SaaS SEO checklist: The guide to an effective SEO strategy

In the SaaS industry, search engine optimization is vital. When you understand what users are searching for, you can create engaging content that drives traffic to your website and encourages them to sign up for your product.

Good SaaS SEO should also ensure that the site provides a smooth user experience, and help you build links with high-authority domains. All of which helps people to trust your brand.

There’s a lot to think about, and it can be hard to know what to focus on first—which is why you need a SaaS SEO checklist, including all the tasks you should do to make sure SEO works for you. (Of course, you could also ask SaaS SEO experts like accelerate agency to help you.)  Read on to find out why a SaaS SEO checklist is so important, and what it should include.

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Importance of a checklist for SaaS SEO

Effective SEO is essential for any type of business. But for those selling Software as a Service, it’s even more important. In the SaaS industry, competition is very high for many search terms. Your competitors often have huge budgets and powerful websites.

You also have to make your site and your content stand out from the crowd, even if your product is very similar to others on the market. SaaS companies, too, need to focus on nurturing users as well as generating leads, educating, and engaging them so that they keep renewing their subscription to your product.

That means targeting their pain points and business interests, as well as promoting your product. It’s about building a long-term relationship with users, and being seen as an authority in your field. You need high-quality content at each stage of the customer life cycle. 

To get your content in front of the right people, you need a strategy for SaaS SEO—with a checklist to make sure you’ve done everything possible to boost organic traffic and increase your domain authority. 

When the search engine bots or “crawlers” assess your website, they’ll see it as relevant, useful, and high-ranking.

Your checklist should cover on-page SEO (content, images, internal links, URLs), technical and onsite SEO (making sure your website works efficiently), and link building (generating backlinks and shares from authoritative sites). 

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SaaS SEO checklist to level-up your strategy

A successful SaaS business will already have strategies in place for things like content creation and scheduling, individual marketing campaigns, lead generation, and customer retention. 

All of those aspects can be enhanced by SEO, as long as you have a plan—and a checklist—for how that’s going to happen.

For example, you’ll need to determine who has responsibility for each part of the SEO strategy, what tools you’re going to use to assess website performance, and the timeframe in which you aim to see an improvement. 

SEO takes a lot of time and effort, as you’ve already seen, and we’ve barely scratched the surface of everything that’s involved.

As we mentioned, you’ll need to consider both on-page and off-page SEO, optimizing your own content and technical performance, as well as working on link-building strategies. For larger businesses whose websites may have hundreds of pages, a specific enterprise SaaS SEO strategy is required.

There are plenty of free tools you can use for SaaS SEO, such as Google Analytics, SEMrush, and Ahrefs. But If you don’t have an in-house team of SEO professionals to handle everything on the checklist, you might consider working with SaaS SEO experts such as accelerate agency. 

Of course, you don’t need to be an enterprise company to do that—any SaaS business can benefit from expert help. For example, accelerate agency can either produce engaging content for you, or work together with your own marketing team.

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Example of a SaaS SEO checklist template

Now we’ll go into more detail for each section of the SaaS checklist for SEO, with examples of how to check performance and improve your rankings.

Tools to use

First, decide on the tools you’re going to use. 

For instance, you can evaluate site performance with Google Search Console (GSC), which shows you the keywords that generate most traffic and identifies crawl errors. Google Analytics tells you how people discover your site, and how they engage with it—such as bounce rate, source of visitors, and time spent on your pages.

You can also check that Google is only indexing the version of your website that you want indexed (e.g. http://mywebsite.com, or https://mywebsite.com) and use Index Coverage in GSC to get a list of web pages that aren’t being indexed at all.

Other free tools include Bing Webmaster’s keyword research tool, and Yoast SEO for WordPress websites. It’s also worth creating a sitemap, which helps search engines understand which of your web pages to crawl and index (basically a collection of URLs for pages with valuable content). You can do this with a generator tool like XML Sitemaps.

Technical/onsite SEO

Check the load speed of your pages with Google Lighthouse or PageSpeed Insights—the latter will flag slow-running pages and suggest improvements. Optimize your images by compressing them and loading critical resources before any below-fold (off-screen) images.

Since Google switched to mobile-first indexing in 2019, it’s vital that your site is mobile-friendly. You can check this with Google Lighthouse or Mobile-Friendly Test in GSC, and use Google Analytics to check page load time on different devices.

You can improve performance by removing unnecessary plugins, and using a reliable hosting service plus a Content Delivery Network (CDN) that delivers content from servers close to the user. Also check for problems such as redirect issues, 404 errors, and broken links. 

Schema markup, or structured data markup, is additional code for your web pages that makes them more appealing and helps search engines recognize the content you want to highlight. 

Google’s Structured Data Markup Helper lets you tag content data for a specific URL, based on the type of data (author, title, individual sections of content) and create a custom HTML to paste into your CMS.

An SEO-friendly URL will generate more traffic—­keep it short (50–60 characters) and easy to understand, include a keyword, and avoid stop words like “and”, “the”, and “in”. It’s also worth using HTTPS instead of HTTP to show search engines that your site is secure and high-quality.

Keyword research

It’s important to understand the difference between types of keywords. For example, informational keywords are related to your niche but not product-specific. Informational searches like “software for business communication” are usually less competitive than product searches.  

Commercial keywords are used when someone wants to learn more about a specific product (“is X software good?”) while navigational keywords tend to be brand names. Transactional keywords show that the user is ready to complete a transaction (“free trial of X software”).

Tools like Google Keyword Planner or Keyword.io will help you understand what keywords to target based on search volume and competition. 

Low-competition keywords and phrases are generally easier to rank for. If you enter a keyword into the Ahrefs Keyword Explorer or SEMrush Keyword Overview, you’ll see how hard it is to rank on Page 1 for that keyword.

You can also search for particular keywords in Google to understand the search intent of people looking for that term. If most of the top results are a certain type of article, such as a product comparison, then that’s what most people want to see.

SaaS companies should also consider voice search rankings, by using keywords that are easy to pronounce. Long-tail or question-form keywords are common with voice queries, and they tend to be less competitive generally. Use Autosuggest to see keyword variants for your search.

On-page SEO

Optimize meta descriptions and title tags by using primary and secondary keywords, as search engine crawlers need to know what your pages are about. (These are also the first thing users see in the SERPs, so they also have to be enticing). Don’t forget alt text for images, as descriptive file names help you rank higher for web and image searches.

As for the content itself, it has to be high-quality, fresh, and relevant. Tackle your subject in depth, positioning your brand as an industry thought leader. 

Identify popular pieces of content from your competitors and ensure your version goes a step further by adding more points or diving deeper. Remember to check for duplicate content, and update or consolidate pages if necessary.

It’s essential that your content is clear and understandable, so explain technical terms in simple language. Pay attention to formatting, using short paragraphs, H2s and H3s, and varied sentence structures. You can also improve readability by using images and charts to break up text, and adding a clickable table of contents.

Make sure you get keyword placement and density right, and always avoid keyword stuffing. The ideal density is 1 to 2%, which is roughly once or twice every 100 words. Keywords should appear in H1s and H2s, at least once in your intro and conclusion, and three to five times on the page.

Include clear CTAs, encouraging readers to take action. This is an opportunity to include a relevant internal link and keyword, and helps SaaS businesses to boost demo requests, free trial sign-ups, and direct inquiries to sales teams.

Landing pages

Landing pages get their own section on the SaaS SEO checklist because they’re the pages you’ll be making regular changes to, usually after split testing. Whenever you do this, refer back to the checklist to ensure you didn’t forget anything, such as relevant keywords and internal links.

In order to increase conversions, you’ll be updating page content or creating new pages from scratch. But every time you do this, you risk losing the SEO backlinks and trust you’ve built up with the original page content.

The answer is to use 301 redirects every time you create a new landing page for the same product. This tells search engines to pass the SEO value from one URL to another, meaning you won’t lose links and rankings.

Link strategy

It’s important that each of your web pages has at least one internal link from another page—if your site has “orphaned” pages, it’ll impact your overall website Health Score. Check through your site for any broken links or errors, such as 404 errors or directs to the wrong pages.

Aside from internal links, your off page SEO checklist concerns link building or backlinks. The key is to create a website and content that people want to link to, as they’ll only do this if it benefits them or their audience. You’ll need to convince them that your product or content is exceptional.

Keep looking out for opportunities, such as publishing guest posts on websites with a high domain rating or high authority (which you can check using tools like Ahrefs and SEMrush). Generate organic backlinks by publishing content on social media or content-sharing platforms like Medium.

Carry out a Link Intersect report as part of your competitor analysis, to see if your competitors are linked to high-authority domains you intend to target. Remember that the quality of your links is more important than quantity, so always focus on creating valuable content for your users.

Include clear CTAs, encouraging readers to take action. This is an opportunity to include a relevant internal link and keyword, and helps SaaS businesses to boost demo requests, free trial sign-ups, and direct inquiries to sales teams.

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