24, Aug 2022
How to do SEO for SaaS products

In three years, our team has managed to grow the total traffic for three SaaS products to 520,000 unique visitors per month. 90% of visitors come to us from Google organic search. In this article, I will explain what steps helped us achieve these results.

But this version will be wider and more detailed. Now, six months after the speech, our traffic is growing and some hypotheses have finally proved their effectiveness.

For all three products (Sitechecker, Copywritely, Kparser) we used a similar search engine optimization methodology. Therefore, I think that the methods described here will be valuable for any SaaS product.

Let me remind you that SaaS (software as a service) is a business model in which you sell access to your program by subscription for a specific period of time.

Content
Fundamentals of methodology.
Ideas for creating pages.
Ideas for getting links and traffic.
Untested but valuable ideas.
Fundamentals of methodology
The methodology is based on two axioms:

your product will change and you do not know where you will come with it years later;
you do not know which pages of your site and external sites will bring the most traffic, backlinks and sales.
Based on these axioms, we form the key task of the SEO strategy in the first year or two.

Embrace semantics in your niche as much as possible and test as many ways as possible to drive traffic and backlinks.

If you had precise answers to these questions, your approach would be very different. But you probably don’t have them. Therefore, you need to build a system for selecting the most valuable pages and external sites as early as possible. Here’s how to build such a system.

  1. Map Your Audience Needs
    Your product is always within some value chain among other products. Think about what other tasks your user solves before coming to you and after he has started using your product. This way you will get even more ideas for creating pages and monetizing your existing audience.

An example of an audience needs map description

  1. Create pages early
    You need to create all the necessary pages and content for them as early as possible in order to:

was where to attract traffic;
users had something to share;
there was something to select pages for improvements;
as early as possible, internal linking began to work, the age of the url accumulated.
Building pages as early as possible means approaching them like an MVP. Do not bring them to the ideal at first, but do it well enough, but as many pages as possible.

  1. Look for ways to use the same content on different sites
    Creating quality content is expensive and time consuming. Create such content for your site, and then think about how to present the same content in a different form on external sites. We drew images for the blog and promoted them on Pinterest, wrote articles for the blog and used their content to respond to Quora.
  2. Set up web analytics as early as possible
    Publish pricing as early as possible, set goals and/or e-commerce in Google Analytics. This will help you start selecting pages based on revenue potential as early as possible.