you can ask yourself:
Remember, what you find should be insights and used as inspiration. You cannot assume all these websites have it figured outâand traffic doesnât correlate with revenue! Itâs a quality game at the end of the day.
đĄOh, and we wrote a guide on it here. Check it out!
Think about where people are switching from before using your SaaS solution for the job to be done.
We can look at two main categories of switch moments:
These are customers unhappy with their current SaaS solution so they begin searching for alternatives. For example, if someone is unhappy with Mailchimp, then theyâll search in google for âMailchimp alternativesâ. This keyword has a search volume of 9,100 globally per month! đ€Ż
đĄ Pro tip: you can even rank for âyour SaaS brand alternativesâ, to dissuade your own customers from churning. Take a look at what Zendesk did – they created a band called âZendesk Alternativeâ and ranked it for this search term!
There are still prospects using a pre-cloud solution to solve their current job-to-be-done. For example they might still be doing everything in Excel, so âjob + excel templatesâ would be an interesting angle to look into in order to capture these people and educate them there is a better way.
How to find these switch moments?
Spend time interviewing your customers and ask them how they used to do their job before using your SaaS solution. You can also take a peek at your own and competitor G2 reviews.
Links are really hard to earn nowadays, and thereâs a couple of ways you can do this, apart from forming content collaborations, with your SaaS by building in growth loops.
Hereâs a few examples of what other SaaS brands are doing with their link building strategies:
First, Mixpanel is giving away free usage of their product if you embed a Mixpanel badge somewhere on your website. Not only are they getting a link back to increase their DR, they are also getting a tonne of brand exposure for their product. It’s not just a link growth loop, itâs also a brand marketing growth loop.
Second, Typeform is adding a link outside of their form embed code. So as people embed a typeform on their website (e.g. a contact us form), they are automatically getting a link back.
Not only are they getting links to their website, they are personalizing the link so it relates to a core use case: forms, surveys, quizzes, or polls.
Third, Oliva, a mental health SaaS, is asking customers to mention them on their careers page when theyâve signed up as a customer. They promote Oliva as a benefit to their current and future employees.
If your SaaS has a direct benefit to another companyâs employees, then you could leverage this tactic in partnership with your Customer Success team.
đĄ Itching for more SaaS link building tactics? Check out 22 of them here.
Hereâs an underutilized tactic, which when you read seems pretty obvious.
Everyone whoâs signed up to your product or newsletter could be your communityâbut they need nurturing. Perhaps youâve heard the new âcommunity driven growthâ buzzword, itâs got something to do with this.
You can leverage your community to create content in different ways.
Hereâs a few of our favourite examples:
1. Maze leveraged their community to create 100s of templates to help people activate in their product. They also rank in Google for longtail keywords, and capture people with a high motivation to sign up and pay for their product.
Other examples can be seen with Miroverse and Airtable Universe.
2. Pitch are working with their community to create presentations on different topics. These presentations donât just create brand awareness through social sharing, but they also rank in Google for a range of different topics.
Not only are they leveraging their user base to create content, they are also doing co-marketing with other brands in the space where they have an ICP-overlap, where they create presentations and Pitch promotes.
3. Maze are also working with their community to gather expert quotes. Not only does this improve the quality of the content they are producing, but it also helps with E-A-T metrics so that Google sees them as an expert and authority on the subject they are publishing content on.
Gone are the days where you can simply outsource a piece of content to a freelance writer who has zero subject matter expertise. You need to speak to and include experts in all content you create. The best and easiest way to do this is through your community.
If youâre investing in building an SEO customer acquisition engine, you need to be able to measure ROI correctly.
Why?
Because sooner or later your finance team will come knocking on your door asking you to defend your SEO investment budget, and understand the results you are bringing to the table.
There are a few things you need to keep in mind when effectively measuring your SaaS SEO channelâs efficacy:
When you do something (secure a link, publish a piece of content, optimise an existing page, etc), it takes on average 3 months to see an impact. So you need to factor in a 3-month lag from action -> result.
For example, if youâre a SaaS company looking to increase organic trafficâyouâre unlikely to bag the top spot on search engine results pages in the first month of your SEO campaign.
You cannot look at a snapshot data view of customers in the same month of SEO investment. Instead, you need to start doing a cohort analysis looking at how signups or leads convert of a period of time of up to 12 months from signup creation date.
The easiest way to model this is to predict number of customers each month, having gathered data from an organic search cohort from > 12 months ago.
Itâs not like PPC where you cut your spend and the whole channel collapses. You need to be able to articulate this in your model and tell the story to your senior leadership team, that the effort you invest in to day compound and stick around in the long run.
đĄ Want a template to measure ROI? Swipe the one we made here.
SaaS SEO is a great channel, but it combines a myriad of disciplines to make it work effectively. You need a team of tech, content, growth, and outreach experts to truly make it work.
In order to reap the full rewards of SaaS SEO, you must remember:
However, if you follow the tactics weâve given you, SEO can be an incredible way to power growth and generate leads for your SaaS. Creating content your users love is also a great way to connect with them and encourage further engagement with your business.
And if you need help getting started, you can always enlist the help of a SaaS SEO agency along the way.
Drive organic traffic, SQLs & MRR to your SaaS
Transform SEO to be your top-performing customer acquisition channel with Skale’s help
Schedule a callThere are several key SaaS SEO metrics you can track to stay on top of your KPIs. The top four are revenue (for overall performance), organic ROI (for measuring returns), visibility & search engine rankings (for measuring keyword strategy effectiveness), and conversions (for measuring strengths and weaknesses). By tracking all four, you can be sure youâre getting the most value from your SaaS SEO strategy.
SEO can be the number one demand gen channel for most SaaS brands where there is already demand to be captured. Itâs a compounding growth channel, so the investment today still impacts the bottom line years into the future. The ROI is, therefore, much better than investing in other growth channels such as in paid acquisition (PPC).Â
Content marketing is a great way to build a connection with users, even before they officially sign up to use your product. SEO content is simply content which is optimized to connect with the right audience in the right way, by offering them information they were already looking for. By answering FAQs and providing users with informative posts related to your product offering, you can build brand awareness and showcase your product in an organic way.
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