It’s no secret that the hardest part of selling software these days is standing out from the crowd. While there are more SaaS directories available like Capterra, G2 and even Product Hunt, each category seems to have become increasingly crowded. Thankfully other materking channels still offer positive return on investment for SaaS products like SEO.
Search Engine Optimization still can draw in traffic and the right qualified leads for the right product. SEO isn’t just about ranking higher on search engines; it’s about establishing authority, building trust, and capturing valuable leads.
So all that being said, let’s go over a quick checklist that can help give you a solid baseline for SEO going forward.
Technical SEO
Let’s start with some relative comfort food for SaaS companies. Technical SEO involves all aspects of the technical side of your website as they relate to SEO. This includes ensuring your site is friendly to Google’s crawlers, overall site speed and mobile-friendliness.
Crawlability
Arguably the most important part of SEO, without which Google can’t know you even exist. To optimize your crawlability:
- Create and update XML sitemaps
- Updated site ensures Google’s crawlers can find everything on your site.
- Most CMS systems either have plugins or native built in sitemap generators
- Generally only needed by rather large content websites, or if you have your documentation published on your site (which you should absolutely do!)
- Optimize robot.txt files
- Ensure it’s at the root of your directory.
- Use it to block crawlers from accessing non-essential or duplicate content (e.g., admin pages, staging versions, certain scripts or resources).
- Clear and shallow site structure
- By shallow we don’t mean vain, we mean no more than 3 clicks to get to the meat of your website.
Site Speed
Google packages these up collectively as “Core Web Vitals” and is the overall way it track’s a site’s performance. The overall things it measures are:
- Fast loading times
- Optimize images by using the now mainstream .webp format that drastically reduces image file sizes.
- Implement lazy loading if applicable
- Minimize HTTP requests
- Ensure no layout shifts happen after content loads (Cumulative Layout Shift or CLS)
- Ensure the largest element (Largest Contentful Paint or LCP) is loaded within 1-2.5 seconds of the page starting to load.
- Make your site mobile-friendly and responsive
- Secure your website with HTTPS
- Use structured data (schema markup) to enhance search engine understanding of your content
Use tools like PageSpeed Insights to measure how you do around Core Web Vitals.
Mobile First Design
As far as Google is concerned, only the mobile version of your landing page matters. It refers to this as “Mobile First Indexing” and generally involves:
- Responsive Design, Dynamic Serving or use completely separate URLs.
- The less time consuming over the long run approach is definitely responsive design, as this allows you to serve the same content from the same page.
- Ensure the content is the same on mobile and desktop
- Ensure your images:
- Are high quality, high resolution images.
- Are relatively supported like .jpg, .png, .webp, and .svg.
- Ensure your images all have alt attributes filled in.
On-Page SEO
On-Page SEO involves optimizing individual pages to rank higher and earn more potential traffic. Main things to check off are:
- Keyword Optimization
- Use relevant keywords in your titles, headers, and content
- Ensure you are targeting the right keywords
- You can start with this guide on keyword research but just know: This section can get incredibly detailed.
- It’s important to choose the right keywords to go after at the right time.
- Meta Tags
- Ensure your titles, meta, descriptions etc are filled in or else Google will happily pull a random blurb from your guide and use that.
Content Quality and Relevance
This is definitely the most subjective part of this list, but some rules of thumb include
- Aligning with the crawlability part of this guide and ensure your Titles match what keywords or user intention you’re attempting to go after.
- Ensure your URL structure is SEO friendly.
- Generally example.com/best-email-tools-we-use is better than example.com/?pid=69 or example.com/2024/06/toolcategory/tools
- Do not keyword stuff or repeat keywords hoping google will rank you better for them
- This has not been strategy since Google’s inception. No idea why this rumor persists.
- Shoot for originality or at least doing something different with your content.
This whole section can practically be a book, but we recommend starting with some wellknown guides like SEO Content A Complete Beginners Guide or hire us instead!
Internal Linking
You’ve taken the time to write all of that great content, make sure you cross link it! Internal linking is an easily forgotten aspect to SEO, and it’s particularly a low hanging fruit in the grand scheme of things. There’s a variety of strategies to internal linking but one of the most popular ones is the pyramid structure.
- Have weekly or monthly reminders to go through blocks of your previous content and see if newer content can naturally link to it
- Ensure you have links to your most important parts of your pages from your home page
- For example, ensure you have links to your app documentation, knowledge base if applicable, forums, etc from the home page.
As always, only plug your links to your content if they fit naturally. For example, we just published a quick summary on our google leak findings for B2B SEO SaaS that explains just how important links still are! (See, natural).
Image Optimization
- As a rule, all of your images should have alt values unless purely decorative.
- We suggest using .webp as most modern browsers now support it and offer the best size to quality ratio.
Off-Page SEO
While on-page tactics lay the groundwork, off-page SEO cements your SaaS brand’s credibility and authority through external validation. Here’s how to maximize these strategies:
Backlink Building
- Acquiring quality backlinks from reputable sites within your industry not only boosts your SEO but also enhances your brand’s visibility and trustworthiness. Prioritize links from sites relevant to your SaaS offering. Whole agencies are built on just this aspect.
- Partner with industry influencers and thought leaders. Their endorsements can drive traffic and improve brand recognition.
- Consider guest blogging, webinars, and co-created content that provides value to both your audiences.
- Encourage satisfied customers to leave positive reviews on platforms like Capterra, G2, and social media. High-quality, positive reviews improve your brand’s credibility and can influence potential customers.
- Continue to produce valuable, shareable content that resonates with your target audience. High-quality content is more likely to be linked to and shared, extending its reach and enhancing its impact on your SEO.
- By high quality we mean case studies, free tools you can break off from your saas, publishing data you’ve gathered from your application, etc.
Social Media
Social media is its own beast, but can help spread your brand awareness if done right. Considering how competitive B2B SEO has become, this can become a viable strategy for your company. At bare minimum ensure you have:
- Your company names are at least registered (even if you don’t plan to use them) on the major social media platforms.
- Last thing you want is to have imposters for your brand.
Content SEO
This part can be an entire rabbit hole of strategy, plans, content calendars, etc. We’d prefer to keep it simple:
- Make content your customers want
- On a site that is pleasant to use
That’s it. No more, no less. And make sure it’s content your customers actually want. We plan to expand on that idea in future articles. (See, more potential internal linking in the future.)
Final Thoughts
Mastering SEO for your SaaS is about more than just boosting your search rankings; it’s about carving out your niche in a crowded market and connecting meaningfully with your target audience.
This checklist is your roadmap to optimizing every facet of your digital presence, from technical tweaks to strategic off-page engagement. Implement these steps consistently, and you’ll not only enhance your visibility but also build a trusted brand that resonates with potential customers.
