Crafting impactful SaaS SEO content: A complete guide

Creating effective SaaS SEO content can sometimes seem to be a tricky challenge. So, we wanted to demystify the process and explain, in simple terms, how to make it work.

This guide explores SaaS SEO content from a number of directions. First, it looks at why it has a slightly different focus from other content. It then goes on to examine the practicalities of producing this kind of content, and gives a few best practices for you to follow when creating it.  

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Understanding SaaS SEO content

When you’re building a SaaS SEO strategy for your business, it’s vital to grasp why SaaS SEO content has to be different from other types of content.

What kind of content works particularly well for SaaS companies? Well, this is mostly determined by the way the SaaS field works. 

The crucial elements you need to keep in mind here include:

• SaaS sales cycles are long: Compared to other industries like ecommerce, the SaaS sector attracts clients who take a long time over purchase decisions. After all, these are B2B customers who won’t be impulse buyers. It’s likely that many individuals will be involved at each stage of the decision process.

That means you need to nurture your leads carefully through the sales funnel. As a result, SEO content for SaaS companies needs to align with each stage of the customer journey. Every step of the way, your messaging has to address the specific concerns and questions your target clients have at different points.

• Complexity of your product: Many SaaS products have technical features whose value can only be truly appreciated if you have a good understanding of the product. It’s a completely different situation from trying to sell someone a pair of shoes, for instance.

You might think that means your content should go hard on explaining all the technical details. But be careful with that. The fact is that SEO content for SaaS companies needs to strike a tricky balance. Sure, you can provide information about the product’s features and benefits, but your content should also remain accessible to a non-technical audience.

• Showcase your offering: If you make a demo version of your offering available, don’t forget to mention that in your content. It can make all the difference when it comes to encouraging potential customers to take that next step down the sales funnel.

One area where you should be a little careful is pricing. If you’re in a growth phase and mostly targeting SMBs, you may be trying to minimize your cost per sale. In that case, it makes sense to include clear details of how much your plans cost and what value each one provides. Many small businesses won’t pick up the phone to get in touch with you unless they see these details on your site.

However, once your business gets to the point where you’re targeting large corporations, you should be focusing on developing a dedicated enterprise SaaS strategy. 

At this stage, you could well be leaving money on the table by automatically capping your pricing. So bear in mind that when it comes to pricing-related content, you need to think strategically.

• Focus on customer retention: Some companies make the mistake of focusing their SEO content purely on attracting new clients. However, to achieve long-term success, SaaS companies rely on customer retention and renewals. There’s no point continuing to fill the bathtub if the drain stopper’s open, right?

Your content needs to provide for your existing customers, too, in other words. This means aiming some toward offering support, telling customer success stories, and ongoing reminders of the value of your product. The goal is to keep your clients engaged so that they’ll be happy to stick with your service.

Putting all this together, it’s helpful to think about SaaS SEO content as falling into two distinct categories:

1. Awareness content

This is any type of SEO content that draws attention to your product. This should include some long-form blog posts that give a useful overview of topics related to the field your business operates in. The idea is to cast your net wide and attract a large number of visitors interested in learning more about your area.

Among this influx will be a few who are potentially interested in buying your service. But in addition, doing this means Google will notice that your site is suddenly a go-to for anyone interested in content about your particular niche. 

Your domain authority will rise, and this will help you rank better all round. You’re playing a long game here, and awareness content helps.

2. Expertise-driven content

Expertise-driven content is more specifically about your product and related topics. While awareness content is created to attract as many visitors as possible, expertise-driven content demonstrates the thought leadership you bring to your space. 

It won’t attract as many visitors, but the ones it does attract will be more likely to convert.

This kind of content needs to provide value that readers won’t find elsewhere. It should answer the kinds of questions that your fellow professionals are struggling with.

In other words, it needs to be genuinely insightful and well-constructed. Putting this kind of content on your site will generate useful backlinks that will give it a competitive edge.

It’s crucial not to overlook the importance of E-A-T for SaaS companies trying to climb the rankings on SERPs. E-A-T stands for Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness, which are key determining factors in Google’s search rankings. Together, these should be a primary goal for your SaaS SEO content creation process.

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How to write SEO content for your SaaS business

So much for the theory; what about the practice? How do you go about creating excellent SaaS content that delivers for your business?

Let’s break this down into its constituent parts:

1. Written content basics

You hear a lot about how content needs to be insightful, engaging, and well written. Actually putting that into action is not always straightforward to achieve. 

In particular, many companies in a technical industry like SaaS run into one specific problem: Their technical experts understand the product well, but don’t know how to write to engage an audience.

Content writing is a skill. Anyone can put together a thousand words on a topic that interests them, but getting the reader interested is another matter. Here are a few tips for how to do it:

• Break up the text into readable chunks: Huge paragraphs twenty lines long are an absolute no-no. Most people don’t like reading big walls of text, no matter how well written they are.
• Use lots of subheadings and formatting: This organizes your content into a more readable form and also helps Google understand your pages more accurately. Bulleted lists are your friends.
• Imagine you’re talking to someone: You’re not writing a university essay or a company report. The prose should be professional, of course, but it shouldn’t be overly formal.
  
  For example, you’ll notice that this article uses contractions like “you’ll” and “isn’t”. That’s just one way of making a piece of writing more conversational in tone.
• Article length: Consider word count as part of your SaaS content strategy. Most blog articles are between 1,000 and 3,000 words in length, depending on how detailed the treatment of the topic is.Be careful not to fall into the trap of adding word count just for the sake of writing a longer article than a competitor. A shorter piece done well will work better than a longer one that’s stuffed with unnecessary padding.

• Add value: Make sure your content delivers actionable insights and advice. Include lists of practical tips (like this one).

The good news is that you don’t have to do the writing yourself, of course. There are SaaS SEO copywriting experts who specialize in producing exactly the kind of content you need. So consider outsourcing this if you don’t have in-house writers.

SaaS content writing is as much of a science as an art; there are important technical elements to master. First up: Keywords and how to handle them.

3. On-page optimization

You’ve done your keyword research and you’ve written the content. It’s full of useful advice and expert knowledge, and it showcases your product perfectly. Job done, right?

Not quite.

On-page optimization is all about tweaking your pages to make them search engine-friendly. It brings all the other elements together and has a huge impact on how well your content performs in organic search. Here are a few of the most important aspects to get right:

• Page titles and meta descriptions: It’s vital to include your target keyword in the page title and meta description. Your meta descriptions should be both concise (for technical reasons) and compelling (to encourage people to click through to your site).

• Don’t neglect the URLs: The URLs should also include your target keyword. Keep them short, descriptive, and easy to read.
• Image optimization: It’s not just the text on your page that needs to be optimized. Give images a boost by adding alt text and appropriately descriptive file names. Make sure the file sizes of images are not too big, because that can affect page load speed.
• Internal and external linking: Include relevant internal links to other pages on your website. This helps out when Google is indexing your page, because it makes the structure of your site as a whole more cohesive. Link to authoritative external sources to support your content and enhance your site’s credibility.

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Best practices for outstanding SaaS SEO content

When you’re developing SEO content for SaaS businesses, there are a few best practices to bear in mind:

Use a checklist to organize the process

Working to a SaaS SEO checklist will keep you focused. It should include entries for all the essentials: High-quality content, internal links and backlinks, competitor analysis, on-site optimization.

Pay attention to technical SEO

Even the best content can stumble if the website it appears on isn’t performing well. Optimizing page load speed is crucial, as is your site being responsive and mobile-friendly. It all helps improve the user experience.

Incorporate your unique value proposition

Your UVP should be uppermost in your mind when developing your content. Look for opportunities to build trust with the reader. Highlight what it is that makes your solution stand out from the competition, and emphasize all the benefits clients can expect when they sign up.

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