24, Aug 2022
SEO for SaaS products: how to compete with the SERP giants
SaaS or software as a service is a software licensing service model by subscription. Most often, such software is located on servers in the network. The user accesses the service through a browser or API, and is entirely supported by the service provider. Simply put, the SaaS model allows the client to work with a ready-made solution online. The user simply pays for access and gets a ready-made tool as quickly as possible. In today’s article, Ivan Paly from Boosta will tell you how he and his team drive traffic to their own SaaS products:
Sitechecker – website analysis service for technical errors;
Copywritely – content analysis service;
Kparser is a search suggestion parser.
For 2 years of work, the team has received impressive results. The products compete in search results with the giants of the seo tools industry: Semrush, Ahrefs, Moz and Backlinko. The total traffic has already exceeded 300,000 unique users and continues to grow, and the number of referring donors is more than 2,000.
We will divide the report into 3 parts: content creation, traffic acquisition and link building. Let’s move on to specific steps. Let’s imagine that you took a product, studied competitors, parsed their semantics and filed the main pages in English. These are classic steps. The question is how to extend the semantics.
Getting traffic
Separation into mini-products
The first way is to divide your product into mini-products. At one point, we noticed that users analyze pages not entirely, but their specific parts: meta tags, h1, title and description. We added pages based on this data, and Google began to rank them well. For example, this was the case with Favicon Checker: we initially made an information landing, added a tool, and saw push traffic. You can add these mini-tools to the first screen, in the middle of an article, or combine them with how-to content. Or you can generally do only one to and leave the title, h1 or description. The main value of such pages is that the user satisfies his intent simply by getting some kind of response from the tool. He doesn’t always need to read the content. Similar responses can be generated in English and then scaled to other languages.
Create mini-products based on API
Many tools that have an API put a lot of emphasis on the quality, accuracy, and volume of their data, but often forget about design. If you work in this direction with the same data, you can easily overtake your competitors. For example, this is what we did with the traffic-checker landing page. In this case, you need to be careful. After receiving traffic, we analyze statistics on conversions and profit. After all, you will most often have to pay for the API. Even if the landing page is in the top, you need to constantly analyze whether it makes a profit.
Other Uses for the Product
Let’s take a look at the kparser search hint parser as an example. First, it was in the top for key-word generator and key-word suggestion tool. At some point, we noticed that the site ranks well for words related to YouTube – the landing page youtube key word tool went well. We wondered what else people might be looking for? As a result, we noticed a great demand for youtube name generator. It turns out that many aspiring YouTubers want to create channels, but cannot come up with a name for themselves.
It’s a bit strange. How can search suggestions help you come up with a brand name? So we went a little further. Our product didn’t just teach YouTubers how to create a brand for themselves. He explained in detail how to use this data. The idea worked. Now it is our most popular product. Further experiments with domain name generator and business name generator began. They were also successful. The important thing is that you look at your product from different angles and try to understand how it can be used.
Comparison with competitors
Surely your product has competitors. Many users are not satisfied with them, and users will look for an alternative. Such requests have a small volume, but the hottest target audience. She has already used the tool and was dissatisfied with something. This is the warmest customer and you can satisfy him. Show your benefits and reflect this in your content. Don’t forget small competitors. Analyze sites with good potential and copy their features. As they grow, the traffic to your landing page will also grow.
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- By Artur Dent
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.
- 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
- 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.
- 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. - 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.
