The Complete SaaS SEO Checklist for 2023

Launching your SaaS product or service is an exciting milestone, but the real challenge comes after the launch. It won’t matter if you have an amazing product if your website doesn’t rank well on search engine results pages (SERPs). Without a strong online presence, generating revenue becomes a tough task. 

Don’t worry! In this article, we’ll cover essential SaaS SEO elements to include in your checklist to help you increase your SaaS website’s success and ranking, even if you are starting from scratch. Let’s get started!

The SaaS SEO Checklist

Your SaaS SEO Checklist should contain the following elements:

1. Set up Google Search Console
2. Integrate Google Analytics
3. Perform Website Audits to Identify Technical Issues
4. Improve the Speed of Your Web Pages
5. Ensure Mobile Usability
6. Perfect Keyword Research
7. Write SEO-Optimized Content
8. Follow Google’s E-E-A-T Guidelines
9. Craft Power Posts
10. Optimize Your Media
11. Acquire High-Quality Backlinks
12. Reduce Your Website’s Downtime

1. Set up Google Search Console

To kickstart your SaaS SEO strategy, the first step is setting up Google Search Console — an invaluable free service from Google. It helps detect your website’s indexing status, search queries, and crawling errors and optimizes its overall visibility. Setting up Google Search Console for your SaaS website is simple! Just follow these steps:

1. Create a Google Account: If you don’t have one already, head to Google’s homepage, click on “Sign In” located in the top-right corner, and then “Create account”. Follow the prompts to set up your account.
2. Access Google Search Console: Once you have a Google account, go to the Google Search Console home page and click on “Start Now”. If you’re not already signed in, it will prompt you to do so.

3. Add your website property: Now, it’s time to add your website to Google Search Console. You can do this by either adding your domain (e.g., www.yourwebsite.com) or your full website URL (e.g., https://www.yourwebsite.com).

Adding your domain property will cover any URLs that fall within your domain and subdomains.

4. Submit your  XML sitemap: The sitemap helps Google understand your site’s structure better. To do this, click on ‘Sitemaps’ on the left-hand dashboard, enter the suffix of your sitemap URL (for most websites, this would be ‘sitemap.xml’), and click on “Submit”.

5. Explore valuable insights: Congratulations! Google Search Console will now begin crawling your website and provide you with insights like traffic, indexing issues, and mobile usability improvements.

Remember, If you’re serious about your SaaS website’s SEO success, Google Search Console is the perfect start to your journey. 

2. Integrate Google Analytics

Now that you’ve set up Google Search Console, it’s time to dive into Google Analytics for your SaaS website. This tool tracks and records website traffic, granting you unique analyses of your SaaS website and application performance. With Google Analytics, you’ll get a comprehensive overview of who your visitors are, their activities, and their interactions on your website.

Now you may be thinking, “But why set up both Google Analytics and Google Search Console?” Well, while Google Search Console helps you monitor technical aspects like performance, crawling, and indexing, Google Analytics helps you better understand your customers’ behavior on your SaaS website.

Setting up Google Analytics 4 is easy:

1. Log into your Google Analytics account: If you don’t have an account, you can click on “Start Measuring” to get started.

2. Fill in Your Account Details: On the new page, add your “Account Name” and proceed by clicking Next.

3. Provide property information: Enter essential data regarding time zone, currency, and property name. Then select ‘GA4’ as the property type and click on ‘Next’.

4. Provide your business information: Fill in the industry category, business size, and intended use of Google Analytics. Once you’ve completed all the fields, click “Create”.

5. Get your tracking code: Go to Admin > Property > Tracking Info > Tracking Code. Copy the Global Site Tag(gtag.js) that appears.

6. Add the tracking code to your website: Now add this code to every webpage you want to track with Google Analytics.

• For CMS-based websites: If your website is built on a CMS, navigate to where you’d typically add Google Analytics tags in its settings and put the GA4 configuration tag there.
• For non-CMS websites: Install the tracking code snippet into the HTML page. Particularly, install it within the header tags.
• Using Google Tag Manager: Even if you’re using Google Tag Manager, you can still use the GA4 configuration tag to add GA4 to your website.

7. Verify your setup: Navigate to the “Real-time” section in Google Analytics 4. If it’s properly set up, you’ll start seeing data about current users on your website.

3. Perform a Website Audit to Identify Technical Issues

Now that you’ve got Google Analytics and Google Search Console up and running, it’s time to perform a website audit. Website Audits are great for your website as they identify your website’s design, usability, and accessibility problems that might be hindering your website’s chances of reaching the top SERP rankings. 

You can use Google Search Console for performing a website audit as you have it already set up. Additionally, Semrush’s Site Audit is also a great paid feature that provides in-depth data about your website’s errors.

To perform a site audit using Google Search Console, follow these steps:

1. Visit Google Search Console, navigate to the “Index” section, and click on “Coverage”.

2. Review the different categories:

• Error: Problems in your website’s indexing.
• Valid with Warning: These aren’t errors but are potentially harmful to your website’s indexing.
• Valid: Your SaaS webpages were indexed successfully.
• Excluded: These webpages were either indexed by either Google or intentionally excluded by the website owner.

3. Scroll down to see the issues encountered by these web pages. You can fix the issues mentioned there with the help of professional developers.

4. Improve the Speed of Your Web Pages

Once you’ve established your SaaS company on Google Search Console and Google Analytics, you can focus on enhancing elements of your website. Improving the page loading speed is crucial as it impacts your site’s ranking on search engines like Google. Here are the key strategies to boost your page speed:

1. Use Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool: This tool helps you identify the specific issues that slow down your page loading speed.
2. Clean your code: Simplifying complex or unnecessary pieces of HTML, CSS, JavaScript, or other codes can significantly improve load speeds. Collaborate with a developer to make your code more efficient.
3. Consider upgrading your hosting: Sharing a server with millions of other sites may greatly reduce your page loading speed. Therefore, investing in a better hosting service could improve your site’s performance.
4. Make use of browser caching: While browser caching doesn’t impact first-time visitors, it does improve the page loading speed for repeat visitors. You can set up caching using a plugin or your .htaccess file.
5. Leverage a CDN: A content delivery network, or CDN, improves page loading speeds by determining the location of your website visitors and serving site resources from the server closest to them.
6. Remove outdated or unused plugins: Such plugins might lead to security issues and damage your site’s loading speed. Ensure you completely remove any plugins you’re not using, rather than just hiding them from the front end of your site.
7. Implement web page caching: This technique speeds up page load times by storing a copy of a given web page and presenting it to users without sending a server request each time.
8. Reduce redirects: Each redirect causes an additional HTTP request-response cycle, leading to increased page load time. Minimize these to maintain faster page speed.

5. Ensure Mobile Usability

with approximately 4.32 billion active internet users worldwide and 87% of mobile owners using a search engine daily, neglecting mobile usability can cost your SaaS website significant visibility and consequently, organic traffic. To make the most of this vast mobile audience, here are some quick tips to help you ensure that your website is mobile-friendly:

1. Enhance User Experience: Implement easy-to-find CTAs, make fonts readable on smaller devices, limit pop-ups, and display a simple navigation bar.
2. Implement Responsive Design: Responsive design adjusts and adapts your website layout to offer an optimal view on different screen sizes and devices, ensuring consistency and user-friendliness regardless of the device used to access your website.
3. Reduce server response times: Optimize your server configurations, utilize caching mechanisms, and consider using content delivery networks (CDNs) to decrease server response times.
4. Leverage caching: Enable browser caching that stores static files on users’ devices, cutting the need to fetch data from the server for subsequent visits.
5. Prioritize visible content: Use lazy loading techniques to load images and non-essential elements only when they’re visible to the user, improving the perceived loading speed.
6. Test Mobile Friendliness: Google prioritizes mobile websites in their crawling and indexing processes. It’s important to test your website’s mobile-friendliness using tools like Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test.

7. Consider a Separate Mobile URL: A separate mobile URL can further optimize the mobile experience for your users, delivering the most appropriate version of your site based on their device.

6. Perfect Keyword Research

Keyword research forms the foundation of SaaS SEO. as it impacts every aspect of your SEO strategy, from content creation to on-page optimization and content marketing.

The following four steps can help you perfect your keyword research process:

1. Leverage Google Keyword Planner

Google Keyword Planner is a powerful and free keyword research tool primarily designed for PPC campaigns. However, you can still use it effectively for SEO keyword research.

Keyword research is easy with Google Keyword Planner! Simply:

1. Login into your Google Keyword Planner Account and click Discover New Keywords.

2. Enter the topic for which you want to create content. Google Keyword Planner will give you a list of relevant keywords to choose from.

3. Opt for a mixture of keywords with high-volume searches and some keywords with low-volume searches. This allows your keywords to compete against fewer pages, increasing your chances of ranking well.

2. Find Trending Search Terms

In today’s fast-paced digital world, virality can transform individuals and companies in the blink of an eye. Being quick to identify and capitalize on trending topics is vital for content creation and marketing success. By staying in sync with societal trends, you can attract a large following and keep your content relevant. Google Trends can help you find the popular keywords or phrases, and start molding content around them. Similarly, you can keep an eye out for trends that may be losing popularity to adjust your content strategy accordingly.

3. Use Premium Keyword Research Tools

Premium keyword research tools play a crucial role in shaping your SEO content strategy. They can help you identify and select the right keywords that align with your content goals. These tools can also provide data on keywords your competitors are ranking and creating content around, giving you a competitive edge.

Here are some keyword research tools to consider:

1. Semrush
2. Ahrefs
3. Moz
4. Ubersuggest
5. KWFinder

4. Use Different Categories of Keywords

Don’t limit your keyword strategy to generic keywords with high search volume. To maximize your reach and target users at different stages of buying, include informational and long-term keywords in your approach.

Informational keywords attract more organic traffic because you provide information to users without directly promoting your product or services. Instead, you cater to the needs of potential customers who are searching for relevant information related to your industry or niche.

Long-tail keywords focus on users at the bottom of the sales funnel, indicating strong purchase intent. By incorporating long-tail keywords, you capture the attention of users ready to make a buying decision.

7. Write SEO-Optimized Content

Utilizing the principles of SEO when writing your SaaS content can greatly improve visibility, enhance user experience, and ultimately drive more traffic to your site.

Where do you start? Here are 5 easy steps for optimizing your content:

1. Understand Your Audience: Get to know your target audience. What are their interests? What problems are they trying to solve? Tailor your content to address their needs, which will improve your SEO and engage your readers.
2. Implement On-Page SEO: It’s time to put your keywords to work! Use them strategically in your headers, meta tags, and throughout your content. This helps search engines understand your content’s relevance.
3. Deliver Value: Prioritize quality over quantity. Search engines reward quality content that resonates with users, as evidenced by parameters like dwell time and bounce rate.
4. Use Internal and External Links: Incorporate both internal and external high-quality links in your content. This makes your content more valuable to your audience while also improving your SEO.
5. Keep Your Content Up to Date: SEO is an ongoing process. Ensure you regularly update your content to make sure it’s current. Fresh content signals to search engines that your website remains active and valuable to users.

Employ tools like Outranking for researching content pieces, editing, and optimizing the content for better on-page SEO scores. Additionally, Outranking provides an AI-assisted writing tool, deep SERP analysis to provide you with the best on-page metrics to help you rank on the top page of search engines!

Remember, good SEO is about providing a great experience for your users and proving your content’s value to search engines. ☝️

8. Follow Google’s E-E-A-T Guidelines

In 2022, Google introduced its E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness) Guidelines, emphasizing the importance of content that demonstrates these principles consistently.

For your SaaS agency, building topical authority and partnering with content creators with expertise and first-hand experience in their respective fields is necessary. By adhering to these guidelines, your website will gain visibility, trust, and organic traffic over time.

9. Craft Power Posts

Power posts are content pieces designed to attract backlinks, social traffic, and organic traffic. Comprehensive and informative, these posts significantly enhance search engine rankings and user engagement. This post from Backlinko is a great example of a power post.

Here are actionable tips on crafting powerful blog posts:

1. Choose the Right Keywords: Optimize your content with relevant keywords. This involves not only comprised of primary keywords and latent semantic indexing (LSI) keywords to demonstrate comprehensiveness to search engines.
2. Publish Comprehensive Content: Thoroughly cover the topic, providing detailed insights and actionable tips. This increases the likelihood of your content being seen as a trusted resource.
3. Optimize for Click Through Rate (CTR): Craft an enticing meta description and compelling title tags to improve the CTR of your content. The higher this rate, the more likely Google is to view your page as useful and reward it with higher rankings.
4. Use Internal Linking: Create an internal linking strategy to stay competitive in search engine rankings. Internal links can help search engine bots understand your website structure better and rank your website accordingly.
5. Promote on Social Media: After publishing your power post, promote it on different social media platforms to reach a wider audience and gain more backlinks.
6. Regularly Update Your Posts: Keep your content fresh and up-to-date. Google favors frequently updated content for relevance.
7. Implement Schema Markup: Implement schema markup to help search engines understand your content better, leading to better SERP appearances.

Note: While creating power posts can enhance your backlinks, consistently crafting high-quality content that serves user needs is the key ingredient to a successful SaaS SEO strategy.

10. Optimize Your Media

Media optimization improves the visibility of your SaaS website on search engines. To make the most of your multimedia content, follow these 12 best practices:

1. Create unique, high-quality videos and images related to your SaaS business. Search engines prioritize fresh and unique content, which can boost your rankings.
2. Embed video content on your website. This can increase your site’s dwell time and engagement rates.
3. Include relevant keywords in your video and image file names, descriptions, and tags. This provides more information about the content, aiding in better categorization and indexing.
4. Utilize video transcripts or captions to further boost SEO. Search engines can crawl and understand the content more accurately.
5. Compress your media files. Large files can slow down your page load speed, a factor that Google considers in its ranking algorithm.
6. Include alt text for all your images. Alt text helps search engines understand what the image is about, improving your on-page SEO.
7. Leverage tools that help in image and video optimizations, like Google’s Web Designer for creating interactive HTML5 designs and advertisements, and platforms like YouTube or Vimeo for video hosting and optimization.
8. Add social sharing buttons for your media to increase your content’s visibility and drive more traffic to your website. These are positive signals of user engagement for search engines.
9. Implement structured data for rich snippets on your video and images to enhance your visibility in search engine result pages (SERPs), leading to higher click-through rates.
10. Use high-quality visuals. Low-quality visuals can negatively impact your user experience, a ranking factor that influences Google’s algorithm.
11. Continuously monitor the performance of your media files using tools like Google Analytics. Analyze user interaction and make necessary adjustments for better optimization.
12. Optimize for mobile users! Ensure that your media files are displayed correctly and quickly on all devices.

11. Acquire High-Quality Links

Strategically securing high-quality links for your SaaS agency can make a significant difference in your ranking on search engines. You can follow these tried and tested tactics to land high-authority backlinks for your agency:

1. Create Useful Free Tools

One innovative way to earn authoritative backlinks is by creating useful free tools that other businesses find valuable enough to link back to. This has proven particularly successful in the SaaS industry where demand for tech solutions thrives. For instance, HubSpot has created various free tools like Website Grader and they have amassed thousands of backlinks as various businesses link to these tools for their useful functionality.

2. Guest Posting

Reach out to other websites within the SaaS industry for guest posting opportunities. Ensure that the websites you outreach to have a substantial following and domain authority. Guest posts can provide a chance to weave in your links naturally and share your expertise with a new audience.

3. Publish Unique Data 

A proficient approach to earning backlinks is by conducting in-house research or creating case studies that provide unique data findings. This information becomes highly valuable to other industry players that may likely link back to your original data source.

4. Broken Link Building

Identify relevant websites in your industry that have broken or dead outbound links. Reach out to them, informing them of the issue, and suggest similar, high-quality resources as alternatives. This method can result in valuable backlinks, especially if your content is superior to what was initially linked.

12. Reduce Your Website’s Downtime

Website downtime is the period of time when a website is inaccessible to its users, which can occur due to server problems, technical glitches, or even scheduled maintenance. Downtime can have detrimental effects on a SaaS company, causing disruptions to customers, potential revenue loss, and damage to your reputation.

These solutions to common website delays can help reduce your website downtime:

Solutions to Reduce Downtime	The Difference
Scheduled Maintenance	Scheduling downtime at hours when user activity is relatively low can help minimize service disruptions.
Use of CDN (Content Delivery Network)	A CDN stores copies of your site on different servers worldwide,ensuring faster delivery and reduced downtime.
Regular Updates and Patches	Keeping software and hardware updated and applying patches timely can prevent unexpected website crashes.
Load Testing	Regular load testing helps identify potential system failures by assessing how the system performs under a significant load.
Monitoring and Alerting Systems	Implementing automated monitoring and alerting systems can provide real-time notifications of any issues that could prompt downtime, allowing for immediate intervention.
Backup Systems	Regular, automated backups and the ability to quickly restore systems can prevent extended periods of downtime occurring as a result of system failures or other incidents.
Redundant Systems	Deploying redundant systems can reduce single points of failure. If one system fails, another can take over maintaining consistency in operational functions.
Quality Web Hosting	Choosing a quality web host that guarantees minimal downtime and provides excellent server maintenance can drastically reduce the incidence of unexpected outages.

Outranking Can Help With Your SaaS Roadmap

Managing SaaS SEO is complex and challenging, but with the right steps and patience, success is achievable. Ultimately, epic content is crucial because, after all, “content is king”. Tools like Outranking have your SaaS SEO interests at heart, allowing you to customize your recipe for content success. Sign up for Outranking today!