Why do SaaS startups need SEO from day one?
Organic visibility is key for driving traffic to your website, however, the most important benefit of high visibility in search is showcasing your product to SaaS customers with bottom-of-the-funnel intents. In other words, people actively searching for a solution to their problem are more likely to convert to your customers, if your product addresses their needs and resolves their problems.
Investing in SEO from day 1 is essential to growing B2B SaaS startups as it sets a very strong foundation for being visible and being found organically by the most active segments of your target audience.
How do you do SEO for B2B SaaS startups?
SaaS SEO revolves around the following key areas:
- Technical SEO
- On-page SEO (the right website structure)
- Content marketing and ongoing SEO effort
Let’s review these areas one by one and explore the key activities a SaaS founder needs to pay attention to.
Technical SEO for a new B2B SaaS website
Technical SEO health is fundamental for any website, as it ensures that search engines can access the website content, index it, and then rank it on search results. Technical SEO also covers optimizing the key page’s elements such as titles, meta tags, H tags, and more advanced techniques such as micro-formatting and generating the right XML sitemaps.
Generally, most of the industry-leading website builders (WordPress, Hubspot, etc) have done a good job of addressing core technical SEO components out of the box. However, if you’re building a custom front end for your SaaS product, or applying a lot of modifications to your WP theme, it is essential to make sure that you address technical SEO factors and apply necessary fixes.
Helpful resource: Google’s SEO Starter Guide
On-page SEO for a new B2B SaaS website
On-page SEO for SaaS addresses content and optimizes your website pages for the right keywords. It also relates to building the right website structure, i.e. having a sufficient amount of pages and content to fully describe your product and address users’ search intents appropriately.
Recommended website structure for B2B SaaS startups
- Key product functions (Features pages)
These pages are the key areas on your website to embed the targeted keywords that describe what your product does. It’s a great way to position your product functionality in the right way and describe the solutions to your customers’ problems.
Recommendation: create a separate page for each feature and optimize each page for a specific set of target keywords.
These pages provide information about how your product integrates with other software. You can use these pages to further describe your product benefits.
Recommendation: create a separate page for each integration. Thus you will be able to capture searches with very specific customer intents.
- You vs Competitors’ pages
These pages showcase how you are compared to your rivals. You can use these pages to showcase how your product is better than your competitors and show exactly why your prospects need to choose your product.
Recommendation: create a separate page for each competitor. Use benchmarks, checklists, comparison tables, and other elements to showcase your product.
Helpful resource: The Ultimate SEO Checklist for Tech Companies Founders
Content marketing and ongoing SEO effort for B2B SaaS startups
Let’s review how you can kick-start your B2B SaaS startup content marketing strategy and optimize for quick SEO wins.
The best initial SEO strategy for SaaS startups is to address the key jobs to be done that your customers have. This approach can be easily converted to How-to’s and blog posts, as well as infographics, FAQs, and other content formats.
In other words, focusing on how your product resolves key ICPs pain points is the best way to start your content marketing effort, as you will be expanding your keywords reach, SEO forecasting, and strengthening your product positioning at the same time.
Recommendation: review the key Jobs-to-be-Done that your SaaS product covers, and build up a content plan around these pain points.