SaaS marketers need to change their approach to SEO, now.

Full disclosure — I own a SEO agency 100% focused on software as a service clientele — that said, it gives me an interesting outlook on the trends that are specific to the SaaS space and what many founders and marketers in the space have consistent trouble with.

The main thing that I see them struggle with, ironically, is change.

There’s such a pride within the SaaS space as being nimble, agile, and adaptable, but when you tell them that the way they’re approaching their marketing is antiquated and woefully outdated they insist that the old ways still work in the same way that they did when they had their first success in the space.

While many strategies for growth don’t change overnight, SEO does. Google updates their algorithm 2–3 times per day, and has major overhauls in the form of algorithm refreshes nearly every month.

Even when these aren’t happening people in the SEO industry who keep their ear to the ground know that the machine learning that Google leans on more and more to inform the search intent behind their SERPs changes entire ranking landscapes more regularly than ever before.

The solution to this, for keyword rankings specifically, is to understand the search intent behind each keyword before building or optimizing any content to rank for that keyword.

Most SaaS companies who have had any organic success to-date have probably experienced drops (or complete fall-offs) for their product, feature, and homepage rankings in the past 6 months to a year.

This is due to Google changing what they believe to be best for their searchers for these types of search terms.

If you type in “customer support” in Google, where you used to see a bunch of the big software players mixed with some informative content, you now see 100% saturation of informative content explaining what customer support is and why it’s important for businesses. If you look hard at who that content is written by, mostly it’s from the old incumbents of the rankings — which used to point at their software, features, or homepage — but they knew they had to pivot to keep their same rankings or even improve their rankings.

This is even more obvious when you search “customer support software” — where probably the biggest player, Zendesk, has an article listing other options for the best solution in 2020 while obviously pinning themselves to the top of the list. Even a year ago it would seem ridiculous to be the market-share leader yet also mention your competitors right alongside you in a list of options for your primary keyword. Zendesk understood though that for this keyword that’s what Google was going to rank the highest, and instead of letting an aggregator like Capterra decide who was going to rank the highest for their main search term they decided to take the matter into their own hands and create the best piece of content on the topic and pin themselves to the top of the list.

This is the kind of change that every SaaS founder and marketer needs to be capable of empathizing with and adapting to. This is what is now required to take the top ranking positions for individual keywords that mean a lot to your business.

Obviously individual keywords like this aren’t the entirety of your organic traffic, and most of the time only make up a small part of your overall traffic — albeit they generally send a lot of qualified conversions. With that in mind another major factor SaaS founders and marketers need to understand is that SEO is not as simple as listing out 100 keywords you want to rank for and pursuing just those keywords anymore, and Google is not as simple as a list of 10 blue links anymore.

There are so many more factors at play now that in-aggregate give you an immense amount of search volume and qualified leads. Targeting content at small customer concerns that compound over time as you add more and more content targeting more and more small concerns can significantly increase your traffic, more-so than chasing an individual keyword that you are having a hard time ranking for but that has a high search volume.

Optimizing your site technically so that the content you’re writing at-scale can have the opportunity of achieving a rich snippet placement — pinning your content to the top of Google — can have an insane effect on your overall organic traffic numbers as you start to get all of the traffic from some SERPs that are hyper relevant to your potential customers.

Google’s even gone so far with some SERPs as to skip the middle man of aggregator sites like Capterra and act as an aggregator itself, such as “project management tools” which lists out tools like Trello, Asana, etc. at the top of the SERP and if you click on one you get sent to an entirely branded search for that specific tool which you can choose to interact with how you decide. This is specific to certain SERPs so you can’t just blindly try to “optimize” for specific keywords without really understanding what Google deems relevant for that search and optimizing on a 1:1 basis.

The most adaptable business who mobilizes the most resources will win in the ranking war on Google. Considering 60% of businesses say that organic traffic is their #1 source of leads and traffic, is that a war you’re willing to lose?

I just see this too often personally and want more business leaders to carry an open mind on this subject moving forward. I’m here to help too if you want to reach out and work with us. We’re happy to point out your blind spots and tackle your most important opportunities head-on.