SEO or search engine optimization is the process of making your website rank higher in the search engines. SEO is one of the most crucial things to work on in these days of digital marketing. By optimizing your website for search engines, a business can make sure that their customers can find them easily online.
People typically use search engines to look for specific services or products. The potential customers of a business type in specific keywords in a search engine that are relevant to the product or service the business provides. That’s why it is important for the business to try and rank higher in the SERPs. This will ensure that their website appears before their target audience. It increases the chance for a website to get more organic traffic, more leads, conversions, and sales too.
What is SaaS SEO?
The process of getting more organic traffic for a Software as a Service or SaaS company by achieving top rankings on the search engine result pages for specific and relevant keywords is known as Saas SEO.
Many Saas companies resort to performance marketing such as affiliate marketing, social ads, PPC, etc. to scale new customer acquisition rapidly. But the costs of these performance marketing options are increasing, and solely relying on the paid acquisition can be disadvantageous too. If you reduce or turn off your paid advertising, the traffic will stop.
That’s why having a strong SaaS SEO strategy is crucial. SEO can drive exponential organic growth by driving constant traffic. Many SaaS businesses increase their investment into the channel to diversify the sources and keep the cost of the traffic acquisition sustainable.
SaaS SEO typically involves increasing a platform’s visibility in organic search to put them before its target audience.
Searching for Your Software
The potential customers know who you are and want to know more about you.
Searching for Information about Software like Yours
The searchers know about the existence of your software and want to learn more about it to see if it’s well suited for their needs. They might not yet be ready to make a purchase.
Ready for Purchasing Software Like Yours
The searchers are getting to know about deals or pricing.
Looking for Content Related to Your Software
Right now the searchers aren’t looking for software like the one you have, but the target audience is looking for content aligning with your works and services. They might need your software sometime in the future.
Even though there are differences between SaaS SEO or SEO for other verticals or businesses, one needs to remember that the main ranking factors of Google remain the same for all the different businesses. Some of the top ranking factors are-
- Content
- Backlink
- RankBrain
It’s crucial to know that the development of an SEO strategy for Saas has to be based on creating great content. The content needs to answer the search query of a user and earn backlinks naturally.
What is Enterprise SaaS SEO?
Enterprise SaaS SEO isn’t different from conventional SEO in terms of the works needed to be done. The 4 main pillars of Enterprise SaaS SEO are-
Strategy
Conducting keyword research and finding relevant keywords that are needed for higher ranking.
Speed Optimization
Optimize the web pages and their loading time according to the best practices of Google.
Content Creation
Creating high-quality SEO content
Link-Building
Trying to organically get backlinks, or getting them through guest posting, direct outreach, etc.
In the beginning, the search volume will be significantly low, as the number of people looking for enterprise software is relatively low. However, being an enterprise company, every single lead is going to bring in a lot more profit than usual for you. In some cases, if landing a single client can be managed per month from SEO, you’ll experience a huge ROI from your SEO expenditures.
How to Conduct Enterprise SaaS SEO
Let’s have a look at the key elements you need to work on while conducting Enterprise SaaS SEO–
Keyword Research
Keyword research is the foundation of any SEO strategy. In this part, you’ll have to look up the specific and relevant keywords you want to rank for. You’ll need to create a sheet to keep track of your content and SEO efforts. There are two practical and popular ways of keyword research, which are Brainstorm & Research, and Competitive Analysis.
The first tactic is to sit down and do some brainstorming for coming up with keywords your target audience uses for searching for your software directly. Also, the keywords your audience uses to search for information surrounding topics around the software.
For the competitive analysis part, you’ll need to get a subscription to an SEO tool and run your competitors through organic research. You’ll get a complete list of the keywords that your competitors rank for. Keywords are usually ranked by the percentage of traffic they get from a keyword. You’ll be able to get a highly comprehensive list of keywords by extracting the most relevant keywords that your top competitors rank for. You will want to target those keywords.
On-Page SEO
All your web pages should be optimized based on the webmaster guidelines of Google. This part is kind of straightforward, as you can just maintain this checklist below-
- Maintaining a Keyword Density of 0.5% to 2%
- Including 2 to 10 Outbound Links
- Including 2 to 10 Inbound Links
- Use the Keyword as a URL
- Keeping Your Article Content Long-Form
- Including Keywords in Your Meta Description
- Including Alt Tags for Each Image Included on the Page
Technical SEO
The process of improving your website for indexability and crawlability is known as technical SEO. With this process, you’ll be making it easy for Google to index and crawl your website. You need to optimize your website in a way that it will load really fast. It’s important that your page loading time is less than 2.5 seconds.
Google uses metrics such as LCP, FID, and CLS to measure loading performance, page interactivity, and page visual stability. You can follow these SEO guidelines as an Enterprise SaaS Company-
- Using GTMetrix & Pagespeed Insights for testing the loading performance of your website
- Making sure all requests get sent via HTTPS
- Hosting the website on an SSD or dedicated server
- Using a CDN
- Serving all static files either from a static subdomain or through a CDN
- The website must be mobile-friendly
- Getting your website rid of all unnecessary redirects. Redirects can chain impact performance.
- Getting rid of unused CSS
- Minify CSS, HTML, and JS. Some several open-source tools that are available for this are-
-
- Minifying HTML with HTMLMinifier
- Minifying CSS with CSSNano
- Minifying JavaScript with Closure Compiler or UglifyJS
- Enabling Brotli/Gzip file compression for reducing file sizes.
- Properly sizing all images before uploading
- Not overcomplicating the architecture of the site
Content Creation
Creating quality content is paramount for conducting SEO properly. You need to maintain the quality of the content, and keep them highly informative for the audience. Make sure that they get to know what they came for from your content. If the audience is able to engage with your content properly, google will rank your site higher in the SERPs. The time spent on your website will increase if the content is of good quality and provide good service to your target audience. You will also be able to gain the trust of your audience. So, leads and sales will also increase along with traffic.
Ongoing Link Building
Only publishing content will not help the SEO of your site, you’ll also need to add some good-quality backlinks. Backlinks are the links that point towards your website and are added to other sites. For example, if one of your competitors has 200 backlinks, and you have only 40, you won’t be able to rank higher no matter how great your content quality is. Here are some of the link-building tactics that you can go for-
- Reaching out to sites that linked to the sites of your competitors, and asking for a backlink
- Guest Post Publishing on other blogs
- Asking Site Owners with broken links on topics around the niche of your site to change those broken links to yours
Final Words
SEO is really important for any kind of business. The importance increases, even more, when it comes to enterprise SaaS businesses. Proper SEO can help your website to rank higher than your competitors in the search engines. It will help you get acknowledged by your target audience more effectively, and you will be able to get your desired traffic, leads, and sales. Make sure to optimize your enterprise SaaS website properly for search engines to get ahead of your competitors.