Gabriele Meliūnaitė

October 9, 2023

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You might be wondering why big players still need to invest in enterprise SaaS SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Surely, they already have a large market share, so why should they shell out more resources and manpower to boost their online visibility?

SEO might not be as important for large-scale companies 20 years ago, but almost everything in the SaaS market has become digital. To keep up with the times, enterprise-level companies need SEO to maintain their high position in the SaaS market.

What is Enterprise SaaS SEO?

Enterprise SaaS SEO is increasing a SaaS company’s visibility on online platforms, especially in a SERP (Search Engine Results Page). By optimizing their SEO strategies, an enterprise SaaS website can rank on the first page of search engine results, which could lead to higher click-through rates and conversions.

Benefits of Enterprise SaaS SEO

As we mentioned earlier, the general goal for any SEO strategy is to rank high in search engine results. This is crucial for SaaS companies, as they need more engagements and conversions for their revenue to kick in.

However, ranking on the first page of Google Search doesn’t guarantee conversions; you also must optimize the content and structure of your SaaS website for visitors to engage with your product. If you do it right, here are several benefits that enterprise SaaS SEO can do for you:

Increases click-through rates and engagements
Delivers content that piques the interest of your niche audience
Helps lessen the costs you need to convert a potential customer
Gives your website an air of legitimacy and authority
Makes your website become more user-friendly and interactive

Overall, SEO helps drive more traffic to your SaaS website, which could increase your visibility and engagement rates.

How to do Enterprise SaaS SEO?

Whether it’s on the content itself or the structure and technicalities of your website, enterprise SaaS SEO covers a wide array of facets. It could take months to streamline your SEO strategy, but the rewards could come in abundance if you do it right.

1. Keyword Research for Enterprise SaaS

Putting in relevant, high-authority keywords is crucial to enterprise SaaS SEO. Keyword research doesn’t just optimize your website’s content but also gives you in-depth data on the interests and needs of your target customer base. A properly-executed keyword research strategy is beneficial for website optimization and product development.

Conducting thorough keyword research for competitive industries

The more specific your keyword or keywords are, the greater the chances that your content will rank high in search engine results. The first step towards achieving this is to identify your SaaS product’s niche audience, then build up from there.

Once you have determined your niche, the next step is to analyze what your competitors are doing. Analyzing competitor keywords is a traditional yet effective way of initially knowing where the right direction is. You can use keyword research tools like Ahrefs or Semrush to do competitor analysis, as this could give you much-needed insight into the current high-ranking keywords in your niche.

Identifying long-tail and high-converting keywords

Of course, the priority in doing keyword research for enterprise SaaS SEO is to drive traffic and collect more conversions. In the SaaS space, particularly in your niche, specific keywords entail the interests of your customer base. These come in the form of long-tail keywords, the more high-converting keywords for SaaS websites.

Long-tail keywords are typically five-word phrases that speak to your niche audience’s most specific needs or interests. These keywords usually don’t have a large search or query volume, which is beneficial for you. If you target relevant long-tail keywords, you’d have less competition, which could result in a higher SERP ranking.

Analyzing user intent and search trends in the enterprise space

It goes on to say that your enterprise SaaS SEO strategy should be centered around your target customer base. One of the ways to do this is by analyzing user intent and search trends, two SEO components that will help you understand your customers’ interests.

Google Search, which has 85.53% of the worldwide search market share, could provide you with a data-driven report on user intent. What is the motive of your customers in entering a specific keyword? Do they want to purchase a service, or do they just want relevant information about a certain topic?

These are the questions that user intent analysis can answer, something that could further boost a SaaS website’s visibility.

2. On-Page SEO for Enterprise SaaS Websites

Compared to other e-commerce sites or news websites, doing on-page SEO for enterprise SaaS websites could be slightly different. Again, you optimize your content mainly to convert visitors to actual customers. You can do that through these enterprise SaaS-specific on-page SEO tips we have prepared for your reference.

Optimizing title tags, meta descriptions, and header tags

When discussing on-page SEO for enterprise SaaS websites, the first things that come to mind are title tags, meta descriptions, and header tags. After all, these are the elements that prop up search engine results. Your target customer base’s first impression of your brand depends on these three components.

In doing enterprise SaaS SEO, optimizing your title tags, meta descriptions, and header tags take on a higher level of importance so your users will not get lost in the rabbit hole. You should remember that you have a large-scale website that contains a vast library of content and landing pages. Make sure that important keywords are present in your tags and descriptions.

Creating valuable and informative content for target keywords

Gone are the days when you could get away with aggregating content and putting in as many keywords as possible. Search engines like Google have since rolled out updates that require websites to write relevant and unique content to rank higher in search engine results.

So, it goes on to say that content is king in doing on-page SEO optimization. Identifying relevant long-tail keywords is one thing; writing informative content to help your readers decide is another. Bringing in content writers and copywriters who are experts in your niche is an investment that usually pays off for SaaS websites.

Utilizing internal linking and content silos for enhanced SEO

Internal linking is among the most underrated components of on-page SEO optimization, especially for large-scale SaaS websites. It doesn’t just provide a hierarchy of relevant content; you could also spread out the authority juice from your higher-ranking pages.

When planning your internal linking strategy, you should consider what they call content silos. A silo structure is a hierarchical content organization that connects to each other based on niche and theme. This silo structure makes it easier to place internal links since you already know which pages are related.

Implementing schema markup for rich search results

A schema markup acts as the code or language search engines use to understand and analyze your website content. If you fail to properly implement it, search engines like Google won’t be able to produce rich search results for your content, which could negatively affect your SERP rankings.

Schematic markup essentially scours your content for very important details that people usually ask for or type in search engines. Your content might be featured in the “People also ask” section or your brand might get a Knowledge Panel on the first page of the results.

You can use Google’s Structured Data Markup Helper to implement schema markup for your SaaS website.

3. Technical SEO for Enterprise SaaS Companies

Along with the on-page components, doing enterprise SaaS SEO also involves the technical aspects of it. You have to ensure your website’s infrastructure is sound and error-prone. Otherwise, you risk wasting valuable content because search engines can’t fully crawl or index your pages.

Continue reading below to see how you could optimize your SaaS website’s technical SEO elements.

Website architecture and navigation for large-scale sites

For an enterprise SaaS SEO like yours, it’s very important for your visitors to easily navigate your site. Large-scale websites often have more pages and content, and a disorganized website architecture could drive away most of your potential customers.

To avoid this setback, you have to seamlessly connect each page based on relevance and topical category. The categories on your home page should be meticulously organized, and your internal links should always connect to relevant or similar pages.

Moreover, you should ensure that search engines accurately index your sitemap. So as not to miss out on potential engagement, always check that the pages you want to be indexed are included in the sitemap.

Mobile optimization and responsive design for diverse devices

Since a decade ago, the Internet has transitioned from personal computers to handheld devices. More than 60% of searches or queries on Google come from mobile devices, which emphasizes the need for SaaS websites to become mobile-friendly.

While it’s true that most CMS (Content Management System) platforms include mobile optimization, there are still some things that you can do to ensure your website’s mobile responsiveness. You can always activate AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages), a Google-led feature that could improve your website’s performance on mobile devices. This way, your website loads faster even on less powerful smartphones and tablets.

Page speed optimization and performance enhancements

Have you experienced exiting a website you just opened because it loads very slowly? Now, imagine that your SaaS website is performing the same way. You’ll miss out on visitors seeing your products and services, which could pull down your engagement and conversion rates.

To enhance the performance of your website, you need to optimize several elements to boost a page’s loading speed. You can cut back on several plugins and advertisement placements, update the codes on the page, and compress images and other multimedia elements. This way, your web page becomes less heavy, which is the key to page speed optimization.

URL structure and canonicalization for complex webpages

Another overlooked issue that haunts enterprise SaaS SEO plans is the presence of duplicate pages and disorganized URL (Uniform Resource Locator) structure. When search engines like Google sense duplicate pages on your website, they select one representative page to potentially show on the search results page. So, to make sure that Google picks the right page, you need to do canonicalization and select the representative page yourself.

Moreover, you should also optimize all your URLs. These should contain some of the relevant keywords from your research, although be careful not to overdo it. To help boost your SEO efforts, always keep your URLs brief and keyword-rich.

4. Off-Page SEO Strategies for Enterprise SaaS

Along with on-page and technical elements, there are also important off-page actions that you can do for enterprise SaaS SEO. Link building or gaining backlinks from other websites is a crucial off-page factor. There are also many social media platforms that you can leverage as well.

Off-page SEO can give all kinds of benefits to your SaaS website, as you can see in the following sections.

Link building and outreach in the enterprise space

Collecting backlinks from other high authority websites could be a viable growth driver for your SaaS website. It’s like getting a recommendation or recognition from one of your supervisors or big bosses; backlinks pointing toward your website boost your brand’s authority and authenticity.

A properly executed link building strategy will increase your DA (Domain Authority), which could drastically increase your organic traffic. You can buy backlinks from high authority websites, granted that you follow the rules from the Google Webmaster Guidelines. Of course, you can always craft valuable content that other websites will link to without you paying a nickel for it.

Leveraging social media for brand exposure and backlinks

Social media has been an invaluable marketing channel for all industries, encompassing the enterprise SaaS SEO space. Establishing a presence on these platforms is always a big boost for your brand, especially if you can successfully reach and engage with your niche audience.

Along with increasing brand exposure and awareness, social media could also be your source for collecting backlinks. If you use the right keywords and craft a shareable content piece, you can see your engagement rate improve. The key to leveraging social media is consistency; if you consistently post content, chances are the algorithm will pick you up and increase your reach.

Guest posting and thought leadership in industry publications

If you’re already a large-scale SaaS company, it’s without a doubt that people are looking up to your brand. In one way or the other, you’re already one of the leaders in your industry, something that you could leverage to reach more audiences or diversify your customer base potentially.

This comes as thought leadership articles that you can distribute to other high-authority websites. Of course, you need to have relevant and up-to-date content. Especially since there’s a high possibility that other webmasters will do a background check on you.

Though leadership articles are one of the self-help categories that have risen to prominence. So, webmasters might even let you post your content for free.

Online reputation management for enterprise-level brands

All these SEO strategies and efforts will be for naught if you don’t have a good brand reputation. During this advent of social media platforms, it’s easier to establish your brand and even easier to crash your reputation to the ground.

Your online reputation takes on heavier importance nowadays, mainly because marketing channels are mostly present on digital platforms. So, whether it’s on social media or search engines, ensure you follow the stipulated guidelines. Keep up-to-date with the trends and market movements, so you don’t miss out on what you can and cannot do.

5. Local SEO Considerations for Enterprise SaaS

For SaaS startups and SMBs (Small to Medium-Sized Businesses), local optimization is an integral part of their SEO efforts. Local audiences typically compose the customer base of companies of this size.

On the other hand, does an enterprise-level SaaS company need to pour its energy into local SEO? Continue reading below to find out.

Optimizing local presence for multiple locations

When selling a SaaS product, you always want to expand your reach as much as possible. If you’re expanding into a new geographical location, you’d want to test the waters and see if you could engage a customer base there. This is why local SEO optimization is still of the essence for enterprise SaaS companies.

Targeting multiple locations doesn’t just involve researching geographic-specific keywords; you must consider other elements like optimized local landing pages and contact information. You should also register your business in local online listings and directories. Alongside your local content and articles, these elements could boost your presence in multiple locations.

Local citation management and consistency across platforms

As a reputable SaaS business, you don’t want your potential and actual customers to get all confused with your company information. This is why optimizing your local search citations is key in establishing a complete and accurate business profile on online platforms.

When doing local citations, here are the components that you need to optimize:

Business name
Complete address
Phone number
Operating hours
Company logo
Company description
Company email address

As we’ve said before, your local citations should be complete, accurate, consistent, and up-to-date. Incomplete or inaccurate information could make you miss potential conversions and sales.

Encouraging customer reviews and testimonials

Customer reviews are an important aspect of brand awareness, especially for SaaS products. You need people to subscribe to your product to reach your revenue goal. That will require some form of commitment from them resources-wise, so they need to know just how effective your offering is.

To that point, customer reviews and testimonials will help make your product more legitimate in the eyes of your target audience. You can include these testimonials as a standalone category on your website. And you can also encourage your valued customers to write a review on apps and social media platforms. Of course, you can’t just tell them to write one. It takes a high level of customer support and product development to get their trust and loyalty.

6. Content Marketing and SEO Integration

SEO and content should go hand-in-hand when doing enterprise SaaS SEO. You need to create engaging and informative content for your visitors to stay on your page. At the same time, you must develop a proper SEO strategy for people to notice your content.

Aligning your content and SEO strategies is necessary. Here’s how you can get started.

Creating a content strategy aligned with SEO goals

The common denominator between content and SEO is your audience. You need a customer-centric approach to optimize both of these areas. So, the first step towards aligning content and SEO is to identify and understand the interests and intent of your niche audience.

When you get that part covered, the next step is to conduct keyword research and use KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) to measure the effectiveness of your marketing campaign. There are free SEO and content tools that could help you track and monitor your performance. Which means that you could immediately pull out campaigns that are not working.

Developing educational resources, case studies, and whitepapers

If you want to demonstrate your expertise in your niche, you can put up educational resources, case studies, and whitepapers on your website. These resources are dedicated to helping your audience improve their knowledge on particular topics. So, you also need to stay on top of in-demand topics and trends in the industry.

SaaS websites focus on writing case studies. This combines a story and a report where a SaaS company details how it helped a particular client achieve their business goals. As a result, this gives potential customers an in-depth view of how that SaaS company can help them.

Leveraging content for link building and thought leadership

In line with case studies and whitepapers, building your own thought leadership content is a big boost for your online visibility and engagement. As you might have realized by now, a large-scale SaaS business is already considered an industry leader, so they have plenty of input in the leadership aspect of the game.

A brilliant thought leadership content plan could also augment your link building strategy, especially since other websites want to refer to an enterprise SaaS company. Many perks come with the reputation that you have built in the market, and you just have to tap into this ability.

7. Measuring and Monitoring Enterprise SaaS SEO Success

Developing and executing these strategies to perfection is not the endpoint of an SEO campaign. You can’t know if your strategy will work, so you need to regularly measure and monitor your website’s performance.

Thankfully, there are monitoring tools that could help you out, as you’ll find out in the following sections.

Setting up SEO analytics and tracking tools

Of course, an enterprise SaaS company will have enough resources to subscribe to a wide range of paid SEO analysis tools. But if you’re just testing the waters, there are numerous free SEO analytics and tracking tools out there. Google Analytics and Google Search Console are the two free-of-charge platforms that stand out. These tools track important metrics such as bounce rate, session duration, organic traffic, and number of users.

Additionally, there’s Google PageSpeed Insights that provides reports on your website’s loading speed. You can also tap into free, albeit limited, versions of Ahrefs, Answer the Public, Semrush, and Moz.

Key performance indicators (KPIs) for enterprise-level SEO

SEO planning could vary in approach depending on the size of the website or business. Small and large websites share the goal of making it to the first page of search engine results, but the journey toward getting there could be different.

When planning for enterprise SaaS SEO, it’s important to prioritize performance indicators that directly affect your business goals. Here are several KPIs that we recommend you should monitor:

Total visitors by country or location
Unique visitors
Bounce rate on landing pages
Form submission rate

Knowing which location is feasible or identifying how to diversify your target audience is a must for large-scale SaaS companies, and these four KPIs could help you achieve those goals.

Analyzing data to refine SEO strategies

These analysis and monitoring tools won’t matter if you’re unwilling to refine your SEO strategy. As webmasters and marketers always say, SEO is not an overnight sensation. It takes some time, and several failures, for your strategy to materialize.

SEO is a trial-and-error process that will test your willingness to adapt to changing times. An SEO strategy that worked two years ago may not be as effective today. So to make sure that you’re keeping up with the trends, maintain a regular analysis of your website’s traffic, user engagement, and content.

8. Successful Enterprise SaaS SEO Examples

SEO has certainly helped a lot of startups grow into enterprise-scale websites. You have Buffer, an all-in-one social media toolkit that provides management and optimization services on all prominent social media platforms. Having started in 2012, Buffer has now hit the $18-million threshold in ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue) thanks to their brilliant SEO tactics. With a healthy following on social media and YouTube, Buffer transformed existing content into up-to-date ones. By repurposing old content or segregating it into multiple new ones, Buffer’s content strategy set quite a standard in the enterprise SaaS SEO space.
Is it possible to increase your website traffic by almost 50% in the span of just two years? That’s certainly feasible for smaller websites, but Hotjar was already an established SaaS brand when they achieved that growth rate. Hotjar, a SaaS marketing automation tool that analyzes and monitors user behavior, used topic clustering and backlink building to enhance their reach on search engine results. This is a classic example of how off-page and technical SEO can boost a website’s visibility, but don’t get that wrong. Hotjar’s content was also top-notch.
If we were to tell you that you can achieve a two million reach in just 12 months, would you think it is possible? Maybe you’re thinking no, but don’t tell that the Peanut App. An app that specializes in answering questions about fertility, pregnancy, motherhood, and menopause, Peanut App produced an organic traffic of 2.3 million visits within a year. They focused on relevant keywords where they did not have much competition. Then categorized posts into topic clusters that made it easier for their visitors to navigate through different pages.

Or you can read one of our case studies:
MOST EFFECTIVE SEO STRATEGIES USED DURING THE KENTUCKY DERBY 2023

Future Trends in Enterprise SaaS SEO

For obvious reasons, enterprise SaaS SEO’s future lies in AI (Artificial Intelligence) and ML (Machine Learning). As in many industries, process automation could be the next main disruptor in the SEO market, which will greatly impact large-scale SaaS websites.

Exploring emerging SEO trends and technologies

With AI and ML flexing their potential and strength on the industry, it’s only natural that SEO will trend in that direction. AI-powered SEO tools will be the name of the game, and it’s only a matter of time before that materializes.

Along with AI, there are also other SEO trends to keep an eye on, including the following:

Mobile responsiveness will take on a new level of importance
Searching information via image upload will see an uptick through Google Lens
SEO’s continuous growth will see companies invest more in business intelligence and analytics
The rise of rich snippets could eat up other websites’ click-through rates

Preparing for voice search and AI-driven SEO advancements

With all these trends and technologies, your enterprise SaaS website should be able to keep up with the times. You have the potential uptick in voice search, where users can just say the words, they want to search instead of typing them into their computers or smartphones. As a webmaster or SEO expert, how do you prepare for this technology?

If you want to optimize your website for voice search, here are several tips:

Research question keywords and long-tail keywords
Optimize your local SEO practices
Look into how your competitors are ranking for rich snippets
Create content that has a conversational tone

Conclusion

As you might have realized by now, enterprise SaaS SEO should be a focal point for any large-scale SaaS company. If you want to maintain your high position in the market or expand into a new customer base, optimizing your SEO practices could help you take the next step.

Of course, there are different facets of SEO marketing that you need to cover. Whether you have an in-house SEO team or outsourcing the responsibilities to an external team, it’s important that you stay consistent — that is if you’re headed in the right direction. Thankfully, several free tools will help you monitor your campaigns’ performances, allowing you to make changes when necessary.

Enterprise SaaS SEO is becoming a space of its own, and you should buy into this trend too. It’s not just about improving your website’s visibility, but SEO can also increase your brand awareness and help you develop products that address the interests and needs of your niche customers.

Frequently Asked Questions about Enterprise SaaS SEO

What sets Enterprise SaaS SEO apart from regular SEO for smaller businesses?

While it’s true that they both have the same goal of increasing visibility and click-through rates, enterprise SaaS websites may take on a different journey when compared to smaller businesses. For most large-scale SaaS companies, they do SEO to expand into a new market or customer base.

To do this, enterprise SaaS SEO might focus on local SEO optimization in multiple locations, whereas smaller businesses hone in on just one location to increase brand awareness.

What are the challenges of implementing Enterprise SaaS SEO?

The continuous evolution of SEO trends and technologies could challenge enterprise SaaS SEO. The advantage of large-scale SaaS companies or organizations is they already have established a brand identity, but SEO doesn’t just cover that side of the game.

Search engines like Google regularly roll out one update after the other, so websites should adapt to the changes, even the high-authority ones. This could be a challenge for enterprise SaaS websites that are already used to their norm of doing things.

How does Enterprise SaaS SEO impact the growth of large SaaS businesses?

Enterprise SaaS SEO does not just improve a website’s visibility, but it also helps a SaaS business develop its product the right way. When doing SEO optimization, you’re also looking at how your competitors are doing and how your customers are behaving.

Access to all this data allows you to take a customer-centric product development that could also be unique from what your competitors are developing. Through SEO practices, you can hit two birds with just one stone; product development and SEO optimization go hand-in-hand in the SaaS industry.

What is the key on-page SEO strategies for Enterprise SaaS companies?

When doing on-page SEO for enterprise SaaS companies, it’s recommended that you focus on long-tail keywords that could optimize your local SEO practices. You must remember that most large-scale SaaS companies optimize SEO to increase their visibility in multiple locations so that long-tail keywords could be the name of your game.

Along with long-tail keywords, you should also craft conversational content. This strategy would help you answer user queries or questions that typically appear in rich snippets on search engine results.

How can Enterprise SaaS businesses build quality backlinks for SEO success?

Having a proper link building strategy is a focal point in enterprise SaaS SEO. Search engines like Google allow websites to buy backlinks into higher authority sites, but that’s not the starting point and endpoint of a link building strategy. You should also manage your brand reputation and ensure that your landing pages are optimized when other websites link to you.

Having said that, creating informative and keyword-optimized content could also help you attract the attention of other websites. They could link to your content as a viable source without you spending any nickel on it.