Grow Your SaaS With a Proven SEO Strategy

It is increasingly popular to use software that works both in the office and at home via the cloud. Software as a Service (SaaS) is therefore a booming business model. Whether it is CRM, project management, e-mail marketing, telephony, or support: there is a SaaS solution for everything. So it’s no surprise that the SaaS market has been growing every year.

However, a growing industry also means more competition. If you want to succeed as a SaaS provider, you need to stay ahead of your competitors. Perhaps the most important aspect is building successful sales and marketing strategies that effectively generate leads that you use to acquire new customers.

Why invest in SEO?

Why invest in search engine optimization (SEO), which takes a long time, when you can also very quickly set up a Google Ads or Facebook campaign that brings in immediate visitors? This is because content marketing and SEO are the foundation for a sustainable, predictable, and scalable growth strategy of your SaaS and therefore should perhaps be the most important part of your SaaS marketing efforts.

Based on my own experience: the organic results provided my SaaS with the most, as well as the highest quality leads. And if you look at some of the most successful SaaS companies in the world such as Hubspot, Buffer, Asana, and Salesforce, they all use content marketing and SEO. Of course, they do this for a reason.

The most successful SaaS companies use a combination of seven channels to generate visitors and leads. All of these channels work together. According to research from Mike Sonders based on SimilarWeb data from 2019, you can nicely see the different sources driving SaaS growth:        

After direct traffic, organic results through SEO are the biggest driver at 29.1%. Referrals generated through PR & link building provide the next pie slice. And the more people know about your SaaS, the more direct traffic comes back to your website.

SEO – and with it organic visitors – are consistently the number one driver of the most successful SaaS companies.

SEO and the SaaS marketing funnel

The sales cycle begins when something happens that makes you think of something needed to help take your organization to the next level. Or when you think of something to make your or your colleagues’ work easier. You then start looking for the problem, then find solutions that can help you with this, and finally choose the SaaS that meets this need.

In this customer journey, you move through a kind of funnel, the marketing funnel, from top to bottom:

• Top – you have a problem and are looking for a solution.
• Middle – you know what solution is needed and are looking for a SaaS that will help.
• Bottom you know what product is needed and you need arguments to convince you to choose this specific SaaS.   

Keyword research for the three phases of the marketing funnel

It’s the same for your prospects. Start by researching who your potential customers are. Try to find out what “jobs to be done” they have and what pain points they experience in their daily work. Based on this, you can find out what they are looking for and why. This forms the basis of keyword research and required content.                                   

Top of the funnel: help prospects with their problem

Your prospect has a problem but does not yet know how to solve it: they are in the research phase. The goal for this content is to fill the top of the funnel by:

• Attract visitors who are aware of their problem.
• Help the reader to solve their problem.
• Teach the reader about a specific solution or product category.
• Get these readers on your newsletter through your blog updates, a content upgrade, or an ebook.
• Giving them a retargeting pixel.

An example for this stage: if you are looking for a way to save your business phone costs, a blog article titled “5 tips to save on your business phone costs” will help.

Blog articles are great for recruiting visitors at the top of the funnel. Below you can see examples of these types of articles:        

Ultimately, it’s about getting these visitors to the next stage, the middle of the funnel, by:

• A click from one of the pages on top of the funnel.
• A visit to a page from e-mail nurturing.
• A click on a retargeting banner that brings the visitor to content in the middle of the funnel.

Middle of the funnel: offer solutions

At this stage, your visitors are aware of their problems and looking for specific solutions. They are looking for more information about these solutions.

For this phase, there are many different types of content possible such as:

• Product category – information about the product category of your SaaS.
• Product category comparison – when your potential buyer is ready to compare different types of solutions based on the main pain point.
• Solutions – specific content targeting the personas in the form of blogs or ebooks.
• Industry – content focused on the industry combined with your solution.
• Features/features – specific features of your SaaS that the visitor is looking for in a solution.
• Integrations – how your SaaS integrates with the tools they are already using. For example, “VOIP software with Hubspot integration.”
• Case studies.

If we stay with the example of someone looking for a way to save business phone costs, this person now knows that a VOIP solution can help with this. Content that supports this is, for example, a blog article with “How to select a VOIP provider.

At this stage, the focus is on the product pages of your website and a small portion of blog articles. Here are some content examples:

At the bottom of the funnel: comparing

Your goals for this part of the funnel are:

• Attracting visitors who are aware of the product that offers a solution to their problem and are also ready to purchase.
• Introducing your SaaS product to their decision process (if it wasn’t already part of it).
• Show the strengths and USPs of your SaaS and that they are better than competitors.

These keywords fall into the categories below:

• Comparisons (your SaaS vs competitor)
• Alternatives/competitors
• Reviews                                                        

Here are the examples in the funnel for someone looking to save on business phone costs: