How to Increase Traffic for Your SaaS Website Through SEO
Nowadays, search engine optimization (SEO) has become a valuable marketing strategy for any business. As a matter of fact, it’s safe to say that SEO has even become mandatory, especially since the market is overcrowded and highly competitive these days.
Running a SaaS (Software as a Service) business can be quite difficult. The main reason is that more and more companies are opting for cloud-based solutions today. In other words, you have to make sure your product stands out from your competitors and that people will opt for your software and not someone else’s. Fortunately, SEO can help you achieve that by improving your online visibility, awareness and exposure, among other things.
More importantly, SEO will help you achieve this in a natural and organic way, thus improving your company’s credibility and authority in the process. As you may already know, everything starts with a website. With that in mind, here are a few ways you can increase traffic for your SaaS website with the help from SEO.
Keyword research
In order to ensure good website traffic originating from your SEO efforts, you must first opt for the right keywords. But, in order to do that, you must conduct some extensive research, beforehand. Try putting yourself in your customer’s shoes. What would you type into your search engine when looking for software similar to yours?
That is what keywords are, short phrases or words that express user intent. If you rank for the keywords your target audience most commonly uses, you’ll be able to appear in their search results. The better you rank, the higher you appear on search results and consumers oftentimes don’t look beyond the first page of what their search results are showing.
In addition, you can opt for both short-tail and long-tail keywords to get better exposure. Keep in mind that ranking for more keywords doesn’t necessarily mean better results. In fact, you want to rank well for the keywords you’ve chosen and you won’t need too many of them to achieve that.
Get technical
The technical SEO aspect of your website is very important for both good rankings and good website traffic. Technical SEO focuses on the functionality of your website, i.e., the performance factors search engines consider as ranking factors.
For example, website speed, mobile friendliness, security and user-friendliness are a few of the factors Google considers a ranking factor. Simply put, any performance aspect that has an impact on customer experience on your website will be counted among ranking signals. Here are a few things you can do to improve the technical SEO on your website.
- Improve website speed – Page load time shouldn’t be longer than 2 seconds.
- Ensure mobile friendliness – Implementing a responsive design should do the trick.
- Improve website security – Implement HTTPS by adding a TLS/SSL certificate.
- Use a CDN (Content Delivery Network) for seamless website browsing.
On-page audit
On-page SEO focuses on a lot of things the technical SEO does with a few exceptions. Basically, an on-page audit is designed to polish your website and the information you have on your pages.
For example, you want to ensure that your B2B leads get directed to your B2B sales team when clicking on a link, instead of ending up on a missing page or something completely irrelevant for their intent.
That’s what audits are for. Their purpose is to tidy everything up so that your website is both user and search-engine friendly. Here’s an example of what an on-page audit should encompass.
- Title tags – Ensuring your title tags are well-written and that they contain keywords for specific content or pages.
- Meta descriptions – Similar to title tags only in more detail. You want to give context to your content to both search engines and users.
- SEO friendly URLs – Allowing users and search engines to understand where the link will lead them to.
- Fixing missing pages, redirects and 404 errors.
- Reviewing the schema.org, so search engines can index your pages properly.
- Optimizing multimedia elements.
- Optimizing internal links.
Off-page SEO
Off-page activities are arguably the most important SEO efforts for your website traffic. This is where you build visibility and awareness for your SaaS business so that it will encourage consumers to visit your website. Content plays the most vital part of off-page SEO and SEO in general. Your content must be educational, informative, entertaining and highly relevant, in order to drive traffic to your website.
Therefore, when developing content for your audience designed to drive them to your website, make sure you educate them on the importance and the value of your products and services. Off-page SEO consists of guest posting, link building, blogging, and promoting content on relevant sources, such as social media platforms, email and so on.
The quality of your content and your backlinks will determine the rankings score and the success of your efforts. With that in mind, post content only on reputable and relevant sources with high domain authority. That way you improve your own authority as well. The more you invest in off-page activities the more organic website traffic you’ll favor.
SaaS business, like any other business, needs visibility and exposure, in order to remain relevant and competitive on the online market. In today’s dynamic environment, this becomes next to impossible to achieve without SEO. That being said, if you make an effort to implement proper SEO strategies, you’ll be able to vastly improve website traffic and ultimately ensure success for your business.