There’s no way to get around it; marketing a SaaS business is very difficult. This is because the software market is very saturated with subscription-based software solutions who rely on recurring revenue instead of one-time software license purchases. Therefore, it is important that a nascent SaaS company does everything in its power to defend itself against its competitors and gain market share in their SaaS niche.
A proven way to do this is to dive into the world of SEO, which is not as intimidating as it initially seems. Unlike other marketing strategies such as social media marketing, SEO allows you to lay out the foundation of your website to be crawled and assessed by search engines (mainly Google) and does not rely on constantly having to run paid ads or hire an expensive sales team to reach potential customers on LinkedIn. Instead, SEO is a proactive strategy that anticipates what people are looking for online and makes sure that you are at the forefront of that process. With that in mind, here are three SEO SaaS tips you’ll need to follow in order to use this marketing channel to increase your website traffic and increase conversions to either free trials or paid subscribers.
1. Find the Right Long Tail Keywords
Keyword research is a critical and necessary part of any SEO effort. However, it is especially important for SaaS companies, as potential users seeking answers to specific topics are often looking for solutions to problems rather than a software solution that can specifically benefit them. To ensure you yourself benefit from this trend, you’ll need to hone in your keyword research and make sure that it includes both long tail information requests and more generalized software related keywords. These software keywords should include comparisons to competitors as well as software integration related keywords.
2. Create contextual content
Good content is extremely important to a good SEO strategy, and SaaS companies can do well by highlighting their software services through content. You’ll also need to create content that highlights your potential client’s vulnerabilities or pain points so that they can see the value they can get from your software. This content that you create as a part of your SEO SaaS strategy should be utilizing long tail keywords that you have discovered so that it will rank properly on Google and other search engines.
If this content is not optimized toward these keywords then it will be very difficult to get it to the right audience in search engines. Your competitors may be doing this more effectively than you are, so be sure to look at their rankings and see what content is performing well for them. You’ll then want to use this competitive analysis to repurpose and create the best and most relevant content for your software niche.
3. Increase Your Content Rankings with Links
An essential, but often overlooked part of SEO, is link building. Link building is a very important signal that Google weighs when analyzing the relevance and authority of a website to target keywords. When working on SEO for your SaaS business, you’ll need need to make sure that you are linking to the keyword optimized content that you have created. This means that you’ll either need to reach out to other websites yourself to see if they’ll link to you, or if you are struggling with this, you can outsourced your link building efforts to an SEO agency specializing in SaaS business.
