SaaS SEO Guide from Our SEO Agency

Across the board, the most successful SEO companies can attribute their online digital marketing success to one main tool: SaaS SEO. SEO stands for search engine optimization. When you intentionally practice SaaS SEO, your SaaS company can increase both its organic online visibility and its leads and attract paying customers.

As a SaaS SEO agency, we believe that every software as a service company provides the resources needed for their customers to thrive. We also operate under the belief that no matter how big or small your SaaS company is, you deserve a personalized SEO strategy from a trained SaaS SEO expert that targets your specific needs.

We also understand that SaaS SEO is a large endeavor and choosing to invest in SEO for your company with a SaaS SEO agency is a big decision. In this SaaS SEO guide, we will cover the reasons why SEO is an important investment, particularly for you as a SaaS company. We will also review SaaS SEO tools, SaaS SEO agency services, and other SaaS SEO tips to help your business. Let’s get started!

A SaaS SEO Guide From Our SEO Agency

Metric Marketing is a SaaS SEO agency, meaning we specialize in SaaS technical SEO specifically for software-as-a-service companies. Whether you are B2C or B2B, we can be your SaaS SEO consultant for all of your SEO needs.

Because SaaS is one of our industry specializations, we know the constraints and challenges specific to SaaS digital marketing. Based on our knowledge, we help our clients overcome roadblocks that are typical for SaaS SEO practices.

Search engine optimization is the practice of increasing your online presence and authority by adhering to search engine standards. The higher your SEO is, the more likely you are to increase your rank on a SERP (search engine results page).

There are a minimal number of spots on the first page of Google, a few of which are taken up by advertisements. In order to get to the top of the list, you need to increase your SEO and therefore increase your organic search visibility. This, of course, takes a lot of time, research, practice, and patience.

Think of SEO as a marathon: You must train, so that, over time, you can prepare for the long haul. Using keyword research, content creation, and consistent SEO best practices adjusted through data analyzation, you will be able to increase your SEO and show your audience that your software company is the right one for them.

A warning from a SaaS SEO agency: Be wary of SEO agencies that promise quick results. Increasing your SEO takes time. It doesn’t happen overnight. Quick results usually mean practices that are unethical and which can result in online penalties. Put your trust in an ethical SaaS SEO company to get long-lasting results you can rely on.

Why You Should Invest in SEO for Your Software Company

SaaS SEO is no small feat. Whether you are working on B2C or B2B SaaS SEO, implementing SEO techniques takes time, practice, and expertise. SaaS SEO, in short, is the practice of increasing your online authority so that search engines see you as a credible resource they feel comfortable presenting to their users—these users/searchers being the people who are your audience and potential leads/customers.

It’s true—many SaaS companies work with digital marketing agencies to increase visibility through paid ads like pay-per-click (PPC) advertising or social media advertising. However, these are short-lived, as SEO works on the quality of your website. SaaS SEO focuses on making sure you are a credible source, meaning your company and company’s website is:

• Accessible
• Navigable
• Designed well both on the back- and font-ends
• Has credible content that makes you an authority in your field
• And more

Paid advertising partners well with SaaS SEO. However, investing in just PPC or other rapid-visibility practices is a moot point if the place your audience is being led to isn’t built on a foundation of quality and credentials.

SaaS SEO investment is also important because it drives consistent traffic. You are not paying for your audience members to find you. Rather, you do research based on your customers’ needs, and form content around those needs so that your business is easier to find.

Below, let’s discuss why investing in a SaaS SEO agency is one of the most important moves you can make for your digital marketing strategy.

Save On Your Cost-Per-Acquisition

You want to advertise to your target audience. Spending money on paid advertising is a great way to do this, and many of the audience members you advertise to will be those who have the most need of your software.

However, many paid forms of advertising are PPC advertising, which, if you remember from earlier in the article, stands for pay-per-click which is exactly what it sounds like. Every time a person clicks on your advertisement, you pay, with the intention being that your return on investment (ROI) will increase because your audience members will become paying customers.

Here’s where the hard part of paid advertisements with SaaS companies comes in: Eventually, the cost increases as your number of audience members lessens. As a SaaS company, you have an extremely niche audience. The risk is that your cost-per-acquisition could actually increase, as there is typically a point where your ad campaign costs more than the money coming in from the new customers you acquire.

Search engine optimization does cost money, but this is typically a set amount over time, meaning your costs actually decrease in the long run. SEO can reduce your cost-per-acquisition. Over time, your cost-per-acquisition decreases because, with continued research, you will increase your SEO.

To put it simply: SaaS SEO is compounding. The more time and effort you put into it, the more you increase your leads. You don’t pay per lead, you pay to increase the quality of your website, which in turn attracts more paying customers over time, thus resulting in a decreased cost-per-acquisition.

Convert Users From Other Channels With SEO

Your SEO efforts benefit every single marketing channel you will use in your digital marketing plan. What do we mean by channel? Your marketing channels are all of the other platforms and tools you use to market your business, including:

• Social media marketing and management
• Web development
• Paid search campaigns
• Paid social campaigns
• Graphic design

When you have a healthy SEO, every single channel reaps the benefits. You can use your website and content across your social media platforms. Your paid campaigns lead to your website. Web design adds backlinks, which is a great tool to increase your SEO.

SEO helps build the foundation on which the rest of your marketing practices rely. Investing in SaaS SEO is investing in your marketing strategy as a whole.

Improve Your Brand’s Visibility for Free

Your brand is your company’s personality. It’s how you communicate with your audience, and the reaction they have to you. Your brand also ties you to your customers because brand recognition creates trust.

What is the importance of trust in SaaS SEO? Using your brand to build relationships with your customers then cultivates a relationship that is not strictly a transactional one. The accounts that subscribe to you have a deeper connection to your company because of ties to your brand, instead of just a trust in your product. Branding your company means your accounts and customers associate your software with you instead of just viewing it as the product you provide.

So the question is, how does branding relate to SaaS SEO? Repetition by intentional SEO practices increases your online visibility. When you have consistent branding—meaning you form a brand for your company and continue to create content with the same tone and brand themes—then you expose your brand to your organic traffic.*

*Note: When we say organic traffic, we are referring to the online audience members who view your page through unpaid marketing tactics, primarily SEO.

Investing in SEO means putting yourself—and thus your brand—out into the world so more and more people can recognize your company. The more recognition, the deeper the trust. The deeper the trust, the better the client relationship.

Not sure exactly how to do that? A SaaS SEO agency is a perfect place to turn to for guidance. Get your questions answered by speaking with a SaaS SEO consultant. We’re happy to chat if and when you have questions!

Make Your SaaS SEO Successful With These Steps

As a SaaS SEO agency, we’ve had our fair share of experience working in the digital marketing world for both B2B and B2C companies. That being said, we’ve picked up a few tips and tricks along the way to share with you in this SaaS SEO guide. Below, you’ll find the basics of SaaS SEO. Sometimes, striking the basics is the best way to operate!

Define Customer Personas

Before you even get started creating content, looking up keywords, and trying to increase your SEO on search engines like Google and Bing, you need to start with the most important element of marketing: knowing who you’re marketing to.

Your customer personas are guides that you create to know exactly who you are marketing to. When creating customer personas, you are essentially creating a character that encompasses a group of people who you wish to attract.

A customer persona is a single person who you create a life around. You determine factors such as:

• Personality
• Income
• Work-life
• Location
• Family life
• Weaknesses
• Strengths
• Goals

Of course, this information does not come from thin air. You need to conduct market research in order to determine your customer persona’s attributes. When you have compiled your research, you can put together a customer persona. This guide gives you insight on how to market to your specific target audiences.

Creating customer personas can be tricky, especially when doing so for the first time. With SaaS marketing especially, your customer personas are typically going to be extremely specific. You have a niche audience, and therefore need to be strictly specific when creating customer personas.

As a SaaS SEO agency, we can help you get started creating your user personas. And if you want us to do all the work so you can get straight to focusing on increasing your SEO, we’re happy to do that, too!

Identify Your KPIs

KPIs stand for key performance indicators. A SaaS SEO agency will use KPIs to track your digital marketing and SEO analytics. We are a SaaS SEO company that makes all of our decisions based on research. We use KPIs to make informed decisions about the next steps in our SEO decisions, including:

• What is working that you can continue implementing?
• What isn’t working that you need to change?
• How you can prioritize or reprioritize your marketing goals based on your results?
• Where and to whom do you need to direct your attention?

Here’s the thing—there are so many different analytics that you are able to track, but trying to stay on top of all of them can actually be detrimental. Instead, we recommend focusing your energy on a few KPIs that make the most sense with your SaaS SEO goals.

Certain KPIs are better for SEO than others. However, the ones we mention may work for one B2B SaaS SEO plan and not a B2C one. The KPIs you track should align with your research so you can make informed decisions about next steps. Some SaaS SEO KPIs we have found helpful are:

• ROI
• Keyword tracking
• Organic search traffic
• Unique visitors
• Bounce rate
• Total number of page views
• Backlink tracking
• And more

Choosing which KPIs to track can sometimes be more overwhelming than analyzing the data itself! Chat with a SaaS SEO agency like Metric Marketing to gain insight on which KPIs will be best to track for your SEO practices.

Do Your Keyword Research

The key to SEO lies in keywords and content—and yes, we said that on purpose. You do keyword research to find out what your customers are searching for, then create content that uses those keywords to gain traction. Content is your voice to your audience. It’s how you connect with them, and it’s how you build your SEO.

Keyword research can be used to find a specific target audience and answer their questions. When a potential customer searches for a particular keyword, you want to engage with them by already having their searched keyword in your content. When your content has what they’re looking for, search engines are more likely to see you as a reliable, credible source, meaning they will present your content to the searchers whose needs you can meet.

Your research will reveal what content is ranking well, what your audience is searching for, and what places your audience is engaging with so you can match—and eventually beat—your competition.

Optimize Your Website & Landing Pages

Your website is the face of your company. Landing pages and your website as a whole are what users are directed to when you appear on their SERP. Focusing on optimizing your website and landing pages means you are creating fast sites for an impressive user experience.

So much of SEO relies on how your audience interacts with your website. When your website and landing pages are built and designed to engage with your audience and maintain their presence and their time spent on the site, your SEO increases.

Review SEO Website Crawlability

Search engines determine whether or not to present your page to a searcher by crawling and indexing your pages. The faster Google can crawl your site, the faster you rise in rank.

Crawling is the act of running through the technical structure of your website to determine the quality of user engagement. Crawling takes into account:

• Site speed
• Website architecture
• HTTP status errors
• Rendering speed
• And more

The technical structure of your site directly relates to usability, a factor that is of the utmost importance when configuring SEO. Make sure your website is well-built because it is the foundation of your online presence and SEO rank.

Our SaaS SEO Agency Services

As a SaaS SEO agency, we also adhere to the needs of the industry itself, not just placing cookie-cutter SEO strategies into our clients’ digital marketing plans. We create customized SEO strategies that are for your niche industry as a SaaS company.

In this comprehensive ​​SaaS SEO guide, we hope you have learned more about individualizing your SEO strategy that is just for your unique business in your particular industry.

Content Strategy

Content is king and is how SEO can gain traction and increase your authority. Your content is how you communicate with your audience members and provide information about your company, your software, and the questions your customers have about your product(s). Having a research-based content strategy is one of the best marketing services a SaaS SEO agency can provide.

Here at Metric, we have a team of expert content writers who work hand-in-hand with our SEO team. Together, we create content all across your website, content that is written based on careful keyword research.

Keyword Research

As we discussed earlier, keyword research drives organic traffic. When you provide your customers with what they are looking for, you can increase your online visibility by appearing at the top of the search results.

Our team of SEO researchers are great at their craft. Every day, we successfully track and analyze industry and audience-specific keyword searches to bring to life through your content. We make all of our decisions based on data; when it comes to keyword research, we understand how impactful our research is.

On-Page Optimization

On-page optimization means making sure the technical side of your website is in tip-top shape. At Metric Marketing, we run on-page analytics to track any errors that can easily go unnoticed when focusing on other components of SEO. We will run SEO audits to fix any issues on your site, increasing your navigability for crawlers and SEO as a whole.

Off-Page Optimization

Off-page SEO are the practices done to improve SEO off your website. Here is where you establish authority and relevance before a user even reaches your webpage.

Metric Marketing is a SaaS SEO agency that knows how to build backlinks in order to increase your off-page SEO. The higher quality backlinks you have, the higher you are valued by crawlers. We research credible backlinks to develop your own authority in the industry.

Technical SEO

Our web developers know how to create a site that search engine crawlers can easily navigate, thus increasing your SEO. Technical SEO is foundational; it determines how your users will interact with your site. Our team of developers builds and remakes websites with optimization at the forefront of their design.

SEO for SaaS Frequently Asked Questions

How Does SEO Integrate With Other Marketing Channels?

All marketing channels lead back to your company’s website. SEO integrates with your other marketing channels because you can apply the content and keywords for your SaaS SEO to other marketing avenues, such as PPC, social media, and graphic design.

In What Ways Does SEO Help With Inbound Marketing?

Inbound marketing convinces your audience that you are the SaaS company your potential buyer should invest in. Creating content based on SEO research to apply to inbound marketing can create better relationships with your customers, thus leading to more sales.

Are There SEO Services for Apps?

Yes! SEO for apps is all about optimizing your app software to appear as a higher rank in app stores. It follows similar practices as website SEO by conducting keyword research to find out what your audience is searching for.

Take Your Software to the Next Level With Our SEO Agency

We understand SEO is a lot to take in. Taking the time to do your research, write content, and track analytics requires a lot of work. It may seem like a full-time job. That’s because, in reality, SaaS SEO is a full-time job!

That’s why working with a SaaS SEO agency can be beneficial on so many levels. SaaS SEO is around-the-clock work. Even when you do increase your SEO, constant maintenance is required to maintain your rank and authority. A SaaS SEO consultant can help you constantly maintain and increase your SEO.

Metric Marketing is a SaaS SEO agency. We specialize in intentionally increasing your SEO with specific SaaS SEO tools we have learned through our years in the field. We have dedicated experts who work to establish, maintain, and excel in your SaaS website SEO, getting you to the top organic search results through ethical practices.

Metric Marketing SaaS SEO Case Study

As a SaaS SEO company, we pride ourselves on our clients’ accomplishments, and we like to let our results speak for themselves. In just one year, we helped increase the SaaS company Stoneridge’s revenue by 140%—from $8.5 million to $20.4 million.

Through our B2B SaaS SEO efforts, Stoneridge’s traffic increased 25% in a year from 109K to 145K users. We continue to work closely with Stoneridge to ensure we stay on top of managing and handling the SaaS SEO tools for this great company.

If you are interested in learning more about how a SaaS SEO expert at Metric Marketing can help you, contact us at (734) 404-8714 or fill out an online form today. We look forward to hearing from you!