Today, companies across the SaaS space are struggling to stand out from their rivals due to the rapid growth and popularity of the industry. This demands a foolproof plan to stand out from the competition and make your brand seen by your target audience.
And that’s where SEO plays a significant role.
SEO strategies can help your software company overcome these challenges, grow organically, and stand out amidst the competition in the market.
1. Keyword optimisation helps SaaS websites rank higher on SERPs
On-page SEO strategies are one of the best ways to improve brand visibility and awareness and get your SaaS website—regardless of what kind of SaaS solution you provide—to rank higher on search results.
Turning to the internet to find information about services they’re looking for and finding solutions to the problems they encounter—in their personal or professional lives—is almost second nature for modern customers.
But, this also means they want solutions instantly and without delay, which opens a perfect opportunity for you to optimise your content for search queries and get shown on top of the search results.
The moment they enter a search query that contains the same keyword you use on one of your pages, voila, your site will appear to them on search engine results pages.
To identify the keyword your target audience is using to search for similar products or services, you need to use a keyword research tool and then optimise your content to include these terms.
Also, you should consider doing some research on what kinds of keywords your competitors are using. This could help discover high-ranking keywords that you could add to your SEO strategy.
Let’s say you’re providing an accounting SaaS solution, you can optimise your web pages with keywords such as best accounting software, accounting software for SMEs, cloud accounting software and mobile accounting software to search higher on accounting-related search queries.
You can also go a step further and include long-tailed accounting keywords like the best accounting software in Australia for retail businesses. This will help you target a more specific audience and avoid getting unqualified leads.
Another thing you should consider when optimising for search queries is that the nature of search is changing with more and more people relying on tools like Google Assistant, Siri and Alexa. This makes optimising your website for voice search important to achieve better growth.
2. Optimising the website experience increases the user engagement
Optimising your web platforms goes beyond optimising your content for keywords. The scope of SEO extends into enhancing the user experience on your website.
Poorly organised content, unnecessary animations, badly-placed links and search boxes are a few elements that can make a website non-user-friendly. And nothing frustrates a visitor like a poorly optimised website that’s difficult to navigate, meaning that a better user experience opens the door for better organic growth.
An enhanced user experience can also guarantee more clicks, and leads, and ensure that search engines will rank your SaaS site higher because they want to provide the users with the best results for their queries.
Also, a good website experience can potentially help improve your website’s conversion rate. Here are a few conversion rate optimisation strategies you can try:
- Implement text-based CTAs into your website’s content.
- Make sure forms are designed to be easy to understand and fill out.
- Create clear and exciting CTAs
- Add a chatbot or a live chat feature
- Use pop-ups but not too many of them
Additionally, by using tools, such as Google Search Console’s Web Vitals, you can get insights into how optimised your website is and how the user experience is for each page, which you can use to track your performance and improve your site.
Once you gleaned insights into how optimised your website is, there are many ways to improve user experience with SEO campaigns:
- Providing relevant information
Providing your audience with relevant information isn’t just about including keywords in your content, but making sure it provides something of value to the reader that answers their queries and solves their problems—Google recently rolled out the helpful content update to identify and rank websites that provide relevant and helpful information.
- Add photos and videos
It’s estimated that about 88% of website visitors spend more time on a website that has videos.
- SaaS clients would particularly prefer a website that reflects how tech-savvy they are. Adding photos of your product and including in-depth demonstration videos that show your visitors how to use the product can help establish your company as a thought leader.
- Optimising the website to load faster
1 in 2 website visitors is likely to leave a website if it’s too slow to load.
A website itself is a product of multiple programs and software components. This is why the performance of a business website has high stakes for a software provider and a low-performing website is not the best reflection of your expertise in the industry.
A few things that can slow your website include poorly optimised images, having too many animations running simultaneously, and caching issues.
- Optimising for multiple devices
Today, mobile devices drive the majority of the traffic to websites and these devices vary in size—from mobile phones and tablets to foldable. It’s estimated that there are about 4.32 billion mobile internet users in the world, so optimising your website for all types of devices is important to ensure that your visitors can access your site at any time, anywhere, and on any device and to bring in traffic to your website.
3. Attract better-qualified leads and drive sales and conversions with CRO
Conversion rate optimisation (CRO) helps you increase the percentage of conversions from your website or mobile app by improving some aspects like adding a pop-up to your site, adding testimonials and reviews, removing unnecessary form fields, and adding third-party signup services, which will drive more conversions.
A well-curated CRO strategy optimises your web platforms to ensure that your website doesn’t stop at getting website views but also increases conversion-based actions like subscribes or online transactions.
It helps you identify the audience intending to either know about SaaS solutions or are in the market for one. The right strategy will allow you to connect with them in an instant.
Today, most website traffic is created through search engines, so having your SaaS website optimised to the needs of your target audience never disappoints—leads generated from search engines have a better close rate than those generated through outbound marketing methods.
4. Improve the domain authority score with off-page SEO campaigns
Off-page SEO strategies like backlink building through guest posting are ideal for SaaS brands to show up on popular content-distribution platforms that serve the same industry as your SaaS company.
Having your SaaS company’s content linked by another website automatically puts you in a better light in the leads’ eye, establishing you as an industry authority and building credibility. It is important, however, to link your content to websites that are relevant to your industry.
Even if your leads don’t convert right away, relevant and optimised content can certainly entice them to keep coming back for reliable information because they trust your brand. This increases the chances of closing a sale and improving conversions.
Customers tend to transact with the brands they trust. Building brand credibility and the industry authority of your organisation can improve trust, meaning more long-lasting customer relationships, brand loyalty and improved retention rates!
5. Optimise app description for relevant keywords to optimise for CRO
CRO strategies extend into the Google Play Store and App Store as well.
App CRO improves the chances of users taking the desired action of downloading, installing, and making purchases on the App Store or Play Store.
Optimising descriptions on these app stores with user keywords, for example, gives your app a better chance of ranking higher in the search results, leading to more installs. Alternatively, including long-tail keywords that are related to what the app does and its target market and also help.
You can also add screenshots, and promotional videos, and even change the logo and app in your App Store or Play Store listing to get more conversions.
SEO campaigns produce long-lasting results that drive growth
We know that SEO is not the only trick in the box that helps you grow traffic and that SEO campaigns generally take longer to show results.
But, unlike other strategies such as digital ads and social media marketing, the results of SEO campaigns last longer.
SEO also promises free traffic to SaaS websites, which is more sustainable than running ads to promote your brand.