If you take a look at the statistics of the SaaS market from 2010 to 2020, it has expanded from $13.4 billion to $157 billion. While 2020 was last year, would you care to guess about where SaaS is going to go in the future? If you guessed that it would expand even further, you’re right. But that also means that the competition is a lot more fierce, and having a successful SaaS SEO strategy is more valuable than ever.

SEO is essentially the battleground for SaaS companies, and you would be surprised at how massive of an impact it can have over your brand as a whole. Your goal is to match your pages to the users’ search intent and attribute potential leads to SEO. And when you achieve that goal, you’ll stand out as a leader in your SaaS industry, which is exactly where you want to be.

With that in mind, let’s discuss the key elements of a successful SaaS SEO strategy – these are areas where you can do better than your competition and boost your brand’s success.  

Keyword Research Should be Based on Intent for a Successful SEO Strategy

If you’re aiming for the perfect scenario, here it is – each piece of content, each blog post, and each landing page should be optimized for a single keyword. It gives the searcher an answer to the question they’re implicitly asking with the keyword, and the answer is provided on exactly the right page – as the searcher has imagined it.

With that in mind, it’s a good idea to kick strategies off with a few broad searchable categories for your keywords. For example, for SaaS companies offering a CMS platform that competes with WordPress, “CMS platform” is a good broad category which you can then use “CMS platform for online store”, “CMS platform for a web design service” or “CMS platform for a personal portfolio”, as more precisely targeted keywords.

Here, you should keep in mind that longer search queries with more keywords mean that the searcher is more serious and precise in what they want.

Content is a Critical Strategy SEO Element

You’ve probably heard it – content is crucial to all SEO strategies. But it’s not just about having content, it’s about the content being valuable and optimized with keywords you’re targeting, and about convincing your visitors that you offer the solution to their needs. For successful SaaS strategies, you need high-quality content, so here are three things to avoid with your content.

1. Using searchable information that’s already out there. This is a common mistake and you won’t get anywhere with it. Instead, serve your visitors something unique that genuinely helps.
2. Overusing marketing-speak and buzzwords. While you might think you’re being catchy and trendy, what you’re actually doing is confusing many of your visitors as not everyone can understand those terms.
3. Making the content bulky rather than easily skimmable. Not everyone has the time to go over that wall of text you just posted – instead, use plenty of subheadings and small paragraphs to make the content easier to consume.

When you’re posting content, an additional benefit of it being genuinely valuable is that other high-quality websites will link to it, which goes a long way in Google’s eyes. When you’ve got the answers to customer’s searches, websites will point towards you, and every time your content is linked, that boosts your rankings and gives you more opportunities to convert leads.

While we’re at it, here’s a bonus thing to keep in mind – a solid SaaS SEO strategy will make use of content that can be easily repurposed. If you’ve created graphics to post on your blog, why not have them linked and shared on your social media accounts? Got a paragraph you’re proud of in one of your articles? Use it in an email campaign! Repurposing is key, and you can use your content to bait out potential clients’ email addresses – this is known as content gating, and it can help SaaS companies get more leads.