Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is an important marketing tactic for most B2B SaaS businesses. When used alongside other channels, it can elevate business performance, provide a competitive advantage and produce long-term, sustained results.
But how do you make the most out of your SEO budget and maximise returns? As you probably expect, there’s no simple, straightforward answer. And we won’t pretend to have a miracle formula to ROI.
However, in this helpful article, we’ll run through our top B2B SaaS SEO tips to help you shoot up the search results. Put these into practice and you’ll never waste a drop on your organic efforts.
Why is SEO important for my B2B SaaS business?
Before we get started, it’s important that you understand precisely why SEO is so instrumental for B2B SaaS in particular. Let’s go ahead and run through the main reasons we think it’s a must-have in your channel strategy.
SEO can help you:
1. Cater to a long sales cycle
One of the biggest reasons why B2B SaaS businesses rely so heavily on SEO is that the sales cycle is typically longer than it is for most verticals. In fact, according to HubSpot, the average sales cycle for a SaaS product is 84.3 days.
This means that there is often a detailed research process, multiple touch-points and a higher educational component required for sales to occur. Which is where SEO comes in as a natural pairing.
By investing in a well-thought-out SEO strategy, you can effectively accompany prospects across all stages of the decision-making process from the top of the funnel, through to middle and bottom.
SEO enables you to meet your target audience with the content they need at precisely the right time and the right stage of the buyer’s journey. This builds trust, establishes authority and boosts conversion potential.
2. Increase visibility online
Another reason that SaaS companies invest in SEO is for improved brand visibility. With so many software tools on the market, it can be challenging to get your name out there and stand out from the crowd.
Being at the top of the search results for keywords that are super relevant to your category is one of the best ways to increase visibility, boost traffic and stay a step ahead of the competition.
With a well-built SEO strategy for your SaaS company, you won’t need to worry about fading into the background.
3. Boost conversions & ROI
If done well, Search Engine Optimisation doesn’t just increase brand visibility. It attracts targeted, quality traffic to your website. Meaning you’re not only achieving high volumes, but you’re getting in front of the right people.
And what does getting more of the right eyeballs on your product or service offerings mean? Over time, higher conversion rates and better ROI.
With constant pressure from execs and investors to improve SaaS metrics like ARR and CAC, this is unsurprisingly one of the biggest draw-cards of SEO for SaaS businesses.
4. Improved customer engagement
Beyond drawing in prospects, SEO can help you improve customer engagement. How? By optimising key elements like title tags, meta descriptions, headings and navigation, you can make it easier for customers to find the information they need. And navigate your website.
This means happier customers, higher potential for upsets, better conversion rates, and, ideally, higher return on investment. All sounds pretty good to us!
5. Enhance the performance of other channels
Finally, investing in SEO for your SaaS business can play a significant role in improving the performance of other marketing channels you’re running. This could be everything from Facebook Ads to Capterra.
For example, if a company is bidding on a specific keyword for Google Ads, but also appears organically in the first page of results for that keyword, the positive reinforcement here is sometimes all that’s needed for the prospect to click and convert.
There can also be referrals from organic to paid channels – someone who visited a website organically to view a blog may be retargeted to with a bottom of funnel add and convert. The possibilities for omni-channel boosts are endless.
Top Tips for Creating an Impeccable SaaS SEO Strategy
Now that we’ve established why SEO is so important for SaaS businesses, it’s time to run through our top tips for getting the most out of your budget. With these under your wing, you’ll have no excuses but to make a huge splash in the search results.
1. Build your SaaS customer personas
The first SaaS SEO tip we have is to get serious about your personas. To choose the right keywords, make meaningful website content and boost conversions; you need to understand your customer personas. And we don’t just mean on a surface level. You should know everything about them.
How do you do this? First, start by figuring out who your top 2-5 personas are. For example, it might be the CEO, the CTO and the CMO.
Once you’ve got a strong idea, move on to conducting in-depth research. Databases like Zippia, SEEK job descriptions, LinkedIn, industry publications, conferences and websites are all great places to start.
Initially, you’ll want to collect the basic info of these avatars. For example, their likely job title, function, age, gender, company type and size. Once you’ve got the basics down pat – it’s time to add some more nuance and colour.
This means beefing up your persona with their daily duties, interests, tools, where they go for their career info, their level of influence in the decision-making process, pain points and more. The more fleshed out these personas are, the more likely you are to ‘get’ your audience and supercharge your SEO efforts.
Every aspect of your SEO strategy, from your keyword focus to your site structure and meta information, should be informed by your personas and their preferences.
2. Focus on pain points
As discussed in the previous paragraph, being all over your audience is key to effective SEO. But what you need to pay particular attention to is their pain points. This is why it’s one of our top SaaS SEO tips.
Understanding what the core pain points are, the reasons they exist and how severe they are, is essential to building a strong SEO strategy that is perfectly catered.
Once you have a strong sense of what they are, you need to focus your efforts on helping educate, ameliorate and solve a problem/s your prospects are struggling with. Mostly through content with the ultimate aim being to get them to use your product to assuage their problem.
3. Use tools to find keyword ideas
Beyond audience, keywords are one of the most critical aspects of your SaaS SEO strategy. In some marketers’ eyes, they are the bones of it. But selecting the right keywords can be more difficult than you might anticipate.
We’d recommend using keyword research tools to help with this process. Some popular ones we use internally are Google Keyword Planner, Ahrefs, Moz, Buzzsumo, Capterra and SEMRush. All have options for generating keyword ideas. (And are also very helpful for technical SEO).
We’d recommend searching relevant topics based on your personas and their pain points in all platforms, then compiling a master list of potential keywords.
From here, it’s all about analysing each individually and cutting them down based on perceived relevance, search vol and competition. Our next tip will help with fine-tuning this process.
4. Get your head around search intent
Along with using tools, knowing how to assess keywords for search intent is crucial.
Why? Because satisfying Search Intent is the #1 goal of search engines. To choose the right target keywords, you must make sure the search intent makes sense for your audience and your company’s approach, and your content aligns with it. Otherwise, you won’t rank.
So, what are the different kinds of search intent? And how do you detect them?
There are essentially4 different intent categories: informational, navigational, commercial and transactional. Each of them, broken down, is basically as follows:
Informational – looking for information on the a certain topic e.g. “What is digital marketing?” “Digital marketing strategies”
Navigational – trying to find or access a specific page online that the user already knows e.g. “LinkedIn login” “Facebook Ads”
Commercial – are looking for more information before making a purchase e.g. “New Apple laptop” “Daycare near me”
Transactional – are looking to actively buy a product with a specific solution in mind e.g. “Reviews for [insert brand]” or pricing
Most keywords are easy to categorise into one of the above; however, in some cases, it’s unclear. Particularly when it comes to B2B SaaS.
For example, “internet banking” typed into google could be someone looking for information on internet banking, searching for a new provider or looking for their customer login.
If you’re unsure about search intent, you can always double-check by looking up a keyword on Google and seeing the types of results that appear. This will show you what Google is prioritising.
Getting your search intent right is key to directing targeted organic traffic to your site, delighting prospects and lifting conversions.
5. Categorise your SaaS SEO keywords by journey stages
As well as understanding the search intent behind your keywords, you need to be able to correctly map them to stages of the funnel or buyers cycle. And make sure you have a proportional number of keywords at each stage.
This will ensure that you’re meeting the specific needs of your audience at whatever stage they’re at. This, in turn, increases conversion rates.
Let’s run through the types of keywords you should have at each stage.
Top of the funnel
The objective of targeting keywords at this stage is to drive brand awareness of your product or service. The keywords will mostly be educational, typically have high search volume and generate a lot of traffic.
The questions for keywords at this stage tend to be around “What is?”
However, they will likely have low conversion potential because they are not high intent. They will also ideally be related to the challenges your prospect is trying to solve. Blog content is recommended to cater for keywords at this funnel stage.
Middle of the funnel
The objective of targeting keywords at this stage is to continue to establish your brand as a thought leader, help your prospect solve their problem & position your solution as a potential option.
The questions for this stage tend to be around “How to?”
Keywords at this stage will likely be related to how to solve their problem. The ideal content for these keywords could be anything from long-form guides, white papers and ebooks to case studies and landing pages.
Bottom of the funnel
The objective of targeting keywords at this stage is to position your product/service as the best solution to your prospect’s problem & drive conversions.
The questions for this stage tend to be around “Who can?”
Keywords at this stage will reflect a clear purchase intention and tend to be around specific solutions, pricing, integrations and features. High-intent content like bottom-funnel landing pages, pricing, demo bookings and free trial sign-ups are the best fit here.
6. Repurpose high-performing content
Now that we’ve gone through our more basic SaaS SEO tips – it’s time to get more creative. One of our key pieces of advice for SaaS businesses, especially those on a stretched-to-snapping budget, is to repurpose existing content pieces for SEO.
Recently created an in-depth eBook for lead generation on LinkedIn? Built a solid case study for sales collateral? Filmed a brand video for your website? These are all the types of content you could choose to recycle for your SEO strategy.
By jazzing up existing content rather than starting from scratch, you can save time, money and resources spent on content, but also climb up the charts. You can also do the reverse, and use SEO Content, but magnify it on other channels e.g. organic social or email marketing.
The possibilities here are truly endless.
7. Check out your competitors
Another tip we exercise all the time in-house is checking out competitors. By assessing the competitive landscape, you can see what’s working, what isn’t and identify any SEO opportunities.
We’d recommend starting small and heading to some of the websites of your key competitors. See what they’re writing about, get an idea about the volume and cadence of content, record your findings and then use a tool like Ahrefs for a closer look.
You can see what keywords they’re ranking for, what their backlink profile looks like and more. You can also do a content gap analysis to see where the potential opportunities are. This is a tip you won’t ever waste time on.
8. Don’t underestimate the power of link building
Link building is not a new SEO strategy, but there’s a reason it’s been around for so long. And there is a reason we’ve included it as one of our top SaaS SEO tips. It works. It is the quickest, simplest and most effective way of bolstering your Domain Authority (DA).
And according to Backlinko, your link profile is one of the most important ranking factors Google considers. And while internal links are important, external links reign supreme.
So what do you need to remember when securing backlinks for your business? Quality, established publications are key. 10 dodgy links are often not even on par with one reputable one. And your anchor text + destination are super important!
High-quality link juice > immeasurable impact on your site health.
9. Invest in on-page SEO
By the nature of the fact that on-page SEO optimisation feels small-scale (adjusting titles, meta descriptions, image alt tags), it can be dismissed as low impact.
But optimizing parts of your website that are within your control is one of the most powerful and underrated SaaS SEO strategies you can invest in.
Small adjustments like including a target keyword in your meta description signals to Google that your content aligns with keyword search intent, which has an impact on rankings.
Trust us – don’t let on-page opti fall off your radar!
10. Optimise around the clock
Optimisation is the secret fuel that keeps most SEO specialists firing on all cylinders and achieving results. They are clever enough to know that a one-and-done approach is unlikely to work.
In all aspects of SEO – continued monitoring and optimisation are required if you want to see long-term results from SEO as a channel. What keywords are ranking? Are there technical issues negatively impacting your performance? Answer these types of questions and you’ve embraced one of the most important SaaS SEO tips.
Round up
There you have it! Our top 10 B2B SaaS SEO tips. Save this article to your bookmarks and you can start boosting the quality and quantity of your website traffic and start scaling up conversions. A successful SaaS SEO strategy that delivers long-term results, is well within your reach.
Need a helping hand with devising or executing your SaaS SEO strategy?
You need a dedicated SaaS SEO agency with a team of search engine rankings specialists to help.
Digital Rhinos has helped 100+ SaaS companies like you nail their search engine optimisation, level up their SEO content marketing strategy and climb up the search engine ratings.
Simply book in a quick, 15-min call today and we can discuss your growth prospects.
