If you have a company that operates in the software as a service (SaaS) industry, your business thrives on digital marketing to acquire new customers. To maintain strong competition, you need constant efforts online to keep your current customers. That will prevent your competitors from snatching them away.

Plus, acquiring leads increases the customer base, which is vital for any SaaS company, including yours. Most of your business success depends on getting potential customers and re-emphasizing your unique services to them.

However, SEO for SaaS companies is unique compared to other businesses, as you may know. Surprisingly, the sales cycle is fast, with an average of 40 days, priced under $5,000 for SaaS products. That means you don’t have enough time to nurture your potential customers.

The biggest problem in SaaS marketing is arguably SaaS lead generation. And that’s why SEO for SaaS companies is still one of the highly effective ways to get more customers.

This guide will help you know how to generate more customers using SEO.

Let’s dive right in!

How to Properly Do SEO for SaaS in 2023 & Beyond

To have a successful SEO for SaaS, you must understand the SEO ranking signals. That way, you can adjust your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategies accordingly. Google’s search algorithm has continuously evolved over the years, including the ranking factors.

However, you have to understand that the primary intention of Google (including other search engines) is to offer better results for their audience. And as you might have guessed, your potential customers are part of their audience.

Ultimately, SEO’s main objective is to optimize your SaaS website for a human audience, not search engine bots.

SaaS SEO helps increase organic traffic by improving the website’s visibility on search engines which results in increased visitors to your website.

People are searching for the software that the SaaS providers offer, the potential customer knows the presence of your software and would get the option to know more about it.

Also, regardless of the differences between SaaS SEO and other SEOs, it’s important to know that the factors that determine your ranking on Google are similar for any business. Here are five crucial ranking factors you should consider.

1. Technical Factors

A weak technical structure will create a negative impact on the visitors and the overall user engagement rate may get impacted. SEO has three technical factors that are highly important:

Secured and reliable website (and that includes the utilization of HTTPS)
Mobile responsiveness
Fast website load speed

These are, no doubt basics, but highly relevant factors. If Google realizes that your website is not secure, it won’t rank your website. If your site is slow, it will increase your bounce rate, negatively affecting your business.

At Digital Success, we analyze the technical health of the site by performing a technical audit. This helps in understanding SEO-related issues that may be impacting users and the Google experience.

2. Content Optimization

High-quality content is significant in SEO for SaaS. If you want to increase your customer base, you have to develop highly relevant, valuable content for your audience, not Google bots. And you have to do so regularly.

However, merely publishing high-quality content will not get you there. That’s because there are more than four million blog posts published every day! So if you want to stand out, you have to include other strategies. (we’ll get to that shortly).

Even though you should develop content for your audience, you should also optimize your content for Google’s algorithm. Remember, not keyword stuffing (you can get penalized), but keyword optimization.

If you use your keywords naturally and implement semantically-related keywords, you’ll be fine. Also, you can consider your user’s search intent. Different keywords have different intents. Check out the infographic below.

Source: Karcher Group

Navigational Intent: the user is searching for a particular website usually linked to brand keywords
Informational Intent: the user wants an answer to a specific question
Investigational Intent: the user is comparing numerous products or looking for a product
Transactional Intent: the user wants to purchase a specific product.

You have to create content for each search intent. The main objective is to develop better information for your audience. This is what we recommend: make your content relevant and valuable and let your keywords flow naturally.

3. User Experience

When Google ranks pages in search results, it not only ensures that it provides the most informative and useful content available for specific search queries but along with this, Google wants to ensure that visitors will have a good user experience. You can’t tackle SEO without the user experience, especially not with the introduction of Google’s RankBrain. The RankBrain is an algorithm that can determine whether a search result is essential to a user. For example, when a top-ranking page has little click-through rate (CTR), Google will deem it unimportant. And that will get the page demoted.

When optimizing SEO for your SaaS site, you have to focus on three primary user experience metrics:

Click-through rate: how many people clicked on your link when it showed in search results
Bounce rate: refers to the number of people who visited your site and left after a few seconds. When that happens, Google will perceive the website as irrelevant.
Dwell time: It shows how long people stay on your website after visiting it. This usually links to the quality and relevancy of your content.

4. Link Profile

Yes. Backlinks are as important as they were many years ago. However, certain things have changed.

Link building for your SaaS company is essential SEO activity for improving site authority and presence on search engines. When an authoritative website links to your SaaS site, Google perceives your website as highly relevant.

However, many years ago, it was more quantity: the more links you had, the better. Nowadays, it’s more about quality. Google checks the websites linking to your site, whether relevant and related to your keywords and niche. Earning a high authority and industry-relevant link is a tough nut to crack. For this, you need an SEO expert who can invest time and dedication in creating quality backlinks for you.

5. Social Signals

Social signals are the engagement your content receives on social media platforms. It’s the interactions between people and their responses to the content on social media. An increase in social signals indicates good domain authority and value of the URL.

Google has stated that social shares are not considered inbound links, so they’re not directly a ranking signal. However, as more people share your website content, you get a higher chance of acquiring these links. In other words, strong content is the key to your SaaS SEO strategy. Valuable or informative content always generates more positive interactions than spammy advertising.

Top-ranking pages on Googly usually have thousands of social shares. So, getting social shares can have a positive impact on your ranking.

How Digital Success Can Boost Your SaaS Business Sales!

Let’s talk about our SaaS SEO proven case study. In just 12 months, over 1,245 % growth in organic visits registered for one of our clients serving globally as a SAAS-based Employee Engagement Platform provider!

The total traffic went up from 1937 to 11,785 sessions in a year which means a percentage growth of 508.41%. The major contribution was noticed from organic and referral visits.

After implementing on-site activities and creating quality backlinks for the website content, the organic traffic grew by 1,244.62% percent from 549 to 7,382 sessions in just 12 months.

Apart from this, we got success in ranking our high search volume targeted keywords. A total of 177 keywords rankings climbed up to the top 10 positions of Google in over 12 Months.

improve keywords rankings for SaaS businesses

With Digital Success, Clients’ ROI on SEO costs is guaranteed. Our SEO experts believe in delivering great results for every client through SEO. SaaS SEO is our strength and has brought smiles to many SaaS startups over the past three years.

Where Does My SaaS Business Go from Here?

SEO for SaaS companies is highly essential for branding and visibility on search engines. With a SaaS specialist agency such as Digital Success Agency, you can boost your website traffic and increase your customer base.

Whether your SaaS company is related to E-discovery, Medical Diagnosis /EEG, or HR analytics, we can help you grow your customer base through effective SEO strategies.

On average, you can expect to see effective results after 4-12 months. This may seem like a long time before the results kick in. However, the benefits are for years to come. As you wait for your landing pages to rise, you can take the time to promote your efforts on all digital marketing channels, such as social media.

With the help of SEO SaaS agencies, you can effectively carry out these tasks and help your business succeed.