Whether you’re a software business looking for a sustainable way to reach your target audience or aiming to help your clients achieve the same, SaaS businesses face a unique challenge when it comes to SEO.
The differences between SaaS SEO and traditional SEO are subtle, but there. And if you work to understand these differences, you’ll be far better placed to outrank your rivals in an all too competitive space–one in which SaaS companies spend an average of 30% of their yearly budget on marketing.
Why is SEO important for SaaS businesses?
First things first: how important is SEO in a SaaS (Software as a Service) business? The short and emphatic answer is very – SaaS SEO is more important and impactful than SEO for almost any other industry or sector you care to imagine.
SaaS SEO sees you leverage Google and other search engines to let your target audience know about your solution and convince them to use it. The aim is to attract visitors to your site, and then guide them through the stages of the buyer journey – awareness, consideration, transaction – to the point where they become recurring users.
Google is the most efficient and effective way to spread your good news. SaaS SEO allows you to precisely target specific users by answering the questions they’re asking and presenting yourself as the solution to the problems they’re facing. It helps you to build brand awareness and trust by continually presenting your solution at the exact moment a potential customer is looking for something like it.
And as an organic marketing tactic, SaaS SEO does all of this without requiring you to give a single cent to Google. An investment in enterprise SaaS SEO is long-term and sustainable – by committing to a data-driven, expert-led strategy, it can develop into a truly sustainable source of traffic and leads that delivers an ever-increasing level of ROI as time goes on.
What is the difference between SaaS SEO and traditional SEO?
What makes SaaS SEO a different proposition to traditional SEO? There are a number of unique SEO challenges faced by SaaS businesses, including:
1. A niche market focus
SaaS SEO must be directed at a very specific audience if you are to get bang from your marketing buck. This is particularly the case for enterprise SaaS SEO, as the primary audience will not be the thousands of users within an organisation, but a handful of powerful decision makers.
Getting in front of these movers and shakers demands deep research into the problems and challenges they face, and the keywords they use in search of a solution. Speaking of which…
2. High-intent keywords
Perhaps the greatest challenge for a SaaS business is to identify the precise keywords and phrases that your target audience uses to search for the sort of solution you offer, as they will often use very different words to the ones you use to describe yourself.
You should primarily target ‘high-intent’ keywords, such as those that present a specific problem that your solution could solve.
3. High levels of competition
On top of targeting these very precise keywords, you may also face ‘keyword saturation’, which occurs when all of your competitors are targeting the exact same terms. One way to avoid competing so directly with your (often far larger) rivals is to identify niche topics and long-tail keywords that others have missed, but that can still drive quality, qualified traffic.
4. Educating the market
SaaS companies tend to start at ground zero in terms of customer understanding, as SaaS solutions – at least the most successful ones – tend to either be new concepts or significant upgrades to existing concepts.
Educating the market on your SaaS solution is no mean feat. You’ll need to create significant amounts of educational content, aligned with and informed by your keyword research, designed to get your solution in front of your target audience, to teach them about it, and to ultimately convince them that they need it.
5. Longer sales cycles
Enterprise SaaS SEO is a particular challenge due to the length of the customer journey. It takes time to generate awareness of your solution, the need for customer education extends the consideration stage, and the complex decision making processes within large organisations can postpone the final transaction stage.
How to do SEO for SaaS businesses
The SEO challenges faced by SaaS businesses are great, but far from insurmountable. To succeed, you need a deep understanding of your target audience and their pain points. You need hard data, and the skills to extract the relevant customer insights from it.
You then need to craft an SEO strategy that uses those customer insights to find cost-effective, high conversion ways to get your solution in front of the right people at the right time. You need to target high intent, niche and long-tail keywords. You need to build awareness, understanding and trust. You need to take a methodical, sustainable, long-term approach that maximises your likelihood of ongoing success.
If you’re brave, you could attempt all this yourself. Or you could increase your chances of success by partnering with a team of experts who have built a reputation for doing all the above: Growth Partners.
Growth Partners: customer insight specialists
Customer insights are no longer a nice-to-have for growth-focused businesses – they’re a must-have. They are the key to SaaS SEO success and should sit at the top of the to-do list for any SaaS business looking to gain a competitive advantage in this incredibly challenging sector.
At Growth Partners we have built a reputation for helping businesses grow by solving real-world business problems with targeted data analysis, strategic marketing thinking and best-in-class digital implementation.
To achieve the results we are known for and provide a blueprint for success, we’ve developed DigitalArchitect® – a proprietary system that uses deep data to highlight online expansion opportunities and determine the strength of your business case for digital marketing investment, laying the foundation for continuous, sustainable growth.
If you’re ready to transform your business with high-quality actionable customer insights, we’re ready to help. Get in touch for an obligation-free chat to kickstart your growth journey.