The Ultimate B2B SaaS SEO Guide

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I’m sharing a walkthrough so your SaaS (Software as a Service) company can drive serious revenue with organic search AKA SEO and make it a sustainable source of lead & demo requests for your team.

Common problems I see with SaaS companies

  • Many SaaS companies go hard on ads and outbound sales and ignore organic SEO
  • Meaning a huge chunk of demand and opportunity in the market from Google is MISSED
  • SaaS websites are often thin on content with just a few pages
  • SaaS companies don’t always see the value in SEO
  • They are often under pressure from investors to hit revenue targets fast

Why Invest In SEO?

Create an evergreen ecosystem of organic content that can rank on Google from now and for years to come attracting inbound leads while you sleep.

Building a solid SEO strategy puts multiple lines in the water on Google to build an organic inbound engine to come up top whenever your prospects want to learn about your industry or speak to sales.

Plus, you can reduce your ad spend over time as your organic traffic and inbound leads increase.

What You’ll Need Before Investing In SEO?

A solid website designed to attract, build trust with, qualify and convert ideal clients. That works seamlessly on mobile and PC. It needs a design that engages prospects along with messaging that resonates with their problems and key goals.

Not sure if SEO is a good fit?

Unless you are in a brand new category/sector or extremely niche market no one knows exists…then SEO is gonna be worth your time as a SaaS company.

SEO needs to be looked at as an investment into your brand, website and organic revenue growth.

Let’s get stuck into it.

Keyword Research

Out with the old skool

It’s time to ditch traditional keyword research where we only rely on software and tools.

Your ideal clients and prospects are the best source of rocket fuel for the right search terms to target and content to create.

From them you’ll learn the most common questions, objections and problems that they have.

Plus you can know the actual words they use to describe your solution. Rather than guessing.

Get together with your sales team and make a list of all the questions, problems and objections regularly brought up.

And listen to sales calls using tools like Gong or similar to find the hidden gems your customers regularly want answers to.

More traditional keyword research

And then, once you’ve got your detailed list created, you can do traditional keyword research too (this list will come in useful for long-tail keyword research / content for pages along with FAQs for pages that your prospects are actually searching for).

Start with the high intent searches related to your offer - e.g. if you provide software to help sales team these might be keywords like: ‘proposal software’, ‘sales recording tools’, ‘buyer enablement software’ etc.

There’s money in the long tail. So the more specific to the offer and industry you want to attract inbound from, the better.

Rather then going after a hugely competitive and generic term like ‘CRM’ you could go specific to your key target industry e.g. ‘CRM software for accounting’

Long tail keywords can rank faster and also provide better quality leads from your ideal target markets.

Common tools used for SEO keyword research: Semrush, Ahrefs, Google keyword planner, Ubersuggest.

Other ideas for keyword research:

  • Problem based searches
  • Comparison searches ‘[your brand name] v [competitor]’
  • Question searches - ‘how to do X?’
  • Cover each stage of the sales funnel - learning / evaluating / searching for a solution
  • Go for zero traffic searches - these are services you provide and know prospects ask for them but the software tools say they have 0 traffic. This is because tools often work off historical data.

On-Page SEO

This is everything you do on your website to benefit your organic rankings.

The two main elements of on-page SEO are the technical build of your site and the content that makes up your pages.

Technical SEO

This typically starts with an audit of your website. Sorting things like:

  • Page speed (should ideally be 2 secs or less)
  • Setting up key data tools:
    • SEO tools
    • Google analytics - tracking all traffic sources, organic traffic, conversions etc
    • Google My Business
    • Google Search Console
  • Full competitive analysis - Thoroughly research the market and identify benchmarks to target and surpass.
  • Changes to meta-data across the website (title tags, meta descriptions) across the site on core SEO pages
  • Building out SEO landing pages for key search terms
  • Work on an internal linking strategy
  • Rich snippet/Schema implementation
  • Other on-page and technical fixes, e.g. Keyword Cannibalisation (when several pages rank for the same keyword and you may want one page to rank rather than the other)
  • Amendments to image file names, alt text, and title attributes across the site on core SEO landing pages

Website Content

So from a SaaS point of view you want to build a page for every feature / target market / use case that your prospects customers could be searching for.

The best way to do this is to start with the high buying intent search terms you identified during keyword research.

Then build out a page for each key offering that matches the search intent.

Here’s a simple way to build pages on your site that rank…

Review the top 3 organic results for your chosen search terms.

Step 1:

Build your service, product page or article page for buyers.

This means you've gotta know your ideal clients cares, problems, objections and goals.

And bare in mind Google's update E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authority, Trust).

For example on a detailed service/solution page we tend to go:

  • Overview of the offering
  • Common problems it fixes
  • Why you need it
  • Processes + video guide
  • How to's
  • Examples/case studies
  • Pricing
  • FAQs

Weaving in relevant social proof (testimonials, videos, reviews). And descriptive CTAs for visitors to take the next step.

Step 2:

Craft a solid design for mobile and PC view.

Build out technical SEO points (meta title + description, image tags, heading tags, add a couple relevant internal links in page etc).

Step 3:

Repeat for all your money search terms and offerings.

At Web Choice we’ve followed this framework to outrank some huge SaaS companies like Salesforce and Webflow.

Once you have covered all the high intent search terms for target clients/sectors wanting your solution…move onto blog articles answering all your clients main problems and questions around key offers.

Again your prospects/customers are the best source of knowledge to fuel your articles content. Because you know the demand is their if they are often raised in conversation.

Off-Page SEO

So this is everything you do off of your website.

Off-page SEO is especially important for when you want to get competitive and more generic keywords ranking.

One of the best ways to do this is building backlinks.

Google see’s backlinks as a trust building factor for your site.

They can build up your website's domain authority and help get those hard to rank pages up in the organic search results on Google.

A few ways to build backlinks:

Free

  • Guest on industry relevant podcasts - ask for a link back to your site after the make the episode and article page for the episode live.
  • Partner with complimentary companies and create content together on each others blogs and build reciprocal links
  • Help A Reporter Out (HARO) - on this platform you can submit articles for requested topics, if your article is chosen you can earn solid links from news/reporting sites
  • Guest article sites
  • Create content that ranks so well and is so helpful others link to it

Paid

  • Purchase links for reputable editorial sites (yes this happens)
  • Use a company like Web Choice to manage your B2B SEO and link building so you can focus on growing your business and closing the organic leads SEO brings in

Just be wary of cheap link building offering the world for next to no money. As these might often get your site penalised and impact your rankings negatively.

Another off-page SEO activity is to get your website listed on directories/citations that are relevant to your industry and give a link back to your site.

Final thoughts

If you are in a sector that isn’t brand new and people are aware of your solution / the problem you fix then when done right, SEO is a goldmine for scaling your organic traffic and inbound without having to rely on paid ads.

Plus it will build up your brand reputation and compliment other efforts e.g. demand generation, outbound sales etc. if prospects keep seeing your company top of organic search.

Ready to get started? Book a call with our team and see if we can help your company.

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