7 SEO Tips for a New SaaS Website
Your team has developed a rocking new SaaS product and you’re finally ready to launch a website and kick-start your digital marketing?
One of the first things you should be thinking about in terms of online presence is search engine optimization. Covering the basics of SaaS SEO will power your digital marketing strategy and set you up for the future growth of your software. It will help your new brand make a good first impression on Google and will serve as an additional motivation for your team to create exceptional content for your website.
The steps we’ve outlined are easy to do for people without an SEO background and require no or minimal investment.
Start with keyword research
When it comes to SEO, everything starts with the keywords your future users type in the search bar or say to the voice search engine.
Knowing what your customers are looking for means that you’ll be able to create the pages for the queries that are right for your business. Many new brands make the mistake of creating a very small website (sometimes even one-pager) and postpone the development of more content for years.
It’s likely that this will make you heavily dependent on paid marketing channels, which can get expensive pretty fast. It’s also good to know that SaaS companies that do content marketing have 30% higher growth rates.
The easiest option for a starter is to take advantage of a trial version for popular keyword research tools, such as SEMRush, KWFinder, or Ubersuggest.
Your next step would be to set up a mini brainstorming and create a list of the main phrases that describe your SaaS product, its core features, and the main pain points it solves for the customer. If you already have buyer personas, use the information you have about them to get new ideas.
Run the list through the tool to check the search demand for your ideas and expand a list with suggestions for related queries from the tool.
Another great free keyword research method is to run multiple incognito Google searches and look at the automatic suggestions. They are related to your query and chances are, they have a good amount of searches.
Chances are, your initial list will change substantially after you review the data and get some more ideas.
Get ideas from competitors
A great feature of all keyword research tools is the option to find out the search queries your competitors are ranking for. This is a great opportunity to expand your keyword list and to get ideas for the website structure and pages. Take the time to review the pages & the topics explored to get insights about key aspects like length, structure, images, etc.
The keyword research tool can give you interesting insights about what is the search demand for the brands of your competitors. If you’re trying to step into a highly competitive market, consider creating pages with a head-to-head comparison between you and the top players in your field. You can target queries such as “competitor brand + alternative” & get your brand exposed to people looking for products similar to the big brands.
It’s important to keep in mind that there is a difference between your business competitors and the brands that are ranking for your top queries. If you focus only on the websites that sell a similar product and ignore your SEO rivals, you’ll be missing out on a lot of insights.
Create a roadmap for content creation
Content marketing is what will make your website great both for users and for search engines. Based on the keyword list and the website journey you have planned, invest the time to create content-rich pages with strong design and visuals. Make sure to keep your brand voice and style consistent.
The natural starting point for the website is the home page, where long-form content is always a winning option. After you have that perfected, develop the pages in the main navigation, where you explore the details about your product and its features.
Pay extra attention to your “About Us” section – don’t forget to add information about your team, achievements, company goals. This is considered one of the important trustworthiness signals for Google, part of the E-A-T signals concept.
To get this right, make sure to include authors on your blog posts, showcase media coverage for your work, link to the official social media profiles of the company and your team members.
Creating the conversional and middle of the funnel pages of the website may be a lot of work, but it’s just a first step. Going forward, you need to create informational content (a resources section or blog posts) or lead magnets such as gated guides and industry trends reports. These can be valuable assets for nurturing your leads and for developing your brand presence.
Cover all technical basics
The other important aspect of SEO is technical. The good news is that you don’t need to be a developer to cover most of the basics. Also, most SaaS websites are using SEO-friendly content management systems and are relatively small in size, which makes SEO significantly easier. However, there are some technical SEO basics that you need to get right from the beginning:
- Get a developer that will get you an 80 or higher score on Google Lighthouse pagespeed tool.
- Test the mobile experience – ask your team to explore the website on different devices and share honest feedback. And test with Google’s Mobile Friendly tool to check whether Google bot can render your website completely.
- Make sure that only a single version of the website is indexable (URLs with or without www).
- Set up an XML sitemap and add a submit it to Google search console, Bing webmaster tools. Add a link in your robots.txt.
- Review the html structure of your pages: The main title of every page needs to be an <h1>, and the subtitles need to be <h2>.
Set up Google Search Console
Setting up the Google search console is easy and free. The tool provides you great insights about the visibility of your website in search results (Performance report), and also your indexation and sitemap’s crawlability (Coverage report).
It’s best to create a domain level property from the beginning since it would provide you with more comprehensive data. Keep an eye on any notifications for errors, security, or mobile usability issues.
Get crazy with structured data
Structured data is often described as part of advanced SEO, but it’s actually easy to implement code that can help Google understand your website better.
It comes with an additional perk – the search result of your website can be represented in a nicer way in the search results. The so-called rich snippets can contain multiple links instead of one, pricing, stars, or a description in Q&A format.
You can explore the full database of structured data formats at schema.org. Make sure to use JSON-LD format since it’s preferred by Google.
Structured data for SaaS:
- Organization
- Software App/Product
- Review
- NewsArticle/TechArticle
- Breadcrumb
- FAQ/How-to
Start building your online presence
In the SaaS world, setting up company profiles on Trustpilot, G2, Capterra, Software Suggest, Software Advice, and Comparecamp is just as important as launching your own website. These pages provide more context about your brand and product for Google, and they will inevitably rank for your branded queries and help users learn more about you.
Add as much information about your company and keep your profile updated. The easiest way to stay on top of this is to put together a small database with profiles that you update every 6 months.
The other key element is including customer reviews in your user journey. Even if you don’t have many customers at the beginning, it’s crucial to have feedback about your product. Keep in mind that users often search for reviews before subscribing to a SaaS and the third-party providers have higher trust compared to owned marketing channels.
Hopefully, our 7-step guide to SEO for SaaS will help you create a great initial set up for your brand new product and create a solid foundation for your organic growth strategy. Don’t forget that search engine optimization is a channel that takes longer to start showing results, but provides sustainable results in the long run.
We hope you enjoyed this promoted post as much as we did!
