The Importance of SEO for SaaS Companies Ryan Law, Vice President of Marketing at Content Agency Animalz, shares valuable insights into how SaaS companies can leverage SEO. He explains, “Many SaaS businesses require a large number of new sign-ups each month due to the low average customer spend. SEO becomes crucial in these cases, as it enables companies to generate cost-effective, high-volume traffic to fill their sales funnel.” His analysis revealed that 85.19% of blog traffic for the SaaS companies he worked with came from organic search.

Here are some reasons why SEO is a top method for SaaS companies to acquire new customers:

Exponential Growth with SaaS SEO A search-optimized page typically experiences increased traffic each month after being published. This effect is compounded as more pages are published over time, leading to exponential traffic growth for your website. A successful SaaS SEO strategy can build on its own success, as demonstrated in this well-known graph:

SaaS SEO cost-effectiveness increases over time. Ryan Law explains, “Most acquisition channels exhibit a linear relationship between input and output, requiring increased spending to acquire more customers, and often, the cost for achieving the same results increases over time (such as with paid advertising). SEO works differently.”

SaaS SEO delivers consistent traffic The unpredictability of online customer acquisition channels can be challenging, particularly for new businesses. SEO traffic and customer acquisition, on the other hand, tend to grow steadily with ongoing investment. Ryan states, “Our research indicates that SEO was the only traffic source to consistently grow last year, increasing by 3.19% month after month.”

SaaS SEO Best Practices To stand out in a competitive landscape where SEO is widely adopted, companies must employ best practices for their SEO strategies.

Focus on technical SEO for SaaS websites High-quality content should be supported by robust technical optimization, enabling search engines to effectively crawl and index your website. Choose a website platform that supports search optimization, ensure fast loading times, search-friendly slugs, and accessibility. Keep up with Google algorithm updates to maintain optimal content performance and drive traffic growth.

Conduct targeted keyword research Attract traffic that leads to conversions by researching and targeting the right keywords. Ryan emphasizes, “Not all traffic is created equal. Generating a million page views from search without revenue is possible if the visitors are not interested in your product.”

Perform SEO competitor analysis Investigate the keywords your competitors rank for and their strategies to gain insights into your potential audience and create content that surpasses competing businesses. Ryan notes, “Search not only generates new business but also helps take business away from competitors.”

Prioritize usefulness High-quality and genuinely helpful content is the key to successful search optimization. Craft articles that are relevant and valuable to users and potential customers. Google's algorithm updates now consider metrics like time spent on pages, link click-throughs, and shares. As customers become more discerning, content must meet higher standards to be effective.

Exercise patience with SEO SEO success builds gradually, so avoid abandoning your efforts when immediate results aren't apparent. Most SEO strategies require months or even years to reach their full potential, making it a valuable long-term investment. "Ask any established SaaS company, and they'll confirm: SEO works," Ryan emphasizes.

The objective of a SaaS SEO strategy is to enhance your website's domain authority, which represents its reputation and relevance in a particular topic or field. With time, increased domain authority grants your website exceptional visibility and facilitates ranking for more competitive keywords.

Stand out from the crowd The SEO landscape is saturated with similar content and websites targeting identical keywords. To attract internet users' attention, differentiate your content in a meaningful way.

By making your content unique and relevant to your specific audience, you'll increase page visits, time spent on pages, and conversions. Ryan suggests asking yourself, "How can we make this content uniquely ours? What exclusive ideas or advice can we offer? What value can we add to existing search results?"

Create content for various buyer journey stages To attract a diverse range of potential customers, develop content targeting each stage of the buyer journey – awareness, consideration, and decision. Avoid concentrating solely on product-specific content or immediate purchases.

Instead, publish content that appeals to various potential users of your product. For those at the beginning of their journey, focus on industry trends, tips, advice, or general informational articles. For those further along, offer practical guides, integration information, feature overviews, and present your product as a solution to specific issues.

Implement internal linking Internal linking benefits your website in two ways: it signals search engines about your content's relevance and encourages visitors to explore your site more extensively.

As users delve deeper into your content, they learn about your field and product while encountering more calls to action, which may prompt them to engage with or download your product.

Stay current with SaaS SEO evolution SEO is a constantly evolving field, with increasingly sophisticated search algorithms, growing competitor content, and rising customer standards. Maintain an up-to-date SEO strategy by continually researching keywords and competitors and monitoring traffic and visitor behavior.

High-quality content remains a constant in SEO value, so focus on providing useful, engaging, and informative articles for your audience to stay ahead in the SEO game.