SaaS SEO Guide
SaaS SEO checklist: The guide to an effective SEO strategy
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Further Reading:
- SaaS SEO Strategy
- SaaS SEO Checklist
- SaaS Technical SEO
- SaaS SEO Audit
- SaaS Keyword Research
- SaaS SEO Content
- SaaS SEO Copywriting
- E-A-T for SaaS
- Enterprise SaaS SEO
- SaaS SEO Metrics and KPI's
- SaaS SEO Attribution
- VOIP and Telecommunications SEO Strategy
- SaaS Link Building
- Payroll and Finance SaaS SEO
- SaaS SEO Agency
- SaaS Link Building Agency
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.
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).
What should your SaaS SEO checklist include?
Later in the post, we’ll show you the full SaaS SEO checklist—but first, here are some of the aspects you need to consider:
High quality content
As we mentioned, content is one of the cornerstones of your SEO strategy, especially due to its importance for SaaS businesses.
“High quality” doesn’t just mean well-written content, although that’s essential, too. In SEO terms, it means being guided by what search engine algorithms want to see.
In other words, you have to appease the Google gods as well as appealing to customers. For example, long-form pieces tend to achieve higher rankings. It’s also important that the content fulfills what’s promised in the headline and meta description, otherwise readers will quickly bounce away from your page.
An SEO content strategy includes keyword research so that you can use commonly-searched terms in your content (as well as your URLs, meta descriptions, and title tags). Search engines pick up on keyword stuffing, so use sparingly—and they also penalize duplicate content.
Aside from the content itself, formatting is part of SEO. A logical hierarchy with H1s, H2s, and H3s helps users to follow your content, while search engines are better able to read and understand the page, too. A table of contents also helps with easy navigation.
Backlinks
Backlinks are also a crucial part of SEO for SaaS, as they help search engines to determine how authoritative, relevant, and trustworthy your site is. By including links to other high-authority sites (especially if they link back to you), your content will be seen as high-value.
Your SEO strategy should include looking for link building opportunities. For example, securing guest posts on well-regarded sites, perhaps by also asking industry influencers to publish on yours. accelerate agency can help you do this, thanks to long-term relationships with top sites.
You can also look out for broken links on other pages, and reach out to the creator suggesting they link to your site instead. Publishing new data, based on your own research, is likely to be shared—which will win you some backlinks, too.
A fast website
An efficient website is part of delivering a great user experience, which helps SaaS companies to nurture leads and keep existing customers happy. Google also uses UX as a ranking factor, including page speed and mobile-friendliness.
People expect instant results when they’re online, so they’ll get frustrated if your site takes longer than a few seconds to load. That means a high bounce rate, which makes search engines think your visitors haven’t found the content useful—and your rankings will slide.
A slow, clunky website also reflects badly on your brand. On the flipside, conversion rates improve by 17% for every second faster the site loads. Optimizing page speed comes under technical SEO for SaaS, and there are a number of things you can do to improve it.
For instance, compress images so that they load quickly and don’t slow down the rest of the site, and avoid sending users through multiple redirects or redirect chains. The site should also look and behave the same way on any device.
Internal linking
Internal linking is when you create links between the different pages of your website. As well as the navigational links that direct people around your site (such as to your support or contact pages), you can also add contextual links in your content, pointing users to interesting and related content.
These links provide context about your content, enabling search engines to understand the relationships between topics and pages and determine its value. While navigational links improve the user experience, search engines also use links to navigate your site.
Internal linking helps crawlers discover all of your links and guide people towards your content. And you can also boost any underperforming pages by linking from your most authoritative content. Check that all links are working, as broken links can damage your SEO efforts.
Competitor analysis
SEO for SaaS also involves analyzing your competitors’ SEO activities. Some SaaS firms choose to outsource this task, but there are also several free tools you can use.
SpyFu and SEMrush show you which competitors are ranking highly on Google, while SEMrush and Ahrefs reveal the keywords they’re currently ranking for. You can also analyze their title tags for any extra keyword opportunities.
To conduct a Keyword Gap Analysis on SEMrush, add your domain and that of your competitor, and you’ll see a list of the keywords you’re both targeting—plus the ones that are unique to your competitor. You can also analyze your competitor’s backlink profile with Ahrefs.
Landing pages that convert
A SaaS landing page may be your homepage, or it may be the destination when someone clicks on one of your ads. Either way, the SEO tactics are similar to those used for the rest of your onsite content, such as using the right keywords and optimizing page loading speed.
The purpose of a landing page is to build trust in your business and persuade the visitor to take action, like signing up for a free trial of your software. An SEO-optimized landing page will rank higher in Google, which means more traffic and more conversions.
It also needs to be optimized to target the right audience, so use targeted keywords (including long-tail keywords focusing on search intent) to attract people interested in your topic and product. It’s worth using HTTPS:// so people know they can trust you with the sign-up details you’re asking for.
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.
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.
Get great results with this SaaS SEO checklist
You’ve seen the importance of SEO for SaaS companies. Make sure you’re getting it right by working through the search engine optimization checklist, and apply the tactics to every piece of content or new web page you create.
As well as using the SaaS SEO checklist, you can boost your rankings and site authority by working with a SaaS SEO agency.
For example, accelerate agency combines technical, onsite, and offsite SEO, from auditing your website to producing successful content, and securing links from top authority SaaS-related websites.