As a marketing channel, SEO is often overlooked by many companies due to its complicated nature. Because it requires you to optimize your website specifically for search engines such as Google, SEO forces companies to make change to their websites that they may not want to make for aesthetic or practical reasons. As such, many companies run to paid ads through Google or social media to generate leads for their company without having to make any changes to their website. While this may sound simpler in theory, in reality it is a lot less cost-efficient than SEO and is also more akin to renting a house instead of building one from scratch.
For SaaS companies, who are used to building their own software solution from the ground up, SEO is a no-brainer. Most SaaS companies have developers on staff or contracted out who actually build software, and therefore can also easily make SEO optimized changes to a website. SaaS companies also often have niche appeal, and are often targeted toward a particular industry. While not every CRM can be Salesforce, for example, many CRM companies focus on particular fields such as construction, event management, or even catering or hotels.
Because of this technical expertise and niche focus, SaaS companies can benefit immensely from an SEO SaaS strategy. In doing this, SaaS companies can make technical changes to their own website based on comprehensive keyword research. This allows them to assign a particular keyword or keyword group to each individual URL on their website. For SaaS companies, who unlike ecommerce companies don’t have to have thousands of product pages, this is extremely helpful and is just the kind of data-driven approach that software companies love.
In utilizing their expertise, SaaS companies can then take a strong look at what their competitors are doing and what target keywords they are ranking for. This can be done through competitive keyword research and keyword gap analysis, which allows a website to compare its ranking to another website. This is not only useful in getting a better handle on a SaaS competitor’s ranking, but also getting a better handle on their software itself and what its offering potential users.
This can allow SaaS companies to prioritize their keywords, and do analysis around several different categories which include product-based or solution-based keywords (an example being ‘hotel CRM’), features, integrations, and competitor or alternatives. This can be helpful for nascent SaaS companies that are looking to siphon off a certain amount of users from a much larger but also more generalized competitor, such as Salesforce or Hubspot for a CRM.
Investing in SEO not only can help SaaS companies better focus their own software development efforts, but it can also allow them to become active partners in their marketing and customer acquisition efforts. In working with an SEO company that is specifically focused on SaaS businesses, or even just outsourcing an SEO technical audit and then using their own developers to implement the recommendations, SaaS companies can utilize their technical expertise and meet potential users where they are at. This is not only helpful in trying to figure out new features for their software, but it can also be helpful in trying to refine what the SaaS company offers to better match user intention in search.
