Table of Contents

1. SaaS market growth
2. Is SEO always important for SaaS companies?
3. SaaS SEO process
4. Closing thoughts

The SaaS market continues to grow

The SaaS market is becoming increasingly competitive and with good reason.

New vendors want a slice of the SaaS pie. SaaS has experienced strong growth during the past decade:

Growth in SaaS Market

By the end of 2025 the market is expected to be worth nearly 300 billion USD.

Positive growth like this attracts a continuous stream of new contenders to the party which makes SaaS marketing, and SaaS SEO, increasingly competitive.

When you factor in the complexities that generative AI has introduced into the mix, it can seem overwhelming deciding where to allocate precious marketing budget for your SaaS product.

Is SEO always important for SaaS companies?

The short answer to this question is no.

If you don’t have product market fit yet, investing in SEO could potentially be a disastrous business decision.

It’s like putting the cart before the horse.

SEO takes time to gain traction, so businesses need to be confident that the intended market desires their product.

Before investing in SEO, SaaS marketers should ask two questions first:

1. Does the product currently serve a need for the target audience and are customers buying and using the product over alternatives?
2. Are there relevant search terms and topics with enough monthly search volume to warrant investment in SEO?

If the answer to those two questions is a resounding ‘yes‘ then SEO can certainly help with the business’ growth goals.

For early stage startups I would recommend testing the ‘SEO waters’ with some PPC first. This will not only assess whether Search is conducive to generating leads (confirming potential customers are ‘out there’ in Search) but it will also provide valuable insights into keywords that prospects are using.

Key differences between SaaS SEO and traditional SEO

Although the principles of SEO are the same whether it is SaaS or a generic product aimed at the mass market, there are a couple of important distinctions you need to bear in mind when thinking about a SaaS SEO strategy that don’t usually apply with traditional SEO.

• SaaS products are often highly specialised and cater for a niche audience. This means that keyword research, content creation, and SEO strategies need to be tailored to the unique needs and preferences of the target audience.
• Search volumes for SaaS keywords tend to be lower due to the targeted nature of the audience. This means that SaaS content marketing requires a more targeted approach.

By understanding these key differences, SaaS companies can develop SEO strategies that are specifically tailored to their industry and target audience.

A SaaS SEO process for 2024

Creating a SaaS SEO strategy in 2024 needs to take into consideration the impact of generative AI on Search.

Google introduced AI Overviews (AIOs) back in May 2024 and these will be rolled out globally over the coming weeks and months. This doesn’t mean ‘SEO is dead’ but it does signal that the old SaaS SEO playbook needs to evolve.

For example, AI will likely steal traffic from the top of the funnel, so writing 5000 word ‘what is’ informational content that can easily be summarised by AI, isn’t going to cut it like it did in 2015.

However, some aspects of SaaS SEO remain constant and consideration of business goals and driving organic traffic and conversions from the target audience still holds true in 2024.

Aligning SEO goals with business objectives

SEO should always be aligned with business objectives. Ranking for a specific keyword only makes sense if it leads to a valuable business outcome.

Before embarking with a SaaS SEO strategy consider what you’d like to achieve from it:

• Brand Awareness. If the goal is greater brand awareness in Search, you need to take into account how to increase brand visibility in AIOs as well as traditional Search (as not all search queries trigger an AI response).
• Drive Conversions. If the goal is to increase conversions and drive more sales, the SEO strategy may prioritise product page optimisation and improving the user experience on the website.

By aligning SEO goals with business objectives, SaaS companies can maximise the impact of their SEO efforts and drive meaningful results.

What follows is a 7 step SEO framework to increase the organic search visibility for a SaaS product.

STEP 1: Identify your target audience and their search intent

Before developing your SaaS SEO strategy you need to be clear on the Who and the Why.

• Who. You need to have detailed insights into who your target audience is. By understanding who your target audience is and what they are searching for, you can create content that is relevant and valuable.
• Why. An understanding of why they are searching, their search intent, is crucial because content needs to address the reasons they are searching in the first place. Understanding search intent allows you to create content that meets their needs and provides them with the information they are looking for.

Google’s Search Quality Raters Guidelines stress the importance of search intent numerous times. Quality content and links can only take you so far. If the page doesn’t address user’s goal for searching, then it is unlikely it will perform well in Search.

STEP 2:Technical SEO foundations for SaaS

Technical SEO can often be neglected by SaaS businesses. It is sometimes viewed as being less important than content and links, for example.

However, this is a serious misjudgement.

Failing to address technical SEO issues is akin to building a house without a firm foundation. If you’re lucky, you may manage to complete the house. But sooner or later you’re going to run into serious problems!

Carrying out an audit prior to starting your SEO strategy is a good way to ensure the website is in good health. Creating and publishing content on a website that has technical problems will impede organic performance at best. The worst case scenario is your content doesn’t get indexed and has no visibility in Search.

Technical SEO plays a crucial role in optimising website structure, minimising site speed, improving internal linking and ensuring that search engines can crawl and index the website efficiently.

Website structure optimisation for better crawling and indexing

Have you ever been to a shopping mall and struggled to find the shop you want to visit because the mall map isn’t great? Chances are you exit the mall as trying to find one shop amongst 100’s is way too much effort!

A well optimised website structure is a bit like a helpful shopping mall map. Good site architecture not only benefits SEO but also provides a good user experience (UX).

If the layout of your website isn’t logical then visitors aren’t going to spend much time trying to figure out what they should do next. Make your website easy to navigate and you will be rewarded with good engagement metrics and a favourable position in the SERP.

Internal linking is another important aspect of website structure optimisation as it helps search engines crawl and index all the pages on the website.

Speed optimisation: enhancing user experience (UX) and SEO

Reducing page load times enhances user experience and SEO. A slow website can result in poor engagement, harming search engine rankings. It’s important to prioritise page speed optimisation for a seamless user experience.

To reduce page load times, consider implementing the following:

1. Reduce the use of heavy graphics and scripts,
2. Optimise images and videos,
3. Utilise caching and content delivery networks (CDNs).

STEP 3: Keyword research for SaaS

Keyword research is an important element in any SEO strategy. However, with the advent of AI in Search, it is becoming less important than it once was.

Because AI enables semantic search capabilities, exact keyword matching is far less important than it was 10-15 years ago. In fact Google has been getting more intelligent over the years and can understand synonyms, misspellings and the intent behind search queries.

Having said that, keyword research is still necessary in SEO to optimise important on-page elements (like the title tags) and to guide content strategy.

Without finding keywords with sufficient search volume to drive traffic to your website, it will be difficult to attract the right type of visitor from Search.

SaaS keyword research process

Due to the niche nature of many SaaS products, keyword volumes tend to be low. Although search volumes are low, they will deliver highly targeted visitors that are looking for answers to a specific problem which your product or service can solve.

Here is a step by step process that will provide a good structure for your SaaS keyword research.

Gather keyword ideas

Good keyword research starts with gathering lists of seed terms from various sources. You will no doubt have your own ideas regarding keywords, but here are some other areas to look into.

1. Customer interviews. It isn’t always easy to interview customers but they are your best source of truth for keyword ideas. If interviewing customers isn’t an option, try asking your customer support and sales teams.
2. Ask customer support and sales. These teams will have insights into customer pain points that will be difficult to obtain elsewhere. These people are speaking to your customers day in and day out so will be able to provide some valuable ideas for seed keywords
3. Look at your competition. What organic keywords do competitor websites appear for? Common SEO tools like Ahrefs and Semrush both have features that will provide this information.
4. Look at PPC search terms. If you have been running PPC, the search terms report will provide valuable data on what keywords your target audience is using. Filter this data to see keywords that drove conversions and you will get ideas for BOFU terms to optimise product pages with.
5. Google Search Console. The Search Results report in Google Search Console gives you keywords that actual website visitors typed into Google. This provides valuable information that may not be available in common keyword research tools.

Google Search Console – Search Results

Input into a keyword tool

There are numerous SEO tools in the market but they all basically function in the same way with regard to keyword research. You enter a seed keyword and it will output a list of related keywords along with metrics like monthly search volume, keyword difficulty and cost per click.

The output of this second step is to export lists of keyword terms into Excel or Google Sheets that we can further analyse and organise.

Organise

You should now have a long (and rather jumbled) list of potentially 1000s of keywords. This step is all about organising your keyword lists so it can be used in your SaaS SEO strategy.

1. Search intent. Some SEO’s propose segmenting keywords into 3,4 and even 5 categories of search intent. I like to follow the KISS rule (Keep it Simple Stupid). Separate your keywords as either informational (for content production) or buyer (for landing pages and product/service pages).
2. Topic clusters. When creating and publishing content it is SEO best practice to interlink pages that talk about various aspects of the same topic. Sorting your keywords by general topic gives you insight into important topic clusters that need to be considered in your SaaS content strategy.
3. Priority, supplemental & emerging. I discuss categorising keywords as either ‘Priority’, ‘Supplemental’ or ‘Emerging’ in some detail on my post on B2B keyword research. ‘Priority’ keywords are those that are directly related to your product or service and the problem it solves for potential customers. ‘Supplemental’ keywords are terms that are relevant to your target audience but unrelated to your SaaS product. ‘Emerging’ terms are keywords that indicate some potential future trend. When fleshing out your content strategy, you should aim for 75% Priority, 20% Supplemental and 5% Emerging.

How to Prioritise Content

Identify low hanging fruit

Any SEO strategy should aim to provide value as soon as possible. If a simple change to a page title or H1 heading leads to a page 1 result that needs to be prioritised first.

Identifying low hanging fruit involves looking for ways to get the most bang for your buck.

Go back to your (now organised) keyword spreadsheets and apply some clever conditional formatting so you highlight any low difficulty high volume keywords.

The idea it to start optimising where you can for these terms, because they will lead to increased organic traffic with minimal effort.

As an example you could format according to the following rules:

1. Green – MSV > 100 & KD < 30
2. Amber – MSV between 50 to 99 & KD between 31 & 49
3. Red – MSV less than 49 & KD > 50

Colour formatting in this way will show you some quick wins (high volume & low difficulty – 2 greens).

Use Conditional Formatting to Identify Quick Wins

STEP 4: SaaS content marketing

Bill Gates coined the phrase ‘content is king’ back in the mid 1990’s.

Unfortunately too many marketers have taken him on his word and the internet today is awash with poor quality content that is boring, doesn’t help drive business goals and doesn’t have the target audience in mind.

And the quality of content will only be driven down further now we have the ability to scale with AI.

When thinking about content strategy for SaaS businesses, anything published needs to be a ‘Purple Cow’ (to borrow the title of Seth Godin’s excellent book) in a field of Frisians.

It needs to stand out from the crowd and truly connect with the target audience so that they remember your brand.

However it also needs to be optimised so that it can be found in Search.

When working with SaaS clients I feel it is important to provide an SEO content structure. But ultimately the content can’t be too formulaic and needs to be infused with the brand’s unique voice and perspective in order to truly gel with the potential customer.

If content isn’t being used as a tool to fuel business growth, then why waste resources producing it?

SaaS content marketing framework

Having a tried and tested process is an important aspect of running any businesses successfully.

Having a proven content framework in place means content production can be scaled whilst remaining true to business objectives.

Here is a SaaS content marketing framework to try out in your business:

1. Audience. Start with your audience in mind. Who are you trying to talk to and what are their pain points? Create content that addresses your prospects’ needs and provides solutions.
2. Editorial Mission Statement. Creating an editorial mission statement before you even produce your first blog post will be helpful in the long run. It will ensure that everyone in the business is aligned with who the intended audience is, how the content will help address their needs and the business goals for the content.
3. Keyword Research. If the goal is to grow organic traffic and increase brand awareness in Search, content needs to consider keywords. Use the information you’ve obtained from audience research, to find terms that will drive potential customers to your website.
4. Audit Current Content. You may already have content that can be repurposed or combined to fulfil the business objectives of your content strategy. It’s better to sweat what you already have rather than waste internal resources producing a brand new piece.
5. Topic Clusters. A topic cluster strategy involves organising content around a central theme (pillar content) with several related subtopics (cluster content) linking back to it. This approach improves SEO by signalling to search engines the depth of content on a particular topic, enhancing visibility and ranking. For SaaS businesses, this strategy boosts organic traffic, establishes authority in niche areas, and drives lead generation by addressing various customer pain points comprehensively.
6. Content Calendar. A content calendar is the bridge which connects your strategy to reality. It ensures consistent, timely publishing, aligning content with brand voice, marketing goals and product launches. A calendar also helps in planning diverse content types, managing resources effectively, and tracking performance.
7. Publish & Distribute. Many businesses are good at publishing but fail to distribute. Strategic distribution on social media channels frequented by your audience, is an important element in any effective content marketing framework, and helps you get the most out of every piece of content you produce.
8. Measure Performance. Without measurement, you can’t determine if your content is meeting business goals. Quarterly analysis of content performance creates a valuable feedback loop, offering insights for future content planning. For businesses with small content teams, these insights help ensure that limited resources are directed towards the most impactful activities, effectively driving the business toward its objectives.

Remember, the focus should always be on creating content that provides real value to your audience, positioning your SaaS brand as a reputable source of information within the industry. This approach not only improves your search engine rankings but also builds credibility and brand awareness.

STEP 5: Link building for SaaS websites

Link building is still a vital part of SEO. Google’s recently leaked document goes into how they evaluate links in quite some detail.

SaaS businesses should consider the following when evaluating potential link building sources:

1. Relevance. Ask yourself would potential customers visit this website. Links should be evaluated in terms of referral traffic potential and not solely on SEO value.
2. Authority. Links from high authority websites tend to carry more weight. However, relevance is likely more important than authority.
3. Diversity. Websites should have a natural looking link profile, so it’s helps to obtain links from diverse sources such as websites, forums, business partnerships etc
4. Build Relationships Not Links! Ultimately link building should be about building relationships with people. Cultivating mutually beneficial relationships with people that work in your industry can mean content gets shared socially, exposing your brand to a wider audience.

Link building for SaaS – think beyond the link

It pays to think beyond the pure SEO value of links.

Link building should primarily be viewed through a PR lens – a vehicle for promoting your brand on 3rd party websites. This brand-centric approach guides link building campaigns to focus on relevance, which should be your key consideration.

Here are some link building tactics for SaaS businesses:

1. Build a Tool. An effective way to attract links naturally is to build a tool that will help your target audience. A good example of this is Writer’s free AI content detector. This tool not only increases brand awareness to the right audience (content marketers) but at the time of writing had acquired links from over 1700 different domains.
2. Guest Posting. It’s important to be selective about where you guest post. Relevance is key so stick to websites that your potential customers might visit.
3. Publish Research. Conducting and publishing original research or industry surveys that provide unique insights can attract backlinks from sites referencing your data. Developing infographics, reports, or whitepapers based on your research can make your content highly shareable and link-worthy.
4. Contribute on Industry Forums. Engaging in discussions on industry forums can be a good way to get highly relevant links back to your website. It is probably more difficult to get backlinks with this tactic than it was say 10 years ago. However, the benefits of brand awareness to your target audience more than make up for this.
5. Broken Link Building. Identify broken links on relevant websites and suggest your content as a replacement.

When building links it is important to to use a wide range of tactics to create a natural looking link profile.

STEP 6: On-page SEO best practices for SaaS

No discussion about SEO strategy would be complete without talking about on-page SEO. However, changing on page elements to make them more keyword optimised won’t have the level of impact it did 20 years ago when search engines relied on keyword tags to make sense of content.

Search engines today are far more advanced and can understand synonyms, misspellings and the meaning of words used in different contexts.

In short, yes on-page optimisation is important. But there are other factors, such as search intent, that need to be met in order to rank well.

Below I have outlined some key points you need to think about when optimising a SaaS website:

1. Page Title. This is the most important on-page element to optimise. Make sure you include your keyword and brand name and stick to 60 characters or less. For SaaS demo pages, including terms like ‘Book Demo’, ‘Free Demo’ can entice users to click through.
2. Heading Tags. Use H1, H2, and H3 tags to structure content, incorporating keywords naturally.
3. URL. Use of keyword in the url is recommended, more as a UX benefit than SEO. Keep urls as short as possible avoiding the use of underscores and article words.
4. Meta Description. This is the text blurb you see below the blue link (page title) in the SERP. Although it doesn’t impact keyword rank, it can have a positive influence on organic CTR.
5. Schema. Implementing schema markup helps search engines understand your content better. And with the advent of Google AI Overviews and the use of AI-powered search (answer) engines like Perplexity.ai, schema markup will become even more important in the future as it helps train AI systems. So get ready for the future of search today and implement schema markup code wherever it is relevant.
6. Internal Linking. The importance of internal links is often overlooked. They channel a website’s link equity throughout a website. Link internally where it makes sense to, using keyword rich anchor text.
7. Image Optimisation. Image file sizes should ideally be no larger than 100KB for fast page load times. Also, adding keyword rich alt tags makes your website accessible to the visually impaired and increases the the chances of your website appearing in Google Images.

By focusing on these on-page SEO best practices, SaaS companies can boost their search engine rankings and attract quality organic traffic to their websites.

Importance of featured snippets & rich results for SaaS companies

Featured snippets are not as important as they once were because of the introduction of Google AI Overviews and various AI answer engines. However, it is still worth considering as they help increase brand awareness for relevant topics which is especially important for newer or niche SaaS products.

Featured snippets are selected search results that are showcased on top of Google’s organic results, offering users a quick and relevant answer to their query. By structuring content using clear headings and bullet points, SaaS websites can increase their chances of being featured in these snippets.

Rich results, on the other hand, enhance search listings with additional visual elements like images, reviews, or pricing information. Optimising content with schema markup can help search engines understand the context of the information presented, making it more likely to be displayed as a rich result.

STEP 7: Measuring SEO success: metrics and KPIs

Without regularly assessing SEO performance, you won’t know how effective your strategy is at achieving business goals. Failure to measure can also lead to impulsive thinking – making changes based on little more than a whim.

1. Organic Traffic. This is a basic metric to track using Google Analytics. It is important to benchmark where you’re starting from so you can track your progress. I tend to focus on ‘Engaged Sessions’ (visits) rather than ‘Sessions’. ‘Engaged Sessions’ are visits that are over 10s or view 2+ pages or convert.
2. Organic Conversions. Any assessment of SEO performance without measuring conversions from organic traffic is incomplete. If you use a CRM such as Hubspot, create a list and track MQLs from organic search. This is a far better way of measuring performance than simply tracking leads.
3. Keyword Rank. This is pretty much a standard SEO metric to track but I think it is over rated as a measure of success. Keyword rank is a good guide to indicate a strategy is working but a page 1 result for a term doesn’t necessarily translate to more demos and increased revenue.
4. Branded Search. The long term goal of SEO should be to increase brand visibility in search. Publishing content that helps your prospects, develops trust in your brand. Eventually they Google you by your brand name (rather than a keyword) when they are ready to buy. Obviously this isn’t an overnight matter, but I would expect to see brand searches increasing over time. Tracking branded traffic can be done using Google Search Console.
5. Engagement Metrics. Good engagement metrics are a positive indication that your content resonates with the intended audience. If you see that the average time on site from blog pages is only 10s, that is a warning sign that your content isn’t working!

By continuously analysing these metrics and KPIs, you can iteratively refine your SEO tactics to improve search engine rankings, drive organic traffic, and ultimately enhance the overall online visibility and performance of your SaaS business.

Closing thoughts

The recent advances in AI technology are impacting the way people search. In addition to ChatGPT, there are now AI search engines (more accurately ‘answer engines’) such as Perplexity AI and Andi which give people search options other than Google.

SaaS SEO in 2024 needs to consider potential changes in the way customers might be using Search over the next 5 years. It is likely that top funnel queries will be better answered within Google AI Overviews or similar solutions. So SaaS marketers should be focusing on producing more middle funnel content to address the needs of users that have passed the information gathering stage.

One way to do this would be to produce content optimised for specific product use cases linking back to a demo page. I call this strategy a Product Cluster and discuss it in more depth on my post ‘is SEO dead?‘.

Despite all the changes, it’s important to keep our feet firmly on the ground and not get swept away on a tidal wave of AI hype.

Google is not going anywhere yet despite the proclamations of SEO is dead! Google still has over 90% of search market share globally and 87% in the US. And although AI Overviews were officially launched in the US in May 2024, Google has reduced the number of instances of queries being answered by AI to a new low of 7% (it was previously as high as 65%!).

So when planning SEO strategy in 2024, it’s obviously important to keep one eye on potential future developments but with a firm grounding on what is working today.