B2B SaaS SEO - A To-the-point Guide

For many B2B SaaS businesses, the game is of numbers and valuation. They operate in a data-driven environment where metrics and numbers are essential for attracting investors, demonstrating growth potential, and ultimately becoming unicorns faster.

Is that you, too?

In the race to become a unicorn faster, you start with heavy investments in performance marketing. But now, when you realize that the customer acquisition costs (CAC) are too high, SEO becomes inevitable.

So here I am to help you with a SaaS SEO strategy that can help you immediately start with your team or agency.

Step 1: Analyze direct and indirect competitors.

Considering that you know your product, business, and market in detail, the first thing you need to do to set your SEO project's foundation is to conduct competitor analysis.?

Direct competitors are the ones who offer exactly the same product features as yours, and indirect competitors are the ones who are either the market leaders of your industry or the ones who offer only a few features similar to yours.

Thoroughly research the features and benefits of all the relative products in the market to get a detailed bird-eye view of the industry. Carefully consider your competitors' digital footprint, strategies, strengths, and vulnerabilities to plan your marketing actions.

With this analysis, you’ll be able to know how you can create your SEO and content strategy that would work wonders for you.

Note: You can use tools like Semrush , Similarweb , SpyFu , and BuzzSumo to conduct effective competitor analysis.?

Step 2: Conduct audience research

The next thing you can do once you have got your hands on competitors is audience research. Get to the nerve of your target audience by discovering their pain points, challenges, interests, and solutions they seek. Additionally, tap into their demographics like where and what they work, their buying capacity, and what are the main problems they are trying to resolve.?

Also, always remember there can be two audiences of a business to be targeted:

Here’s a quick overview of how you can define your audience personas:?

Make a copy of this Google Sheet that will help you start to create your customer personas before you jump onto defining their buying journey.

Step 3: Document Buyers’ Journey

While working with B2B SaaS businesses since Missive’s inception, we have seen one thing set as the base: documentation of buyers’ journey.?

Because that’s what defines how and when the user will sign up for a free trial and eventually become a paid subscriber.?

Here is a sample customer journey for a B2B product, which is yet to turn into a SaaS model but is almost similar:?

So, if you’re new to the SaaS journey, never underestimate the power of documenting your buyers’ journey.?

By understanding the stages of the buyers' journey and creating unique content for each stage, you can increase the chances of better visibility and outperform your competitors. Guide your buyers through various funnel stages to increase conversion rates with effective lead-generation strategies .?

Once documented, it becomes easy for the entire marketing team to be on the same page for the target audience, why they would trust your product, and when they will buy.

Step 4: Perform Keyword Clustering

Because this is not a blog covering SaaS SEO challenges or mistakes, I wouldn’t go deep into saying keywords are not what you feel are right for your product; it’s about what your target audience searches for.

I don’t want to repeat how you should be going behind identifying the seed keywords and using the permutation and combination of your product and their features to research and analyze the right and relevant keywords.

But, the basic thing that can be done is for all of those identified keywords, execute the keyword clustering to determine the best place to group semantic keywords logically.?

We internally use Keyword Insights for keyword clustering and identifying the intent behind the keywords to bifurcate between money and blog keywords.

Step 5: Build a Comprehensive Content Strategy

Being too much into content-driven SEO, we believe content is the base for SEO as it reflects how much you value your customers and help them with your content.

Also, B2B SaaS is one such industry where content requirements are heavy in terms of

• Product knowledge base
• Video Gallery
• Educational blogs
• Influential content
• Commercial pages
• Lead magnets
• Product reviews
• User-generated content
• Guest blogs
• And more

So what you need to do is use those keyword clusters and start with the following things:

1. Identify the top topical clusters and their subtopics
2. Start aiming the subtopics with the lesser keyword difficulty but highly necessary for the target audience.
3. Make sure each topic you finalize should be planned based on the customer journey stages.
4. Define the readers’ brief and other details as we add for our content writers in one of the comprehensive content calendars.?

Make a copy of Missive Digital’s Content Calendar .

Such clusters boost your B2B SaaS project's visibility, clicks, and conversion rates while establishing you as an authority in your niche.

Step 5: Set up a Content Optimization process

Did you attend any of my talks on optimizing for featured snippets? I did one for WhiteSpark Local Search Summit and another for Semrush . I even wrote a detailed post on it in Search Engine Journal.

If not, let me tell you that creating content is just 20% of the task done. The remaining 80% is all about optimizing it until it builds value for your audience.

So, you can use our content optimization template by making a copy of the same and optimizing every important element of your content.

Ensure you strategically incorporate targeted keywords into content, meta titles, meta tags, and meta descriptions. Optimize existing content to enhance its relevance and value. You can refer to Google’s SEO guidelines to follow the best best practices.

Make sure every piece of your content is adding value to your audience.

Also, once you’re done with optimizing, make sure you monitor the performance for the same using the content optimization tracker we use internally.

When you have everything in place, you can get amazing results, even with just your on-page SEO efforts.?

Step 6: Build powerful backlinks

Despite Google saying link building is not among the top 3 ranking factors , we cannot ignore the importance it brings to building the brand’s authority in Organic Search.

Even though it may look very easy and straightforward, link-building and PR strategies take more time and effort than ever! While reaching out to bloggers and media houses, have an approach of collaboration rather than self-promotion to add an authoritative value. Additionally, ensure you have an appropriate ratio of do-follow and no-follow links to align with SEO’s best practices. Analyzing the backlinks of your competitor's websites, you can strategize your link-building and PR strategies accordingly.

While filtering the sites for collaboration, ensure they are popular in your industry and have higher domain authority (DA) with good traffic.?

When you build your links on the right websites and platforms, you double the chances of your online visibility. However, one thing you need to remember while executing a building strategy is following white hat backlink practices.

Step 7: Continue Optimizing the Website for Better UX

While planning your SaaS SEO strategy, don't overlook the critical aspect of technical SEO. To get the maximum results for your SEO efforts, ensure your website loads in less than 5 seconds , your pages are responsive on all devices, and you have well-designed UI/UX.?

Moreover, address gaps in your sitemaps, crawling/indexing, URL structures, redirects, and schema markups to give all the green signals to Google. You can make a Google sheet, as shown below, to list the problems your client’s site has and solve them all. Additionally, audit the site for technical SEO every month to ensure a smooth process across the project time period.?

Step 8: Distribute Content Effectively

We can’t emphasize enough when it comes to content marketing in 2023 . Many people think content marketing is just about blogs and textual content, but that’s not the full picture. It also includes visual and audio content like infographics, YouTube videos, and podcasts, and repurposing all the content in multiple formats to make the most of it. In my conversations with SaaS founders, I’ve discovered that content marketing is where they struggle the most. The best way to overcome content marketing challenges is by being creative, thinking out of the box, and interacting with your target audience in an interesting and fun way.?

Starting from your blog structure to the quality of your content and the unique perspective you bring to the table, always give your 100% to stand out from the crowd.?

Step 9: Distribute Even on Social Media and Email

I could have easily covered social media and email content distribution in the above point. Still, we have seen that the content created for SEO is hardly promoted on social media by B2B SaaS companies.

Why?

Because that’s the channel they only focus on for lead generation, but forget that if you keep on sales-focused messaging and no education or entertainment on these marketing channels, it would be difficult to sustain the results, and then you would wonder why performance is not consistent.

If you’ve created content for SEO but don’t feel like sharing it on social media and email channels, it means they were just created for the sake of creating and getting in front of Google.

Such content would never perform anyway because even Gary Illyes recommended using social media promotions to speed up the content indexing process.

Ensure you utilize all the channels to support each other, and that brings me to my next but last point.?

Step 10: Opt for Omnichannel Marketing

The key to your B2B SaaS SEO project success lies in omnichannel marketing.?

I’ve been telling this on social media, and my topic at BrightonSEO 2022 was Remarketing SEO , which was also about the same.

Also, at the Agency Growth Summit by SE Ranking , I recommended agencies to start recommending omnichannel marketing instead of just pitching individual services.

Cover as many online and offline touchpoints for your customers to find you easily and facilitate them with the best experiences before they meet your sales team to improve the conversion rates. With the power of omnichannel marketing, you enhance SEO efforts and create lasting customer relationships that drive sustainable growth.

Step 11: Analyze & Optimize Your Strategy

As you now have discovered all the foundations of the SaaS SEO strategy, you can’t overlook the importance of analyzing and optimizing your strategy accordingly.?

Let’s say if the keywords you have targeted keywords are not getting you the results or you have gathered more insights about your target audience, you can modify and level up your SaaS SEO strategy accordingly. Track the performance of your keywords, content, outreach efforts, email marketing, and social media promotions.

One super important thing you need to keep in mind is SEO is an evolving field, and you need to constantly look for the things that will get you better results. What is working today may not work tomorrow, so be prepared to adapt to the latest trends and shifts in the market.?

B2B SaaS SEO Takes Time; Have Faith, and Keep on Going

SEO is a channel that maximizes ROI in the long run, just like mutual funds or SIP.?

So, the crucial thing you need to know while doing SEO for B2B SaaS is to have patience and not expect great results overnight. Though the B2B SaaS industry is growing fast, there’s increasing competition in the market, and customers may take their own sweet time to make the decisions.

To decide if your strategies are working or not, give a 2 to 3-month window; if you still aren’t struggling with achieving your goals, revamp your strategies.

Always remember - Any marketing, including SEO, is about experimenting based on past experience and learning.

Just like planning and deploying MVP fast and carefully is important for any product's success, implementing the SEO strategies fast and carefully will define what works and what doesn't.