SaaS SEO Revealed: Our Experience Scaling Organic Growth

Content Marketing February 26, 2024

SEO for SaaS companies can be an extremely powerful growth channel, bringing in a steadily growing stream of leads and new users.

Organic traffic just has that magic power of investment – i.e. the time and money put into it returns to you exponentially over time. Say you invest $100K in the SEO team and their tactics this year. True results will start pouring in over the next year, culminating with the actual payback at some point in the future. However, that payback won’t stop there – you’ll keep growing organically – and that is the essence of SEO.

When that payback comes and how the SEO strategy performs for your SaaS will depend on a great many things.

What to Expect in this Article

Today, I’m here to tell you what those things are, and how you should optimize for efficiency, from my experience of over 10 years in marketing. However, to do this right, we should go about it strategically:

  • First, we’ll go into the definition of SEO for SaaS – what does it even mean? Is it different from SEO for other types of businesses?
  • Second, we’ll look at the benefits- what it can achieve for your business’ visibility, bottom line, and for your website’s health and overall traffic.
  • Moving forward, I’ll showcase some real data from our agency’s portfolio, breaking down how to create and then follow a goal-aligned, comprehensive strategy.
  • Further down the line, we’ll discuss some examples of success with a SaaS SEO strategy and explain what led to that success.
  • Towards the end, I’ll try to answer some of the burning questions the general SaaS community has about SEO. These are questions I’ve meticulously vetted for authenticity and usefulness.
  • Then I’ll draw it to a close with a list of some of the SEO mistakes I’ve seen over the years, detailing why and how you should avoid them.

And that’s all the further ado I can spare for now, so let’s dig in:

Contents

What Does SEO in SaaS Even Mean?

SaaS SEO is essentially search engine optimization applied to a SaaS business’ website(s). It generally involves a strategic approach, bringing together its various elements in a deliberate effort to attract new leads and users through organic traffic and to drive brand power by creating authoritative, well-researched, and memorable long-form content that serves the target audience’s wants and needs while optimizing for keywords that match the same wants and needs in search engine users.

SaaS SEO is a multipronged, medium-payback-period process involving:

  1. website, audience, and competitive analysis and monitoring.
  2. keyword research, planning, and monitoring.
  3. technical SEO website planning, fixes, and optimization.
  4. on-page SEO for:
    1. Landing pages
    2. Product pages
    3. FAQ pages
    4. Documentation articles
    5. Blog articles
    6. PDF documents
    7. all other pages on the website, to a lesser or greater degree
  5. off-page SEO (from link building to social proof elements and overall website link health).
  6. an integrated blog strategy where keyword research meets essential content & product marketing practices to determine the most impactful way to capture relevant users and persuade them of the brand’s authority within their respective niche.
saas seo strategy gif

Many believe that SEO is just keywords and analytics, but in today’s world that will get you nowhere in the long run. Actual SEO must observe and nurture the authoritative, social proof, and link health elements of the SaaS website and work to continuously grow them. Stay tuned to find out why further down the article.

How Important Is SEO in a SaaS Business?

This question and the way SaaS founders reply to it can provide a vital understanding of how SEO actually works. Let me explain:

  1. If you ask a SaaS founder who’s just begun their SEO strategy: they’ll likely say SEO is not that important, that Sales or OEM deals are actually driving more business than Marketing, all while marketing’s pestering everyone about SEO while providing breadcrumbs in return. All more or less true during the early stages of a SaaS.
  2. If you ask a SaaS founder a few years after they’ve started their SEO strategy: they’ll likely say SEO is a steady driver of organic traffic and sales, helping keep the heart of the business beating through a consistent stream of new users / leads. They’ll mention how the number of organic conversions grew from 1 per week to 1 per day, to 10, 20, and now 50 per day. The quality can vary based on the team’s performance, but the results speak for themselves.
  3. If you ask a SaaS founder during an alarming downturn in organic traffic: they’ll likely say SEO is vital, it keeps the business afloat, and that they’ve instructed the marketing team to get the organic traffic back ASAP, or the entire SaaS machine crumbles.

So, like in quantum physics, the perception of SaaS SEO’s importance varies greatly based on the observers’ position in time and space 😉. SEO for SaaS is therefore vital once you know how it works, but can seem “useless” if you’ve never tried it. If you ask us, it’s key to actually running a profitable business with a predictable revenue stream and new users’ trend.

SaaS-related keyword CPCs are notoriously expensive. Most bootstrapped companies have a very limited runway (2 years or less) to prove their concept. If they can gain traction with SEO in the first 3 – 6 months on relevant keywords, it will reduce their dependency on paid channels and help them build brand awareness much quicker.

Matt Smith
Head of SEO at HawkSEM

How Does SEO Apply to SaaS Businesses?

Detailing what I already touched on, SEO applies to SaaS as follows:

  • It works to ensure the business’ website is optimized for organic traffic, using product-aligned main keywords that most accurately represent the business’ offer while having a decent-to-great search volume.
  • It helps establish the layout, concept, and topics of the blog section to bring in the largest amount of relevant traffic possible and serve those users in a way that both helps them and puts the business in a positive light.
  • It often assists in establishing product positioning through careful audience, keyword, and competitive research and analysis.
  • It drives in a steady stream of new business coming in organically via search engines, passing through website forms, and usually landing in the Sales’ team inbox
  • It uses a complex set of outreach, guest posting, and linkbuilding tactics to raise the authority of the website, which in turn increases brand visibility and authority.

The greatest benefit of investing in SEO is to build trust and credibility for your business. Primarily, SEO helps boost visibility in search engine results and this helps position the SaaS solution as a reliable and coveted resource within the industry. Naturally, this instills confidence in potential customers, resulting in demand generation and conversions.

Niyati Sanghavi
Freelance Content Marketer

Benefits of SEO in SaaS

The main benefits of a properly implemented SaaS SEO strategy are:

  1. Increased brand visibility and reach
  2. Competitive search positioning
  3. Progressive organic traffic growth
  4. Comprehensive, memorable, brand-building articles
  5. Steady stream of organic top-of-the-funnel (TOFU) leads, users, & overall sales
  6. Calibrated product positioning
  7. Increased website authority
  8. Expanding network of industry connections
  9. Extensive, optimized pdf guides to organically drive MOFU / BOFU leads
  10. Repurposed content for customer marketing
  11. Manages overreliance on paid advertisements
  12. Optimized local search rankings
  13. Optimized Google My Business (Google Maps) page
  14. Better website health, navigability, scannability

Of course, for your SEO tactics to actually generate the majority of these 14 benefits, Marketing will need quite a bit of support from other teams, at least in the initial stages, but also as part of maintaining a well-oiled, algorithm-breaking search visibility machine. An agency approach can cut down on those needs (minus the website development part, typically), but to efficiently manage them, you will need an in-house marketing lead.

SEO offers numerous benefits for SaaS companies, but in my opinion, the most significant value is the ability to increase overall visibility and share of voice in organic search results. With so many SaaS companies relying heavily on paid ads to drive traffic and conversions, earning that top organic listing can be marketing gold.

While paid ads come and go, lasting SEO gains allow SaaS brands to surface in search even when competitors may be outbidding on keywords. This consistent visibility strengthens trust and authority in the eyes of prospective buyer. Plus, organic traffic converts well because searchers are actively looking for solutions.

So in short, the biggest SEO value for SaaS is the long-term visibility, authority building, and competitive differentiation it enables. With so much paid advertising noise in this space, sustainable organic growth is hugely impactful. It takes diligent effort, but the rewards can transform a SaaS startup’s trajectory.

Christoph Trappe
Director of Content Strategy at Growgetter
Blogger at ChristophTrappe.com

By the Data: How to Set Up a Successful SEO SaaS Program

Step 1: Forget about SEO

One of the most important lessons you learn in SEO is that it should never be the focus of your efforts. If all you care about is optimizing for SERPs, you’re not going to be very good in terms of:

  • Satisfying search user intent
  • Mentioning the SaaS product inside your articles
  • Finding the right point of view and tone of voice to match your target audience
  • Achieving any sort of ROI from SEO
  • Creating a steady organic driver of leads / customers
  • Publishing “non-SEO” content upon request – remember that even topics with no search volume should be optimized for search engines – you never know when one of them could start ranking just because it’s a good article.

To effectively move beyond this challenge, your blog strategy needs to address your target audience’s needs while at the same time having a decent search volume. We recommend you start small with low difficulty, long tail topics under 100 mean search volume (MSV) – usually “how to” questions tied to your niche. Then it’s all a matter of consistency.

Step 2: Polish All Key Marketing Messages around Your SaaS

Write down all advantages, how you should address them. Get your messaging on point first – top priority.

Throughout your SEO efforts, never forget the end-goal: to bring in new customers for your SaaS. If you keep reporting positive traffic increases without actual conversions, it’s not going to work out long term.

The best way to promote the product inside SEO articles is by:

  • Figuring out all your audience pain points.
  • Addressing those pain points with key marketing messages (KMMs).
  • Having copy, materials, graphics, videos, PDFs, or at least some internal links prepared for each KMM.
  • Finding topics that relate to, if not directly address those pain points.
  • Finally, based on those KMMs, insert product mentions or even short tutorials that show product value in a way that doesn’t take over the entire article, but complements it while providing tangible value to prospects.

Product mentions don’t have to sound like ads or look like inline banners. Likewise they also shouldn’t be simple throwaway mentions, like you’re absentmindedly throwing a net over a school of fish hoping to catch something. Remember that your product is useful, and that value should be highlighted with practical advice on actual things it can do right now.

↪ Feeling like this is a bit more than you can handle? Don’t worry – we can help. At Digital Tailors, we have experience collaborating with other marketers, such as CMOs, as well as Product Managers, CEOs, and other C-level business functions. Simply put – whatever you need help with, we’re likely able to help. And don’t worry – our discovery call is free – simply email [email protected]!

Step 3: Research, research, and more research

Research is the backbone of a successful SEO strategy for SaaS. I’ve boiled it down to three types of research that I think are essential:

1. Industry Research

First off, you or your writer should learn as much as you can about the industry.

If you’re new – find some recent cornerstone materials and PDFs to give you a general sense of the niche and how you could approach writing about it.

If you have some experience, try to deepen that knowledge with some research into the specific market concerns and current audience pain points. 

Industry research should always include Google News and Google Trends. You can see the most popular news topics in the industry over the past X months, then search for the topic in Google Trends to see how search interest evolved over time and on what type of content (Google – articles, YouTube – videos). You can also check if the industry itself is growing, and whether there’s interest in the things you want to write / publish content about.

Aim to figure out:

  1. How much you currently know about the subject matter.
  2. What are the most important websites that you can rely on for research?
  3. Which of the topics you already picked are doable with your current level of knowledge.
  4. What’s the next level you’re aiming for – what should you learn next?
  5. Are there any topics / clusters that are too complex and require a technical person?
  6. Which are the most sought-after newsletters in the industry.
  7. Which specific phrases you should set Google alerts for to receive timely industry updates.
  8. Lastly, which influencers or communities you can reach out to for quotes / articles / other marketing initiatives like podcasts & webinars (which can complement an SEO strategy very well).

2. Competitive Research

competitive keyword research

Example of competitive research in SEMrush’s Keyword Gap feature between 4 big tech news websites.

Competitive research is essential from multiple points of view:

  1. You see what the competitors are doing
  2. You figure out if there are untapped keywords that you can use
  3. You set some performance goals to overcome
  4. You notice if there are any subpar articles you can attempt to dethrone

Competitors with a solid SEO strategy are a gold mine whenever you’re trying to launch your own – mostly because you can simply look at what they’re doing, see precisely what can be improved, and do it. Think things like: articles that would need tables, images, quotes, better structures / formats, more FAQs answered, so on and so forth.

3. Keyword Research

Last but likely the most important type of research – keyword research means scouring the web for potential topics you could use for your SaaS SEO strategy. I usually do this through a three-pronged approach that accounts also for the previous types of research mentioned here:

1. Industry-informed keyword research. Once you’ve gone through adequate research on your industry, you should know and have written down the current talk of the town: what people are concerned about, what potential customers might want / need, and the overall way of relating to current industry issues. Next, all you have to do is:

  • Come up with 3-5 topics for each current development you identify
  • Google the topics. A simple step and way of researching that often gets overlooked – remember your best research tool in SEO is Google itself.
  • Pick the best articles. Don’t just go for the first 3, SERPs are in a constant state of flux – so find the ones that seem to be the overall best on that first page.
  • Identify what keywords those URLs rank for. Search for those pages in your preferred SEM tool and identify the best keywords

2. Competitive keyword research. Not much extra apart from what was said earlier. Simply review your competitors’ SEO magic in your SEM tool. Identify good, accessible keywords where you could write something better than they have, then determine if there are better forms for those keywords in terms of search volume and difficulty to select as your focus.

3. SEM Tool-assisted keyword research. Lastly, use your SEM tool to move from topic to topic, from website to website, from search query to search query until you identify stray topics you couldn’t find otherwise.

Step 4: Nail Down the Strategy

All this research is all well and good, but to achieve SEO success in your SaaS, you need something to tie it together:

  • Pull all the keywords you’ve selected into a spreadsheet.
  • Separate your keywords by clusters, and then see if you can assign multiple clusters per blog category.
  • Come up with new categories if necessary, but here’s a pro tip: don’t make too many categories & subcategories or you’ll end up with a complicated mess.
  • Optimize all your blog categories for SEO in the same document and write down all essential details for both web devs and all the other marketers on your team.
  • Create an overarching approach for your Blog strategy and write it down somewhere next to your keywords, clusters, categories, and research.
  • (Optional) Come up with some placeholder titles & potential content ideas for each topic. You can use ChatGPT for this sort of ideation at scale, but even AI-generated short-form marketing copy needs some tweaks and edits, so remember these are simply placeholders to give you the general direction for each article.

Step 5: Make Sure Your Website Works

This one’s actually something that should be ongoing since before step 1, but before moving on to step 6 you should be 100% sure that:

  • Your website and website pages are all indexable by search engines.
  • Your website has a proper sitemap.
  • Your main blog, categories, author pages, and landing pages (LPs) are indexable and optimized for SEO.
  • Your website actually works well (in terms of page speed & lack of severe errors).
  • There are no glaring errors in the SEO Audit from Ahrefs, nor in the GSC Core Web Vitals report.
  • Your blog is readable and provides a good experience for users. No need to make it perfect – if you’re a bootstrapped SaaS, usability trumps design at this stage.
  • Your WordPress setup is kosher – no bad plugins, auto-updates, and other potential stuff that can harm your site – hire a professional dev to check and make sure and also be on hand in case something crashes.
  • Also you will require a log of how the blog was built. If you don’t have access to the original people that built it when something breaks, your new devs will struggle to find out how to fix it – that delay could mean the difference between continued growth and months spent recuperating the traffic and authority lost during a week of downtime.
  • Your Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and Firebase accounts are set up and working together neatly, communicating with your blog, your product, your SEM tools, and any other software that may be relevant to you. The most important part of this setup is ensuring you’re tracking the correct goals as conversions.

Step 6: Start Writing

Now that your strategy is in place, you simply have to write what you know, upload, and publish while respecting SEO practices:

  • Use a focus keyword (title and intro mandatory, first heading good).
  • Use unique words naturally.
  • Try to be as useful as possible.
  • Try to make the article as scannable / readable as possible:
    • Add visual and interactive elements!
  • Write a meta description between 145 and 155 characters that includes the keyword at least broadly. I use Mangools’ free Google SERP Simulator to check all my titles and descriptions and make sure they fit in the SERP.
  • Add a featured image with descriptive alt text. 
  • Add alt text to all your images describing exactly what’s in the image.
  • Credit all your images in the image caption. Not only is this standard practice, it will also help enrich your page’s link profile. What’s that? Read the next point: 
  • Ensure your page has a good link profile. Essentially, you need to have a good number of internal links and a few external links to authoritative sources – educational or organization websites work best. 
  • Add social proof elements – quotes from industry influencers really help in three ways:
    • They help your audience understand the topic better and connect to other industry professionals.
    • They show search engines your article contains authoritative content.
    • They improve the link profile (provided you add a social link for the person you’re quoting – for SaaS, I recommend linking to their LinkedIn profile).

Last but not least, you should publish anything you can that makes sense for your SaaS, including press releases, webinars, podcasts, and more. The more you keep your blog up to date, the higher the chance you’ll rank.

And don’t forget to optimize everything for SEO, even when there’s no real search volume for the main keyword – maybe there will be in the future.

↪ Is this too much? We can help make sense of all these various tactics and build a strategy together that will see your SaaS soar among the stars of the business world. Email us at [email protected] and you get a quick report on your current status for free.

I would say SEO isn’t for every SaaS company. Provided the opportunity is there and the search landscape isn’t saturated in their market, I would describe it as a sustainable, cost-effective way to invest in an “evergreen” marketing channel.

Just like a healthy “evergreen” plant never loses its leaves, when done right and with the right TLC, SEO content continues to build trust at all stages of the funnel year round.

You don’t have to worry about the ad money running out, or how to resurface work that you invested top dollar in after it’s buried on a social feed.

It’s always there with a fighting chance, and that value (and the ROI) continues to build steadily over time.

Annie Maddison
Content Marketing Manager at Synthace

Successful SaaS SEO Examples

organic traffic client 1

An example of a client that started their relationship with us in late 2019. Their growth has been affected by various factors that did not fall under our control, but even so the growth has been steady.

Read our full case study on this SaaS client here:

From Newcomer to Leader:
How We Boosted a SaaS Client to the Top

See the case study

organic traffic client 2

A different client who came to us simply for content writing services – proof that simply writing good content is the key to unlock exponential growth.

organic traffic client 3
organic traffic client 4

Examples of two new clients we received – by simply publishing a few articles we’re already on our path to steady sustained growth for both.

organic traffic mailchimp

An overview of one of the most popular blogs in the email SaaS area – Mailchimp’s resources section, which grew tremendously in just two years time, probably aided by a giant budget, to now having over 27,000 keywords just on the first page of Google, their total reaching close to 560,000 keywords. They started from a relatively safe blog back in the summer of 2022, using their high authority to target more and more difficult topics and dominate Google for keywords with astronomical MSVs, such as “how to make money online” with a volume of 90.5K, for which they rank at number 2.

organic traffic rei

The Rei website  is another great example of a high-performing SEO strategy.  The recent downturn that started in 2022 looks like the result of Google rearranging the SERP for their particular niche. Still, 7.4M organic sessions per month is nothing to laugh at, and this is just an estimate from Semrush – typically, real numbers are much higher.

FAQs about SaaS SEO

1. Are SEO services worth it?

Yes. As the graphs above prove, with a minimum steady budget for blog management, and appropriate due diligence to make your website as neat as possible, snowballing organic growth is possible and truly a quick hack to daily new SaaS leads and users.

2. Which SEO metrics are important to track?

There are many debates around SEO metrics, but to put it simply, you should first and foremost track Website Conversions (the goal must be correctly set up in Google Analytics). Organic Traffic is the second metric typically tracked for SEO, which in GA4 is under Reports > Acquisition > Traffic Acquisition. Beyond those two, there are a few more metrics you can choose from:

  • Conversions assisted by the blog. Depending on the size and complexity of your website, you might want to track conversions that are the direct result of SEO. To do that, go to Advertising > Performance > All channels in GA4 and you will see your SEO conversions next to Organic Search. It can be argued, however, that all website conversions have, in some form, been aided by SEO, even if SEO is not the direct cause.
  • Authority Score / Domain Rating. This metric is a score given by SEM platforms to every website domain. It’s typically a proprietary algorithm from each different SEM company (such as Semrush), but most follow the same model, looking at link power, organic traffic, and spam elements. 
  • Referring domains. This one represents how many other websites link to your site. It’s one of the main metrics going into the Authority Score equation, while also giving you a good idea of your popularity, particularly if you look at specific domains that mentioned you organically. Most search engine marketers use SEMrush for this metric.
  • Website health score. This one is a combination – you should look at three things to get a clear idea:
    • Page Speed in one of the many online checkers.
    • Core Web Vitals in Google Search Console and Ahrefs.
    • Site Audit in Ahrefs Webmaster Tools, which allows you to check fundamental errors in the functioning of your website and assigns an overall health score. The audit can be set to repeat automatically on a schedule.
  • Organic keywords. This is one of my preferred metrics to look at if I want to understand the evolution of the website at the present moment. If what I’m doing is right, the number of keywords is steadily going up at any given point. But don’t be deterred when there’s a sudden drop in keywords – Google and other search engines regularly do a sort of “clean up” that removes unnecessary positions towards the bottom of the SERP (page 50+). However, Google may also drop you on purpose, through a manual action or penalty.
  • Other somewhat important metrics: click-through rate (CTR), backlinks, search visibility, conversion rate, engagement rate.

3. Are SEO tools worth it?

Mostly. Make a list of all the free tools you could use – and there are plenty, then see which ones are most worth paying for based on your specific needs. Between big SEM platforms, most marketers typically go for SEMrush, Ahrefs, Moz, any combination of two, or all three. It mostly depends on the budget you have, as all three platforms have some brilliant and distinct value additions for any search engine marketer.

4. Can SEO make you rich?

If you want to make a business out of curating SEO content, it can be done. Amazon affiliate deals have also historically spawned plenty of SEO content farms designed to bring in revenue from multiple websites and monopolizing search. These approaches are disingenuous and occasionally blatantly illegal – so if you want to do something like this, it’s helpful to think of SEO not as a get-rich-quick scheme, but more of a “if you make good content you’ll make good money” scheme.

5. Which SEO techniques should be avoided?

Any link farms should be avoided at all costs (typically people proposing you buy backlinks to your website). Not only does Google hand out penalties for that, but it’s also very costly for something that might completely destroy your website’s reputation. Other SEO tactics, aka black hat tactics to avoid are:

  • Comment spam
  • Duplicate content
  • Fully-AI generated content
  • Hidden text
  • Negative SEO 
  • Article spinning
  • Keyword stuffing
  • Sneaky redirects

6. Which SEO technique is most important?

This one’s simple – website health. Without it, none of your content will ever rank.

7. Why does SEO take time?

Typically due to the Google bots that scan your website on a schedule – also called crawlers – determining how useful your content is and deciding where to rank it. It’s also due to the amount of  time it takes to write enough content for the traffic to reach its payback period. 

However, you can speed up the process slightly by pasting the URL of any new article into Google Search Console’s search bar, hitting enter, then clicking on “Request indexing” if the page isn’t already indexed. This will move that page to the top of Google’s queue.

8. Will SEO be replaced by AI?

This is uncertain. Google has taken stances against poor AI content already, but we have also seen many websites unleashing mountains of AI-generated drivel onto the internet, which Google’s “existing systems to determine the helpfulness of content” haven’t been able to take down – re: this answer taken directly from an AI response on Quora:

ai blunder eggs can be melted

Overall, time will tell if AI will replace SEO, but seeing as search is one of the biggest revenue generators for Google, I assume AI won’t kill SEO, only change it drastically, as many previous online trends have done the same.

9. Will SEO become obsolete?

Highly unlikely. Even if all the SEO content writers are replaced by AI, SEO will still exist as a concept.

10. Will SEO exist in 10 years?

Very likely, yes.

11. How do you do SEO without resources?

You start with a minimalist, functional blog and publish great content. Site creators like WIX or Squarespace have minimal SEO functionalities, but work well on a budget. However, we recommend WordPress.org for long term, professional use. Also, make sure you have at least one conversion goal set up in Google Analytics so you can track your performance.

Common SaaS SEO Mistakes and Why You Should Avoid them

1. Leadership doesn’t trust marketers

It’s a common theme for marketing to be one of the least trusted, most underfunded departments in a business. Marketers are often the last ones asked about business decisions, even though we have some of the most up-to-date insights on market trends. Our constant work in an ever-changing online world exposes us to daily new trends, insights, and opinions from industry leaders, giving us a unique perspective. The solution is to simply add marketing to the loop, especially surrounding major business decisions.

2. Devs completely ignore marketers until it’s too late

Developers have possibly one of the toughest jobs in SaaS. It’s no surprise then that they have little patience or time for marketers – who can be annoying with their constant requests. The solution here is a concerted effort on both sides to create a workable process: one the one hand, marketers need to prioritize their requests, highlight things that need fixing ASAP, and add proper documentation to any issue they report. On the other hand, Devs should first and foremost handle urgent requests appropriately, trusting that marketers know how to prioritize. Furthermore, web devs should respect marketing when creating a website and ideally keep an SEO marketer in the loop about the progress.

3. “This is our positioning, let’s write ten articles on the same topic”

When SaaS owners, B2B particularly, figure out their positioning, their instinct is to repeat that message as many times as possible. And it’s correct. But writing 10 articles on the topic is not the way to do it. You do that by writing 5-10 landing pages on different SaaS features that each speak to the original positioning you want to communicate. Writing 10 pages on the same topic only leads to duplicate content and confusion as search engines won’t know which article is actually canonical.

4. “We don’t like WordPress, so we’ll use something else”

Snake oil salespeople are as common online as they’ve ever been. It’s easy to fall for a shiny, untested, and worryingly new content management system (CMS) with limited SEO options. Most times, SEO marketers aren’t even that concerned about the latter part – we can optimize articles regardless of CMS – the issue stems more from the fact that shiny new platforms tend to have less than stellar availability. In fact, many crash unpredictably or have some fatal flaw in their backend that can destroy a website’s SERP rankings. We’re not against new CSMs, but I do recommend at least reading some reviews from people who know what they’re talking about before saying yes to an unproven CMS.

5. “We don’t have time to upload this week / month / trimester”

Many times in our marketing lives we’ve been faced with clients who either did not trust us enough, or had some ancient technical implementation of a blog, and thus couldn’t give us access to publish or at least upload our articles, so we had to rely on their Product Manager, or CMO, or some other random person in their business for nearly everything we did. Often, that person would go “we don’t have time for this now” – and would postpone their blog publishing for months on end. On the whole, this is the worst thing you can do in terms of SEO. Search engines prioritize new articles that have fresh information, and regard websites with constant updates in a positive light. So pausing publishing for even a month can have drastic effects on organic traffic growth.

6. “Weekly content updates sound great, but we’ll implement 20 when they’re done”

Similar, but not as bad, is the issue of content updates. Imagine the same situation as the previous point, but we’re suggesting article updates (to fix issues, make them more user friendly, improve SEO, or simply to add newer info). The point of content updates is to send constant positive signals to search engines that you’re taking time to maintain the content on your website. If they aren’t done at least monthly, their usefulness diminishes proportionally.

7. “We don’t have a positioning yet / our best-match keyword has 0 search volume”

One of the essential steps in building a successful SaaS is market research – aka figuring out if there is demand for your product. However, many SaaS owners unfortunately never talk to a marketer until the product is almost done and many thousands of dollars have already been invested into it.

Imagine, then, a hypothetical SEO marketer coming in and scrambling to find a keyword that shows some sort of interest in what the SaaS is offering. Often, I’ve been in that situation and found the keywords closest to what the SaaS was offering had zero monthly searches, no interest whatsoever, zero signs of life in Google trends, and only a few people that seemed to find something like this marginally useful.

I believe in that case you’ve failed as a SaaS, and should cut your losses. But if you want to stick with the product, we recommend hiring marketing experts like our agency offers to conduct some appropriate research, understand demand and then you can decide how to pivot your SaaS to offer something people are actually looking for. 

Never forget SEO isn’t simply a tactic to bring you organic traffic – it’s rooted in market research. Keywords are but the voice of millions of people surfing the web every day. If none of them are looking for your product on a monthly basis (as most SEM platforms report monthly MSV values), then your product is in need of serious rebranding. You can easily find demand for similar products, there are plenty of ideas out there simply waiting for you to reach out. It’s all a matter of perspective – would you rather lose the investment or take a shot at a rebrand?

How’s Your Organic Traffic Going?

Regardless of your growth stage, we can help. If you’re a SaaS leader looking for organic growth, or a marketer looking for some help in your efforts – we’ve got your back. 

All you need is to reach out at [email protected] and say you’re interested. We even offer a short report on your current status, for free, within 48 business hours of you reaching out 😉