1. Define Success
To achieve SaaS SEO success, you have to know what success actually means to you. Otherwise, you’re just chasing the gold at the end of the proverbial rainbow. Your goals also narrow your focus. If you know what you want to happen, you can reverse engineer the tactics it’ll take to get you there.
While it’s tempting to just rush headlong towards getting as many sign-ups as possible, pick something specific and measurable.
Your goal may be something like: Increase monthly recurring revenue (MRR) by $X over X months.
With that goal in mind, set some KPIs that you’ll track regularly. Take into account both SEO KPIs and KPIs relevant to your business.
Common SEO KPIs are:
- Rankings
- Impressions
- Traffic
- Leads/conversions
Common SaaS KPIs are:
- Marketing-qualified leads (MQLs)
- Sales-qualified leads (SQLs)
- Monthly recurring revenue
- Cost per acquisition
Every SEO tactic you take should ladder up to these KPIs. Measure on a regular basis to check your progress, but make sure you give your new SEO time to grow.
2. Develop Personas
Only 35% of SaaS companies have a central document that describes their customers. If you’re not one of them, take time to create one. And no, we’re not talking about a thin profile on “SaaS Susie.” Talk to both your marketing and sales teams to determine the psychographics — not demographics — that your most valuable customers have in common.
These could be things like:
- Personality traits
- Lifestyles
- Interests
- Attitudes and opinions
- Values
If you are among the one-third of SaaS companies that already have a buyer persona, make sure that it’s relevant to SEO. It is possible and even likely that the customer coming through Google will be a little different than the PPC customer. Identify what those differences are so you can develop content that will add value to their work and life.
3. Get Close to Your Competitors
Chances are, you know who your competitors are. But when it comes to SEO, there are two key distinctions:
- Marketplace competitors might not be your SEO competitors.
- Any site that’s ranking for terms you want to rank for is a competitor, even if they aren’t a software provider.
Let’s break that down.
There may be SaaS companies you consider massive competitors because they offer a similar product or solve a similar problem. But if they’re not pursuing SEO, they aren’t your competitor in this channel. There may also be non-SaaS sites ranking for SaaS-related terms. You guessed it; those sites are now your competitors, too.
Now, the competitor analysis begins. You can enlist a trusted partner or a comprehensive SEO tool to answer the following questions about your competitors:
- What keywords are they ranking for?
- How are they ranking for those keywords?
- What content types are they using?
- How long is the content they publish?
- How often do they publish content?
- What do I need to do to beat my competitor?
4. Curate Your Keywords
Your competitor analysis might’ve yielded a good keyword list. While that’s a solid starting point, we always recommend adding to it since there’s a good chance your competitors aren’t ranking for every single relevant keyword (and if they are, it’s really time to get cracking).
Good keywords aren’t just one or two words. In fact, shorter keywords can be the hardest to rank for, and 91.8% of search queries are actually long-tail keywords.
With that in mind, consider the following:
- Questions your prospects have
- Challenges they face
- Relevant, related topics
These are all great sources for keywords. And once you’ve built that list, it’s time to sort it.
Start by sorting your list according to where those keywords fall in the buyer’s journey. These are:
- Top-of-funnel: People searching these terms are looking for a solution, but aren’t necessarily ready to subscribe.
- Mid-funnel: Prospects at this stage know they have a problem; they know a software solution exists, but they haven’t started researching products just yet.
- Bottom-of-funnel: When people search these keyword types, they’re ready to buy and just need to be shown the way.
Within each of those groups, categorize the keywords based on their difficulty level. These are:
- Low difficulty: These are usually longer-tail, lower search volume keywords. They’re easier to rank for and may be good to target at first.
- Medium difficulty: These keywords are more competitive, but they may also be further down the funnel — a great thing when you do start to rank for them.
- High difficulty: These are short, highly-competitive keywords that are often bottom-funnel. Think of terms like “education software” or “SEO software.” Short, competitive terms can be a good fit for product pages.
5. Map Keywords to Your Website
You have your goals, your competitors, and your keywords. Think you’re ready to start slinging content? Think again.
Ranking — especially for valuable, competitive terms — is a long game. It’s about carefully mapping your keywords to your site and making strategic additions over time that both Google and your prospects will eat up.
At a high level, what you need to know is this: where the keyword falls in the funnel typically corresponds with the right piece of content for it. Blogs are generally a great fit for top-of-funnel keywords, while service/product and about pages are great for mid- and bottom-funnel keywords.
