One of the core and foundational ways of SaaS business promotions is SEO (Search Engine Optimization). SaaS businesses are very different from product-based and service-based businesses, making their marketing and promotional activities utterly different from other business models.
SaaS SEO is done primarily to boost organic traffic on SaaS business websites. The SaaS SEO tips play an integral role; these strategies help increase the SERP (Search Engine Result Page) rankings of a SaaS website.
Let us look at the top SEO tips that can help your business to improve its growth.
The Top SaaS SEO Tips To Look Out For
The umbrella of SaaS SEO tips is very extensive. Several strategies come under SaaS SEO tips. Our SaaS SEO tips will help you to get comfortable with the best strategies of SEO. So let’s begin the comprehensive guide on SaaS SEO tips.
1: Keywords
The keywords are those words, queries, and phrases that have the utmost importance in your web content. Why? Mainly because these are the words that users are most likely to type in the search box. Let’s look at an example.
If a web surfer enters the query “How to manage personal finances,” the keyword will be “personal finances.” The primary purpose of using these keywords is that they help relate to surfer’s queries.
For example, a blog published on your SaaS website on how to manage personal finances. If the surfers go through the content and find the keyword “personal finances” and information relating to it, they will spend more time on your website.
We talked about the keyword’s influence on user engagements; let’s look at how it could be helpful in broader terms—the search engine crawlers’ user engagement metrics for SERP ranking.
If you have higher user engagement, surfers spend more time on your SaaS website. Then eventually, your user engagement metrics improve, and so do your SaaS website’s SERP rankings.
One thing that you should remember relating to keywords used for your SaaS web content is that there should be overstuffing of keywords. This means that keywords shouldn’t be overused to fluff the content.
Why so? This is mainly because search engine crawlers are good at identifying keyword density; if high, they will eventually downrank your SaaS website, which means a waste of SEO efforts.
In addition, search engine crawlers, surfers, or readers don’t like keyword stuffing. Readers and surfers would find your web content dull if it had a keyword high keyword density and overstuffing, which would eventually increase the bounce rate and decrease the user engagement metrics.
There is no hard and fast rule to always use primary keywords in your web content. However, we set the primary keyword as a priority, and its favorable density in the web content should be between 2-5%.
Sometimes, you might be urged to use a keyword more frequently than the recommended density percentage. So what to do then? In this case, semantic keywords come for rescues.
What are semantic keywords? You might be thinking. These are those words and phrases that are homogenous to your primary keyword. For example, our primary keyword was “personal finances,” the semantic keyword to it would be “personal wealth,” “funds,” and “fortune.”
Now you can’t come up with keywords and semantic keywords yourself. However, there are great tools like Semrush and Google Keyword Planner. These tools are a perfect fit for keyword research.
Some of these tools are paid, and some are free. All you need to do is enter your web content topic like “Best Tips To Manage Personal Finances,” These tools will give a primary keyword and a variety of semantic keywords that could be used in web content.
Some of these tools provide helpful insights regarding keywords; let’s look at what matrices these tools offer.
- Search Volume: The search volume of a specific keyword refers to the number of searches and queries a keyword gets. A keyword that has a high search volume attracts more increased web traffic. Having said that, if a keyword has a high search volume, it also means that it is highly competitive and challenging to rank for search engine crawlers.
- Keyword Difficulty: These are those keywords that are highly competitive, which means they have been used by sites with higher domain authority multiple times. These keywords are not preferable for SaaS websites that aren’t mature enough. In general, using these keywords reap minimal or no rewards.
- Click-Through Rate: These metrics reflect the keyword’s click-through rate. Click-Through Rate refers to the amount of organic traffic generated by a keyword. Keywords with higher click-through rates attract more organic traffic.
- Traffic Potential: SEO results are not instantaneous, so long-term projections should be kept in mind. A keyword used by your SaaS website today might be irrelevant or valuable after a few months. What to do, then? It would help if you always looked for keyword trends. If they have soared to the peak earlier and now declining, then using them isn’t preferable.
2: URLs & Meta Descriptions
URLs & Meta Descriptions are essential in increasing your SaaS website traffic and SERP rankings. So what are these you might be thinking about? Well, as complicated as they sound, these are not a big deal.
URLs are the uniform resource locations of your webpage; in layman’s terms, these are the internet address of your website. These web links appear on the search bar and over your web page.
Meta descriptions are short descriptive sentences that appear on search engines. That gives a preview to your readers and web surfers of what your web content is about. These are essential as they are critical in attracting your target audience.
If meta descriptions are poorly composed, web surfers won’t click on your web page. However, if done right within seconds after reading meta descriptions, web surfers would click on your web page.
Key things to remember when composing meta descriptions are that the primary keyword should be there. The use of semantic keywords is optional, but in most cases, it is preferred too. Keeping your meta description short is also necessary; the number of characters should be at most 160.
One of the best practices for composing meta descriptions is that these should be engaging. Therefore, adopting casual in-tone meta descriptions is not only allowed but encouraged too. This is because your primary purpose of meta description is to make web surfers comfortable and urge them to click on the web page.
3: Heading
Heading and subheading also play an essential role in optimizing your overall content in accordance with the search engine. At the same time, the optimization of a SaaS website heading and subheading should be taken care of.
Search engine crawlers focus on your SaaS website’s heading and subheading. The more adequately the heading is optimized, the better SERP rankings and SEO score.
Now how to execute the optimization of the heading? Well, it is simple. One thing that you should practice while optimizing your heading is that these should include keywords and semantic keywords.
As a rule of thumb, the primary heading or H1 should be including the primary keywords. While the H2 and H3, which we usually call sub-heading, should include semantic keywords. This is one of the practices that top-performing SaaS websites have regularly followed, and you can also expect great results from this practice.
4: Image Optimization
Images add life to your web content, and visuals, whether animations or real-life pictures, play an integral role in increasing user engagement; why so? Well, web content mainly consists of words and long compositions.
No matter how compelling these compositions are, they need the assistance of images. For example, a long-form blog post without pictures would be boring to surfers, leading to an increased bounce rate and decreasing your website’s user engagement metrics.
The image adds interactiveness to your website. When discussing images, these also assist readers in understanding complex compositional text. How, in your web content, you are explaining complex numeric data would be challenging for readers to comprehend. Once you add visual representations like graphs, it becomes easier for readers to understand even the most complex information.
Protocols should be followed while adding images to your web content. While drafting and creating web content, we must abide by search engine optimization guidelines in every element, so these should be considered while using images. Here are some of the protocols to follow when including images:
- File Names: When adding images to your web content, you have to add their file names too. This makes it easier to understand what your web content is about.
- Alt-Text: Sometimes, due to irregular internet speed, surfers may have some inconveniences in loading the images. In this situation, what appears to them is alt text and image descriptions if these are added. These are helpful for surfers to understand the context of the website. This is considered a good practice as it is useful for people with visual disabilities. One key thing to remember here is the alt text; image descriptions should include keywords.
- Context:Images: you will add should be in context to your text, pun! This means that if your text is about personal finances, then so does your images should be in accordance with the topic; the photos could include “images of people making saving” and talking to financial consultants and pictures of people making a budget; otherwise, if you use exercises or fitness images in a composition about personal finances the this would leave surfers bamboozled.
- Number of Images: By now, you would be super enthusiastic about pictures and can’t wait to use as many images as you want; we want to pause you here. Photos are great, but if many images are added to web content, this will increase your content’s data size and pictures. The page would take longer to load, which annoys surfers, and they won’t skip a second to bounce off your site. It is preferable to use 3-4 images per 2000 words. Image compression is also a good practice that reduces image data size.
5: Linking Strategies
Link-building techniques can help you improve your SaaS website performance in terms of SERP. There are mainly two links when we talk about link building. The first is internal linking, and the second one is external linking.
Internal linking is when one of your web pages has a link to some other of your web pages. A great example of internal linking is when you add links to landing pages to your blog content.
Internal linking helps in surfer’s navigation to your website. High scores in SEO can be achieved with this linking as it gets easier for search engine crawlers to locate your website.
External linking is when your website hosts a link to some other website. When doing this, only those websites with optimal domain authority should be linked. For example, a website with high DA scores is linked, and your website’s SEO score and SERP ranking enhance.
The TakeAway
We have talked in detail about SaaS SEO tips. These tips help get you started with the best promotional success on search engines and an attractive, healthy amount of prospects. Our goal was to educate you about SaaS SEO tips that could lead to your SaaS business growth.
The last recommendation we want to share with you is that the execution of these SaaS SEO tips is complex, and that’s why smart SaaS businesses outsource their SEO, content creation and content marketing to SaaS SEO agencies.
These firms help them in boosting their SEO traffic. Finding the right SaaS SEO agency partner that is reliable, affordable, and paves the way for SEO success can be challenging, but we have done that for you too.
Startigia is a SaaS marketing agency that can help you achieve SEO and content marketing success. Through our tailored services, we can help you achieve the brand recognition your SaaS business deserves. Avail our services now, and achieve better results with SEO for your business.