Search engine optimization, or SEO, is one of the least understood marketing channels. Unlike paid social or paid Google ads, creating an SEO strategy involves making changes to your own website and nudging Google along to recognize these questions. For SaaS companies, who are adept at creating their own software platforms, it is preferable to use their own platform to get leads as opposed to borrowing or renting others. In this sense, invest in SEO can be likened to buying your own plot of land and building your own house as opposed to renting an existing one. While this investment will take time, a SaaS SEO agency owns all of the changes that are made to their own website and any ranking gains that come along with it.
Moreover, if you look at all the best SaaS SEO agency strategies, they bring specialized skills and knowledge to the table. They are well-versed in the intricacies of search engine optimization, enabling them to develop targeted strategies tailored to your business goals. Their experience in the B2B industry equips them with a deep understanding of the unique challenges and opportunities you may encounter.
However, a SaaS company needs to invest in an SEO SaaS strategy in order to implement SEO effectively on their website. They need to take a holistic look at what their competitors are doing, create a keyword research strategy, a content strategy, and an offsite strategy to gain backlinks to relevant website pages. They then need to implement these and generate effective SEO content and consistent backlinks to this content in order to rank.
This may sound like it is possible to do on your own, but SaaS companies should hire a specialized agency or freelancer to help them with their SaaS SEO efforts. After all, a SaaS companies should be great at building and selling subscription-based software solutions, but may be too close to the software to know how people could potentially be searching for it.
When creating a SaaS keyword research strategy, you’ll want to prioritize keywords in several categories: product type, solutions, features, industries and clients, integrations, and competitor alternatives. The great thing about doing SEO for SaaS companies is that searchers tend to know what they are looking for, they just want to use Google to find it. Ranking well on Google for relevant keywords will give potential subscribers to your software solutions a large degree of trust. In fact, the majority of searchers trust the information they get from Google way more than from social media sites such as Facebook or Twitter.
While any SaaS company should not just invest in one marketing channel, investing in optimizing a SaaS website for search has innumerable benefits. Not only will it help companies gain warm leads who are already actively searching for alternatives to competitors and software solutions to help them solve their problems, it will also help build customer trust. Because Google is, theoretically, based on relevance of information and site authority, ranking for some keywords will help a SaaS website rank for others.
Although the initial investment in an SEO SaaS strategy is high, it will pay off for years to come. This investment will help SaaS companies take their marketing efforts to the next level and passively get in front of customers who may have considered a competitor – or not even considered a SaaS solution at all. For all the reasons stated, a SaaS company would be mistaken to not at least optimize their website for SEO and fix their website’s technical problems, as this can only help the user and help build trust in their SaaS offerings.
