The 3 Pillars of SEO for SaaS

When creating a public website for an online business, for example a SaaS (Software as a Service), it is unfortunately too common to neglect important aspects at a technical and strategic level, directly related to SEO. Thus limiting the potential to acquire users and potential customers thanks to organic traffic coming from search engines (Google).

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It depends largely on the type of business and the business’ target, but normally the organic traffic coming from an optimal SEO strategy and optimization is usually the one with the highest quality and profitability. The question is: are you willing to take advantage of that free traffic?

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Important: Before reading on, it is essential for you to understand that SEO is normally a medium to long term strategy – more like a marathon. Therefore, the sooner you start working on it, the better.

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At GRAVYTON, an agency specialized in SEO for SaaS, we have seen all kinds of projects, and in this article we will guide you on how to improve the SEO of your SaaS business by following a simple 3-step roadmap: clean, optimize and grow. These 3 steps are, in our opinion, the 3 pillars of SEO for SaaS.

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SEO roadmap for SaaS by GRAVYTON

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1. Clean

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It is very common that, due to the nature of a SaaS business and its software, Google often crawls and even indexes hundreds or thousands of URLs in its search results that do not provide any type of SEO value.

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We are talking about things like URLs of forms, logins, social media shares, etc. URLs generated by the software automatically without any SEO value make Googlebot “waste time” crawling those pages and lower the relevance of your website in search results.

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Therefore, the first step in the roadmap is to clean your website so that Google only sees what you want it to see: the URLs with an SEO goal that you have defined on your site. Great examples of these urls are your homepage, complementary landing pages to the homepage (functionalities, price, FAQ, team, etc.), blog homepage, blog articles and landing pages focused on capturing traffic related to the searches of the competing brands. We will deal with this last point a little later.

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Avoid automatic creation of unnecessary URLs

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Always try to avoid generating these types of URLs and make sure that they always have the Meta robots ‘noindex’ tag in the HTML code so that, even if Google finds them, it willnot include them in the search results.

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Robots.txt

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The robots.txt file is a text document that is always added to the root of a domain (example.com/robots.txt) and serves as a guide to determine what a crawler or spider can and cannot track on your website.

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Therefore, it is important to configure it correctly so that Google never crawls the URLs mentioned above, thus optimizing the time it spends discovering and updating pages on our website.

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2. Optimize

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Once we have correctly executed the first step, the cleaning step, we will have gotten rid of all the URLs that do not contribute anything to the web positioning of the site. Now you need to improve the SEO of the pages or URLs that you do want to rank, and you can do it with the following steps:

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SEO Keyword Research

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The first thing is to carry out research on how users search for your service or product on the Internet. It is very likely that you will be surprised. This research work is what is known as SEO keyword research and it is a basic piece you need to build a successful growth strategy for your SaaS. There are a thousand and one ways to correctly carry out keyword research, but this Backlinko guide can come in handy.

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On-page SEO

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Once the keyword research has been carried out, you will have a lot of concepts, terms and topics (keywords) that users use to search for your service, product, or questions about the industry. Topics that, quite possibly, you are already dealing with on the homepage or the different landing pages of your website.

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What you have to do is take advantage of all the new information to improve those URLs, optimizing their content, headers, meta (title and description).Be sure to include these keywords and their derivatives, always adding value to the user, to enhance relevance and rank better in Google results.

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It is also important to note, in order to cover the terms or themes that most interest users, you will have to create new URLs, in the form of pages or in the form of blog articles.

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Avoid cannibalization

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When carrying out optimization of URLs and content, keep in mind that each landing page must deal with a specific topic. Do not talk about very different topics in the same URL and above all try to avoid optimizing the same topic in different URLs. This causes what is known as cannibalization. Cannibalization implies that several pages or URLs of your website compete for the same terms or concepts to rank themselves in Google, which can lead to none of them being ranked correctly.

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3. Grow

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With steps 1 and 2 you should have eliminated or hidden the URLs that did not contribute anything in the eyes of crawlers (Googlebot). You should also have data on how users search for your product and have optimized your home page and the rest of the URLs including landing pages and blog articles- to rank better for those keywords… Now what?

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Now it’s time to GROW.

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Create new landing pages

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Are people looking for services or products that you don’t offer but could offer? Perhaps it is a good idea to offer them and generate a landing page about it so that they find your website in Google results and know about your product.

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Does your sector have a competitor that is a clear benchmark? Create a landing page that ranks for searches such as ‘alternatives to XXXXX’ or ‘opinions on XXXXX’ with which to rank and appear in searches for your brand made by users looking for an alternative to or opinions on the brand of that referent competitor.

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Improve content strategy

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Your blog will be one of your best allies in your SEO strategy for SaaS. Many times, users may not know your brand name yet. They may not even know how to find the solution to their problem, simply because they don’t know their technical or real name.

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Create articles that deal with topics in the sector that interest your potential users and customers. Answer their questions with quality content that shows that you are an expert in your sector.

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With a good blog content strategy you can greatly increase the number of visits to your website. Qualified visits that will begin to know your brand more and more, thus increasing branded searches, and which you can convert into trials or clients through internal links and CTAs.

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Do Link Building properly

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Having optimized Googlebot crawling and On-page SEO of your website is essential if you want to increase organic traffic. A good content strategy is also imperative too. Only one last push is missing: Link building which can be defined as obtaining external links from authority websites.

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Getting external links to your website will help increase your domain authority and relevance, improving your ranking in Google. But be careful, not just any external link will do.

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You should try to make them quality links, from websites with a theme similar to yours, from your sector. If it is links that come from well-known websites with traffic, it is even better. Do not abuse the anchor text optimized in excess. The fact that these contain your brand is more than enough.

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If you want to know more about link building, you can read this complete guide by the Ahrefs tool.

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