How Solid SEO for SaaS Boosted This Product's Conversions by 900%

If you own a SaaS business, you know how competitive the playing field can be. What you may not know is one way to compete and enjoy the success you want is through good SEO for SaaS. 

Over the years, we've developed our own SEO playbook that has helped us skyrocket traffic and conversions within our SaaS portfolio of products – including Docparser and LeadDyno – and we want to share some of that success with you. So, here are the top tips we've learned to help you grow your SaaS company.

Table of Contents

• What is SEO for SaaS?
• Long-term benefits of a SaaS SEO strategy
• How to get started with SaaS SEO strategy
• SureSwift Case Study #1: Optimized content for Docparser
• SureSwift Case Study #2: Improved user experience for LeadDyno

What is SEO for SaaS?

SEO (search engine optimization) for SaaS is the way in which you boost consistent organic traffic to your site using strategies to help you rank well on Google and other search engine pages (SERPs). This includes various elements and techniques that work together to help improve your rankings for certain search terms, much of which is centered around quality content. When done well, SaaS SEO results in an effective inbound marketing resource connecting you to people who are:

• Seeking your specific software
• Looking for information on the type of software you offer
• Ready to buy software like what you’re selling
• Looking for information that has to do with your software

Long-term benefits of a strong SaaS SEO Strategy

A solid SaaS SEO strategy is key to the success of your SaaS business for the following reasons:

Lowers Acquisition Costs

Let’s face it – using paid media (like paid social or pay-per-click/PPC) to acquire new customers is expensive in SaaS marketing. You’re paying for every single click to your site and while, of course, you’d love more traffic, as your success grows, so do your costs in getting it. And once you’ve gone through markets that are most likely to convert to paid users, you won’t reduce the cost per acquisition. SEO works the opposite way, though, and over time can help bring your acquisition costs down. These may be higher than paid media to start, but they’ll soon lessen as you see compounding growth.

Helps to Exponentially Scale SaaS Business Growth

Consistent evergreen content can have a significant compounding effect on growth. In fact, when businesses combine their usage of SEO and content marketing well, they can lower the cost of customer acquisition by more than 87%. So, if you want to boost sales and brand awareness for your SaaS business, then prioritize high-ranking content creation within your SEO strategy.

Converts Customers from Different Marketing Channels

Omnichannel marketing, including good SEO, is key to bringing in business. And while you need to invest in good content creation for effective SaaS SEO, keep in mind that this content isn’t just there to help you rank on SERPs. It’s also useful for driving and converting customers using other channels like email marketing, social media, and paid traffic too. These methods help to create brand authority and awareness, allowing you to promote your content, earn backlinks, and even increase referral traffic.

Key SEO Ranking Factors

Several factors impact how a site – SaaS or otherwise – ranks on Google and other search engines. These factors are ever-changing, thanks to constantly evolving SEO trends like the recent development of search engine AI. 

This is why it’s important that you understand how your site is likely to be ranked so that you can attain the best outcome possible. To help, here are some of the top elements that you should focus on to increase ranking:

• Optimized, high-quality content informed by keyword research
• UX (user experience)
• Quality backlinks
• Technical SEO elements like site loading speed, security & reliability, and mobile responsiveness

How to Get Started With SaaS SEO Strategy

Here’s how you can address these ranking factors as part of your own successful SaaS SEO strategy.

Quality Content and Optimization

Onsite content is broad but can include these key elements:

• Optimized pages with target keywords embedded in your site’s header navigation
• Where and how keywords are added to your content (they should appear in intro paragraphs and headers)
• A title tag with your target (main) keyword
• Content length and quality (ensure that it’s helpful to readers and not too brief or long-winded)
• Interactive or multimedia content with optimized file names (keyword variations)
• Cross-linked pages throughout your site

Our proven process for optimizing content

Content optimization is meant to provide more relevant and valuable information to your audience. At SureSwift, we have a proven content strategy and production process. To help get you started, we're giving you a sneak peek at a few key steps in our digital marketing strategy. Plus, we’ll detail an example of how we’ve put the process into action and seen measurable success.

Your first step in writing optimized content is to create an outline, aiming for an article with 2,100 words that contains quality information and at least 5 images (including a feature image and infographic).

Here’s a rough plan for how your outline might look:

• Intro
• Table of contents
• CTA
• Related articles
• Section 1
• CTA
• Section 2
• Graphic/infographic
• Section 3
• Pull quotes from influencer
• Section 4 
• Related video
• Summary
• Popular articles

Follow these tips for creating optimized SEO content for your SaaS website:

• Conduct competitor and top-ranking site research and make a list based on sections from that content. 
• Conduct keyword research in Ahrefs or a similar SEO tool that helps identify KD (keyword difficulty) and search volume. Once you’ve found the most relevant keywords, use them as your H2 and H3 headers based on what makes sense for the flow of the article.
• Complete the article based on your outline.
• Optimize your article using an SEO service like MarketMuse.
• Upload in your CMS (content management system), ensuring SEO and readability both hold a high rating.

SureSwift Case Study #1: Optimized content for Docparser

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We took all of these principles to heart when optimizing 20 blog posts for Docparser. The team ensured SEO best practices were followed – each post had at least 2,000 words, a table of contents, a helpful, shareable infographic, optimized photos, alt tags, and more.

In just four months, the article Extract Data From PDF: How to Convert PDF Files Into Structured Data saw a 54% increase in impressions, a 58% boost in clicks, and a whopping 94% boost in trials. Wow.

Similarly, the team improved How to Extract Text from a PDF in Seconds: Use Any Computer or Mobile Device and saw impressions increase by 39%, clicks grow by 97%, click through rate (CTR) increase by 41%, and trials improve by 57%.

Now, you can't always assume great results will happen right away. That's why it's so important to continuously monitor, test, and optimize with improvements over time, as the team learned firsthand. 

At first, the team attempted a one-size-fits-all strategy, but after nine months of tracking conversions, trials, and rankings, 6 out of the 20 articles were underperforming and had dropped in rankings, including Data Entry Automation Software: Automate Document Based Workflows.

So, the team devised a new content marketing strategy for each of the 6 articles by cutting down and rearranging different sections to match search intent. They eliminated the extraneous frequently asked questions sections and better utilized relevant keywords. The results? It worked extremely well. For example, Data Entry Automation Software's impressions went up by 110% and its clicks improved by 99%.

Keep in mind that good content and optimization won’t matter without a solid content strategy. This includes creating valuable content targeting a group of relevant keywords related by topic that then gets promoted to earn links. 

Once you notice a boost in rankings and traffic, you can use that data to improve and optimize the content to drive consistent SEO traffic to your site and create even more growth. Then, repeat the process to target new keywords. But this content marketing strategy requires strong keyword research technique. ‍

Keyword Research

Effective keyword research plays a huge role in the success of your SaaS SEO. It’s the main reason that your SaaS business appears in the search results for your target market. You should include relevant keywords and keyword variations naturally throughout your content without keyword stuffing. Focus on topics where you might qualify as a natural thought leader. Create different types of keywords based on how potential customers will search. These search patterns and keyword types are known as:

• Navigational – searching for a specific site (typically with brand keywords).
• Informational / Top of funnel – looking for an answer to a question or solution to a problem. These drive awareness and usually comprise the most searches and traffic, but are the least targeted with the lowest conversion rate. Blog content does well here.
• Investigational / Middle of funnel – looking for a product or comparing different products against each other. Searchers know solutions exist but haven’t explored them yet, so are seeking options. Feature or product landing pages do well here.
• Transactional / Bottom of funnel – looking to purchase a specific product. Users are aware that solutions exist for them and know what they are but still need to decide. Relevant keywords include product or brand names.

User Experience (UX)

With the introduction of RankBrain, an AI-based algorithm that lets Google recognize relevant search results to users, user experience metrics have become a key SaaS SEO ranking factor. These three UX metrics are important to ranking high in this area, and your site can be demoted or promoted in results depending on how you stack up here:

• Click-through Rate (CTR), or the number of people clicking your link from their Google search results.
• Bounce Rate, or how many people who immediately leave your site after a few seconds - presumably because it isn’t relevant to their Google search query.
• Dwell Time, or the amount of time a user stays on your site (it’s assumed the longer they do, the more relevant your content is to them).

SureSwift Case Study #2: Improved user experience for LeadDyno

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As a result of improving UX, our team helped LeadDyno’s page How to Start an Affiliate Program increase from rank 11 to rank 1. They examined the layout of the page, which had been detrimental to the viewer's experience, and rearranged a few sections to better match user search intent. The blogpost now flows better and is more comprehensible overall. 

On top of snagging the #1 spot, the team also found:

• Impressions increased by over 200%
• Clicks increased by over 340%
• Sessions increased by over 430%
• In-app conversions increased by a whopping 900%

With results this good, just think how much a strong SEO-focused content strategy can impact your bottom line as a business. 

Backlinks

Google considers sites to be more relevant when other sites link back to them, and it will therefore rank them higher. In the past, the quantity of backlinks was of greater value to Google search rankings, but today, it’s the quality of backlinks that matters most. 

This means you’ll need to ensure that the websites and content linking to you are credible and that they also relate to your keywords and niche. For example, if you sell a tool for HR professionals, a backlink from a site selling sports gear won’t help you. 

Technical SEO Elements

Technical SEO refers to the method of improving the technical aspects of a website to achieve better rankings. This might include boosting loading speeds, designing for a high-quality mobile experience, and updating site layout to improve overall UX. 

Three main technical factors are particularly important for SaaS SEO, because they confirm that your site follows current standards. Keep in mind, the way Google crawls and indexes your site is impacted by these factors. The less work and time needed to do so, the higher you’re likely to rank in a Google search.

1. Site security and reliability, including link architecture, HTTPS utilization, and status errors. Simply put, if Google doesn’t see your site as secure, it won’t rank.

2. Mobile responsiveness. If your site isn’t mobile-friendly, it won’t rank.

3. Site loading speed. If your site loads too slowly, it won’t rank. Speed also affects user experience and engagement so, even if you’re getting some SEO traffic, you need to make sure that your site is running fast enough that people will stick around, and your bounce rate won’t jump.

Hopefully, with this background knowledge of content marketing strategy and SaaS SEO ranking factors and how you can incorporate them into your strategy, the SEO for your SaaS product won’t seem so daunting or intimidating. With the right strategy and process, you’ll be ranking higher, boosting traffic, and enjoying more conversions and sales very soon.