9 SEO Best Practices to Gain Visibility

The SaaS industry is worth billions, but the competition is fierce. Investing in digital marketing and SEO to get ahead is no longer an option — but a necessity. Today, the customer journey is largely digital, so not only must you rank high in search engines, you need to prove your expertise to your audience from the get go. This is where SEO best practices come into play.

In the long run, SEO performance directly influences return on marketing investment. By promoting visibility of your website via content and SERP practices, you attract more traffic, which can result in higher conversion rates, and therefore, more customers.

It can be challenging to keep up with the latest SEO practices when major search engines are constantly changing their internal algorithms and ranking practices. Just like any other marketing campaign, you need to review and implement the latest SEO practices on a regular basis for best results. 

Below you will find actionable steps for building an effective SaaS SEO strategy, ultimately helping you to grow your revenue and scale your business.

Why SEO Matters for SaaS Companies

Developing a strong SaaS SEO strategy puts your content in front of the right audiences who are searching for solutions like yours. Whatever the quality of your blog posts or website, you will not be able to reach the audiences you hope for if you do not learn what search engines favor. 

An effective SaaS SEO strategy can help your business with:

• Reaching the right customers who are in need of your product
• Finding potential audiences that match your ideal customer profiles
• Beating out your competitors
• Increasing organic search traffic to your site
• Establishing brand authority
• Reducing lead acquisition costs
• Increasing customer acquisition
• Assisting sales teams in scheduling meetings
• Providing content topic suggestions
• Pinpointing where your customers are in their buyer's journey

SEO plays a major role in the success of your website and content, but it can be tricky to master. Although effective SEO has a lot of moving parts, it’s easy to see why your company must take it seriously. Investing in your SEO has never been more essential for you as a SaaS company, so here’s how to get started. 

The 4 Main Types of SEO

There are four types of SEO. The focus of each will vary depending on the industry you are in. 

1. On-Site SEO

On-site SEO refers to optimizing the content (i.e. copy, imagery, video, graphics, etc.) that lives on your website. It includes all of the pages of your site, as well as the individual content pieces such as blogs. This form of SEO is what tells search engines the type of content you are producing, and it then places it in front of the audiences it thinks are most likely to be interested in it. Search engines are not human, so they must analyze multiple factors before ranking your content against what a user is searching for. 

As a result, SaaS companies should mainly focus on this form of SEO but it is not an easy process. Not only does your website need to be relevant, but it also needs to provide a good user experience.  On-site SEO best practices advise you to optimize for user search intent, links, url structure, page loading speed, bounce rates, and more. 

1. Off-Site SEO

Also known as off-page SEO, this is SEO done outside of your website and far more technical. An example includes link building, or links published on other credible sites that point back to yours. If these are high in quality (i.e. relevant to your audience), they build your authority in the eyes of your audience and search engines. The more links you have from various credible websites, the more authority you build as well. 

Another component of off-site SEO is social media marketing. Your social media account can be used to teach audiences how to use your products, get the most out of your services, and so on. This is your chance to build a personal, authentic connection with your audience. 

Additionally, influencer marketing, PR, events, and online reviews add to your company's overall reputation so be sure to maintain these as well. As you can see, off-site SEO best practices must be relevant and valuable to your audience — like everything else in your marketing strategy.

1. Technical SEO 

Technical SEO involves optimizing your servers so that Google can crawl and index your site more effectively. To provide the best user experience and improve site crawl-ability , you need to pay attention to the page functionality. Your site’s structure, navigation, XML sitemaps, canonical tags, redirect pages, code, and so on, must adhere to certain guidelines in order for search engine spiders to find, crawl, and index all of the pages and information on your website. Without it, your site will struggle to get a spot on the first page of Google.

You must also optimize your website for mobile and eliminate duplicate content for effective technical SEO. Due to its complexity, many companies have in-house or outsourced SEO experts to handle this on a continual basis.

1. Local SEO

Commonly used by brick and mortar businesses, local SEO optimizes online visibility in local search results. Many SaaS companies don't focus on local SEO, but if you host in-person events it's worth focusing on.

Google Business Profile (previously Google My Business) is a key part of local SEO. In this way, customers are able to rate a business or product and find the HQ address, which lends credibility to the company. Again, it comes down to how both consumers and search engines perceive your business. So don't forget about local SEO, even if your business is 100% online.

What are SEO Best Practices for SaaS Companies?

Start with a Site Audit

Before getting started with optimizing your SEO, take the time to conduct a site audit to see where your website stands. A site audit provides an overview of how your website is performing, plus any issues you may be running into technically or on the user experience side. 

Use a tool such as Semrush or Ahrefs to check your site’s SEO and create a report on its findings. The tips provided are excellent for improving your search rankings, but for a more in-depth look at how you can improve your organic search traffic we recommend a professional SEO audit instead.

Understand Your Audience’s User Intent

The intent of your audience is reflected in the search terms they use. Based on what they’re looking for, or the stage of the buyer’s journey they are in, they will be searching for specific keywords you will want to target. 

Users have four types of intent: informational, transactional, commercial, and navigational. Users fall into different phases of the buyer's journey based on these keywords. For example, if an organization were seeking HR solutions, these might be some of the keywords they would be searching and the intent behind them.

• Informational: With this type of intent, audiences will be wanting to learn about their options for HR solutions.
• They will likely search for broad information such as “types of hr software” or “what is hr software”
• Commercial: Commercial intent shows this audience is investigating different services and brands.
• Commercial keywords may include “best hr management software” or “[name of software X] vs [name of software Y] benefits”
• Transactional: Transactional indicates that users searching for these keywords are likely ready to purchase and take action.
• Users may search “[name of software] demo” or “[name of software] pricing”
• Navigational: Users with navigational intent are trying to find a specific page or website. 
• Search examples include “[name of software] login” or “[name of software] contact page”

Perform Your Keyword Research

Keyword research is an important part of SEO. Not only do you need to research the most relevant, intent-focused terms and phrases for your business, but your competitors as well. For your organization, start with seed keywords that focus on the broad topics your target audience is searching for in regards to your industry and services. From there, identify long-tail keywords — containing three or more words — that are detailed in intent.

Organize your keywords into a shared resource so that your marketing teams can use it to plan content and campaigns.

Optimize Your Website

Pages on your website can be optimized to rank higher based on the keywords you've found. For on-page SEO, it is important to use title tags, meta descriptions, and keywords in your content and site's headlines and subheadings. These appear in the search results and are what entice users to click. 

You will also need to include your primary keyword throughout the pages of your website. Be sure to include a primary keyword several times within the copy, and at least once in an H1 and H2 heading. Be sure to include supplemental or secondary keywords that provide search engines with greater context as to what your content is about. However, be careful to avoid keyword-stuffing, meaning not to overuse keywords to the point where it reads unnaturally, as search engines will quickly pick up on this and penalize you for it. 

Create Relevant Content

Next, create a content strategy to support the targeted keywords and user intent you have discovered about your audience. Keyword-rich content will bring you to the top of searches when users are looking for specific types of value or information. 

Build gated and ungated content pieces based on the keywords and examples of intent from your audience. Similarly, you'll want to focus on a specific keyword and topic per article and create content that is relevant to the user's search. 

Post Content Consistently

Posting content on a regular basis is a top SEO best practice. A regular posting schedule shows search engines that you are a reliable source of information that aims to help users. Consistent activity shows you’re very involved in your space. 

Many disagree on how often to post, but once per week is a good starting point. Note that more than once a day is not advised. Not only is it difficult to produce quality content at this rate, but it’s an easy way to cannibalize keywords — meaning you have too many identical keywords across your website and content and search engines can’t decide which to rank higher.

Improve Your Site’s User Experience

User experience, or UX, is important because search engines reward better experiences with higher rankings. Create a website that is easy to navigate, meets the user’s needs ahead of time, and is high-quality and responsive across all media such as mobile devices especially considering that Google’s mobile-first indexing means that a bad mobile experience could lead to your site being penalized for bad user experience. 

Best practices follow Google’s Core Web Vitals, which are user-focused metrics that report on the health of your site’s user experience. Run a report on your website and focus on improving errors immediately to help ranking. 

Focus on Backlinks

A backlink is a link from another website to yours. As your brand grows, you will get more backlinks. Think about how often major SaaS companies such as Salesforce are mentioned online, they probably have thousands of backlinks to sort through. You can build backlinks by building connections via guest blogging, directory listings, working with influencers, prompting users to leave reviews, and social media. 

In order to maintain positive SEO practices, you should also maintain these links. It is important that the links come from reputable sources. Links from spam sites will only hurt your domain authority. You don't want to be connected to bad websites that can bring you down as well.

Link Externally and Internally

You can also build your authority by including links from relevant websites in your content pieces. Include no more than one or two links per piece. This link should only point users away from your site if it's speaking to a topic that you mention but aren't the expert on. 

Similarly, make sure to include links to your own content to enhance the information within the article. Users will naturally have additional questions as they read, so provide them with those answers. In addition to improving your SEO, it helps users understand the content better. Use at least two to three internal links per piece of content and website page. These links naturally guide users to related content revolving around your topic clusters and relevant pillar pages.

Monitor Your Progress

Once you have implemented SEO best practices, keep monitoring progress so you can pivot when necessary! You can determine the effectiveness of your SEO efforts by tracking your search results and organic traffic. Metrics for SaaS companies to measure include rankings, organic search traffic, along with engagement such as bounce rate, time on page, and return visitors. 

Let's Get You More Visibility and Ranked Higher

Marketing tools do a great job of pointing out errors, but you need to know what to do about them. A professional SEO audit includes a thorough analysis of your current efforts and processes in order to identify ways to drive more web traffic to your site and help you get your site in front of the right audiences. Our goal is to help you scale your business, and to do that, you need a high-ranking website. 

Get in touch with us to learn more about the benefits of performing an SEO audit for your SaaS company.