While every company has its own challenges when it comes to digital marketing, SaaS companies do have their own unique roadblocks that they need to move past when creating a digital marketing strategy. While SaaS companies don’t need to promote specific products in the way that an ecommerce store has to, they do have other consideration when it comes to correctly positioning themselves in the marketplace. Firstly, SaaS companies need to come to the realization that only a small number of their potential user base is actually looking directly for software to solve their problems. As such, a SaaS companies not only has the hurdle of convincing someone that they are capable of solving their problems, but also that they are capable of doing so through a recurring subscription to their software service.
While content marketing can be extremely helpful in converting users, it does not solve the problem on its own. In fact, great content cannot will someone to discover your SaaS website. This is because content marketing is such a common marketing tactic these days that there is a huge surplus of content out there. As such, many people don’t know where to find content that they would actually be interested in, and more often than not they have no real way to discover content that would actually be helpful to them.
In order to best leverage a content marketing strategy, a SaaS companies need to use SEO. SEO, or search engine optimization, is a variety of methods that are used to help optimize a website to rank on Google and other search engines for target keywords. There are many factors to an SEO SaaS marketing strategy that make it work. The biggest one of these is keywords, as all SEO efforts for SaaS companies stem from a targeted and refined keyword research process. When using keywords, you can hone your content marketing efforts toward specific problems that your SaaS solution can solve. This then needs to be followed up by quality content, and of course, building links to that content.
Target the Correct Keywords
Keywords are key to the success of any business that promotes its products and services online. However, when using a SEO SaaS methodology, you need to ensure that the keywords you uncover during your keyword research process are related to informational queries instead of solely targeting keywords around software. Informational queries usually contain at least several words or a key phrase. In some instances, they can be longed and more niche. These are called long tail keywords. Long tail keywords typically have low search volume, but are extremely targeted toward what an adopter of your SaaS solution may be looking for. If you are able to rank highly for long tail keywords and rank for enough of them using your content marketing efforts, then you’ll start to see increased traffic to your SaaS website.
Create Links That Point to Your Content
Link building may be one of the more opaque parts of SEO – but it is also one of the most important. Building links requires you to get other websites that you do not own to link back to your website, typically in a contextual way. For an SaaS SEO strategy, you will want to make sure that any sites that you get links from actually right about technology, business, and other relevant niches to SaaS. While the websites that link back to you don’t need to be extremly targeted to a micro degree, they do need to be relevant to your SaaS offerings generally. Otherwise Google will detect an unnatural linking pattern and likely penalize your website. Once you are able to build these links, and target them toward informational queries or long tail keywords, then you will start to see your rankings explode.
While there are certainly other factors you need to consider when it comes to creating an excellent SEO SaaS strategy, the trifecta of keywords, content and links will help to steer you in the right direction. By following this methodology, you will be able to gain traffic toward relevant keywords from Google and start to increase the adoption rate of your SaaS software.
