How Important is SEO in a SaaS Business?

Prioritising finite marketing resources

Running your own business makes you appreciate the concept of scarcity – especially when it comes to marketing resources.

You’ll likely have thought “If I spend X on promoting on this channel then I won’t have Y to advertise on that channel.”

Billion dollar tech giants may have long since forgotten this need for ruthless prioritisation, since their scrappy startup days are a long way behind them. But for most SaaS companies that are trying to decide how to spend a finite marketing budget, choosing the right marketing channel can make or break growth.

So where does SEO sit on the prioritisation list? 

SEO can be an effective channel for SaaS, but it isn’t ‘free’, it won’t start delivering leads in a few months and it isn’t necessarily the right strategy for all SaaS businesses.

How SEO helps SaaS businesses

Research from Chief Marketer shows that SEO provides leads with one of the highest ROIs of any channel, second only after email marketing.

There are three key benefits SEO can offer SaaS businesses:

1. Low CAC. Once a SaaS SEO strategy has set in, it can generate a consistent volume of relevant traffic and qualified leads at one of the lowest Customer Acquisition Costs (CAC) of any marketing channel when measured over the long term.
2. Compounding returns. Creating and publishing high quality content consistently over time attracts links naturally that builds website authority making it easier to rank for a wider range of keywords and topics that are relevant to your audience.
3. Builds trust. The more times a B2B SaaS buyer encounters a brand when researching prior to purchasing, the greater the degree of trust built. SEO helps build that trust on Search. If executed correctly, prospects will seek out the company they have become familiar with, when they are ready to buy.

Increasing brand trust is a benefit that isn’t talked about enough as traditionally the focus has been on keyword rank. The most important benefit of good keyword visibility is that prospects become familiar with the business.

Familiarity is crucial for B2B SaaS growth which is characterised by long sales cycles requiring content that provides potential buyers with the knowledge they need to make an informed decision. SEO ensures this content is found by the prospect which develops trust in the brand.

Ultimately, SEO works to evoke familiarity bias leading  prospects to Google your business specifically  when they are ready to buy or are researching information during their buyer journey.

SEO isn’t a quick fix. Realising these benefits requires a significant investment over time.

This is why it’s important to consider the pros and cons of SEO for your SaaS business before deciding to invest in the channel.

Situations where SEO doesn’t help SaaS companies

Most businesses have a finite budget to work with so it’s important to pick and choose your marketing channels carefully – focussing on those that will help achieve goals efficiently.

SEO requires long-term investment so it’s important for SaaS businesses to understand when it might not be the best channel to prioritise. For example, if:

1. You’re launching a new product to an unknown market. If you haven’t achieved product market fit yet, SEO should be avoided. An unknown market means you won’t have insights on the right keywords to target and the types of content needed to drive traffic and engagement.
2. You’re at a very early stage with limited resources. If you’re an early stage startup with limited marketing resources, you’ll likely want to focus on maximising sales with minimal investment. If you know that your potential customers use Search, consider investing in Google Ads, targeting bottom funnel keywords only. Once you’ve started driving sales, you can start to think about SEO.
3. You’ve got an ultra-niche product. SEO needs keywords that have the potential to drive organic traffic to your website. If your product is so niche that nobody is searching for it, then SEO should be avoided.
4. Leads are the only priority. Over the long term SEO delivers compounding returns at a low CAC. However, if leads are an urgent priority right now, you’ll see better returns by spending your budget elsewhere. That said, you might still want to consider a BOFU-focussed SEO strategy so that you’re ranking for terms buyers are searching for when actively looking for your solution. 

If SEO isn’t the right fit for your SaaS business right now, you might want to consider PPC, LinkedIn, industry events, or direct sales. 

Using PPC as a prelude to SEO

Even though it might not be the right time to start investing in SEO, that doesn’t mean you should completely forget about Search. 

In a previous post I’ve talked about the benefits of  PPC and SEO working together. 

In fact, PPC can also be used as a prelude to running SEO – a way of testing channel viability.

This can be a useful play if you’re an early stage startup with a requirement to get leads from Search. You know that your potential customers are using search engines, but SEO is too much of a long term investment to consider.

The main goals of a PPC pilot strategy are:

1. Lead generation 
2. Getting PPC keyword data to test SEO viability

Considerations for using PPC to test SEO 

There are a few things to consider when running such a strategy. You need to strike the right balance of using broad targeting to gather enough keyword information, but not so broad as to drive irrelevant traffic.

Here are the main points to bear in mind when using PPC to test whether SEO is worth it for your SaaS business:

1. Keyword research. Start with keyword research to find buyer focused keywords that have the potential to generate leads. These will be used in the campaign.
2. Allow for a healthy budget. Running Google Ads and being stingy with the budget is like trying to drive a car in first gear only – frustrating! The system needs data to optimise campaigns and restricting budget minimises data capture which hinders lead generation, particularly with automated bidding strategies.
3. Start with phrase match. Always start with phrase match and ignore Google’s ‘advice’ to use broad match. Phrase match (close variant) means this match type is more like broad these days and will provide a wide variety of potential top funnel terms that could be used in a future SEO strategy.
4. Keep on top of negatives. Monitoring the search terms report closely within the first 2-3 weeks is crucial to ensure that ad traffic is a good fit for your business. There will be plenty of irrelevant keywords that Google will throw in and if you don’t add negative terms regularly, your ad budget will be spent driving poor quality traffic.
5. Switch to automated bidding. After a month, switch to ‘broad’ match and max conversions if you are getting qualified leads, or max clicks if lead generation is slow. Keeping on top of negatives will help to make sure that traffic is still relevant, paving the way to a safe transition to automated bidding. And changing to automated bidding will help drive more search terms data that can be used as insights for SEO.

After 2 months you will have enough data to understand whether Search is a viable marketing channel for your business. 

Essentially you will have paid Google for information on how your audience behaves and engages on Search by collecting TOFU terms your prospects are using.

And of course there is the added bonus of potential leads.

There are three possible scenarios.

The ideal scenario is obviously the third one in the table – leads and information on TOFU terms – as it proves there is an opportunity to develop engaging content and drive traffic from all stages of the funnel.

Getting leads but no TOFU information means you should consider a buyer-focused SEO strategy, optimising product and service pages and building links to them to ensure high visibility for BOFU in Organic Search. Running this alongside PPC will mean you have valuable page 1 real estate for important buyer keywords.

The least favourable scenario is ‘no leads and no TOFU data’. However, even here we have gathered some useful information and can confirm with data that SEO isn’t the right channel, potentially saving 10’s of thousands in pursuing an SEO strategy.

Is SEO Important for SaaS? It depends…

When you ask the question above to Perplexity.ai or ChatGPT, they both generate the same answer:

SEO is crucial for SaaS businesses due to several key factors/reasons…

In reality, the true answer (as is often the case in marketing) is ‘it depends’.

It’s important to do your due diligence before embarking on an SEO project, to make sure that it’s the best strategy to achieve business goals. The maturity of the company is important, as is the product or niche, and your wider marketing objectives.

If prospective customers don’t use Search or the product is very niche, or doesn’t yet have product market fit, then consider alternative marketing strategies to target places where your customers are.

Finally, it’s important that key stakeholders have an appetite for long term investment and aren’t expecting overnight results. If the people holding the purse strings expect to magically turn on a lead faucet after a few months, they will be severely disappointed.