5 SEO tips for Saas companies
Overview
- The cone structure for your content
- Speed is indeed important
- Titles, the easiest SEO factor
- Create content per vertical
- Improve your ranking
1. The cone structure for your content
SEO as you probably know has 2 parts that work together in harmony. On the one hand, you have the technical side. This means that your website should be technically in order so that Google’s crawl bot can easily start reading all the content. This also includes things like the speed of your website, which we’ll cover in a later post.
But the content is something that is certainly equally important and if it is done right then you can generate not only a good SEO ranking but also a lot of conversions with your blog. This should be formatted according to the topics you would like to be found for. Usually these topics will be your products/services.
There used to be a lot of bad blogs written that were just crammed with the same keyword. Because the companies wanted to be found on this, so if you use the word a lot then in theory you should be high up in the search results.
This is something that fails today, it is better that you just write good content that your potential customers find useful.
What does work these days is the cone structure. You should think of the shape of a cone, the top dot is a product/service for which you want to be found. But that dot can’t stand so high without the sides, these are the support blocks that make the subject rank so well. For example, if your service is a CRM then these support blocks could be articles that deal with CRM integration, how to fully leverage a CRM, how your CRM brings your marketing and sales closer together,….
The previous examples are all specific topics of interest to your target audience and people are effectively searching for these things. Since all these things are also related to CRM, you can put them all under the same cone of CRM. You can also make a general blog post with a lot of information about your CRM in it where you also refer to all your different blog posts. You can even go so far as to link to your blog posts on the feature page of your CRM as well.
You have to see this as a kind of cross-pollination and you show Google that this is all connected and that it is an important topic for you.
2. Speed does matter
There has been a big shift to mobile web traffic for years. Since 2015, mobile searches have outpaced desktop. That says a lot about how people search. People search for information quickly and want to get the information immediately. The internet is at the tips of their fingers, literally.
Google obviously saw this trend and made a commitment to focus more on website speed. Because with your smartphone, chances are you’re not using wifi but your mobile data. Therefore, the page should load quickly even if you are on a 3G connection, for example.
For Google Ads, it has been known for a while now that mobile speed is an important ranking factor. Therefore, the Google Page Speed test was created. If the speed of your website was faster then your ad was also placed higher than those of your competitors. This is because the quality of the landing page and the experience for the user is better.
With Google Ads, it is well known that speed is hugely important. In SEO, it is still said with few words but it is something that definitely counts in your ranking. Not long ago, they came out from Google with a new speed test to push even more for fast websites. This one is the Google Page Speed Test V6, this new test makes even established ones blush. Because below you can see the result for a brand like Nike. As you can imagine, a score of 7/100 is not too good. It may well be that this score was better for the new test but the V6 is a lot stricter than the V5 test.
If you run the V6 test you can also get a full chit of the things that can still be improved. That way, you can start addressing this yourself practically or if you have a web developer you can start sharing this with him/her and they will take it further.
3. Titles, the easiest SEO factor
Titles, titles and more titles. Nowadays there are more than 200 factors that will influence the ranking of your website or webpage. Of all these factors, titles are the one that can give you the fastest ROI. It’s also a factor that you can easily adjust even if you’re not a webmaster.
The title of your pages can easily be found in most website builders. These titles also show up on Google in the search results. This is your exit board as a company and it should be in order down to the last detail.
If we do a ‘site:’ search, i.e. enter ‘site:yourdomainname.be’ in Google, the result will be all the pages of your domain/website that are currently indexed by the Google search engine. We want to check here that the titles are displayed correctly. Sometimes we see that the titles are abbreviated at the end because they are too long. Other times we just see things like ‘homepage’.
For Google’s crawl bot, the title is the first thing they look at when they visit your page. It is therefore essential that you tell here what the page is about and indicate for which keywords you want to be found.
4. Create content per vertical
Very often we see Saas companies saying that their software ‘can be used by anyone’. That’s good because you have a very large market that you can appeal to. The worst thing you can do then is to address the whole market with the same message that says something like: “we make software that makes your business more efficient, you save time and everything is online”.
If you create your content this way, you will be competing with all the blogs that your competitors write too and you actually give little added value to your readers because the subject is far too general. You say everything but nothing at the same time.
In an ideal scenario, you’re going to create blog posts and content per vertical. You know exactly who your customers are and what sector they are in. You also know what you can offer specifically to each sector. That’s what people want to read. Be sure to give them some practical tips for their business as well, it’s something they will take away and it’s something that will hold their attention.
You also know which sectors are very profitable for you, so you can bet even more on those. If you handle this very well, you can become the reference in this sector. This is much more valuable than generally being in position 4 or 5 for brand awareness.
tip:
If you’re not really inspired to write about a particular sector, you can interview your existing clients to gather valuable info about issues they’re working on.
5. Improve your ranking
Before you can improve your ranking, it is of course important to know your current position. You can easily test this via our Serpstat API. Here you can see what authority your domain has.
However, we also use Serpstat to rank you against your main competitors. This way we can see perfectly where you are in the market. Since the Saas sector is usually very competitive there will be some work to do to really start scoring well.
Your rank in Google should of course not only be seen in terms of your domain. It’s good that your domain ranks high but you may also have certain pages that are going to rank very well. Think about a blog post that gets a lot of traffic and has received a very valuable backlink from a website with a lot of authority on the topic. The collection of lots of good blog posts with good authority also give your general domain a boost in authority. You can also share these blogposts via your social media. If you are a B2B business this will likely happen on Linkedin. Remember, these links on online platforms are also backlinks.
Sometimes it is very obvious but you can also just ask people for backlinks to certain parts of your website. You probably know some people in the industry who would be willing to give you a link.
More SEO tips for the Saas industry?
Besides these 5 tips, there are of course a lot of other insights that should be looked at on a made-to-measure basis to start bringing in low-hanging fruit. We at Growl can help you with this. Are you part of an ambitious Saas company? Then we would love to hear your story!
