SaaS SEO Strategy: 6 Ways to Convert Traffic Into Leads

Software as a Service (SaaS) marketers often struggle with bringing meaningful and positive SEO results, due to poor or inconsistent SEO content strategy. Common problems include:

• Minimal sales and sign-ups for the SaaS product
• SaaS feature and solution pages not ranking for intended keywords
• Organic traffic not converting

In this article, we will discuss six actionable ways to devise a powerful SaaS SEO strategy focused on generating leads and sign-ups, not just organic traffic — which is essentially a vanity metric if it doesn’t convert. 

Why is SEO Important for SaaS Agencies?

• SaaS agencies that utilize SEO reach a larger audience over the internet, thus increasing their digital footprint.
• SEO-led content, crafted with the easiest SEO tool for SaaS, typically ranks higher on search engines, bringing more targeted and sustainable traffic, leads, and conversions to SaaS agencies.
• Compared to other marketing strategies, SEO-related efforts are the most cost-effective for SaaS agencies, since there is a high return on investment (ROI).
• Consistent application of SEO helps SaaS agencies build long-term brand equity, boosting a brand’s online recognition and reputation.
• By providing relevant and high-quality content, SEO ensures that visitors’ needs are met and encourages them to become customers.
• With the help of keyword analysis and consumer data, SEO strategies can identify and cater to the users’ specific needs.

Let’s dive into the secrets to successfully increasing your SaaS sales!

Build a Growth-Focused SaaS SEO Strategy

To increase leads and sign-ups for your SaaS website, follow these steps:

Step #1: Perform Keyword Research to Determine High-Intent Keywords

Keyword research is the most important step for devising a growth-focused SEO strategy. You should identify keywords that your highest-ranking competitors use. Keyword research tools like Semrush can also help. 

Performing keyword research to determine high-intent search terms can significantly improve the SEO strategy for a SaaS business if carried out systematically. Here’s how:

Identify Your Target Audience

Understanding who your customers are, what they need, and which keywords they use when searching for your products or services will help you better target them with SaaS marketing.

Understand Search Intent

It’s crucial to comprehend the “why?” behind a user’s search query. This will help you generate keywords that are more likely to lead to conversions. To achieve the best conversion rates, it’s vital to understand that different types of content may satisfy the same search intentions. For instance, a search query like “how to check backlinks” might lead to a blog post explaining the process, but also to a product page for a tool that performs this task.

Categorize Keywords

In the SaaS industry, keywords fall into four broad categories: blog posts, knowledge base pages, product and service landing pages, and comparison and review pages. When generating keywords, you should categorize them accordingly.

Analyze Potential Keywords 

Use tools like Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer or Site Explorer to analyze potential keywords. This will help you understand various attributes such as keyword difficulty and search volume, guiding you in prioritizing your top keyword opportunities. You can also use a keyword clustering tool to group similar search terms.

Save Relevant Keywords 

Whenever you identify relevant keywords for your SaaS business during your research, save them so that you’ll have a list to help you plan future content for your website.

Elevate High-Intent Keywords 

You’ll want to prioritize and elevate keywords associated with strong user intent: ones that suggest users are closer to making a purchasing decision.

Regularly undertaking this process can keep your keyword strategy relevant and accelerate your SaaS business’ growth.

Pro Tip

In the beginning, you should focus on ranking for commercial intent keywords: the keywords that product-aware prospects search for. This is a great way of introducing your software or other products to potential customers. For example, if your SaaS provides email marketing services, your keywords could include:

• Product 1 vs. Product 2
• Alternative to Product 1
• Email marketing software
• X best tools for email marketing
• How to create personalized email campaigns

After commercial intent keywords, you can start using informational keywords that educate your users about the specific problem they are facing. For email marketing, these could include:

• What is email marketing
• How to do email marketing
• Types of email marketing
• Complete guide to email marketing

Make sure you choose keywords that are directly relevant to your business or product.  If you select tangentially related keywords instead, like “best digital marketing software,” you will either not rank at all, or rank but not get the right audience.

Step #2: Create a Well-Researched Content Strategy

Content strategy — the process of planning, developing, and managing content for your website — is a major component of SEO.  While creating a content strategy, you should:

• Define your goals for content creation
• Conduct research to create user personas
• Run a content audit and identify content gaps
• Brainstorm content ideas
• Manage your content

You should also plan the:

• Frequency of content publishing
• Topic clusters around which to create content
• Quantity of content pieces
• Targeted audience

Creating a well-researched SEO content strategy for SaaS demands a significant understanding of your target audience, competitors, market trends, and more. Mastering each step of an effective content plan for your SaaS business will attract more visitors to your website, and will generate leads that convert into customers. 

By efficiently planning implementing, and periodically reviewing your SEO strategy, you can significantly enhance your SaaS company’s visibility, brand credibility, and customer engagement. Follow these instructions to develop a robust SaaS SEO content strategy:

• Formulate a SaaS content marketing roadmap by researching your audience and competitors.
• Prepare a SaaS content calendar outlining content production tasks and timelines. This should cover all forms of content meant to attract and engage your audience, including blogs, videos, social media posts, and newsletters.
• Write high-quality content that not only drives traffic but also positions your company as a topical authority in the niche SaaS market. Credibility generates trust — which, in turn, drives conversions.
• Distribute your content across your target audience’s preferred channels. These might include social media platforms, marketing emails, or guest posts on blogs.
• Assess the efficacy of your SaaS content marketing by regularly using analytics tools to track metrics like website traffic, bounce rate, and conversion rate.
• Align your content marketing strategy with your business goals. For example, if you are introducing a new feature in your SaaS product, let your audience know by generating content about it.
• Create a variety of content types, not just articles and blogs. These could include expert guides, case studies, eBooks, and even online courses related to your niche.
• Implement a robust keyword research process, and continuously update your content plan in keeping with keyword trends. Specify the type of content to be created for each keyword. 
• Specify where you’ll publish each piece of content. For example, you might want to prioritize content with commercial intent, which suggests you’d focus more on product or service descriptions.

Remember to use data-driven insights to guide your plan and measure its effectiveness for continuous improvement. The ultimate aim is to build your brand’s authority in the SaaS market, drive sustainable website traffic, and fuel short- and long-term business growth.

Pro Tip

Use a content strategy tool. Creating an SEO content strategy is challenging, and requires you to find and coordinate multiple resources. With a content strategy tool, intelligent AI bots will do the heavy lifting for you! 

Step #3: Balance Education With Promotion

Your SaaS website’s goals should include both educating visitors and promoting your products and services to them. SaaS marketers often think that blogs are only for informational purposes. However, you can also leverage them to improve leads and sign-ups, by discussing your services at the same time as educating your audience.

Imagine a user is searching for “ways to create a personalized chatbot.” You have written a blog about this exact topic, linking to your SaaS company’s personalized chatbot service. Now, when the user finds your blog post via Google, you can take the opportunity to explain how your chatbot stands out from the competition.

When you use this method, avoid sounding too sales-driven, and don’t neglect to actually educate your audience. This will drive users away from your website since their original query isn’t being answered.

Step #4: Create Well-Researched Blog Posts With E-E-A-T in Mind

How can you structure your blog posts to be both educational and promotional without sounding too salesy? It only takes two steps:

1. Research the topic thoroughly.
2. Follow Google’s Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trust (E-E-A-T) guidelines.

Topical Research

Most writers make the mistake of content spinning: slightly rewriting someone else’s content. Avoid this at all costs, or your content will fail to stand out. These articles may rank well on search engines, but they aren’t designed to attract human readers. If your content is the same as everyone else’s, rather than communicating your business’s unique selling points, why should users choose you?

To generate original content, work with a writer who understands both your customer’s pain points and your SaaS services, and who will research thoroughly and come up with a good outline. 

However, that’s only one piece of the puzzle. No matter how diligently your writer researches the topic, no amount of Googling will reliably answer questions about the optimal word count, or about what images, videos, and links to include.

How can you and your writer get these answers? Use Outranking: your one-step solution for content research, writing, editing, and optimization!

Here’s how Outranking drives more leads to your website:

• Creates a content brief in keeping with your SaaS branding

• Analyzes extensive SERP data, then writes AI-assisted first drafts

• Optimizes the whole page, from title tags to links

• Optimizes existing content on your SaaS website

When you pair your writing team with Outranking’s innovative tools, you can create irresistible content for both humans and search engines. You can learn more about Outranking’s features from the following video:

E-E-A-T Guidelines By Google

As our Enterprise SEO Trends and Content Strategy articles discussed, current SEO best practices involve implementing Google’s E-E-A-T guidelines. This means that your content should be:

• Based on first-hand experience in the given topic
• Authored by a subject matter expert
• Published on a highly authoritative website
• Trustworthy from the perspective of users

Step #5: Don’t Forget Technical SEO

Amidst all this keyword research and on-page SEO chaos, it’s important to remember saas technical SEO. If search bots can’t crawl and index your website easily, they won’t rank your website, and all your work will be for nothing.

Here’s how to improve your SaaS SEO strategy through technical SEO:

• Optimize site structure. Make your website easy to navigate by using clear headings, tags, and meta descriptions for each page. This helps search engines understand the content and purpose of each page, leading to better visibility and ranking.
• Improve page speed. Optimize images and code to reduce load times, and consider using a content delivery network (CDN) to further speed up the process. Faster-loading pages rank better in SERPs since no one wants to wait for a slow website. Learn more about page speed and its effect on SEO here.
• Enhance mobile-friendliness. With over half of today’s global web traffic coming from mobile devices, making your site mobile-friendly is critical. Use responsive design to ensure your site looks good and operates effectively on mobile devices.
• Secure your site with HTTPS. Improve your site’s security — and your search engine rankings — by implementing HTTPS encryption. Google has confirmed that the increased security HTTPS offers is a ranking factor.
• Create an XML sitemap. Make it easier for search engines to find and understand your site’s content by creating and submitting an XML sitemap. This file lists all your website’s essential pages in one place for search engines to index.
• Manage duplicate content. Use workarounds like “rel=canonical” or redirect other versions of your pages to the main content to prevent search engines from indexing duplicate pages. Duplicate content also includes information that is plagiarized from other websites, making content spinning even more detrimental to your website’s performance.
• Optimize for voice search. Optimize your site with long-tail keywords and natural language phrases that people would use in everyday conversation. Voice search is on the rise due to the use of virtual assistants; incorporating this structured data into your site makes it easier for these programs to find.

Following these steps can greatly enhance your website’s technical underpinnings and boost your SaaS company’s visibility on search engine results pages. Remember that technical SEO is an ongoing process; continuously review and update your strategies as search engine algorithms and user behavior evolve over time.

Keep this brief guide on hand whenever you feel stuck in the technical SEO optimization process:

Methods to Improve Technical SEO	Explanation
Crawl efficiency	This refers to how easily a search engine can crawl and index your site. Optimizing your crawl budget can lead to better visibility in search results. Tips include avoiding duplicate content, managing HTTP status codes, and ensuring your XML sitemap is up to date.
Structured data markup	Implementing structured data markup (via a tool like Schema.org) can improve your SEO. It provides search engines with additional site data, which can enhance SERP listings and increase click-through rates.
Improved site speed	Data shows that even a one-second delay in page response can result in a 7% reduction in conversions. By keeping your website moving quickly, you can reduce bounce rates and improve your chances for higher ranking. Techniques include compressing images, minifying code, and leveraging browser caching.
SSL certification	Google has marked HTTPS as a ranking signal, indicating SSL Security should not be ignored. Increase your site’s trust and ranking ability by encrypting the data transferred between the user and the site.
Mobile Optimization	With mobile-first indexing, Google ranks sites based on their mobile version before their desktop version. Employ responsive design, and make sure the site is properly displayed and functional on mobile devices.

Step #6: Focus on Link-Building

Link-building is an essential part of improving your SaaS SEO strategy and leads, but it requires some proactive effort. Here’s how to build links effectively:

• Develop valuable content. The cornerstone of your link-building strategy is to produce high-quality, relevant content that truly provides value to your target audience. This could range from insightful blog posts and in-depth research articles to compelling infographics and engaging videos.
• Connect with influencers and thought leaders. Industry influencers and thought leaders can play a pivotal role in expanding your content visibility since they typically have a large following. When you share your content with these key players, your brand can reach a broader audience and earn high-quality backlinks.
• Build relationships with related websites. It’s not enough to just write great content; you must also establish robust relationships with other relevant websites in your niche. Respected websites with a significant audience can link back to your content, providing more exposure and improving your backlink profile.
• Leverage social media. By sharing your content on various social media platforms and engaging with your followers, you can generate natural backlinks. Plus, people who find your content valuable will want to share it with their followers, creating even more backlink opportunities.
• Utilize your existing network. Start your link-building journey with your existing professional relationships. Companies or individuals you already have ties with may be more inclined to promote your content by linking back to it.
• Make use of integrations. If your SaaS product integrates with third-party solutions, reach out to those companies to link to your content. This strategy serves the additional purpose of highlighting your SaaS product’s integration features, which can be very appealing to potential customers.

Remember, quality should be at the heart of link-building, not quantity. To attract more quality links, use various link-building tactics, which you can find at https://editorial.link/saas-link-building-guide/, Avoid the temptation to rush into acquiring numerous links from websites that may not be related to your content. Focus instead on getting links from domains that are directly relevant to your content, product, or niche. With a systematic approach to link-building, you can set your SaaS business up for success in the competitive online marketplace.

Mapping Your SaaS Content Strategy Onto the Marketing Funnel

Effectively mapping out your SEO content strategy so that you’re prepared for the top and bottom of the marketing funnel (ToFu and BoFu) is vital for any SaaS business.

ToFu SEO Content Strategy

At this stage, your potential customers might not even know they have a need to fill or a problem to address. Your goal with ToFu content should be to create awareness and deliver valuable information by:

• Using long-tail keywords. Long-tail keywords can help you reach users who are already interested in what you provide, even if they don’t know yet that your specific product exists. Websites that focus on long-tail keywords experience an increase in relevant organic traffic.
• Developing educational content. Content at this stage should be informational, raising awareness about potential problems or needs. Particularly effective formats include blog posts, infographics, and eBooks.
• Focusing on external marketing. Promote your content on a variety of external platforms, such as social media sites and apps, to broaden your reach and bring prospective clients’ attention to your services.

BoFu SEO Content Strategy

Now that your prospects are ready to decide on a solution, try:

• Using commercial keywords. Your prospects are looking to make a purchase, so your keywords should reflect that. Collaborate with your sales team to identify the right commercial keywords.
• Creating solution-oriented content. With BoFu content, you should clearly demonstrate how your SaaS product can effectively solve the customer’s problem. Consider methods like case studies, testimonials, or product demos.
• Implementing a strong call to action. Incorporating a compelling call to action (CTA) can increase conversion rates. CTAs should be clear and compelling and should guide visitors toward a purchase.
• Providing in-depth product information. Detailed product descriptions and feature lists can help prospective customers compare your offerings with your competitors’. In particular, comprehensive product pages can influence users in your favor.

Remember, the key to a successful SEO content strategy lies in understanding your audience and their journey. Tailor your content to meet their needs, and answer their queries at each stage of the funnel.

Ready To Take Your SaaS SEO Strategy To The Next Level?

Now that you know how to convert traffic into leads by strengthening your SaaS SEO strategy, it’s time to put your knowledge into practice.