SaaS SEO: The Common SEO Concerns Of SaaS Startups And Companies

Plenty of SEO concerns are bound to emerge for  SaaS companies. When executed properly, SEO strategies for SaaS can reduce acquisition costs and maximize marketing ROI substantially. The general feeling is that most SaaS companies struggle with SEO issues that impact customer acquisition costs and diminish revenues.

Branded items have more visibility

Many SaaS websites receive a lot of branded traffic, yet they are hardly ever found in unbranded searches. Even unicorns from countries with rapid economic growth, such as the US, UK, or India, struggle with SEO strategies for SaaS despite having more branded traffic.

Driving branded traffic is great if you are already popular through funding and performance marketing that results in evaluations. When you ignore non-branded items that your searchers use for SEO, for SaaS startups lose out to the competition. Missing out on such opportunities can be prevented when both branded and non-branded traffic are prioritized.

A flawed SEO content strategy

Before investing in SEO for SaaS startups, they will start to develop content based on customer journey stages. Such content revolves around branded items that aid in email outreach and performance marketing. Product marketing teams have metrics to chase, and the content approach is suitable for that.

They are keen to obtain better sales-qualified leads and marketing-qualified leads to achieve their monthly recurring revenue. But when you are investing in SEO, the purpose is not to obtain more SQL and MQL, even though your top management may want that to happen.

Unstained content value

SEO for SaaS startups writes and publishes a lot of content, but without appropriate review and analysis, the content value is not sustained across all content. Most of them are excited to publish 40 to 60 blogs a month, but in such cases, content quality may suffer. Hence, it is recommended that a thorough content review process be conducted that considers the following:

• Requirements: Was the content delivered according to the brief?
• Contextual intent: Does the content have the right context? Does it serve the user’s intent?

With ChatGPT becoming popular, you would need an editor in place.

The focus on creativity over SEO

Another significant SEO strategy for SaaS is that to attract the crowd, the product marketing team needs creative punchlines. It helps search engines and users understand what exactly they do with the headline.

You need to guide the search engines on who you are and what you can do if they put you in front of customers with the correct queries at the right time. Creative punchlines are great for performance marketing, but balancing them can do wonders in the case of SEO for SaaS startups.

Decaying content

Extensive content libraries often suffer from decaying content, a recurring but slow decline in content impressions, clicks, and traffic. So, when you are publishing new content, you need to remember what you published in the past.

When the content is no longer valuable to the audience, search engines may take it off the SERPs for many queries. Publishing content is only 20% of the task, as the rest is optimizing it for featured snippets.

No content optimization plan is in place

The moment content is written and published; the team needs to remember to monitor whether it performs. This isn’t the case with SaaS businesses, but rather with businesses from a variety of industries who rely heavily on content pipelines for SEO.

When you do not optimize the content properly.

• You are not able to maximise content ROI as all the content that you publish does not drive traffic or conversions.
• You miss out on the opportunity to have various touchpoints to bring the target audience to the website.

Keyword cannibalization

Among SaaS websites, keyword cannibalization is a major issue. An example is that these topics may create keyword cannibalization for a VOIP smartphone app.

• What is a softphone and why do you need it?
• The benefits of a softphone
• The importance of a softphone

When you are writing about the first topic, you cover the definition of a softphone and its benefits.

The second one is

• Softphone explanation
• Softphone aids
• Softphone trials

Reading either of the contents would serve the same purpose. It turns out that the target queries were identical as well. Despite the apparent differences in the themes, the background, questions, and audience are all the same. In short, only the titles differ.

Underutilized internal linking

Interlinking SEO for SaaS startups happens in a couple of ways.

• Incorporating too many read-more sections between paragraphs
• Not linking the premium anchor text that was mentioned in the content

Every piece of content is published while taking into consideration the search term for which it was written. There is also a content optimization mistake that can diminish your content’s value. As the Google starter guide suggests, it helps users and search engines understand what the page is all about.

Blindly emulating Competitors to obtain links

Just because your competitor has earned that backlink does not mean it will be relevant for you. They may have gone after irrelevant links, and should you do so?  It is not that you succumb to the strategy of your competitors. Hence, it is sensible to analyse the competitor’s backlinks and identify which are the most relevant.

This helps you to prevent putting efforts in the wrong direction and wasting resources that would have been spent elsewhere.

Not enough or zero content distribution

SEO strategies for SaaS companies need to be implemented quickly, and the former has to keep the pace high. Discover the Ultimate Guide to Effective SEO Strategy. This tactic has the drawback of making content delivery an afterthought. The work is not going to end with printing content, as you need to have a distribution strategy in place. In the world of marketing and business, SEO cannot do the job on its own.

It is necessary to rebrand, repurpose, and syndicate for SaaS companies to achieve the expected results. In hindsight, ROI is maximized.

SEO for SaaS startups needs to be a strategic and careful investment. For SaaS companies, focusing on performance marketing and lead generation strategies is expected to be the norm. But when SEO strategies for SaaS are implemented properly, they have the ability to reduce customer acquisition costs and enhance ROI substantially.

For more such technical blogs, Connect with GTECH.