Operating in the SaaS industry can be a scary proposition for many companies. And investing in an SEO campaign can be even scarier, especially if you don’t know who you can trust.
How can you be sure your SaaS business is structured in the best way possible? What is the effective SEO strategy to follow? Which strategies work best for SaaS businesses?
This guide will present our proven SEO system, developed over many years of working with SaaS companies.
Table of Contents
An Overview of the SaaS SEO Framework
A SaaS SEO framework is best understood by examining the individual components of a strategy. The various pieces of a successful SaaS SEO program work together to create a method for measuring and driving powerful, scalable growth that leads to increased revenue.
We will outline the strategies and best practices for optimizing SaaS websites for search engines throughout this guide. If there are any gaps or items you’re unable to perform yourself, you can always reach out to Ahbiv Digital Agency for assistance with implementing SEO strategies on your website.
To explain what SEO is and how it applies to SaaS (Software as a Service) companies, we must define two concepts:
- SaaS company business model
- A professional and Proven SEO framework
The Business Model for Saas
SaaS is a business model in which a company offers software via the internet, including subscription fees, rather than selling its software. SaaS companies are unique from other business models because they offer a product that is not tangible or has limited use.
The software as a service (SaaS) model is characterized by services provided over the web and accessible through standard web browsers. It is a scalable, cost-effective business model that allows businesses to get more for less. You can add features to create new markets and categories, and this gives SaaS companies a unique opportunity to compete in the organic search space with SEO.
Proven SaaS-Based SEO Framework
SEO can be confusing for many companies, but we’ve developed a framework that helps SaaS companies of all sizes. We will show you how your business can benefit from SEO through this framework.
Saas SEO Framework Structure
Let’s check what is needed for a good Saas SEO framework.
Right Keyword Search
Keyword research involves determining what keywords consumers use to find SaaS products or your company’s solutions. Understanding searcher intent can be the most important aspect of keyword research and building a strategy.
When conducting keyword research, Ahbiv Digital Agency typically takes a holistic approach to analyze the term’s popularity and its reasons. It can also help keep in mind what a potential customer is likely looking for if your company offers a product or service in a competitive industry.
We will be focusing on upper, middle, and bottom-funnel keywords mostly. where the top funnel explains about a searcher looking to solve a problem performing a search, often targeting awareness keywords which are called your “upper funnel” keywords.
Middle funnel keywords are when a search is performed by a customer to view products, services, or brands that may help solve their problem.
Bottom funnel keywords are those that searchers use during the final stages of their purchase decision, just before they actually buy the products.
After building a keyword list and pulling research data from several tools, we compile our results into a framework. As we build our framework with a targeted keyword list in mind, Our goal is to use current and future keyword research to continuously improve upon the foundation we’ve built.
Technical Structure
Technical Structure is important because it helps ensure that the foundation of your site is solid, thus allowing you to focus on creating quality content assets. For example, if your technical Structure is right then your website gets crawled and indexed by search engines so you can drive more traffic to your website.
We first analyze your site and create a technical audit. We can see any SEO issues that need to be fixed. We then prioritize what needs to be done based on the severity of the issue and work from there.
We prioritize repairs that meet several criteria: the severity of their impact and the time it will take to make them. If you’re a mature SaaS company, you probably have a team of people who manage different parts of your company’s website, including a team of developers who keep it running smoothly. They can give you a timeline for fixing these changes once they know their difficulty.
We monitor your site’s technical Structure to ensure that pages are not accidentally removed or relocated. If a page is moved or broken, we will fix the issue promptly.
Content Strategy
After covering the technical components of SEO, we turn our attention to more creative and people-oriented strategies. It is also where we begin to take action that has the greatest impact on search engine optimization. Unless your site still has technical problems to address. Before you set out content strategies for your website, you must identify your target audience and their intent when searching for keywords. The keywords they use and relevant content are available to satisfy their needs.
To build a content strategy, one should evaluate a website for its existing Structure and the identified target keywords. Additional web pages may need to be created to address keywords that do not have corresponding content. The content should then be organized and structured to produce relevant, high-quality hierarchical structures.
Creating a content strategy often entails looking beyond the pages already on your site and the pages that need to be created to increase user engagement. It would be best to consider the longer-term production cycle of content related to targeted longtail topics, which boosts your authority in your industry.
Over time, as you continue to publish content on your site, you can expect it to receive higher rankings in the search engines. Producing and releasing content without target keywords can result in what many content marketers refer to as “content drift.”
Because content planning and creation is such a complex process, We’ll craft a content production strategy based on relevant data and trends in your target market. We’ll also determine what content needs to be produced and added to your site.
Offpage Strategy
Next, we develop an offsite strategy to determine which type of links are needed for your site to rank. We consider the pages on your site that we want to link to, the sites from which we will get links, and how authoritative these sites need to be to achieve your desired ranking.
Link building is a way to create strong, reputable links that help a website’s credibility and search engine ranking. A credible link profile shows Google and potential site visitors that the owner’s site is an authority in a given industry.
When you build links, your company isn’t just investing in a marketing campaign that will come and go quickly. Instead, links add value to the sites they direct visitors to over time. Google often looks on sites that have had their links around for several years. It is because it indicates to Google that the site receiving the links is valuable.
A solid link profile is difficult to build but pays big dividends. It can help you rank well for your target keywords and hold those rankings over time. Likewise, a targeted link profile can be a long-term asset to your SEO efforts.
A link-building and content production strategy will eventually drive your desired results.
SaaS SEO Ranking Factors
The SaaS business model can be understood in just a few sentences, while the concept of SEO is more complex. Many factors can impact the way any given site ranks on Google, so it’s important to have at least some understanding of the industry to see results.
Some of the most important factors that influence how your website ranks on Google are:
User Engagement Metrics
Your site’s engagement often depends on how visitors find your content and how long they stay on your site. Google considers time spent on a site, clicks, and interactions with your content, and the pages visitors view as the most important engagement metrics.
The higher the engagement on your website, the better the experience for users, who are more likely to click on your site and view your ads. Any content you publish must be easy to find and well written, so Google benefits by receiving more traffic and ad revenue. Recently, Google has started to give ranking preference to sites with high user engagement metrics.
Link Metrics
SEO professionals for years have used link metrics as one method to increase rankings. These strategies include
- Linking your site to another domain
- linking to internal pages on your site
- Link relevancy, pointing choice of anchor text to your site
- Analyzing the authority of both the domain and the page you are linking
- Gaining knowledge of the domain authority of your site and the various pages on it
When building links to a website, it is important to distinguish between followed and no-follow links. Placement of the link on the source site is also an important consideration. You can use Several other metrics to gauge the success of a link-building effort, but these are the most critical.
Available Onsite Content
You can break Ranking factors into broad categories, but some key factors are also. These might include:
- The target keyword in a title tag
- How your site’s header navigation is optimized for search engines
- The positioning of keywords in page headers and introductory paragraphs can help search engines index the content effectively.
- How you use search terms to target content
- Content-Length
- How to add and edit cross-links
- Coverage around the topic and the use of keywords
- Interactive content such as tiles or cards that link to other features or resources
Of course, the content on your site is a key factor in SEO. Providing helpful information about your product or industry will encourage traffic from other channels. Which can, in turn, establish your site as an authority and lead to more return visitors and shares.
Usability and Structure
The crawling and indexing of your site by search engines such as Google can be affected by several factors. Including the number of pages on your site and how quickly those pages load. Faster-loading pages usually encourage user engagement, which can impact the speed at which your site appears in search results.
Google also evaluates your site’s link structure and the number of HTTP errors like 404 and 500 server-side errors. These are discovered during the crawling process and when Google’s servers access your site’s robots.txt, sitemap.xml file, or any Web page configuration. Such as how it handles CSS, JavaScript files, query strings, etc. These items affect user engagement, search engine rankings, and traffic. A well-built site depends on a strong foundation of these technical features.
Conclusion
This framework should provide a thorough understanding of how the various segments of SEO work together to influence your site’s ranking on Google. These strategies do not apply to other business models and should only be applied to SaaS companies.
For more details, contact Ahbiv digital Agency, as we are here to provide you with more information.