The Complete Guide to Enterprise SaaS SEO
The Benefits of Enterprise SaaS SEO
Mastering Enterprise SaaS SEO: The Key Steps
Why Enterprise SEO is Unique
Invest in the Power of Enterprise SEO
Investing in enterprise SaaS SEO is one of the most important steps tech business leaders can take to ensure they’re generating leads, and revenue long-term.
While there are dozens of ways to promote an enterprise-focused SaaS brand, few strategies are more effective than learning how to manipulate your position on the search engine result pages. In fact, studies show that SEO generates 1200% more traffic than any other channel.
For any type of SaaS business (no matter your target niche or audience), SEO strategies offer a way to capture potential customer leads, build brand awareness, and unlock new opportunities.
However, enterprise SaaS companies, focused on capturing the attention of larger companies, rely on search engine optimization more than most. After all, if you’re operating in the enterprise SaaS world, you’re contending with a smaller audience, stronger competition, and more complex sales journeys.
Today, SaaS companies say SEO drives more than almost 2/3 of all organic traffic they see on their sites. In this article, we’re going to explore the importance of enterprise SaaS SEO, and introduce some of the techniques you can use to drive results from search engine optimization.
The Benefits of Enterprise SaaS SEO
The SaaS industry is one of the fastest-growing sectors in the world. Currently, the market is expected to reach a value of $883.34 billion by 2029, representing a CAGR of 19.7%. As trends like digital transformation continue to shape the landscape, and businesses invest heavily in agile, innovative, and cloud-based tools, demand for SaaS is increasing, particularly among enterprise brands.
However, as the market transforms, it’s also becoming increasingly difficult for enterprise SaaS companies to separate themselves from the competition and acquire leads. That’s where SEO comes in. Organic search comprises around 53.3% of all web traffic, helping B2B companies generate 2 times more revenue than most channels.
With the right enterprise SEO strategy, companies can benefit from:
Improved brand recognition: Even if you have an amazing SaaS product to offer, your revenue won’t improve unless your customers are aware of your company and solutions. SEO helps you to gain visibility, placing you at the top of the search results when customers search for specific terms and questions related to whatever you offer.
Increased traffic: The more traffic you bring to your SaaS website, the more prospects you’ll have to potentially turn into leads for your business. The top result in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) gets around 31.7% of all the clicks which means the higher you rank, the more traffic you’ll gain. You can even use SEO tools such as Google Search Console, Google Analytics and SEO reporting to predict how much traffic you’re likely to receive for each targeted keyword or phrase.
Enhanced brand reputation: Trust goes a long way in the Enterprise SaaS landscape. When major businesses are investing in a product or solution, they need to know they can rely on their provider to deliver excellent results. Appearing at the top of the search results for specific terms instantly gives a brand a credibility boost. Additionally, SEO techniques like content creation can strengthen thought leadership and authority too.
Competitive Advantage: With a strong SEO strategy, implemented by a professional SEO agency or team, enterprise SaaS companies can essentially dominate the entire search engine results page, pushing other competing companies out. You can fill the search results with pictures, videos, and posts about your products and services.
Full journey optimization: A strong enterprise SaaS SEO plan doesn’t just focus on attracting customers to a brand, or converting them at the bottom of a funnel. It can also help companies understand each buyer persona; then, use this information to understand how to connect and engage this audience through every stage of the purchasing journey. This helps companies to build relationships with their B2B buyers, and nurture them throughout the full sales funnel.
Mastering Enterprise SaaS SEO: The Key Steps
While there’s no one-size-fits-all strategy to developing the ultimate enterprise SaaS SEO plan, there are certain steps every company should follow to unlock measurable results. Whether you choose to work with an SEO expert experienced in SaaS solutions, or you go it alone, you’ll need to invest time and effort into each of the following tactics:
Step 1: Research Your Enterprise Audience
As an enterprise SaaS company the chances are you have a much more focused target audience than the majority of software brands. Making sure you understand your target group and their specific needs, goals, and pain points, will help you to create a more powerful enterprise SEO campaign.
Start by defining what the word “enterprise” means to you. Consider how many employees your average buyer has, their purchasing power, and their budget. Then, start building a buyer persona for your SaaS customer based on the following factors:
Demographics: Look at factors like age, job title, geographical location, market segment, educational level, and even spending power.
Goals: What do the companies you work with accomplish when purchasing products from you? What are their goals and expectations?
Pain points: What issues do your current customers face, and what blockers might stop them from purchasing your service?
Once you have a basic user persona in place, use it to ask questions that will drive your SEO strategy, such as what kind of content (including social media) do your customers consume, and what kind of questions do they ask when searching for solutions online?
Step 2: Enterprise SEO Keyword Research
With your buyer persona to guide you, the next step in your SEO efforts involves researching effective keywords for your campaign. Keywords are at the heart of any SEO strategy, as they determine what terms you’re going to be trying to rank for. When you’re targeting a specific group of enterprise buyers, think carefully about the language they’re likely to use on the search engines. While your team may have a good grasp on traditional SEO, enterprise SEO strategies typically require the assistance from an SEO agency.
Long tail keywords are often more effective for enterprise SaaS SEO for a few reasons. First, they have lower competition than short-term keywords. Secondly, long-tail keywords are more specific, allowing you to target the precise types of customers or buyers you want to reach.
It might be worth looking into records of conversations your sales team has had with customers in the past, or assessing the keywords competitors are ranking for using SEO tools like SEMRush and Ahrefs. You can also find inspiration for keywords by looking at the “Searches related to” or “People Also Ask” sections of Google, or by utilizing Google’s Keyword research tools.
Remember, the best keywords should have plenty of traffic, and low competition. Ideally, you’ll want to target a variety of different types of terms for different levels of buyer intent. For most enterprise SaaS companies, informational, and transactional intent will be the most important options to target. This means focusing on finding keywords for SEO content that informs your audience, and convinces them to make a purchase.
Step 3: Create your Content Strategy
Using the list of keywords you’ve researched; you’ll be able to start planning the next stage of your SEO strategy: content marketing. Content is one of the most valuable tools in any SaaS company’s toolbelt, and it’s essential for enterprise SaaS SEO. Around 97% of companies believe content marketing is essential to their advertising strategy.
Content not only gives you more opportunities to appear on the search engine result pages with blogs, articles, and other pieces, it also helps to boost the authority and credibility of your company. The more thought leadership content you produce, the more you’ll be able to engage with your target audience, earn their trust, and facilitate conversions.
To ensure your content resonates with your audience, and ranks highly on the search engines:
Create content guidelines: Build a set of editorial guidelines outlining the tone of voice you’re going to use in your content, the value proposition of the brand, and the language you want to use. Your guidelines will help to create a consistent experience for audiences.
Design pillars for search intent: Next, group your keywords and content ideas into groups based on the topic covered, and the intent of your target audience. Remember, Google prioritizes search intent, so knowing how to create a combination of informational, educational, and transactional content is crucial.
Make content in-depth: Although blog posts and articles don’t have to feature thousands of words to be successful, they should answer every question your customer has. If you create content pillars, you’ll be able to link out to additional articles on your website within them, improving the time customers spend on your site, and boosting authority.
Optimize each piece: Implement your keywords into your content carefully, making sure they appear naturally in the body of your content, the URL you use for the website page, the title, meta descriptions, and tags.
Make it engaging and enticing: Remember to deliver value to your audience with every piece of content. Provide actionable tips and guidance, answer common questions, and make sure customers know where to go next when they’re finished reading if they want more advice, or they are interested in purchasing your products.
Step 4: Building strong link profile
Links are one of the most valuable tools you can use to enhance your SEO strategy. In a successful enterprise SaaS SEO campaign, companies use a combination of internal and external links to boost their presence within the search engines, and improve customer experience.
Internal links align the connected pages on your website, making it easier for Google to crawl through your content, and helping customers to access extra information when they need it. External links, on the other hand, boost authority by validating the claims you make. For instance, if you share a statistic, linking to that statistic proves you’ve done your research.
Additionally, you’ll want to earn as many inbound links from other businesses as possible, to demonstrate your credibility in the marketplace. Simply creating quality content is the number one strategy used by 90% of marketers to earn links, but you can also experiment with:
Press releases and guest posts: Working with publishers to report news about your business, or producing content other companies can share on their websites is an excellent way to rapidly draw backlinks from high-authority companies in the SaaS industry.
Monitoring brand mentions: Using a brand mention tool to monitor references to your brand on social media, review sites, and other websites means you can reach out and request a link from other companies. It also offers an insight into your business reputation.
Broken link building: Broken link building involves reaching out to companies with broken links on their websites, and offering them a replacement link instead. You can search for broken links using tools like Ahrefs and SEMRush.
Step 5: Optimize Website Structure and Navigation
It’s worth noting that Google doesn’t just consider the quality of the content on your site, or how many people are linking back to you when deciding where to position your website on the search engine result pages. The company also focuses on evaluating the user-friendliness of your site.
A big part of enhancing enterprise SaaS SEO, is making sure your website structure is easy to follow, and streamlined. There are a few ways you can do this. For instance, if you cover a lot of different types of content on your website, grouping them into categories and sub-domains can help make your site easier to navigate, for both users and the search engines. You can also use tools like tags to help customers find content related to specific topics, or add a search bar to your website to make navigation simpler. Taking advantage of internal linking is helpful too.
You can create pillar pages about a specific broad topic, with links to various other pages on your website with more in-depth information. For instance, if your Enterprise SaaS company focuses on selling marketing tools, you might have pillar pages for complex topics like SEO, which link out to content about link building, technical SEO, and content marketing.
Step 6: Master Technical SEO
Speaking of improving user experience, it’s also worth remembering there’s more to SEO than just on-page optimization (content creation and keyword research) and off-page optimization (backlinks). An enterprise SaaS SEO strategy should also include an SEO audit and plan for technical SEO.
Technical SEO involves improving the user experience on your website, by improving things like page loading times and performance, reducing broken links, and strengthening crawlability. The easiest way to improve your technical SEO is to work with an agency that already has experience in this area. However, some of the things you can consider include:
URL management: Scan your website for any URL issues, like broken links, or pages that redirect customers to other parts of your site. Use an XML sitemap to streamline your site’s performance, and use canonical tags to ensure the correct version of each page is indexed.
Boosting website speed: Page loading speeds impact both SEO analytics and user experience. You can use tools like Google’s PageSpeed insights to track issues with your site’s performance and pinpoint pages that aren’t optimized. If your site loads slowly, consider using strategies like image compression, browser caching, and JS minifying.
Structured data and schema markups: Structured data helps search engines to understand the content on your page, and improves your search listings with rich snippets. Schema markup is a form of code that provides Google with additional details to show in your search listings, such as client ratings, service areas, and open hours.
Step 7: Invest in Mobile Optimization
While you’re working on technical optimization for your Enterprise SaaS SEO strategy, it’s worth paying attention to mobile optimization too. Mobile traffic now accounts for more than half of all global web traffic, so if your site doesn’t perform well on smartphones, you’re going to miss out on crucial traffic and opportunities.
Use tools like Google’s mobile-friendly test to check your site works on all devices. If your site doesn’t work well on mobiles, consider working with a developer or web designer to simplify your navigation menu, use a responsive theme or template for your site, and optimize your images and buttons for smaller screens.
Remember to optimize CTA size and location for mobile devices too. It’s important to ensure your customers can still click on your links and access your products when they’re using a touchscreen device.
Step 8: Measuring and Analyzing Performance
Finally, it’s important to remember that enterprise SaaS SEO takes time and effort to master. You’re unlikely to see results straight away, and you’ll need to constantly track the performance of your campaigns to make sure you’re constantly improving your results.
If you work with an enterprise SaaS SEO agency, they’ll be able to provide performance reports that outline how your strategies are working. Otherwise, you’ll need to consider investing in your own tools and resources to gather analytics. Use solutions like Google Webmaster tools, and the analytics features built into your site platform to track the KPIs that matter most to your business.
Remember, there are hundreds of metrics you can potentially track, but some of the most important for many enterprise SaaS brands will include:
Primary Enterprise SEO KPIs: Organic traffic numbers, number of pages driving traffic, link profile growth, number of conversions, average cost per lead.
Secondary Enterprise SEO KPIs: Repeat visits from customers, demo requests and bookings, number of app downloads, and average customer lifetime value.
Why Enterprise SEO is Unique
It’s worth noting that although the strategies used for enterprise SaaS SEO and standard SaaS SEO have some overlap, enterprise SEO can be a little more challenging. It can take longer to see results from enterprise SaaS SEO because of the following factors:
Strong competition: The SaaS marketplace is becoming increasingly saturated as more companies enter the landscape. You’ll have a lot of competition, even for relatively niche keywords, which means it might take longer to build authority and ensure you’re getting consistent results. You’ll need to analyze competitors regularly too.
Longer sales cycles: B2B sales cycles are often longer than B2C sales cycles. This is particularly true in the enterprise SaaS world. If you’re trying to get companies to invest in your solution long-term, you’ll need to dedicate more time towards improving your credibility, earning trust, and convincing customers to stay with your brand.
Niche audiences: Although the market for SaaS is huge, there are fewer major enterprise brands out there for companies to target than everyday consumers. This means your audience is going to be more specific than most. You’ll need to consider leveraging zero-volume keywords and other strategies to boost your chances of success. Plus, you’ll need a deep understanding of your target audience and their purchasing journeys.
Team collaboration: Enterprise SaaS companies generally work with teams distributed across a variety of different locations, particularly in today’s age of hybrid and remote work. Bringing all of your staff members together to work consistently on an SEO strategy can be difficult. Make sure you invest in collaboration and communication tools to keep your staff members aligned and on the same track.
Reputation: Finally, even if you have a strong reputation, the more brand equity you have, the more risk you face when it comes to negative PR. Branded searches can sometimes be derailed by negative mentions unless you have a strong reputation management strategy. Make sure you pay attention to sentiment around your brand.
Invest in the Power of Enterprise SEO
Enterprise SaaS SEO can be a complicated concept to get your head around. There are multiple different factors you’ll need to consider to ensure you’re ranking in the search engines, from building a great link profile, to boosting your thought leadership with content.
However, while generating results with enterprise SaaS SEO can take time and effort, it also pays significant dividends. Use the right strategies in your campaigns, and you’ll be able to scale your business faster, find more customers, and boost your revenue.
The easiest way to get started is to seek out the help of a professional team, with experience working alongside reputable enterprise SaaS companies. The best agency will give you the step-by-step guidance you need to generate real results from SEO.
Contact Amplifyed today to learn how our enterprise SaaS SEO teams can help your business grow, with state-of-the-art SEO campaigns. Book a call with one of our friendly team members now.
Scott Johnson
Founder
Hey! I live in San Diego and have been involved with SEO since 2010. Our amazing team at Amplifyed specializes in helping SaaS and tech companies dominate the search rankings. We serve as an extension of your team to make sure your content ranks and drives the right people to your website. Let’s connect on LinkedIn and schedule a chat.