Blog

Many companies are shifting their focus from costly performance advertising strategies to organic search engine optimization strategies. SEO for SaaS will not be very different from SEO for any business in the future. But as CEO, you would want to consider hiring SaaS SEO agencies/consultants devoted exclusively to marketing SaaS business.

Further, if your agency/consultant is or has been a SaaS founder themselves, this is even better.

Only a SaaS founder has seen the various cycles of a software business and understands the need. Often, a tech company is more interested in signups, which results in a direct increase in revenue, rather than vanity metrics like news signups, traffic, etc., which a traditional SEO agency may not understand.

Plus, how to position the product, what kind of CTA (call to action) to have in what kind of blog, is something a SaaS founder knows very well.

Perhaps, that is the reason, a lot of people love working with us, since our founders, Harsh Gupta and Kirti Prakash, have run many successful businesses themselves and scaled them just using SEO.

How SaaS SEO Differs from Traditional SEO Strategy

Almost all SaaS founders I talk to have their content marketing strategy poorly planned, and execution is even worse. Most of them would hire a small team or an agency and have 0 signups even after months of investments.

Reason: They follow a traditional SEO strategy.

SaaS Content marketing strategy differs (or should) from a typical content marketing strategy.

Unlike traditional SEO strategy, which is focused on optimizing websites for organic search traffic, SaaS SEO is all about driving signups and, thus, revenue.

There are several reasons why SaaS SEO is different from traditional SEO strategy.

1) SaaS products are typically subscription-based, meaning they must constantly be marketed and promoted to drive new sign-ups.

2) Additionally, SaaS products are often complex, with various features and pricing plans that can confuse potential customers. This means that SaaS SEO needs to be laser-focused on creating clear and concise content that highlights the key features, benefits, and pricing of the product.

3) We use the term “purchase intent” only in SaaS keyword research. These keywords being bottom of the funnel, cater to the searchers who are ready to purchase. They want to buy a product in your niche or consider your competitor, or simply try to solve a big problem that you solve. Let’s say you are an email marketing product. The target keywords would be something like “best email marketing software” or “best mailing list software.”

4) The product features have to be explained well in long-form articles.

5) SaaS products are complex. Hence more education is needed. This means creating eBooks, whitepapers, and tutorials. The long-form content needs to discuss pain points in detail and elaborate on how you solve them. I personally like doing lots of video tutorials inside the blogs and also screenshots of products in action.

6) Creating content that explains how to use your product for the best results. For example, how do you send 100s of cold emails using your tool? Another example – how do you manage multiple clients in a project management tool.

7) Create content about your industry and where you stand in it. Also, this includes creating your page vs. your competitors. Be very graphic on these pages, like quadrants and comparing features and pricing and your USP.

8) Churn is a reality in SaaS business, so we need to write many customer support articles to retain current customers. Finding the keywords around customer support can be a bit of a challenge, but once done correctly, they can also bring in lot of organic search traffic (new customers) as well as satisfy current customers’ questions. At the very least, this will increase retention, if not get new signups. Just look at zoho or zapier customer success articles. They not only rank but also show users how to use their product.

What a good SaaS SEO strategy looks like (used by SaaS SEO Consultants)

If you’re looking to optimize your SaaS product for organic traffic, then you need to mix both traditional SEO strategies and SaaS SEO techniques.

1. Optimize Your Website for Organic Search results

Any SEO plan should start with optimizing your website for natural search. This means ensuring that your website is well-designed, easy to navigate (for example, has a table of contents), and talks about a specific function like sales (instead of being generic, a mistake made by most websites).

The words and phrases people utilize to search for information online are known as keywords. You may increase the number of visits to your website and the likelihood that they will become customers by focusing on the proper keywords.

2. Correct Technicals

Technical SEO is the process of optimizing your website to help explorers like Google find, crawl, understand, and index your content. The goal is to increase your ranking on search engines to be more visible.

Search engines such as Google want to present their users with the best possible search results. To accomplish this, they need to crawl and evaluate web pages on many factors. Some factors are based on the user’s experience, like how fast a page loads. Other factors help search engine robots grasp what your pages are about. So, by improving technical areas, you help google crawl and understand your site. Better the work done here, the higher the rankings. So we don’t want to miss out on this,

Here is our spreadsheet for your technical audit. You can copy this and do it for yourself. We also do a fully comprehensive technical audit and a customized strategic plan for your specific business for $500.

3. Develop a Content Marketing Strategy

Produce high-quality content and write at least 15 articles a month to be taken seriously by Google. We have worked with over 2 dozen brands and tried various permutations and combinations. Anything lesser than 15 articles a month doesn’t give us hyper-growth.

Another important thing is to write on keywords around a particular niche or a function, to begin with. So let’s say you are a cold email outreach tool. We recommend in the beginning, you only write around cold emails and email characteristics like SPF, and DKIM. That alone would be 50-70 keywords (based on our experience working for Cliently, where we delivered 75k monthly traffic in just 8 months. Case Study). The thing is, if we write about the sales niche as well, google doesn’t understand what our expertise is. So first, these cold email keywords should be attacked, and then the broader sales function keywords.

Cliently’s growth in just 8 months.

4. Optimize Your Content for Search Engines

Once you’ve created your content, you need to ensure that it is optimized for search engines. This means using the correct keywords and adding relevant metadata (such as titles, descriptions, and tags) to help your content rank higher in search results.

5. Build Links to Your Website

Building links from other sites is one of the best strategies to raise your website’s search engine position. The more links you have, the more likely people are to find your website. Several ways to build links include:

• Organically – If you are an established website or an author, people will automatically refer back to your content in their content as they see you as authority.
• Submitting your website to directories.
• Writing guest posts for other websites.
• Buying links

Buying links is the fastest way to grow traffic with minimal results. We cold email companies all the time to buy backlinks for our SaaS clients. We prefer buying premium SaaS backlinks or sites with low spam scores and high traffic. Even 5 such paid backlinks (costing about 150 dollars each), can give a significant boost in traffic.

For one of our brands, we acquired 6,000 backlinks over 12 months

6. Monitor Your Website’s Performance

It’s essential to monitor your website’s performance so you can identify and fix any issues that may be affecting your ranking. You may utilize various tools, such as Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics.

Keep a special eye on reports from Google Search Console. From time to time, it will send you notifications and detail the issues that make the reading experience terrible.

Be on the lookout for such emails.

Key Questions to Ask a Potential SaaS SEO Consultant

Choosing the right SEO agency can make or break a brand. Simply because if done wrong, you will lose the previous 4-8 months without seeing any results. And as SaaS founders ourselves, we understand the opportunity cost is enormous.

Of course, you lose all the money as well spent on the agency.

Do you have case studies or client examples?

Anybody who has given results will gladly share case studies and client’s testimonials.

A professional SaaS SEO consultant can offer clients testimonials that detail the specific ways the company or its consultant has helped them grow their company using SEO.

Do you know my platform/site technology?

WordPress, Webflow, and Wix require different techniques in SEO. Usually, they are minor tweaks, but still, your consultant should know your platform in and out; rather than working on it for the first time.

Do you have experience with my business type?

Prefer a consultant who not only worked for SaaS but also around your niche. This is the very reason why our founding team works well and every time produce results. Each of us has worked for many brands in various niches.

What is your pricing structure?

Because SEO may be a costly investment, make sure you are getting a reasonable price for the services you are purchasing. Ask the consultant about their pricing structure and what you can expect to pay for their services.

A good SEO agency costs around $3,000 to $10,000 a month.

Can you give me a traffic projection?

Be reasonable with your expectations because SEO might take some time to produce benefits. Ask the consultant if you’re considering their timeline for results and traffic projection, and ensure it’s in line with your timeline.

Traffic projection can be made by looking at your competitors, the keyword universe’s combined volume, and estimation of the difficulty of ranking keywords. And of course, the consultant would factor in backlinks they would get on your site.

What will the reporting look like?

Will it be weekly? Monthly? Quarterly?

What would it contain?

I can’t say about others, but we are big on transparency. Hence in my reports, I include all the backlinks that we get; articles written and some metrics on them like headline score, plagiarism score, etc., articles ranking on page 1 and page 2; conversions; any technicals that we corrected; action plan for next month and so on.

After all the hard work is done, tracking the campaign’s progress and reporting the results to the client is essential. This helps show the ROI of the SEO campaign and ensures that the client is happy with the results.

Are you a SaaS founder yourself (optional)?

Only a SaaS founder has seen the ups and downs and the full cycle of the SaaS business. So they get it better than just any digital marketer. Probably, another reason, founders love working with us.

Let’s talk about Betterzilla’s methodology

As a leading SEO agency and being SaaS founders ourselves, we have the experience to help your business rank higher in search engine results and achieve its goals.

We like to follow a 360-degree approach to Content Marketing.

We know traffic isn’t the only important thing to successful digital products. We love understanding the SEO potential of your product and working tirelessly to get it in front of the right audience and in turn, optimize organic search results on Google. We are highly focussed on signups and thus increasing MRR.

Hence, we use a pain point SEO approach (sometimes called the bottom-of-the-funnel approach) in the starting and then gradually move to mid-funnel and top-of-the-funnel keywords.

These keywords are easy to rank on, and they have double-digit conversions (from blogs to signups). Moreover, the keywords have a high purchase intent. How do we find them? Here are some of my LinkedIn posts that describes that in detail. Stealing competitor’s traffic ; Paint-point SEO

Bofu content on one of our brands seeing double-digit conversions.

We create an SEO content model designed to hit your goals in the shortest time by optimizing current content, creating new content strategies, and building a solid off-page profile.

We also continually make on-page optimization suggestions for your most important pages. This involves optimizing meta titles, doing internal linking, or ensuring our content is competitive enough to beat all current page 1 results.

We frequently check the technical aspects of your website to make sure it is adequately crawled, indexed, and structured. Giving visitors and web crawlers the most incredible possible experience on your website is essential to us.

Current conversion rates are also analyzed, making suggestions for improvement and putting those improvements into practice.

High-quality and topically relevant links are acquired monthly for each of our brands. We secure 30 to 50 backlinks for your website (mainly SaaS links)

I also work on a guarantee model, whereby specific traffic is guaranteed by the end of month 9-12, and if targets are not hit, the invoice is not raised until then.

Every client is assigned an SEO Strategist, a Content SEO Specialist, a Tech SEO Analyst, and an Off-Page Manager.

How Much Does a SaaS SEO Consultant Cost

Even though we are SaaS SEO experts, we find it difficult to provide an answer to this. Why? Because SaaS SEO can vary so much from one organization to the next. If you browse our site, you won’t find any quoted prices or rates.

That isn’t because we have something to hide; on the contrary. It’s because we want to work with you to give you the most significant notion of the individualized service we can provide, regardless of whether you are a well-established B2C brand or an up-and-coming B2B SaaS company. A constrained, predetermined price list cannot accept delivery of such a customized SaaS SEO campaign. And any organization claiming otherwise is probably more concerned with its profit line than your result.

SEO is a complex and ever-changing field, which makes it difficult to put a price tag on SEO consulting services. However, regarding SaaS businesses, the cost of an SEO consultant can range from $500 to $10,000 per month.

Several factors will affect the price of an SEO consultant, including –

1. The number of articles to be written.
2. Technical articles like help guides require a combination of writer and technical person who understands the product in and out.
3. How easy/difficult it is to get you on rankings. Are you a CRM? I will charge you a lot more than, let’s say, you are a cold email tool. In CRM, I would be competing against Salesforce, Zoho, and Hubspot, which would require many backlinks.
4. How fast do you want to grow? Accordingly, we would have to get the backlinks. The more backlinks, the faster the growth.
5. The SEO project’s complexity overall
6. The consultant’s experience level

Our range is in the ballpark of $3,500 a month, where we deliver 10 long-form articles and 20-40 premium backlinks a month and manage your SEO end to end.

How Do You Hire an SEO Consultant? Where do you find them?

If you’re looking to hire an SEO consultant, there are a few places you can look. One option is to search for consultants on Upwork, Fiverr. This can be a great option because it allows you to see a variety of consultants in one place and compare their services.

Another option can be asking your friends and connections for referrals. After all, trust is the foundation of SEO.

One thing I would like to point out is that do not go by search engine results on the internet. Different search results give you different results based on your geography, personality type, search history, etc.

For instance, if you are searching the keyword “SaaS Seo Consultant,” our page may come on top in the United States (since, at the time of writing, we would be driving backlinks from the US websites) but may not come on top in Australia.

Another factor could be 90% of our traffic is from the States; Google may think we serve audiences only in the States, so it won’t push us elsewhere. And to be honest, this is our strategy, going ultra-niche. First, winning the niche audience in a specific geography rather than going broad.

Conclusion

If you want to ensure that your SaaS company has the best possible chance of success, then you need to invest in good quality SEO. However, with so many agencies out there claiming to be experts in this field, it can be challenging to know who to trust.

That’s why it’s so important to do your research and choose an agency with a proven track record of delivering quality results. Once you’ve found a few agencies that you think could be a good fit, it’s time to take a closer look at their services.

Firstly, you’ll want to check that they offer the full range of SEO services you need. This includes things like keyword research, link building, and content marketing. Once you’ve confirmed that they can meet all of your needs, it’s time to look at their prices.It’s also important to remember that the cheapest option isn’t always the best. Make sure you’re getting what you pay for by looking at the results that each agency has achieved for its clients.