SEO for SaaS: Understanding the SaaS Funnel of Conversion and Best Optimizing Practices

6 Minute Read
Written by: Branko Ilishev
Mar / 25 / 2021

One of the key elements of the SaaS companies’ online success lies behind their carefully planned and executed SEO strategy. Actually, if you take a glimpse at the development of the absolute best SaaS companies of today, you can notice how their SEO strategy is the critical driver behind their prosperity. 

Nonetheless, it’s imperative to see how to assemble the ideal SaaS SEO plan with all segments of the SaaS funnel and optimize it for the target audience. To make things clearer, in this article, we’ll pay attention to the significance of the SEO for SaaS and how to optimize all funnel segments properly.  

What Is SEO for SaaS? 

SEO for SaaS is the optimization of the SaaS company’s website to expand the organic traffic on the search engines, specifically to clients interested in that company’s SaaS services. Apart from the paid marketing campaigns, SaaS SEO is the most prolific way of gathering leads and increasing conversions. Furthermore, it has a great advantage over the PPC ads – the traffic doesn’t stop when the paying stops. SaaS SEO gives everlasting results that bring the target clients closer to the solution to their problem in the years to come.   

That is the reason it’s imperative to have a solid SaaS SEO strategy. Web optimization can drive steady traffic and outstanding organic development. Numerous SaaS organizations are expanding their interest into the channel to broaden traffic sources and keep the expense of procurement reasonable. 

How Does SaaS SEO Work?

First of all, for the SaaS SEO to work, it must focus on the most important segments of the SaaS funnel of customer acquisition. 

  • The target client is already looking for your product. They know you exist but want to find out more about your service. This is called the raising awareness phase, where the searcher looks for information.
  • Your product and its popularity vs. its functionality. The target audience knows about your product, but they need to find out how it will meet their requirements. This is called the consideration phase, where the searcher wants to know all about their problem.
  • Ready-to-buy clients. They know about your product, know how it can help them, and they are now ready to negotiate and buy from you. The last phase of the funnel is called transactional, where the searchers are ready to buy.

The description above is best presented visually in the image below, and it captures the three segments of the SaaS funnel on which the SEO strategy needs to be planned.

SaaS SEO funnel

Why Do You Need a SaaS SEO Strategy?

The SaaS SEO strategy will bring you the wanted online success to your SaaS company. It will help your company’s growth, popularity and increase the market share. More and more focus is being put on organic growth in the recent period since it is the only option that guarantees evergreen results. Still, why should you immediately make an appointment with a SaaS SEO agency if you haven’t done it so far? Let’s go over the reasons. 

SaaS Seo Means Exponential Growth

By producing fresh, innovative, and engaging content, your SaaS content marketing will establish a steady exponential growth of your SaaS company. More precisely, by conducting such a strategy, you will be able to target the specific group of potential clients that go through each of the phases of the funnel. Providing answers to the questions in each phase will help you drive a consistent level of traffic. Further nurturing them will help you convert these leads into buyers. 

SaaS Seo Decreases Your Ad Budget

When you optimize for the search engines, you can rely less on the paid advertisements; thus, you will save money in the process. Many SaaS company owners often have doubts when it comes to choosing SEO or PPC since both are yielding results. However, investing in SaaS SEO strategy pays off in the longer run. The results you can achieve with a properly executed strategy can bring the need to pay for ads to a zero. 

SaaS Seo Includes Social Media Strategy as well

The content you put out as a part of your SEO strategy doesn’t exclusively target keywords. It can also be used as part of the social media strategy where your followers will be exposed to quality content offering answers to any question they might have for your product/service. This means that you can expect more organic visits and conversion of leads acquired through other marketing channels. So, it is safe to say that the SEO for SaaS will help your SaaS marketing SEO strategy as well. 

Best SEO SaaS Optimising Practices

saas strategy

1. In-depth Analysis

The first step is to have your website deeply and extensively analyzed. This is done by the SEO SaaS agency that will conduct a thorough audit on the tech issues and the content. Plus, they will research your competition and see which are their strengths and weaknesses, and more importantly, how you can overtake their position. 

2. Targeting Keywords for Each Funnel Phase

Next, identifying the target keywords for each of the funnel phases means identifying the personas and the challenges they meet. Usually, this is a task for the SaaS SEO agency as well. By using the appropriate SEO tools, the SEO experts will be able to identify which informational keywords have the most searches, which consideration keywords are popular with the people in the second phase of the funnel, and which are the transactional keywords that ready-to-buy clients are using in the closing part of the purchasing cycle.

3. Produce Fresh Content Better Than Your Competitors

Longer content, content that depicts in-depth analysis, visual material that makes the content more engaging, structured, and formatted in an easily comprehensible way – are all features of great quality content. Add to it the uniqueness of the topic, and you have a killer blog post ready to be shared and linked. However, make sure you understand that there are no unique topics on the net – every topic you can come up with is already discussed and written about. Still, it doesn’t mean that you can’t take a unique approach to it and introduce an original idea of the topic that many people have already used in their blogs. So, uniqueness refers to the approach rather than the topic itself. 

4. Carefully Observe the Changes

Finally, you need to be always on top of the changes in the ranking positions and the other data from the Analytics Tools you are using. Observe your growth, observe your competitors, observe what is working and what is not working. Pay attention to tips about Google Algorithm updates, as they can make or break your website. All in all, be always on top of what happens online and keep a step ahead. 

Some Final Words

SEO for SaaS companies is a bit different from the general SEO for websites. It focuses more on the persona of the ideal clients and how they go through the SaaS funnel of conversion. It is all about the client and their need for the software as a solution to their problems, and the SEO strategy for SaaS companies should aim at the centre of that necessity. 

About the Author

Picture of Branko Ilishev

Branko Ilishev

Branko is your SEO prodigy. He manages the SEO team and finds creative solutions for your online visibility problems by thinking out-of-the-box. He also translates the collected data of analytics into understandable information that gives you concrete insights.