SaaS business provides customers access to a particular service by paying a certain amount per the pricing models. Most SaaS owners struggle initially due to insufficient funds and customers.
They often rush to other methods like social media marketing to get more customers instead of investing in long-term organic marketing using Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
SEO is essential in growing SaaS revenue, especially if you have a limited budget for other marketing methods, but it takes time.
Some common SaaS platforms that have embraced SEO in their marketing plans and gained millions of customers include Canva, which gets estimated organic traffic of 120 million per month, according to SEMrush.
Many SaaS owners give up on SEO very early, as it takes time for you to see the actual results.
Some benefits of implementing SEO for your startup include getting more customers using fewer costs, educating your customers about your product, and getting customers at the early stages of the funnel.
The article will cover 11 SEO hacks every SaaS owner should do to get more customers.
Best SEO Hacks for SaaS Startups
Here is a list of the best SEO hacks for those operating SaaS startups. Most tips require one to experiment, work hard on the project, and be patient to see the actual results.
1. Write better Meta descriptions
Meta descriptions play an important role in content getting featured snippets on search engine results. It makes it easier for search engines to understand what the content entails, signaling the users when they search.
Having proper Meta descriptions helps SaaS owners have the best click-through rate (CTR) and more traffic, leading to more sales.
Many owners do not put enough effort into writing Meta descriptions as they feel it is unimportant for their site.
If you have been leaving Meta descriptions out, it is time to change that and start getting some traffic. Some of the best ways to write better Meta descriptions include:
- Ensure your Meta description consists of 155 characters and below.
- Ensure you have the main keyword and a call to action.
- Use active voice to increase the chances of the visitor taking action, i.e., visiting the sales page.
- Make it unique by being different from your competitors and matching your content.
2. Use content clusters for content creation
It involves creating website content using pillar and cluster pages where the pillar content is the main page, and the cluster pages are created to support the pillar pages.
For example, if we have WordPress as the pillar page, the cluster pages can be the best WordPress themes, the best WordPress Plugins, the best WordPress Hosting Providers, etc.
Content clusters make achieving Google Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness (EEAT) principle easier.
It shows your expertise on the said topic, making the search engines trust your website, and it creates a better site hierarchy where users can find any related content to the main topic.
It can have an overall effect on engagement, making you get several conversions from that.
Numerous tools can help you with the creation of content clusters. Some common examples include SEO Scout, KeywordInsights.ai, and Keyword Cupid.
3. Perform Image Optimization
For better technical SEO, you must have a faster loading speed for your website. You must optimize your images to ensure they do not affect the website speed. Some of the best practices to implement include:
Reduce the file size to ensure the image is well compressed to get the smallest size possible. You can use websites like Squoosh, jpeg.io, JPEGmini, and Kraken.io to get the desired size. Small sizes reduce loading, making the website fast, and many customers like that.
Ensure all the images you use on your SaaS website are mobile-friendly.
Change the image file name. When downloading or saving images, they come with funny names, i.e., download.jpg, kelvion.png, but instead, change it to something creative like a-man-carrying-the-12-cm-block.jpg. It will help the search engines understand the image and rank it faster.
Pay for a Content Delivery Network (CDN) that will help you optimize the images and deliver results to the clients using the shortest time possible.
Use the alt attribute to help the search engines understand more about the image if it fails to load and make it easier for the visually impaired to get the context of the image.
Implement image-structured data using schema to achieve rich search engine results.
Use the correct format. There are different image formats: PNG, WebP, JPEG, and GIF. WebP is the best format if you want good loading speed with small sizes.
For more guidelines about images, read the Google documentation on how to achieve the best results.
4. Perform Internal Linking
Internal linking is an SEO technique where you link to other pages on the same website or domain.
When search engines discover some links in your content, they treat it as of high value and index them faster, making them rank more quickly.
You direct your customers to other important pages of your website that can add value to them.
Internal linking reduces the chances of orphan pages that may lead to indexing issues, making search engines take a long time to crawl, index, and rank them.
The best way to perform this type of link is by using anchor text to direct your customer to the relevant pages. Ensure you do not use the same anchor for different pages, it can confuse search engines, making you struggle with indexing.
To have a proper linking practice, ensure you understand the structure of your website, the relevant pages, and the value of each page. It is better to link the best-performing pages to continue getting more clients.
5. Analyze your competitor’s
Research to understand who your competitors are and go over their SEO process. The competitors should resemble the product you are working on, helping their clients fix their issues.
Most of them have company blogs where they write their content. For example, if your SaaS is a keyword research tool, your competitors will be SEMrush, Ahrefs, Spyfu, Low Fruits, etc. Some metrics to analyze from your competitors include:
- The number and which keywords they rank for.
- The best-performing top pages.
- Backlinks to understand how they get their links and their strength.
- The type of content they use, i.e., videos, blogs, etc.
- Level of customer engagement through likes, comments, queries, etc.
After collecting enough data, you will have enough data on what to work on with your team and start ranking on some terms your competitors enjoy.
6. Perform proper keyword research
Proper keyword research ensures that you go for easier keywords to rank, as they have less competition. Many SaaS companies make the mistake of going for keywords with higher competition, affecting your SEO success.
When you create content using the right keywords, your startup has a higher chance of ranking high on the search engines.
According to Backlinko, the first page on Google alone gets an average click-through rate of 27.6%, which leads to thousands of conversions depending on your niche.
Some factors and steps to follow during keyword research are:
-Match the user intent. There are four types of intent: commercial, transactional, commercial, and navigational. For transactional and commercial, we use words like best, join, buy, etc.
For informational, customers want some information, i.e., how to draw a straight line in Excel, and for navigational, they want an exact website, for example, to design, they search for Canva. Understand which intent is best for your SaaS and do keyword research.
-Keyword metrics. When using automated keyword research tools for SaaS SEO. They provide metrics that enable you to make the right choice.
The metrics include the search volume, companies ranking for the keyword, and keyword density.
It is good to go for keywords with low keyword density and small competitors using the same keyword for faster ranking. Other factors include Search intent, Content depth, relevance, freshness, authority, Number (and quality) of backlinks, Domain Rating, and SERP features.
-Other common keyword research methods include using Google autosuggestion.
7. Get good at backlink building
Backlinks are incoming links from one website to another page of a different website using anchor texts.
Having quality backlinks proves to search engines that your content is of high value and relevance, and shows your authority on the topic. They later give you more trust, making you rank higher on search engines.
When search engines notice that many users have linked their websites to your content, they push you to rank higher.
Apart from ranking higher on search engines, they also improve your credibility, and you get referral traffic from other websites, making search engines discover your new pages fast due to faster indexing.
According to Google, backlinks are one of their ranking factors, making it a big deal for SaaS startups aiming to perform better in search engines.
After creating content for your SaaS, you can deploy several methods to get links, i.e., guest posting, using SEO agencies, using the HARO technique, etc.
8. Write better content
When creating content for your SaaS blog, ensure it’s high quality and meets the best writing guidelines. If you work with content writers, ensure they deliver well-researched content, free from plagiarism and grammar errors.
Ensure the content can stay for a long time and can lead to conversions. It is one of the best SEO hacks when it is your first time working on SaaS SEO.
Some of the best tips for SaaS SEO content writing include the following:
- Write comprehensive content after doing proper research about the keyword.
- Write better headlines to improve the CTR.
- Include your keywords under subheadings and ensure the headings are consistent throughout the article.
- Include visuals that are relevant to the article.
- Perform internal linking to link the article to other content on the website.
- Don’t forget about content optimization; working on evergreen content has a compounding effect.
9. Ensure your website domain has an SSL certificate
There was a period in 2014 when Google announced having HTTPS as a ranking factor. Installing an SSL certificate provides extra protection for your customer’s sensitive data.
It also signals the search engines that your website is safe for visitors, and they can trust it, making a website reliable in the search results.
There are several providers where you can buy a cheap SSL or low-priced SSL certificate, especially when starting a business.
The common ones include Comodo, DigiCert, Sectigo, AlphaSSL, and RapidSSL Certificate. It is the first SEO hack every SaaS owner should use.
10. Avoid Keyword Cannibalization
It involves creating content using the same keyword. In this scenario, you find many topics optimized on the same query. When you finally rank for the content, the keywords will start competing against each other.
It will harm your overall SEO, leading to reduced CTR and few backlinks on your site.
You can find cannibalized content or keywords on your site using tools like SEMrush, Google Search Console, Ahrefs, and the “site:[domain]” operator.
To prevent keyword cannibalization, here are some SEO hacks to implement:
- Perform proper keyword research.
- If you have multiple pages of content targeting the same query, you can change them and redirect them to one page.
- Perform content audits regularly to see which topics are doing well, and if there is content that talks about the same thing, merge them.
- Optimize the existing content by reducing the keywords and changing most parts.
11. Check indexing problems
For your content to rank fast, ensure you crawl and index your content as soon as you hit publish. There are SaaS that publishes many pages at once, especially those using programmatic SEO.
It is good to check the number of pages indexed after publishing. Sometimes, it might take longer, and you can consider using third-party indexing services.
The common software used for indexing is the Google Search Console.
After logging in, click on the URL inspection located on the left, submit your URL, and click the Request Indexing button to submit a URL for crawling and indexing.
Conclusion
Getting more revenue from your SaaS startup is not rocket science. It takes a lot of hard work, especially with SaaS SEO.
All you need is to follow the above practices and do them regularly to make your site attract more visitors and get more conversions.
Doing content correctly will solve most of the issues SaaS startups face when using SEO as their primary marketing method.
