Creating a Winning SaaS SEO (7 Strategies + Examples)

SEO for SaaS is highly targeted to audience pain points. It increases SaaS companies’ visibility and credibility to earn the prospect’s trust.

For example, we built a winning SaaS SEO strategy and our client’s conversion rate doubled – from 0.56% to 1.16%.  And one of the most important landing pages targeting the “application penetration testing” keyword has seen an increase of 522.8% in organic sessions.

This is when the SaaS SEO strategy pays off.

In this guide, you’ll learn how to create a SaaS SEO strategy that drives results. Or we’ll handle it for you.

How SaaS Companies Benefit from SEO

There are many SaaS SEO benefits, such as increased online presence, conversions, and brand authority. For example, SEO allows a SaaS company to establish a topic authority relevant to its subject and increase credibility.

1. Build a Strong Online Presence and Attract Clients

According to a 2023 survey, two-thirds of business-to-business (B2B) decision-makers look for products online. This includes SaaS prospects, who may search for solutions before understanding their options. For example, they could land on your website through non-paid search results.

SEO for SaaS helps you attract customers searching for target keywords related to your SaaS business. Take our client for example. In just two years, organic users grew by 88%, while organic sessions saw a 72% increase.

2. Position Your SaaS Company as a Thought Leader

Diligent keyword research lets companies publish highly relevant, solution-focused content that remains active and available for a prospect’s next search. Moreover, a high SERP ranking allows you to reach unlimited potential customers.

Product-led content meets search intent and leads readers to subscribe, sign up, or make a purchase. It helps you grow your authority by naturally implementing your solution throughout content. And without spending any budget on ads.

Traffic losses, for instance, can result in a significant decrease in the number of free software trial conversions. Maptive is doing a great job by providing actionable steps to help customers maximize lead response by using their automated territory creation feature.

Here are the steps they included:

Remember that your audience wants to know how your SaaS solution will improve their workflows or drive value for their organization. And your content needs to emphasize those benefits, particularly at earlier funnel stages.

3. Promote Effective Teamwork and Productivity

SaaS SEO requires a consistent stream of fresh and valuable content, so it’s not easy to manage all by yourself. Scalability lets you build on your content’s success and reach more customers.

And your team has a limit to the amount they can produce per day or week. However, you can boost your success by choosing our SEO services.

Here is why it’s important to stay ahead of the curve and let us help you adapt to the latest SaaS trends:

The SaaS industry is rapidly expanding, with a predicted compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 18.4% through 2032. Experts anticipate the U.S. market will reach $236.69 billion by then.

Now that you understand the benefits of SaaS SEO strategies, it’s time to dive into actual steps.

7 Steps to Create a SaaS SEO Strategy that Drives Results

SEO strategy for SaaS should reflect a company’s sales funnel. Since customers have different needs at each funnel stage, understanding your typical customer journey is essential to success.

1. Step: Understand the SaaS Sales Funnels Before Creating Your Strategy

During the initial customer journey phase, the prospect discovers your company as a potential solution to their problem. It starts when someone at the client organization starts researching a solution to pain points.

Awareness Stage

The SaaS sales funnel starts with the awareness stage where the customer’s interest is still not strong enough to convert. There are a lot of questions and concerns.

Prospects might be at a few different stages of knowledge if they’re running an initial search.

They are:

• Aware of one or two pain points but less aware of a larger issue, such as the lack of data organization

• Understand the problem but do not know how to solve it, aside from Googling for ideas

• Suspect there might be a software solution, but are unsure about the possibilities

• Already use a software solution that doesn’t meet their needs, so they’re searching for alternatives

When developing an SEO strategy, your first task is to list your prospects’ common questions.

For example, they might want to manage their sales in one centralized platform and learn how the service can integrate with their business. So, they wonder: “Can the SaaS platform integrate with the tools we’re already using (e.g., CRM, ERP, etc.)?

Your task is to explain how your SaaS product is optimized for integration and how easy it is for them to integrate their systems with it.

Engagement Phase

This is the stage when prospects become marketing-qualified leads (MQLs). After learning the basics about your solution and how it might solve their problem, they take a step further, possibly by downloading a gated resource or subscribing to your newsletter.

Picture a prospect who searches for human resources (HR) solutions. They might search for “HR impact employee engagement”, hoping to find valuable answers.

To create your content for this stage, consider what follow-up questions a new prospect would have. Remember that statistics are extremely valuable in B2B sales funnels, where niche expertise drives people to convert.

Using keywords and source information, such as how you conducted the research, can help you acquire high rankings.

Decision phase

By this phase, your MQLs have expressed serious interest in your product and become sales-qualified leads (SQLs).

Decision-phase SEO focuses on helping buyers choose you over the competition. Since these customers already know their options, you must convince them that your product is the best solution.

At this stage,  shoppers use comparative key phrases like “SaaS Product 1 vs SaaS Product 2” or “Which SaaS solution is best for project management?”.

Here are the best-performing pages for the decision phase:

• Comparisons
• Alternatives
• Listicles
• Product pages

You should also optimize your product, category, and demo request pages, as decision-stage buyers are ready to examine those more closely. Use keywords strategically and avoid incorporating competitor keywords, even if you know who they’re comparing you with.

Focus instead on highlighting the benefits that set you apart, especially those you’ve emphasized in earlier stages.

Conversion

The conversion phase is when your efforts pay off — the lead chooses your solution and becomes a customer. Think about the decision-making structure among your target customers. If your contact point must confer with other people, someone is still likely to search your solution before the decision happens.

Your consideration-stage content will work well, but your contact-forward pages should receive the most attention. Your review pages should also present you in the best light.

Retention

Because SaaS is primarily subscription-based, the sales funnel doesn’t stop at conversion. Buyers will continue to evaluate whether your solution works for them. Express confidence in your key features to draw customers in, then encourage them to explore the next level of service.

They’ll look at direct communications, such as newsletters and customer success contacts, but they may also turn to customer reviews.

These touchpoints are a form of comparison shopping. So your decision-phase content should reflect the most up-to-date version of your product in case current customers return to review their options.

Pay special attention to your “best-of” and “X versus Y” content.

Company and product updates make excellent retention-phase content. They reassure customers that yours is still the best solution, building customer loyalty and allowing you to upsell.

SEO’s Role in the Sales Funnel

SEO nurtures leads through:

• Free trials, demos, or pricing pages
• Post-signup SEO strategies (e.g., onboarding content, customer retention SEO)

SEO plays a crucial role at every stage of the sales funnel by optimizing content to attract, engage, and convert leads.

At the top of the funnel, SEO helps draw in traffic, particularly for free trials and demos through:

• Targeted keywords
• Relevant content
• Optimized landing pages
• Product pages

Once a user signs up, SEO supports retention through post-signup strategies. For example, personalized onboarding content, FAQs, and tutorials.

2. Step: Conduct Keyword Research Focusing on Each Stage of the Buyer’s Journey

Keywords and key phrases are the linchpin of SEO at every funnel stage. These are the terms your target audiences use when searching for solutions online.

Selecting keywords is one of the first steps in developing your SEO strategy. You want to match your target buyer’s search terms as closely as possible because these searches will bring you the warmest leads.

Understand the Keyword Funnel

Keyword research leads you to these high-potential terms. Each of your target buyer groups will have its own set of keywords, making it essential to understand those buyer groups.

Top-of-the-Funnel Keywords

ToFu keywords are usually informational, related to specific solutions to a problem. They tend to start with “how” (e.g. how to do or fix something).

For example, our SEO agency can cover topics like “SEO mistakes” with a blog that shows steps on how to avoid them through our solutions.

Here are the examples of our ToFu keywords:

Middle-of-the-Funnel Keywords

MoFu keywords are usually commercial, searched by users who are aware that solutions to their pain points exist.

For instance, those can be keywords for product/service lists, such as “best SEO agency for SaaS”. Or alternatives, “Traditional SEO vs SaaS SEO”.

Here is an example of our client’s MoFu keywords:

Besides explaining the key differences between remote learning and online learning, they naturally weave their online tutoring solution throughout the content.

Bottom-of-the-Funnel Keywords

BoFu keywords have the highest conversion potential because people are ready to buy/subscribe.

These keywords usually target specific phrases, targeting alternatives, pricing models, or feature pages, exact brand names, tools, and solutions.

Here are the BoFu keywords we target:

Know Your Audience

Your buyers’ needs determine their search behaviors. Before you can create an SEO strategy, you need to know how many buyer groups you target. And the pain points that drive each one to find you.

One effective approach is to create customer profiles for each segment. A persona is a detailed profile of your ideal customer (i.e., it contains information about their role, job responsibilities, pain points, and challenges).

If your marketing and sales teams have defined buyer personas, you can work with these to save time and resources.

If you don’t already have pre-existing personas, you can create them to drive your keyword strategy.

For more information, learn how to create buyer personas here.

Understand Search Intent

Each audience segment will have unique search patterns with target keywords for each need.

These keywords fall into four categories, each reflecting a particular user intent:

1. Informational keywordsare searched by people who want to learn or get instructions. These queries often start with words like “how”, “what”, “when”, or “why”. For example, “How to do SEO?” or “Ways to do link building.”
2. Commercial keywordsare used by people in the product research phase.  They may be higher up the funnel—aware that they need a software solution, or they could be comparing two or more products. These are queries like “Customer relationship management software” or “Salesforce vs. Zendesk.” Given the extended SaaS buying cycle, you can expect to target multiple commercial keywords for each buyer group. 
3. Navigational keywordsmention a specific brand or website. Prospects use them when they are aware of your brand and want to know more. Navigational keywords are the most consistent across buyer groups. They include your brand name, plus words like “benefits,” “features,” or “pricing.”
4. Transactional keywords indicate a strong desire to purchase and include words like “buy,” “subscribe,” or “request a quote.” They may include your company name or the pricing model you provide.

Now, you are ready to dive into keyword research.

Do a Keyword Research

Create a list of potential keywords for each customer group with terms in each category.

Put yourself in your customer’s shoes and imagine how they’d search for solutions to the problems your product addresses.

Ask your sales team for frequently asked questions. It’s also valuable to scan customer reviews, which tend to include references to customer needs.

Source a valuable topic from your customer reviews in the following way:

1. Check for the customer reviews
2. Source the main keywords
3. Brainstorm around a particular topic
4. Turn pain points into benefits

And here is the topic inspired by customer review: “X Creative Ways to Increase Your Rankings and Drive Leads”.

Once you’ve brainstormed a list of potential keywords and topics, look at the companies ranking at the top of the SERP.

You can also use the Organic Research tool and check for the SE keywords column.

Then, scroll down the page and look at the “People also ask” and “People also search for” sections.

Add these keyword versions to your list of phrases to target.

Next, run your brainstormed keywords through SEO tools like Semrush or Google Keyword Planner. Look at these data points:

• Search volume
• Keyword difficulty
• Competition level
• Cost-per-click (CPC)

Although CPC measures keywords in paid ads, it tells you how competitors prioritize certain keywords.

While it can be tempting to pursue the most popular keywords, these also tend to be the hardest to rank for.

Target Error Keywords

Another great strategy for SaaS is to target error keywords.

Imagine a SaaS website experiencing issues with permanent redirects. You can check these errors/notices in the Site Audit tool.

It’s most likely that they will search for “redirect permanent not working”.

This is a great way

to promote your SaaS SEO services that focus on fixing SEO issues.

3.  Step: Cover All On-Page SEO Aspects

On-page SEO addresses the visible and customer-facing aspects of your page.

It involves optimizing keywords, creating valuable content, and structuring your page for readability. These processes earn reader trust and emphasize site value to search engines.

Ensure You Have a User-friendly Page Structure

Your site and each page should be easy to scan and navigate. This means having a well-organized menu with logically structured pages and subpages.

Lengthier articles may have a table of contents, allowing readers to jump to specific sections or preview what they’ll learn. For example, this BeeFee article:

Use Your Keywords Strategically

This is where you put your keyword research into action.

Each page should have a focus keyword and several additional secondary keywords.

Your focus keyword is the term you want a page to rank for the most. Include your focus keyword where it makes sense and fits organically in the text.

Avoid “keyword stuffing”— packing your article with as many keyword uses as possible. Google recognizes and penalizes this strategy.

Optimize Meta Tags by Focusing on Pain Points and Solutions

Meta tags are snippets of code that give Google extra information about your page. They can help you get clicks.

Always think about a user’s goal and pain points when they enter a query into a search engine. For example, those in need of AISO services are struggling with their brand visibility in AI search.

And our SEO team can turn invisible brands into trusted leaders in AI discovery.

Here are the meta tags for our AISO service page:

Title Tag: AI Search Optimization (AISO) Services – Sure Oak

Meta Description: Get found with our AI Search Optimization (AISO) services. If your content isn’t AI-ready, your brand will be invisible—but we can change that!

So, describing what the user will gain after clicking on the meta title is crucial.

Add Credibility to Your Content with Valuable Images and Infographics

Multimedia content improves scan ability and makes your content more engaging.

Avoid generic images in favor of photos, infographics, and videos that add to the audience’s understanding.

Be sure to follow Google’s image recommendations to maximize SEO value.

Here is how to create value-driven visuals:

1. Turning complex data into digestible formats
2. Presenting ideas through insightful graphics
3. Providing simple steps in an understandable way
4. Using raw screenshots, highlighting only essential stats/results
5. Collecting customer reviews and backing up your claims

Create High-Quality Content for SaaS Audiences

Avoid technical jargon wherever possible and focus on communicating your understanding of the reader’s industry.

If you have audiences with multiple levels of awareness, minimize advanced terminology and briefly explain references for less knowledgeable readers.

Google rewards experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness (E-E-A-T), and readers appreciate a resource they can trust. Earn crawlers’ and readers’ trust by linking to reliable sources and writing from a genuine understanding of the subject matter.

While maintaining your brand voice, strive to be a relatable expert.

4. Step: Build a Scalable Content Marketing Strategy

Content scaling requires a transparent workflow that the team can follow even as volume increases.

Consider how you create each piece of content and develop a step-by-step plan, optimizing as needed to improve efficiency.

Leverage Topic Clusters and Pillar Pages

SaaS content explains a technical solution to a non-technical audience. There are countless topics and subtopics to cover, and your audience relies on you to contextualize them.

Before you start, you need to understand search intent.

Experts predict that continuing to provide user value will be the best way to drive ranking priorities in the future.

Clustering provides this context while making your content findable for humans and search engines.

A cluster strategy has two levels of content, including:

1. Pillar pages: A “complete guide” style page that explores the core topic in depth, linking to subtopics for those who want more detail
2. Subtopic pages: Focused pages that explore narrower aspects of the broader topic, linking back to the pillar page as necessary

Subtopic pages can also link to other subtopic pages and may have sub-subtopics, depending on the topic’s complexity. Internal linking keeps everything organized so readers can jump to higher-level or lower-level explorations as necessary.

For example, here is a portion of our pillar targeting clients from the financial sector:

Optimize for AI Overviews

Continuing to provide user value will also help you keep up with more tech-forward challenges, such as the rise of the zero-click search.

AI overviews (placed above featured snippets) can give searchers basic information without requiring them to click on a link.

To rank in AI overviews, your task is to:

• Improve your content’s clarity and claim SERP features
• Follow Google’s E-E-A-T guidelines and you won’t go wrong
• Ensure factual accuracy (triple-check everything)
• Write short answers (under 1 minute reading time if possible)
• Be original (include examples, especially while defining concepts)
• Turn overly complex terminology into digestible concepts
• Make your content scannable (AI overviews might come in the list format)
• Strengthen your backlink strategy through brand mentions
• Fix all technical issues (indexing, HTTP status codes, and more)

Follow these steps to rank in AI overviews and increase your visibility. If you need some help, give our AISO experts a try.

Create a Content Calendar

With multiple target audiences and complex topics, SaaS SEO can quickly get complicated. A content calendar keeps the whole team on track, even as you produce more content across more platforms.

Start by providing an overview of how often you’ll post to each platform. Then, use this map to determine which topics you’ll address for each audience and on which channels.

Design a Style Guide

Scaling your SEO strategy often means working with additional collaborators, either in-house or outsourced.

A style guide gives everyone access to the same guidelines and can keep your content focused, on-brand, and on-message.

Here is what to include in a brand messaging guide:

Repurpose and Refresh Existing Content

One of the most effective ways to scale is by getting more from your published content. You can save time and resources by transforming older posts.

Start with an audit of your existing content.

Some posts may be evergreen and only need a few touch-ups for republication. If you have outdated content, update it with new information.

Here is the checklist for content updates:

• Review SERP results and get new insights
• Check the high-ranking pages
• Source relevant keywords again
• Check for outdated information/stats
• Add new insights and optimize for SERP results
• Refresh images/infographics if needed

You can also redevelop content into a new format and publish on social media. A statistics-heavy article could become an infographic or explainer video.

Alternatively, you might distill a dense whitepaper into an overview blog post that links to the original whitepaper.

5. Step: Perform a Technical SEO Audit for SaaS

A SaaS solution’s website reflects the company’s technical expertise and customer knowledge. Technical SEO polishes your website and makes it function smoothly, impressing audiences and crawlers.

Your technical SEO strategy should cover the following key topics:

• Site speed: Slower sites frustrate users and may deter crawlers.
• Security: Expired security certificates can send readers and bots elsewhere.
• Sitemaps: Crawlers use these to find your site’s pages and understand how they fit together.
• Schema markup: Standardized tags help crawlers understand your content.

This is one of the more complex aspects of SEO. Working with an expert SEO provider is often the best way to ensure success.

During our technical SEO audit, we check these elements:

• Website structure
• HTTPS
• Images
• Canonical URLs
• Redirects
• XML Sitemaps
• Robots.txt
• Core web vitals
• Page speed
• Mobile
• Crawl errors

Here is how to fix crawl errors:

• Redirect the broken page – Redirecting users to another relevant page is the easiest way to fix 404 errors on your site. Just make sure you redirect them to something relevant. Don’t just send them back to the homepage.
• Restore the page – If there’s still a lot of demand for a page you’ve deleted and there’s no suitable page to redirect users to, consider restoring the original page.
• Always fix broken internal links – If broken links exist on the site, you can simply edit the link to point to the correct URL. Fixing those will improve the user experience and potentially reduce the bounce rate.  
• Create a 404 page – Create a unique 404 page that guarantees that the visit is not wasted. A way to do it is to create an engaging message like: “Didn’t you find the freelance service you were looking for?” and a way for users to browse the website for more options (like presenting a search bar). 

Now, let’s dive into the link building strategies!

6. Step: Build Link Building Strategies for SaaS Companies

Strategic link building is an essential element of all successful SEO strategies. It has two basic components:

1. Internal linking: Creating links from content to other pages on your site to move prospects along the funnel
2. Backlinking: Encouraging links to your site from reputable third-party sites

Both link types increase your site’s authority for Google crawlers and raise awareness of your SaaS brand.

Some of the most efficient link building strategies focus on:

• Awards: Best products in category, or leading global SEO agency that links to the awards page

• Brand mentions: Securing mentions in high-impact listicles like “best service for X” that drive referral traffic, conversions and boost LLM visibility.

But it’s not easy to get brand mentions. Here is what our SEO expert says:

These strategies can expand your link profile and boost your SEO, though seeing results may take time.

• Case studies: You write a case study to showcase the success of your services, and the client links back to you. It’s that simple. You can also categorize your case studies based on industries.

• Spy on your competitors: Link building tools offer a glimpse into your competitors’ backlinks and their referring domains. Create a list of sites linking to those companies and consider how to earn similar links. Conversely, look for gaps in competitors’ backlink profiles and seek to fill them. You can do this with the Backlink Analytics tool.

• Collaborate with others: Guest posts and content partnerships introduce you and your expertise to interested audiences. Look for sites that aren’t competitor-hosted but get plenty of respect in your target industry.

• Manage Digital PR: Digital PR shapes and protects your online reputation through fostering strong connections with journalists and influencers. Press releases are the most valuable asset, creating backlinks and letting you steer the narrative about your brand.

Now that you know how to efficiently acquire backlinks, you need to learn how to claim your profile on popular platforms and win searches.

How to Compete with Aggregator Sites (G2, Capterra, Forbes listings) 

Software buyers use platforms like G2 and Capterra to compare solutions. Claiming your profile on these platforms lets you dominate SaaS-related searches. And build more backlinks and capitalize on their large audiences.

Set up your profile in the following ways:

• Analyze competitor reviews: You need to identify your top competitors on G2, Capterra, and TrustRadius. Look for recurring themes in positive and negative reviews. And extract keywords and phrases customers use to describe pain points and benefits.

• Refine your messaging based on customer pain points and insights: Adapt your website copy to emphasize strengths customers value most. Address common objections raised in competitor reviews by highlighting solutions. And create an FAQ section that responds directly to concerns mentioned in reviews.

• Optimize and enhance your review profiles: Ensure your SaaS category and tags are accurate for better discoverability. Update your descriptions to align with the customer language found in reviews. Add case studies, testimonials, and comparison charts to differentiate your product.

• Encourage and manage reviews proactively: Prompt satisfied users to leave detailed, specific reviews. Implement a review request strategy post-onboarding or after key milestones. Don’t forget to respond to all reviews (especially negative ones) to show engagement and credibility.

• Repurpose review insights for SEO and content strategy: Use review-based pain points to develop blog posts, landing pages, and social media copy. Next, create comparison pages like “Your SaaS vs. Competitor”, leveraging real review data. It’s also worthwhile to build long-form content that aligns with common search queries from review sites.

By actively engaging with SaaS review platforms, you refine your positioning while boosting visibility in the SERP landscape.

7. Step: Utilize Analytics To Measure SaaS SEO Performance

Measuring the success of your SEO campaign starts with choosing the most relevant key performance indicators (KPIs), including:

• Organic traffic: How many visitors come to your website via SERPs
• Conversion rates: Show how many site visitors take a target action, such as scheduling a sales demo.
• Bounce rates: The percentage of visitors who leave your site after viewing only one page. High bounce rates may mean you’ve been targeting less relevant keywords.
• Keyword rankings: Where you appear on the SERP for various target keywords.

Now that you’ve completed all steps, it’s time to learn how to stay adaptable and keep up with SEO trends.