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Search engine optimisation isn’t dead; it’s just evolving again. With the rise of AI assistants and generative search, marketers are scrambling to rename or redefine SEO.
GEO (Generative Experience Optimisation)? AIO (Artificial Intelligence Optimisation)? Marketers love an acronym!
How about Search Optimisation? After all, whether a prospective SaaS buyer is on Google, Bing, or an AI platform, they are conducting a search.
However, the name is a moot point.
In the end, the goal is to be visible on all search platforms that your potential customers are using.
Undoubtedly, B2B buyers are actively exploring all of these options. In fact, nearly half (48%) of B2B software buyers surveyed in 2024 said they use AI tools like ChatGPT to research solutions, with 98% finding it impactful.
Another industry study late last year found a whopping 89% of buyers have incorporated generative AI into at least one stage of their purchasing process.
These aren’t just fun facts ; they signal a massive shift in how people find information.
Whether content is discovered via a classic Google search results page or an AI chatbot’s answer, the goal is the same: ensure your company is visible and persuasive wherever people search.
Because it’s still one of the most cost-effective, scalable ways to generate qualified leads, build long-term brand equity, and reduce customer acquisition costs (CAC) – all while compounding over time.
In an environment where paid channels are getting more expensive, attention spans are shrinking, and AI is reshaping how people find information, SEO gives SaaS companies a competitive edge by meeting prospects where they’re searching – and doing it in a way that builds lasting trust.
Let’s examine in more detail why SaaS companies should invest in SEO.
SEO isn’t just a traffic generator – it’s a growth channel. Compared to paid acquisition, SEO tends to deliver:
Ranking consistently for relevant searches, and visibility on AI platforms does more than drive visits – it builds your brand.
When your SaaS product or expertise shows up over and over again, prospects start to associate your brand with credibility and authority. This increases:
This halo effect is subtle but powerful – especially in competitive B2B markets where brand trust influences buying decisions more than product features.
SaaS SEO isn’t just about blog traffic. The most effective strategies cover every stage of the buyer journey, integrating seamlessly with other marketing efforts.
When mapped correctly, SEO content becomes a foundational asset that also powers:
The ROI of SEO isn’t just in pageviews – it’s in how many different channels and teams can reuse and benefit from the content you produce.
Unlike paid channels that turn off the moment the budget runs dry, SEO content has a compounding effect:
It’s not instant. But the long-term value of a well-executed SEO programme almost always outpaces short-term acquisition tactics.
Yes, AI is changing the search landscape. But that makes SEO more important for SaaS businesses, not less.
In other words, SEO has evolved into Search Optimisation. It’s no longer just about Google. It’s about being visible wherever someone might be looking for what your product solves.
Here are three challenges SaaS businesses experience when implementing an SEO strategy in this new AI age.
Google sends less traffic to websites due to AI Overviews. These may be better for the user but potentially brutal for your traffic.
In 2024, nearly 60% of Google searches ended without a click.
The zero-click phenomenon isn’t new, and traffic from Google to websites has been declining for several years due to featured snippets.
This trend means we need to rethink how we measure SEO.
Organic impressions were once regarded as a rather insignificant SEO KPI. With the increased prevalence of zero clicks, impressions in Google and AI platforms should now be regarded as a key metric to measure SEO performance by.
In the age of AI search, SEO is becoming less about traffic and more a battle for shelf space. Your brand still needs to be present and recognisable even if the user doesn’t immediately ‘buy’ by clicking.
Generative AI means anyone can churn out dozens of blogs, e-books, or articles in minutes.
The result?
A flood of AI-generated, commoditised content has left Google’s index looking like the internet in beige.
If your content is generic or just recycling old ideas, it will disappear fast.
For SaaS companies, that’s a big problem. On the one hand, content is important for building visibility, trust, and brand recognition. On the other hand, producing outstanding content at scale is difficult, even with AI.
For too many SaaS companies, scaling usually means shortcuts. And shortcuts usually mean lower quality. It’s a catch-22.
By now, marketers have learnt a couple things:
And yet, pressure to publish more hasn’t gone away. Stakeholders want more blogs. More use cases. More of everything.
The challenge is twofold:
That usually means involving internal subject matter experts (who often don’t have time to write the content) and investing more time in conducting original, industry-relevant research.
Good SaaS content should focus on original perspectives that actually add value. All this isn’t easy and takes effort, thought, and a willingness to go deeper than the surface-level content everyone else is publishing.
The days of knocking out a quick “What is X?” blog post and watching it rank are over. Those pieces are the easiest to mass-produce…but they are often ignored.
SaaS SEO in 2025 demands content with actual expertise behind it. Producing that kind of content consistently (and at scale) is one of the toughest jobs in marketing right now.
SaaS buyers are no longer loyal to a single search box. A recent survey found that generative AI tools like ChatGPT are trusted by 34% of B2B decision-makers as sources for shortlisting vendors.
The way people search for information is fragmenting. For marketers, that means we can’t just think about traditional SEO anymore.
The SEO (or search) challenge today is to show up wherever prospects are searching.
Today’s SaaS buyer might:
I think a common misconception that SEO has carried for too long is that it operates in a silo and is somehow separate from other marketing channels. This assumption is totally misaligned with how buyers search in the real world.
Now that people have more ways to search and Google isn’t the only gig in town, SEO is being forced to take a long, hard look at itself, and there is an urgent requirement to think deeply and focus on how buyers really search.
The simplistic era of ‘rank-click-covert’ SEO is long gone and probably died a long time ago.
SEO has never been simple, and the introduction of AI search has added a new layer of complexity. Here are some tactics that can help address the current challenges and ensure your SaaS SEO strategy remains effective.
When a prospective customer searches for something, they often want an answer quickly. If your content takes forever to get to the point, don’t be surprised when it’s ignored by humans and AI systems.
Structuring content so user questions are addressed first makes it easier for AI platforms to parse, as they are designed to address the intent, or why, behind a user’s query.
Consider it akin to an inverted pyramid: commence with the conclusion or definition, followed by further elaboration. This format is excellent for user experience and visibility in AI search platforms.
Find out what people are asking
Start by pulling together the main questions your audience keeps coming back to. You can do this through surveys, chatting with customer service teams, or just digging into the kinds of searches people are making.
Get straight to the point
When you write, don’t dance around — answer the question right away. If the topic’s complicated, give the most useful or common answer first, then you can get into the weeds with extra details or edge cases later on.
Make it easy to scan
Break things up. Use clear headings, bullet points, or whatever makes it simple for someone (or an AI tool) to spot what they need fast without having to dig through walls of text.
Add layers for the curious
After the quick answer, build in more context or deeper explanations for the folks who want to keep going. That way you’re helping both people who just want a fast answer and those who want the full story.
In short, give them the goods up front before delving into the topic in more detail.
We all know video is everywhere now. People expect it. And honestly, it’s one of the few formats that still feels relatively untouched by the flood of auto-generated content.
So it’s worth thinking about how SaaS companies can actually use it as part of their SEO strategy, not just for vanity views, but as a way to show real use cases.
The search results page isn’t just ten blue links anymore. There’s video, images, snippets, AI summaries…all jostling for attention. And since Google owns YouTube, and YouTube’s the second biggest search engine, it makes sense to optimise your content for both. AI search tools also sometimes reference YouTube videos directly in their responses, so having something decent there gives you another shot at visibility.
So where do you start? Look at your high-priority SEO pages—maybe a use case article, a comparison page, or a “how it works” guide—and think about whether a short explainer video would add anything. It doesn’t have to be polished. A simple screen recording with decent audio is often enough.
Also, embed the video in the blog post or page, add a transcript if you can, and use Video schema markup to help Google (and AI tools) understand what it’s about.
It won’t be quick. But it’s worth the effort—especially now, when everyone else is just spamming out content and calling it a strategy.
Technical SEO doesn’t get much love in meetings. But without it, everything else you do—your clever content, your keyword research, your fancy design—can fall flat. Especially now, when AI systems are scraping the web to decide what’s worth showing to users.
If your site’s a mess under the hood, you’re probably making it harder for both search engines and AI models to understand your content.
Here’s what to get right first:
Once the basics are in place, add some structure. Schema markup might’ve started as a way to get rich snippets, but it’s doing more heavy lifting now, especially for AI platforms.
AI tools value up-to-date information. If your content’s old or your sitemap isn’t refreshed, it may get skipped over. Also, consider allowing newer AI crawlers like GPTBot in your robots.txt if you want them to pick up your latest updates.
One last thing: don’t obsess over every warning in an SEO audit tool. Focus on the stuff that actually stops your content from being found or understood. The point isn’t perfection. It’s clarity.
When everyone uses the same tools to create content, much of it begins to sound similar. Content becomes polished, predictable, and, to be honest, a bit pointless.
One of the easiest ways to cut through the noise? Go and speak to the people in your company (or network) who actually know the thing. Not the marketers. The engineers. The product managers. The customer success team. Anyone with real expertise.
You don’t need to turn it into a big process. A quick 20–30 minute chat is usually enough. You can record it, transcribe it, and pull the best bits into your content. No need for slick quotes or perfect phrasing; just use the insights.
You could also:
This approach won’t scale like spinning up five AI blog posts a day. But that’s kind of the point. Content with real human input feels different. It’s better and more trustworthy and more likely to be linked to or cited.
Also, it gets your internal team involved in marketing without asking them to write the whole thing, which they probably don’t have time (or interest) to do anyway.
Search intent has been floating around as a buzzword for years. However, with the advent of AI, understanding search intent is becoming increasingly important.
When content fails to align with user intent, it leads to high bounce rates, negatively impacts rankings, and is disregarded by AI tools.
There are still broad buckets of intent that are useful to think about:
Most SaaS-related searches fall into the first and last categories. So you need to make sure your content fits the intent behind the query—not just the keywords.
When a user searches for a specific solution like “best OKR tools”, provide direct value by offering a comparison of options. This comparison should include pros, cons, and pricing information.
With tools like ChatGPT or Perplexity, people ask more complex, layered questions. They might say:
“We’re a team of 10 using Slack and Notion—what’s a good lightweight project management tool with a decent mobile app?”
That’s not just one intent—it’s a mix of requirements, context, and preferences. If your content doesn’t address at least part of that, you’re probably not making the cut in an AI summary.
This is where having a mix of pages helps:
It’s not always about stuffing all that into one page. It’s about building a network of pages that together cover the full set of questions and use cases buyers are likely to care about.
Search the query you’re targeting and look at the top results. What format are they using? Are they blog posts, videos, tools, product pages? Match that. Don’t try to force a product page to rank for a high-level educational query—it rarely works.
Additionally, review your bounce rate and the time visitors spend on your page. If visitors arrive on your page and promptly depart, it typically indicates that the content is not engaging enough.
If your content doesn’t match what the searcher actually wanted, it doesn’t matter how good your writing is.
Internal linking doesn’t get talked about much. It’s not glamorous. It’s rarely a priority. But it quietly does a lot of heavy lifting when it comes to SEO.
If you want search engines of AI-powered crawlers to understand your website’s structure, internal links are what guide them. Without them, your pages are just a disconnected mess.
Google’s John Mueller has said internal linking is “super critical” for SEO, and it’s one of the few ranking levers you control entirely.
You’re trying to build a clear, connected structure so search engines can understand the relationships between your content, and visitors can navigate it naturally.
Internal linking also helps reinforce topical authority. If you’ve written a bunch of solid articles around “SaaS onboarding”, linking them together signals that you’ve actually got depth on the subject, not just a one-off post.
Technical SEO is a bit like plumbing. If everything’s working, you barely notice it. If it’s not, nothing else functions properly, no matter how good the content is.
For SaaS websites especially, where you’ve got login walls, web apps, and dynamic content flying around, the basics really matter. But there’s a line between doing what’s necessary and wasting time chasing minor metrics.
Once the essentials are in place, stop obsessing. Google’s own team has stated that Core Web Vitals are relatively minor ranking factors. You don’t need a 100/100 score in Lighthouse. And shaving half a second off your page load time isn’t going to catapult you to the top of the SERP.
Every SEO tool out there will flag hundreds of technical “issues”. Most of them don’t matter.
Instead of trying to tick every box, ask:
In short, technical SEO isn’t about chasing perfection. It’s about making sure your content is accessible, understandable, and fast enough not to annoy anyone. Get the groundwork solid, then move on.
Otherwise, you’ll spend all your time fixing things that don’t add value.
Backlinks are still a big part of how Google figures out what to rank. That hasn’t changed. But the way we go about earning them has.
You can’t just fire off a batch of guest posts or chase anchor text anymore. It’s not 2012. If you want links that actually move the needle and show up in AI-driven search results, you need to focus on authority and visibility, not just links for the sake of it.
So the goal isn’t just to rank higher. The objective is to establish credibility as a reliable source for both human and automated users.
And yes, the trusty old guest post still works if you’re contributing something useful and not spamming AI-generated listicles.
When you earn coverage in the right places, people start searching for your brand. That sends positive signals to search engines. Plus, you get referral traffic, not just SEO equity.
There’s a compounding effect here:
Also, let’s be honest: AI tools don’t just follow links. They learn from what’s written about you. If your brand keeps turning up in trusted sources, even if those mentions aren’t linked, you’ve still planted a seed that might grow into visibility later.
So yes, links matter. But it’s not a numbers game. It’s a relevance game. Focus on getting your name in the right places, not every place.
SEO has never been a channel that can be set and forgotten. But now, with AI search results, zero-click searches, and shifting user behaviour, you’ve got to rethink how you measure performance.
Some old-school metrics still matter. Some don’t mean what they used to.
You can use CRM tracking, GA4 events, or attribution tools to map SEO activity to actual revenue. It’s not perfect, but it’s better than reporting “we got 10,000 visits” with no context.
AI search has changed things. You might show up in an AI overview or a featured snippet and never get a click. That doesn’t mean your content isn’t doing anything.
Visibility still matters, even if the traffic doesn’t always follow.
Personalisation, AI boxes, and SERP features mean your first position might be halfway down the page in practice. So if you’re tracking rankings, combine that with click-through rate (CTR) data to see what’s really happening.
You’ve done all the work to get the visit; don’t waste it.
Track both, but know that non-branded is where you win new attention. That’s where your content strategy shows up.
You can estimate how much you’re spending on SEO (content, tools, freelancers, etc.), then divide by the number of customers you get through organic.
If it’s cheaper than paid channels, and it often is, you’ve got something that scales.
Search engine optimisation is a constantly evolving field. Algorithm updates and changes in user search patterns are continuous. The current landscape includes AI overviews and a decrease in organic clicks.
So how do you make sure your strategy doesn’t fall apart six months from now?
You build it on things that don’t go out of date.
Keep your content fresh. Update your best-performing content. AI tools and search engines favour content that doesn’t look abandoned.
As a SaaS SEO Specialist, I’ve worked with B2B SaaS businesses to boost their brand visibility and drive growth through search engines. If you’re looking to attract more traffic and generate high-quality leads, let’s arrange an initial chat to explore how I can help.
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