SEO for B2B SaaS: A Comprehensive Strategy Guide for 2023

What’s the first thing a potential customer does when they want to subscribe to a tool in your niche?

They Google it. 

If your B2B SaaS business doesn’t appear in those initial results, you’re losing out on a huge chunk of revenue. 

That’s why SEO (Search Engine Optimization) for B2B SaaS is crucial. But it’s a complex process to understand, so many successful businesses like Postalytics entrust agencies such as MADX to handle their SEO efforts – the results speak for themselves. 

In this guide, we’ll explain what SEO means for B2B SaaS and the best practices and strategies you need to get ahead of the competition. 

What We'll Cover:

What is SEO for B2B SaaS? 

B2B SaaS SEO involves increasing the organic traffic of your website through various initiatives like;

• Incorporating the right keywords,
• Writing content that ranks,
• Building backlinks for your brand. 

The aim is to make your brand more visible on SERPs for relevant search queries, bringing more traffic to your site and ultimately driving conversions. 

For example, if you have a workplace communication tool, you would want to appear in the top 10 results on Google when someone types a query like, “How to improve workplace communication?” or “Best workplace communication tools.” 

What are the Benefits of B2B SaaS SEO? 

There are many case studies online where B2B companies have driven growth with SEO. Here, we’ll point out four important reasons why SEO drives growth. 

• Drives consistent traffic: Unlike paid marketing, like ads and affiliate marketing, organic efforts drive consistent traffic to your business. For example, an evergreen piece of content will keep bringing traffic instead of a PPC ad that will only bring traffic until you keep paying.

• Improved visibility and ranking: When you implement targeted SEO strategies, your content keeps ranking higher, attracting more audience to your website. 

• Increased trust and credibility: When you appear in relevant search results and you build high-quality backlinks to your site, people start associating topical authority with your brand.

• Reduces cost per acquisition over time: When you utilize paid channels, your CPA keeps increasing. With SEO, you get results over time and see your CPA dropping.

Keyword Strategy Across B2B SaaS Sales Funnel 

Keyword research is one of the most important elements of SaaS SEO. We provide keyword research services to our clients and prioritize keywords based on different stages of the funnel. 

Top Of The Funnel (TOFU) 

Top-of-the-funnel keywords are focused on driving awareness and generally have a high volume but a low conversion rate. These keywords aim to solve a problem your target audience has. Note here that your audience still does not know about your product, so it’s a good practice to give them information first and then lead them to your product. 

Some TOFU keywords for a workplace communication tool can be: 

• Workplace communication best practices.
• Work collaboration.
• Work communication strategies.

Typically, blog content will rank high for TOFU keywords. 

Middle Of The Funnel (MOFU) 

Middle-of-the-funnel keywords typically have an intent to purchase but not a strong one. Your audience generally knows about the different solutions to their problem, but they haven’t still started exploring all those options. 

This means they typically enter search phrases that help them understand the different solutions. 

Some MOFU keywords for a workplace communication tool can be: 

• Workplace communication software.
• Collaboration tools.
• Work chat tool.

Typically, product or feature pages rank high with these queries.  

Bottom Of The Funnel (BOFU) 

Once a prospect reaches this final funnel stage, they are concerned with finding the best possible solution to their problem. 

They are typically aware of the different tools on the market but need help finalizing one among a few choices. 

These keywords are generally low-volume but high conversion. 

Some BOFU keywords for a workplace communication tool can be: 

• Slack vs. Chanty.
• Best workplace communication tools.
• Slack reviews.

Typically, review pages, listicles, and comparison articles rank high and get the most traffic for these queries. 

SEO Services for B2B SaaS 

As a SaaS SEO agency, we focus on six SEO elements that help a B2B business gain visibility and rank high on search engines. Let’s explore each of them. 

Technical SEO 

You might prioritize the most relevant keywords or write the best content, but it would still fail to rank if your technical SEO functions are not working well. For example, if your site has a lot of crawl errors, Google may not be able to crawl and index your site, meaning it won’t appear on search results. 

Here are five things you need to take care of in a technical SEO audit: 

• Check indexing by using tools like Ahrefs or Google Search Console.
• Add schema markup and internal links.
• Fix broken links.
• Improve the site’s loading speed and mobile usability.
• Decrease website and crawl errors.

On-page SEO 

On-page SEO techniques refer to anything you do on your website to appear in relevant search results on search engines like Google.  

Here are some on-page SEO strategies you can adopt for your B2B SaaS business: 

• Write unique content that matches the search intent for that particular keyword.
• Use headings and subheadings to structure your content.
• Place target keywords in your heading, subheadings, and meta description.
• Optimize title tags and remove duplicate tags, if any.
• Add internal links to your content.
• Optimize your images and add alt text.
• Optimize URLs by keeping them simple and relevant.

Off-page SEO 

Off-page SEO strategies refer to anything you do outside of your website to influence rankings and appear in SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). 

One of the most important off-page SEO strategies is link-building, which we’ll explore in depth in the next section. You can also focus on content promotions, email outreach, etc. 

For example, you can promote your articles on social media with links that can be easily directed to your blog or participate in guest posting via email outreach on authoritative websites. 

Backlinks  

Link building is an important off-page SEO element that involves strategically increasing the number and quality of links pointing to your website. 

Google and other search engines consider backlinks an important ranking factor as they show that your content is valuable, useful, and credible. The more high-quality backlinks you get, the more the probability of ranking high on SERPs. 

A good backlink comes from a relevant site, has a relevant placement, and a relevant and descriptive anchor text. 

You can earn backlinks by conducting outreach, publishing a data source, engaging in broken link building, finding unlinked brand mentions, creating linkable assets, and engaging in competitor backlink gap analysis. 

Competitor Analysis 

The first step when we onboard a client is understanding their tool and what makes it unique. The next step is conducting a competitor analysis. It helps us understand the different SEO strategies they are using and the results they are getting. 

For example, using tools like Ahrefs, we can discover the organic keywords they are ranking for, the featured snippets they have earned, their content gaps, their most linked content, their backlink growth, their most referring domains, etc.

‍

After this research, we create a report on what we can replicate and improve for our clients and the areas where our client has an advantage. This helps us create laser-focused strategies that are bound to get results. 

Landing Pages 

A landing page is a stand-alone page that attracts traffic and achieves a specific goal, like increasing sign-ups for the newsletter or subscriptions to the free trial. 

Here are some best practices you can follow while creating landing pages: 

• Keep your CTA above the fold.
• Resist the urge to crowd the landing page with too much content.
• Use clear and persuasive copy.
• Include visuals or imagery that attracts attention and doesn’t crowd the text.
• Ensure the page loads fast.
• Design for the right device. Ensure it works well on both – laptops and mobiles.
• Test your landing page before releasing.

Best Strategies and Practices for B2B SaaS SEO 

Here are a few best practices you can adopt that will help you gain more from your SEO efforts. 

Research Your Target Audience 

The more you understand your target audience, the better you can create content that fulfills their needs. You can even get insights on the type of CTAs that work best, the platforms they use the most, the SEO campaigns they find most useful, etc. 

Here are two things you should aim for when conducting audience research. 

Identify Audience Pain Points 

If you’re targeting multiple personas, different audience segments will have different pain points. For example, a small business using your work communication tool will have different requirements than an enterprise customer. 

You can divide these pain points into the following categories for better targeting. 

To find out these pain points, you can talk directly to customers, analyze customer feedback, or ask your sales or customer-facing teams. 

Prioritize Search Intent 

Aligning your content with the search intent of your audience ensures that they find the information they need when they consume your content. 

Search intent is divided into four parts: 

To find the search intent for a particular keyword, use a keyword research tool like Ahrefs and find the top 10 results. Whether most of them are listicles or product pages, you’ll get a fair idea of the kind of content to make to satisfy the search intent. 

This also helps you rank higher as the content becomes more relevant to your target audience. 

Check Competitor Trends 

Instead of hitting and missing the mark, many SaaS companies research their competitors and find the SEO strategies they are using. 

This helps you learn from them, find out the gaps in their strategy, and optimize yours to beat the competition. 

While conducting this step, consider both direct and indirect competitors. For example, your direct competitors for a work communication tool are Slack, Chanty, etc. Your indirect competitors would involve solutions that help solve the same problem but in a different way, like Zoom or Google Meet. 

You can use Ahrefs to find the top-ranking pages of your competitors and their top-ranking keywords. 

Make Sure to Have High-Quality Content 

To rank high and beat the competition, you must create high-quality content that solves your audience’s query and provides valuable insights. 

But what does high-quality content mean? 

It fulfills all or most of these criteria: 

• Content that goes into depth. For example, it covers all the topics related to that keyword.
• The content has engaging visuals in the form of audio or video.
• It’s easy to read and has an easy navigation structure so people can hop on to the sections they want.
• It shows you how to do something instead of being too theoretical.

Here’s a content creation process you can follow. 

Determine How Much You Should Publish Content 

While there’s no set rule for how much content you should publish, many studies suggest that you can aim for anywhere between two to four articles per week. 

If you’re creating research-intensive content, this number may be lower than normal standards.  

Perform Keyword Research 

Instead of haphazardly finding keywords for your SaaS business, set up a process that makes it easy to perform keyword research. 

For example, a guide on how you prioritize keywords, which tools you’ll be using for the process, what factors you consider, whether you look at the keyword difficulty, and if so, what KD score is considered appropriate for your brand, etc. 

This helps the team stay on the same page and streamlines your research. 

Prepare a Link-Building Strategy 

Backlinks are Google’s one of the top three ranking factors. Without good quality backlinks, you might create great content but not see it ranking in the first SERP of Google. That’s why a backlink strategy is important in improving your site’s visibility and credibility. 

The top ways to build backlinks for your SaaS company are broken link building, finding unlinked brand mentions, analyzing competitor’s backlinks, creating linkable assets, guest blogging, engaging in HARO (Help A Reporter Out), and email outreach. 

Promote Content to Earn Backlinks 

Best SaaS companies know that just publishing content is not enough. You need to promote it on social media, platforms like Quora and Reddit, approach influencers in your niche, share the content with your email list, build internal links so readers can hop on to more content on your blog, and repurpose content. 

Set Success Metrics and KPIs 

You’ll want to know what results your content and SEO strategies deliver for your business. 

One way is by setting success metrics and KPIs that your team can regularly track. This could be keyword ranking, backlinks created, referring domains, conversion rate, overall revenue, organic click-through rate (CTR), etc. 

Tools like Ahrefs and Google Search Console also allow you to compare your traffic and impressions for two periods, helping you understand how your SEO efforts bring results over time. 

You can see how Google algorithm updates affect your site and the measures you can take to optimize the site further. 

Final Thoughts 

Getting your B2B SaaS SEO strategy right has multiple benefits. It increases your brand’s awareness, establishes topical authority with high-quality content and improves rankings. 

Instead of waiting months or years to reap these benefits, you can contact an SEO agency like MADX that specializes in all the different elements of SEO. This helps you get the right guidance to set your SEO strategy for success. 

To know more about SaaS SEO, head over to our blog. 

‍