B2B SaaS SEO: Best Practices and Strategy for 2023

Аivаrаs Rаmoškа

October 5, 2023

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B2B SaaS SEO is steadily gaining traction as a competition point in the business industry. It’s not enough that you have a good product in your hands; that product will be useless if people are unaware that it exists. This paves the way for SEO (Search Engine Optimization) to provide value to SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) companies.

Along with product development, B2B SaaS SEO has become a pivotal growth driver in this industry. Increasing online visibility is always a competitive advantage, especially in the SaaS space, where companies prioritize engagements and conversions.

Whether a product owner or a marketer, these B2B SaaS SEO practices will be crucial for your short-term and long-term growth.

Take a moment to look through our additional articles:

Key Considerations for B2B SaaS SEO

Doing SEO for B2B SaaS doesn’t denote a one-off approach; it’s a strategy book that branches out to different components. This is a rigorous process, but the rewards you’ll reap will be advantageous if you get it right. Continue reading below to discover the key considerations you need to make for B2B SaaS SEO.

Understanding the distinct nature of B2B audience and decision-making

In any B2B SaaS market, having a customer-centric strategy is always a priority. That’s true not just in product development but also in all facets of the marketing and distribution side of the business.

You have to remember that the needs and demands of consumers are constantly evolving. It’s an ever-changing cycle that you need to constantly monitor to create a customer-centric strategy in product development and marketing.

For example, the advent of streaming platforms like Netflix and Amazon Prime has been a force in the SaaS business model. Several years ago, the public was first made aware of these platforms’ existence; since then, it has undergone many changes in product interface, pricing plans, and geographic availability.

This tells us that the evolving nature of the B2B audience will always factor in your decision-making. Whether it’s on traditional marketing or SEO campaigns, monitoring your niche audience and getting as much feedback as possible from your existing customer base is important.

Aligning SEO strategies with the B2B buying cycle and customer journey

The B2B buying cycle is not overnight; it might take weeks or months to turn a potential customer into an actual one. You have to re-engage with your potential customers occasionally, a process that will test your patience and creativity.

However, you can’t be passive and just wait for your SaaS business to acquire new customers. You can’t just sit back and let the apple fall off from the tree. You need to shake that tree day by day, or when the time comes, climb up and get that apple by yourself.

This picture we painted applies to aligning your SEO strategies with your buying cycle. The customer journey starts when they first become aware of your product through word-of-mouth or social media platforms. You should be able to guide these potential acquisitions throughout their journey, and a properly optimized SEO plan will help you achieve that goal.

1. Understanding B2B SaaS Audience and Keywords

The beauty of B2B SaaS SEO is that you hit two birds with just one stone. While expanding your reach, you’re also getting data-driven insights on developing your product. Understanding your audience is the first step through all this, and you can do that by analyzing their interests and queries on SERP (Search Engine Results Pages).

Identifying target audience personas and pain points

What can your product do for interested customers? Who are these interested customers or clients? The common misconception around any business is this hunger for expanding services to more than one market. While that is feasible for huge companies, it might not be the best goal for SMBs (Small to Medium-Sized Businesses).

One of the key growth drivers for SaaS businesses is the ability to offer a working product or service to their niche audience. So, before you can do that, you need to know your niche customer base. You need to produce a list of your target audience personas, which results from weeks and months of analyzing the movements in the market.

Identifying your target audience’s personas and pain points is one of the initial steps in doing SEO for BSB SaaS products. This way, you can build up your product through web content that speaks to your audience’s immediate interests.

Conducting a comprehensive keyword research for B2B-specific terms

When you have determined your target audience personas, the next step is to identify what’s going through their minds. Concerning your niche product and market, what are their needs and interests?

You don’t need to be a mind-reader to get all this information; conducting comprehensive keyword research for B2B-specific terms will do the trick. This is an essential part of the whole B2B SaaS SEO process and one that will realistically help improve your website’s visibility on search engine results.

When doing keyword research, “comprehensive” always comes to mind. To rank higher and achieve more visibility, you need to be as specific as possible. You could use B2B-specific modifiers to make your keywords more straightforward. Take a look at these B2B modifier categories:

Size of the business
Alternative solutions for competitors
Niche industries or target markets
Use cases for your product or service

Thankfully, you don’t have to do keyword research manually. There are free SEO tools that offer keyword research, which we’ll talk more about below, and there are more advanced SEO tools.

2. Optimizing On-Page SEO for B2B SaaS

Once you have researched your niche audience and related keywords, the next step is to craft engaging content. But no matter how informative or entertaining your content is, it won’t matter if it doesn’t have the proper tags and labels. To learn more about these tags, continue reading below.

Crafting compelling meta titles and descriptions

Meta titles and descriptions comprise the words you usually see on search engine results. When you search a keyword or keywords on Google, the results or snippets you see are called meta titles and descriptions.

While most CMS (Content Management Systems) platforms automatically use your post title and excerpt as your page’s meta title and description, you can make a different version for each. Why should you do that? Here are the key attributes that you need to consider when writing your meta titles and descriptions:

They should be keyword-rich, but be careful not to overdo it.
Meta descriptions should have a clear CTA (Call To Action).
Ideal meta titles are typically 60 characters long, while ideal meta descriptions could have up to 160 characters.

Remember that these are the users’ first impressions of your website, so you have to make sure you optimize as much as possible.

Utilizing header tags to structure content effectively

In any SaaS website, your page categories mean much more than anything else. Whereas blogs and news websites thrive on lengthy content that increases users’ session duration, a B2B SaaS website prioritizes effective categorization to point visitors to the products they’re searching for.

Using the correct header tags on your pages will help you structure your content effectively. Most SaaS websites, especially enterprise-level ones, have a variety of products that they present in a single page. So, when doing B2B SaaS SEO, you have to make sure that you use header tags for search engines like Google to crawl and index.

An optimized header tag hierarchy will also help improve website navigation, especially if your tags point to their internal links. Remember that you’re not just using header tags for search engines; you’re also optimizing these tags for a user-friendly experience and interface.

Integrating relevant keywords naturally within the content

It’s no secret that a keyword-rich page is more likely to rank high in search engine results, especially if those keywords are relevant and have more than enough search volume. However, you cannot be blatant with the use of these keywords. You might have gotten away with this strategy a few years back, but Google has since rolled out updates that prioritize unique content over only keyword-rich ones.

It goes on to say that integrating relevant keywords naturally is of utmost value when planning web content. Your readers should see a coherent flow throughout your page; there shouldn’t be detours or bumps just because you want to put in as many relevant keywords as possible.

There are different techniques for doing this; some B2B SaaS SEO experts plan their content around relevant keywords, while others insert the keywords naturally into pre-written content. Either way, you have to do it as naturally as you can.

3. Content Strategy for B2B SaaS SEO

Along with the product landing pages and pricing pages that are most important for B2B SaaS websites, there are also other avenues for you to insert valuable content. Creating a blog section for your website will always reel in more audience, and other forms of content will make your brand more legitimate and trustworthy.

Developing authoritative and informative content

Other websites think of entertainment when they plan their content; for B2B SaaS SEO, it is essential to be as informative as you are engaging. These two attributes should always go hand-in-hand when developing your content strategy. You can’t be too informative to the point that your readers are going through your post.

You must keep them on their toes at some parts of your content. For any of your posts to work, take a look at these characteristics that a B2B SaaS SEO content should have:

Your content should be built around the trends in your niche market. (Example: What are the upcoming technologies, and how could they affect the life of your niche audience?)
Your content should be factual and accurate. (Example: Research about relevant stats put up by high-authority statistics websites like Statista )

When you create content around your audience’s interests, being informative, factual, and engaging with your tone will further grasp your readers’ attention..

Creating in-depth guides, case studies, and whitepapers

You may have freedom with the content you want to put up, but you also have to ensure you’re not wasting your resources or readers’ time. How could this content help your readers’ cause? Can they extract information that will help them make relevant decisions?

To help your audience drive decisions in their lives, your B2B SaaS SEO content strategy should have a healthy dose of in-depth guides, case studies, and whitepapers. If you have a vast library containing these content categories, there’s a massive chance that you will rank high on search engine results.

In particular, case studies have proven to be a great source of authoritative juice for SaaS websites. Case studies present how a SaaS product has helped address the specific needs of its customers or clients. This does not just inform the reader regarding the product’s features, but it also tells them that the product works.

Addressing B2B audience pain points and providing solutions

As we have mentioned above, any content strategy’s key component is to address pain points and provide solutions. When people use search engines like Google, they are always looking for answers and solutions. For your content to achieve higher visibility in search engine results, particularly on the first page, you should have answers and solutions.

To do that, you should always be on top of your audience’s needs and interests. Here are avenues where you could identify the pain points of your B2B audience:

Use free SEO tools like Google Search Console to analyze the top keywords and queries typed in by your users.
Monitor audience behavior on social media platforms, including highly informative sites like Reddit and Quora.
Stay on top of new upcoming technologies coming out of the market and determine their benefits to your target customer base.
Track user behavior on your website and focus on the products that they usually have their attention on.

4. Building Authority through Link Building

Along with content strategy and addressing your audience’s pain points, there are also other facets of B2B SaaS SEO that you should optimize. One of these facets is link building, which is an integral part of off-page SEO. Collecting backlinks pointing to your SaaS website is always a great way to increase your authority, that is, if you’re getting these backlinks from high-authority B2B sources.

Identifying authoritative B2B sources for backlinks

When venturing into the link-building facet of off-page SEO, you should know that not all backlinks benefit your SaaS website. Moreover, engaging in bad link-building practices will do more harm than good, especially with Google tightening its rules around this strategy. For your reference, here are some practices that you should avoid when putting up your link-building strategy:

Buying links in the black market or engaging in free link exchanges.
Investing in too many backlinks instead of focusing on getting links from high-quality sites
Stuffing keywords in a single article with the hopes of gaining more attention
Posting spammy comments on high-authority blog posts

These are just some bad practices you should avoid in link building. What you should do instead is to naturally build up your links by contributing beneficial guest blogs or taking advantage of your social media presence.

Guest posting and contributing to industry publications

As we just recently mentioned, guest posting is one of the most natural ways to build up links. Guest posts are blog posts or articles that you contribute to higher-authority websites. These posts contain helpful information for their readers, and you can also include relevant links that point to your website.

Of course, it goes on to say that most authoritative websites will be initially skeptical when offering to write guest posts. Are you just trying to build links? Or are you trying to build links while also prioritizing how you can provide answers for a specific site’s audience?

So when offering guest posts, you should always check if their niche audience is also in the same or relevant market as your website. This way, you can use your expertise to write content and naturally insert your website’s relevant links into the guest post.

Establishing thought leadership through valuable content

The SaaS space, or any other business industry, is a gold mine for thought leadership content. Many people look up to business leaders regarding life advice and motivational support, which presents many avenues for you to reach a larger audience and even diversify your customer base.

It won’t be effortless; establishing thought leadership is like growing your social media profile. It’s never an overnight thing. There are rare cases that you can go viral, but for the most part, you must stay consistent and patient throughout the process.

If you aim to become a thought leader in your SaaS market, here are a couple of tips to get you started:

Aim to inform and motivate, not to sell.
Be consistent with your content frequency.

Of course, you would want for people to link back to your website and boost your link building efforts. But before that happens, you need to prioritize how you can help their cause first.

5. Technical SEO Considerations for B2B SaaS

Along with on-page and off-page considerations, another significant aspect of doing SEO for B2B SaaS is technical SEO. This refers to how sound the structure of your website is, particularly in terms of mobile responsiveness, UX (User Experience), UI (User Interface), and schema markup.

Read more below for technical SEO considerations for B2B SaaS websites.

Ensuring mobile responsiveness and user-friendly design

Before diving into the technicalities of optimizing your website structure, here’s one important stat that you should know: 63% of Google’s organic search traffic comes from mobile devices. A huge part of the world’s population owns a smartphone or tablet, which has become their go-to device for everything they do daily.

So, it’s no surprise that more than half of organic search traffic in search engines originates from these hand-held devices. To this point, you should optimize your SaaS website for a responsive and user-friendly interface on mobile gadgets.

While most CMS platforms can make your website mobile-friendly, they can’t do everything. For a higher level of mobile responsiveness, you must avoid putting up too many advertisements and pop-ups and ensure you’re not overstretching your website’s multimedia capabilities.

Optimizing site speed and performance for a better user experience

Speaking of multimedia capabilities and advertisement pop-ups, putting too many elements on one page will certainly affect your website’s loading speed. The average recommended page loading time is 1-2 seconds; anything over 2 seconds might discourage a website visitor from continuing their page session.

Using a faster, more expensive hosting service for your SaaS website could drastically improve your page loading speed. But if you’re still building up your website and you don’t have a lot of resources to pay for an expensive hosting service, you can do these optimization tips instead:

Compress images into smaller file sizes
Remove irrelevant images and videos in your media library
Avoid over-spamming ads and pop-ups on one page
Opt for a mobile-first code
Reduce HTTP requests
Consider using cache plugins

Moreover, you can use online website speed tests to stay on top of your page loading speed.

Implementing schema markup for rich search results

Since being introduced to search engines in 2009, Google Rich Snippets have become a viable source of website organic traffic. These snippets don’t just provide direct information about what the user is searching for; they also provide information or descriptions about your website. These details offer more authority and legitimacy to your website, giving you more reasons to optimize your rich snippets.

For your reference, here are several details that users will see on your snippets, that is if you rank high enough for them to see:

Images and videos
Price and availability of your products
Customer reviews and ratings of your business
Links to related websites

For Google to use this information you have, you need to use the Structured Data Markup Helper. But before you implement your schema markup, always ensure that the details included in your website are up-to-date and accurate.

6. Local SEO Strategies for B2B SaaS

For a B2B SaaS company, you must increased brand awareness in your target geographic location. After all, this is where your direct customers are located.

Did you know that B2B SaaS SEO can also help you optimize your brand visibility in a specific location? That’s the power of local SEO strategies, which we’ll dive into in the following sections.

Optimizing Google My Business for local visibility

Along with the option of expanding your reach through paid ads, you should know that Google constantly rolls out updates that make it easier for businesses to increase their local visibility. One of these features is called ‘Google My Business’, which lets you optimize your Google business listing.

Some businesses and companies still overlook the value of an optimized business listing in Google. You should not make that same mistake, especially if you want to drive more organic traffic from your target area. To optimize your business listing, here are some tips to get you started:

Claim your business profile
Update basic details like your business category, address, phone number, and office hours
Add photos and information about your products and services
Respond to both positive and negative reviews

The important thing is to keep all these details up-to-date, especially the descriptions of the products and services you offer.

Nurturing local partnerships and collaborations

With so many business avenues nowadays, there are also more opportunities to forge local partnerships and collaborations. Even if two businesses are in different niche markets, there are some points in which their goals intersect.

So, collaborating with another local business or presence could benefit your SaaS company if the right opportunity presents itself. Diversifying both of your customer bases is possible along with the chance to share expertise and thoughts. You’re increasing your brand’s visibility across a different audience while solidifying your credibility with your existing customer base.

Of course, this could only happen if you choose the right partners. When planning for a local collaboration, ensure that the person or the brand you’re linking up with has a respectable reputation in the community.

Encouraging customer reviews and testimonials

What are the things you do before purchasing a specific product? You canvass first for lower prices, and most of the time, you also rely on recent customer reviews and testimonials.

Before people decide on buying your product or service, most of them turn to the reviews you’re collecting from existing customers. Not all of them can write reviews of your product, even if they had a positive experience. Sometimes, you have to request customer reviews, especially if you know your product has a good reputation.

Along with putting up a dedicated review section on their website and social media platforms, some SaaS companies create a referral program to reward existing users when they refer their friends to your product. This program serves as word-of-mouth marketing, where existing customers spread the word about how good your product or service is.

7. Analytics and Performance Tracking for B2B SaaS SEO

B2B SaaS SEO is one form of digital marketing that has intimidated many people from doing it. While there are so many terms and terminologies connected to SEO, a critical benefit of digital marketing is you also have tools that help you monitor your campaign performances.

Setting up B2B-specific SEO analytics tools

If you’re looking for a B2B-specific SEO analytics tool to help your cause, you’ll be pleased to know that there is an abundance of it. Even niche tools provide solutions for each facet of SEO, whether that’s in keyword research, page indexability, backlink check, or page loading speed.

While most of these tools have paid versions you need to subscribe to, there are free versions too. For one, Google offers free-of-charge tools like Google Trends, Google Search Console, and Google Analytics. You just have to link your CMS platform to these tools, and you’re good to go.

Of course, other paid tools offer optimization services for B2B SaaS SEO. Here are some names for your reference:

Ahrefs
Semrush
Moz Pro
Surfer SEO
Keywords Everywhere
Ubersuggest
Screaming Frog
SpyFu
Clearscope

Whether it’s a free or paid SEO tool, the important thing is you know how to maximize its capability.

Monitoring key performance indicators (KPIs) for success

When doing B2B SaaS SEO, keeping an eye on everything is impossible. Just like an inverted pyramid, there are SEO considerations that you should mark as your priority, depending on the nature and needs of your website. These are called KPIs (Key Performance Indicators), which are factors that have the highest chances of increasing your website’s visibility and authority.

The big picture in creating a SaaS website is to drive organic traffic in the hopes of seeing more conversions. To this point, here are the KPIs you need to monitor when doing SEO for B2B SaaS:

Organic traffic
Form submissions
Bounce rate
Product landing pages
Page loading speed
Errors in crawling and indexability
Backlink quality

Analyzing data to refine and adapt SEO strategies

As you’re keeping track of these KPIs, it’s also essential that you’re adapting to the trends and changes in the SEO space. You should never forget that Google regularly updates its rules and considerations, so the SEO strategy you have today might not be as effective in a few months.

That said, you need to be as responsive as possible. If one of your SEO campaigns is not working anymore, you must be willing to pull it out and refine it to boost its effectiveness. This way, you’re adapting your content to the ever-changing nature of the SEO space and your customers’ interests.

8. User Experience and B2B SaaS SEO

If you have a website that is intuitive and easy to use, there’s a higher chance that your users will stay longer on your site. Learn more about the importance of UI and UX in the sections below.

Focusing on intuitive website navigation

Your website should not look like a treasure map to your visitors. Navigating through your website should not be a maze-like experience; it should be straightforward and easy. There should be a seamless transition from one page to another.

Achieving an intuitive website navigation is crucial for your success. To achieve this goal, here are some characteristics that your website should have:

Consistent and accurate categorical items
Use of visual elements as guidance, not just as decorations
Clear, moderately filled pages for ease of use

While it’s true that you should also make your website aesthetically pleasing, your priority should still be on ease of use when it comes to navigation.

Enhancing call-to-action buttons for lead generation

A CTA (Call-To-Action) is already an overused yet effective component of any form of marketing. In digital marketing, such as B2B SaaS SEO, your CTAs could come as a button, image, or text link that you can place on various locations.

So, your CTA button should be prominent. Whether you put it on the top, on your sidebar, or in the middle of a case study, your CTA button should stand out for you to generate as many leads as possible.

Creating a seamless and informative user journey

The user journey on your B2B SaaS website should be as personalized as it can be. If a user clicks on this particular link, does it direct them to a page that is relevant to what they’re searching? There should be a seamless stream of information as visitors move from one page to another.

Most UI and UX designers plan this logical flow for a long time. But for your planning efforts to be successful, your interface will undoubtedly go through different trial-and-error phases. You can do this by testing the interface or requesting feedback from focus groups and random users.

9. Future-Proofing B2B SaaS SEO Strategy

Your B2B SaaS SEO strategy isn’t a one-off plan you’ll just execute and leave out. With the advent of AI (Artificial Intelligence) and ML (Machine Learning), you should always bear in mind that the SEO space will undergo numerous changes year by year.

Staying updated with search engine algorithm changes

Search engines, especially Google, roll out multiple algorithm changes yearly. Google releases monthly updates, some of which involve changes in its search engine’s core algorithm. These updates could affect your website’s performance, especially regarding your visibility and click-through rates.

You should be dedicated to monitoring these changes, especially if you’re just gaining some traction in search engine results. Following SEO news websites like Search Engine Journal, Search Engine Land, and Google’s updates will have you up-to-date with these algorithm changes.

Failing to adapt to recent updates will not penalize your website, but you will lose out on organic traffic that could have driven more conversations to your SaaS product.

Preparing for voice search and emerging SEO trends

Sooner or later, you’ll see more people voicing their Google searches rather than typing them on their devices. The continuous development of Bluetooth devices and AI-powered platforms is contributing to the eventual rise of voice search capabilities. It’s no longer a myth anymore, as in other emerging trends in the SEO space.

To help you stay on your toes, here are some of the emerging B2B SaaS SEO trends that you might want to keep an eye on for the next few years:

Algorithm changes in product landing pages
Priority on audience-targeted content, not on keyword-rich pages
Bigger presence of videos in search engine results
Tightening rules on AI-generated content
Changes in zero-click results like rich snippets

Adapting to evolving B2B buyer behaviors

It’s fitting to end this section by emphasizing the evolving behaviors of B2B buyers. Many factors influence B2B buying behavior, most of them coming from trends and changes in the niche market. Along with niche market changes, other external factors like geographical economy exist.

Most importantly, B2B buying behavior could be influenced by the product itself. If you introduce changes, even minimal ones, to your product, you should anticipate changes in your customers’ buying behavior.

Conclusion

Doing B2B SaaS SEO is a process that requires consistency and responsiveness. You need to be patient with the results and adapt to the ever-changing nature of your niche market and the SEO space.

Most importantly, all these on-page, off-page, and technical SEO considerations won’t matter if you don’t know where your niche lies. Unless you’re an enterprise-scale SaaS company, expanding into different audiences is not as effective as focusing on a niche customer base.

So, to wrap it up, producing a customer-centric B2B SaaS SEO strategy for your niche audience is crucial for both your short-term and long–term growth.

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