Doing SEO is all about implementing the right strategy that aligns with your business needs. However, most SaaS firms fail to achieve their desired growth because they lack the skills to build tailored optimization plans for their business.
So, if you own a SaaS company and you are struggling to scale, there is nothing better than getting tips and advice from the experts.
In this guide, we provide seven tips on how B2B SaaS companies can optimize their websites to build strong brand awareness. From setting your goals to knowing your customers, analyzing competitions, and doing keyword research, we help you understand everything you need to know.
What is B2B SaaS SEO?
Online visibility in a competitive landscape is essential when it comes to making sales or generating leads with a website, especially for SaaS firms. B2B SaaS SEO is the process of enhancing a company’s website so that it appears on the search engine result page (SERP). The aim is to drive more organic traffic and conversion, eventually leading to business growth. For example, an email marketing platform might optimize its service pages to attract more leads willing to sign up for free trials.
How B2B SaaS SEO Differs from Traditional SEO
SEO for B2B SaaS enterprises contrasts traditional optimization in a number of ways. The table below highlights key differences.
| Metrics | B2B SaaS | Traditional |
| Conversion | It focuses on converting trial users into paying customers. | It concentrates on getting more organic traffic and sales. |
| Content strategy | In addition to engaging and informing its readers, it requires tailored content, such as case studies, free trials, and demos, to show the value of a product or service. | The content is created with the aim of informing and engaging visitors. |
| Traffic | It goes beyond clicks to focus on optimizing the site for signups and long-term subscriptions. | Traditional optimization focuses more on organic traffic and clicks. |
| Metrics and analytics | Involves tracking metrics like user subscriptions and customer lifetime value. | Measures bounce rate, average time on page and conversion rate. |
Although SaaS SEO has elements of traditional, it differs because of its tailored approach that focuses on enhancing the user’s experience and encouraging clients to subscribe to the services or use the products.
Advantages of B2B SaaS SEO
SEO is indispensable for SaaS companies as it is the only way to acquire organic traffic necessary to put the business in front of potential clients. Below are some of its benefits.
Lower the Cost of Acquiring New Clients
One significant benefit of optimizing your website is that it increases SaaS marketing ROI because it helps reduce customer acquisition cost (CAC) and increases the number of clients who subscribe to or use your services for a long time.
An alternative is pay-per-click (PPC) search campaigns, which involve paying for clicks. These campaigns are quite expensive. The more clicks, the more money the company spends to acquire new customers. Unlike paid ads, the cost of getting new prospects through SEO doesn’t increase with every click.
Visibility
Effective SaaS SEO leads to improved visibility in the SERP. If a business leverages the right optimization strategy, it will reach the top of the organic results, where prospects who are looking for solutions will see the brand, subscribe to it, and possibly recommend it to others.
For example, Hubspot, a marketing platform, leverages a robust site optimization strategy that includes developing content and enhancing its website to rank for keywords relevant to its customers. This has led to increased visibility for the SaaS company.
It Helps Scale Growth
With consistent organic traffic coming to your website, more customers will get to know your business and engage with it. This expanded customer base and increased recognition will scale your business revenue, leading to rapid growth. Aside from that, you can attract traffic from regions or countries other than yours.
7 B2B SaaS SEO that Yields Positive Results
Below are seven tips you can use to boost your organic traffic and earn more leads and conversions.
Determine Your Goals
To successfully improve the performance of your business website, you need to have a clear idea of what you want—signups, free trial, subscriptions—and how to measure growth. This means that you have to be SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-bound) to set a clear goal. Some common goals for B2B SaaS companies can include
- Gaining high-quality leads
- Increasing brand awareness
- Reducing the cost of acquiring more clients
- Encouraging your customers to sign up for free trials
- Addressing your reader’s pain point
After defining your goals, you have to know how to measure them. This means setting KPIs (Key Performance Indicators). For example, you can measure how many people fill out a signup form or create an account with your business.
You can also measure the number of people who leave your website without engaging with your content. Another KPI to measure is the number of returning users. With all this data, you can analyze your SEO strategy and fine-tune it to make it better.
Create a Purchaser Persona
To successfully do SEO, you have to know your ideal audience. That said, you have to define your buyer persona. This persona represents your ideal customers based on users who have already engaged with your business. If you are just starting your company, you can examine your competitors to learn who is engaging with their business.
For example, an email marketing SaaS business buyer persona can include freelancers, marketing managers, inbound marketers, and agency owners who are seeking cost-effective yet email marketing solutions to grow their brand.
The customer persona will include details such as location, age, gender, education, interest, income, values, search patterns, and pain points. Acquiring all this information will help you develop content that matches your user’s search intent. In addition, you will also be able to address buyers’ pain points with well-crafted content.
Do Keyword Research
The secret to triumph for a B2B SaaS company is to identify its buyers’ challenges and how its products or services can solve them. With this information, the business can develop content around those pain points that will attract and educate its users. However, the firm must find keywords its buyers are searching for when they look for its products or services.
Luckily, there are several SEO tools that can help by offering insight into search volume, keyword difficulty, and competitive analysis. You can also explore other B2B SaaS companies in your niche to discover keywords for which they rank. Aside from that, you can brainstorm seed keywords related to your product or services. For example, for an enterprise offering email marketing services, “email marketing platform” can be a good seed keyword.
When you are done with that, you can expand the list by looking at long tail keywords with specific phrases about what your customers are searching for. An example of a long-tail keyword is “email marketing software for small businesses.” It is also recommended to search for question-based keywords like “What is email marketing software?” as well as related ones like “best email marketing strategies to scale operation” to expand your keyword list.
Create High-Quality Content
Writing top-notch content is the backbone of B2B SaaS SEO. The reason is not far-fetched. With the right content, your business will rank for suitable keywords, generate leads, and convert them into customers. However, this is no easy task! There are a few things you need to understand before you start writing that mind-blowing blog post or service page.
User intent is one of them. You need to know what potential visitors are searching for and write something that matches it. For example, if they are searching for “how to use email marketing software,” the intent is informational. So, creating a blog post that provides detailed information should be the goal here. There are four types of user intent:
- Informational: Provides in-depth information about a particular topic with the aim of enlightening the reader.
- Navigational: It helps users in their search for a particular page or information.
- Commercial: Visitors are interested in buying the product or subscribing to your services, but not yet.
- Transactional: This is for users who are ready to buy a product or subscribe to a service.
With that in mind, you can proceed to write something better than your competitors that adds value to your visitors. To be successful at this, you have to analyze your competitors’ content to see what is working for them and produce something better than theirs. Aside from that, you have to write for humans, not robots. This means writing in a clear, conversational manner and providing practical tips, examples, insights, and case studies.
Take Care of On-Page SEO
On-page, also known as on-site SEO, involves everything you do on a web page to improve its performance. It is an important long-term SEO strategy for B2B SaaS companies because it affects visibility and organic traffic. Here are some tips for on-site optimization.
- Use keywords in the content: Place your target keywords strategically in your content and ensure they are included in the H1, first paragraph, and subheadings (H3, H3, H4, etc.)
- Work on the title tag: Ensure the titles on each web page contain the primary keywords and are between 50 and 60 characters long. Also, they should be unique so that Google can clearly understand each page’s purpose.
- Write persuasive meta description: Since the meta description provides a summary of the page, it must be descriptive enough to make the page click-worthy. Keep it between 150 and 160 characters and ensure it contains the primary keywords.
- Structure the content with headings: You should add headings to the content to make it easier for readers to skim through the page. While H1 will be the title or the headline, you can use H2, H3, H4, H5 and H6 to cover subtopics.
- Optimize images: You should add alt text (alternative text) to describe images so that search engine crawlers and people using screen readers will understand them better.
- Use internal and external links appropriately: Ensure you link between pages so that users will be able to navigate your site, and search engine crawlers will discover more pages easily.
Technical SEO
It involves enhancing the site to make it load faster, easier to crawl, and more secure. One way to do that is to safeguard sensitive data like passwords from being compromised using Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS). Aside from that, finding and fixing duplicate content on the site will prevent issues like backlink dilution, wasted crawl budget, and undesirable URLs appearing on the SERP.
The speed of your website matters as it influences SEO. You can use Google’s PageSpeed Insights tools to determine your site’s current speed. If the speed index is above two seconds, you can try minifying the code, reducing image sizes and using a CDN (Content Distribution Network).
In addition, you have to make sure your business website is mobile-friendly by ensuring that it is easy to navigate and responsive and the content is readable on mobile. Also, make sure the URL structure of the site is descriptive, simple and unique.
Get High-Quality Backlinks
Backlinks are links from highly authoritative sites within your niche pointing at a page on your website. They are important because search engines view them as recommendations that your content is credible. That is why the more backlinks a site has, the more trustworthy Google sees it. This is in addition to the brand awareness and referral traffic they bring to the site.
Best practices for acquiring backlinks include getting them from trustworthy sources, ideally sites with domain authority above 60. In addition, you should acquire “follow links” and place them naturally in the content, using relevant anchor text that properly describes the content of the URL.
Final Thoughts
There is no doubt that SEO is important for B2B SaaS businesses as it is a sure way to gain free organic traffic if done correctly. From acquiring new leads to increased online visibility and growth, enhancing SEO provides several advantages. However, you have to determine your goals, whether you want more signups, organic traffic or brand awareness, to develop a successful optimization strategy.
Aside from that, knowing your customers will make it easy to target the right audience, understand their pain points and create content that explains how your product or services provide the solutions they seek. When you do all these and improve your site on-page, off-page and technical aspects, you are surely creating a successful long-term SEO strategy for your B2B SaaS business.