Getting started with B2B SaaS SEO

Where should you start with SEO? 

When it comes to SEO strategies for SaaS businesses, especially when you’re just starting out, less is more in most cases. I always say SEO strategies are a bit of a rabbit hole – if you want to cover all bases to the maximum possible standard, you’re going to need a hell of a lot of time, patience, expertise and money.

I’m not saying that isn’t the aspiration, of course it is, but in terms of getting started, there are a few non-negotiables that I’d say you need to be doing consistently, before you begin investing in a whole SEO team or even super technical audits. 

Q. What are those SEO non-negotiables? 

Broadly speaking there are three types of SEO: 

• On-page SEO – so the content on your website, think blog content, metadata, title tags, internal links – they’re all part of On page SEO.  
• Off-page SEO – everything that is not on your website, but contributes to your online presence. The most obvious part of this is link-building, so other businesses linking to your website content, but it also includes your social media presence, reviews and any content you’re putting out across other platforms as well.
• Technical SEO – I usually think of this as development SEO. It’s essentially the optimisation of your website’s backend combined with a bit of UX. To have a well optimised site from a technical SEO perspective, your website needs to be easy to understand and navigate for both users and Google bots. Without expertise in this area – it’s generally the hardest to manage and optimise, but that doesn’t mean we have to discard it completely. 

When I talk about non-negotiables, there’s a couple of things from each of those buckets that you can focus on and get to a good level without a huge budget or tons of SEO experience. These are: 

• Developing a target keyword list 
• Having a target keyword for each of your website pages 
• Having optimised metadata for each website page
• At least semi-reguarly producing blog content targeting a keyword 
• Building an audience on social media with platform specific content (to increase exposure to your brand and content. Not only will this act as an additional traffic source, but it also increases your brand salience and can indirectly result in a boosted domain authority through acquired backlinks)  
• Ensure your site has a valid SSL certificate (so your URL starts https instead of just http) 
• Make sure your sitemap is uploaded to Google Search Console 
• When you’re building or revamping your website, make sure your site hierarchy is logical 
• Improving your site speed 

It looks like a lot, but in reality, the effort vs. impact for the optimisations and tactics on this list is really favourable – and in the beginning at least, you can manage a lot of them without needing to hire specialists. 

Q. You’ve mentioned keywords a lot there – how do you do keyword research and decide which keywords you should be going after? 

Keywords are a big part of on-page SEO and there’s no one way to decide which keywords you should be going after. There are different approaches, different types of keywords and different benchmarks. 

Personally, I prefer to start keyword research outside of tools like SEMRush and Ahrefs. The reason for this is that ultimately the goal of SEO is to increase your sites presence on search engines, in order to drive more traffic to your website, increase inbound leads, provide helpful content to your prospects throughout their entire buying journey and, if you follow this train of thought to its logical conclusion – you want your SEO strategy to drive revenue, right? 

So if we want the traffic we drive through SEO to ultimately result in revenue, we need to make sure it’s the right traffic. If we have a SaaS platform for HR professionals, we want to be driving HR professionals to our website, in an ideal world, when they’re looking for a new platform. What we don’t want to do is invest time, effort and money driving couriers to our website who are looking for the next service station, for example. 

In a roundabout way, what I’m saying is that, like all good marketing, keyword research for SEO should start with understanding your ICP.  What are they searching for answers to? What challenges are they trying to solve? What assets do they need to allow them to do their jobs more efficiently?

These questions will differ depending on whether you’re looking for longtail or short tail category keywords. For category keywords, you need to understand how your ICP refers to your product or solution.  Ask the questions, build a bank of answers and ideas and then go into keyword research platforms. 

So once you have some ideas about what keywords/topics/categories you want to focus on – jump into a keyword research tool. SEMRush and Ahrefs are the two big ones, but if you don’t want to shell out for a subscription, Neil Patel offers a couple of good free ones as well. 

Starting with the keywords you’ve identified, use the tool to understand their search volumes and keyword difficulties. I mentioned it earlier, benchmarks, especially for keyword research, differ. That’s because your domain authority is a huge part of what KWD you’ll be able to rank for. SemRush puts the KWD thresholds as: 

• 0-14 = Very easy. 
• 15-29 = Easy.
• 30-49 = Possible.
• 50-69 = Difficult. 
• 70-84 = Hard
• 85-100 = Very hard. 

When I’m working with clients with very low domain authorities, I tend to find these thresholds aren’t particularly helpful. Generally for these clients I’ll focus on relevant keywords with KWDs from 0 – 30 for their content strategy – particularly those with informational intent . What this usually means is an increased emphasis on long-tail keywords. Which actually has the added benefit of allowing you to keep laser focussed on the intent of that keyword, resulting in a better piece of content. 

In order to expand your keyword lists, you can use tools like SEMRush’s Magic Keyword Tool to explore similar or related keywords or Ahrefs Parent Topic tool to identify longer tail keywords relating to a specific topic of interest. 

A good strategy that is often overlooked here is actually just typing in a keyword or phrase to Google and taking a look at the ‘people also asked’ section for anything relevant to your product or solution. 

Q. On the technical SEO side of that non-negotiable list, you’ve included site speed. How do you improve your site speed? 

This is a big one and there’s a couple of easy things you can do. 

Firstly, make sure any images on your site aren’t huge files. You should compress any images, particularly PNGs, before you upload them to your site. There are loads of tools you can use, I’ve always used Tiny PNG, but they’re all much the same. 

Secondly, if you run any sort of site audit off the back of finding your site speed is slow, you’ll almost always see a warning about unminified Javascript and CSS – it sounds really complicated but it’s easily fixed with a plugin for your CMS. For example, WordPress sites can use WP Rocket to minify their Javascript and CSS automatically and it’s pretty cost-effective as well. It also helps with caching, so you get the speed benefits of that as well. 

Finally I’d suggest keeping an eye on your redirect use. Redirects are essential in a lot of cases, but overusing them when you don’t need to can really slow your site down. This usually happens over time as you add and change bits to a website without having a firm grasp of the overall hierarchy of the site. That’s why planning and monitoring your site hierarchy is also on that list of non-negotiables – if you don’t stay on top of it, it can cause a whole host of problems. 

Scratching the surface of B2B SaaS SEO

The tactics and strategies above are a great starting point for your B2B SaaS SEO strategy – if you can implement even a few of the non-negotiables, you’ll be on the way to driving revenue through SEO. 

Of course, even getting started takes some time and effort. If you are looking for additional support with getting started, or have mastered the basics and want to take your SEO strategy to the next level, enlisting outsourced SEO support from a B2B SaaS specialist is a great option. At Codi we have two decades of experience organically growing B2B SaaS businesses. Get in touch today to speak to an expert.