This guide
With this guide, I want to help SaaS companies to understand how they should implement their SEO.
What you will find in this and the following chapters are the basics elements for your SaaS to bring traffic on your site more likely to turn into paying customers from organic search as a channel.
As the focus on the guide is organic traffic, I will focus on SEO rather than other channels (email, PPC, retargeting, etc).
The guide is a work in progress, so expect updates and new chapters to be published soon.
SEO for SaaS 101
Online presence plays an important role in any type of business, from big eCommerce to local corner shops, potential customers are looking for products, services or are just discovering your existence. As organic search traffic is scalable, SaaS companies can benefit even more from it, and for this reason, the competition is fierce.
Competition can have different forms, product and search, direct and indirect competitors, alternative solutions that you have never considered, and so alike. That makes your ability to acquire visibility even more difficult because not only you should overtake other players, but products uses can change based on the audience.
Most of the times, dealing with traditional products on the scale means competing with brands that sell similar items. When competing on price, you have to sell more, when products have higher value competitors are more fierce, and often products need more maintenance.
When you work traditionally, you sell a product, you need to be ready to sell again to a new customer, and so on, every day.
This approach changes with SaaS businesses, and it is one of the reasons why of such competitive landscape, the product a subscription, and so revenue is not only scalable but also predictable.
Even with different business models, a SaaS business has some specific characteristics:
- Sell a product, and the customer pays monthly
- Provide access to a service
- Higher customer lifetime value
- Customer services limited
- Cancellation doesn’t involve any operation
- No operational costs for every new customer
- Scalability
- Predictability
Software as a Service (SaaS) companies can build their online presence to reach a large number of customers, and still need fewer resources than traditional businesses. It is the beauty of scalability.
The approach to SEO is different from any other businesses, the product is unique, and it requires a similar approach to SEO.
SaaS businesses can sell niche products for specific industries, as well as mainstream products to the general public. Just to give a few examples, the following are some popular SaaS companies that we use every day:
- Netflix: video subscription service
- Uber: vehicle booking service
- Spotify: streaming music service
- Airbnb: homestay booking service
- Shopify: online store platform
How SaaS can benefit from SEO
While a SaaS business has many advantages, the big downsize is generating traffic within an extremely competitive landscape.
As most of the market is only online and it is becoming relatively easy and less expensive creating a product, SEO for SaaS is extremely important and at the same time more difficult, as many other companies are competing for the same space.
When carried on correctly, SEO can generate a steady stream of new paying customers, with predictable and scalable growth for your product and so revenue increase month by month.
With this series of articles, I will guide you through the different aspects of SEO for SaaS.
The chapters in this guide cover the following topics:
New chapters coming soon