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We spoke to some of the leading SaaS SEO specialists to build this ultimate guide to SaaS SEO. Learn how the experts think about SEO and how they go about executing award-winning SEO strategies that help generate millions of dollars.
SEO is one of the most important topics to understand as a marketer. As a specialism, it can help businesses grow at a frightening rate and can do so with great ROI as you are not paying directly for the clicks and therefore the traffic from search engines like Google and Bing.
This is a complete guide on how to devise and execute a successful SEO strategy for a b2b company. The bulk of time will be spent covering the discovery and strategising elements as actually planning & executing are the easier parts. This approach has been implemented by large B2B companies and SaaS start-ups and has also won B2B SEO awards for its impact on revenue so we can vouch for its effectiveness.
B2B SEO is a digital marketing strategy used by companies that sell to other businesses as a way of increasing their online presence and increasing the number of people who visit their website. This in turn typically turns into more business generated for that company through website form submissions.
B2B SEO is different from B2C SEO because of a lesser focus on e-commerce websites and consumer search habits. This is important because e-commerce websites are typically larger and technically more complex than B2B websites.
E-commerce websites can include hundreds if not thousands of products and product categories that all require descriptions and content, whereas websites owned by companies selling services to other businesses are generally smaller in size and therefore less content.
It’s true to say some consumer-facing websites are not e-commerce websites and some serve both individuals and businesses, in which case this B2B SEO strategy will also be relevant. The thing that a B2B SEO strategy typically misses out on is large technical e-commerce SEO work
SEO is important because it is a low-cost digital marketing strategy that can dramatically improve your company's growth when done correctly and in line with other things such as a great product or service offering.
Having a large visible presence on search engines in your chosen field can help build trust and authority with your audience and increase the awareness of your brand online.
Search Optimisation is just one way you can capture search engine demand. The other is through Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising. The difference between SEO and PPC is that SEO is designed to generate traffic from clicks you don't have to pay for, where as PPC is a strategy based on paying for clicks from search engine results.
SEO is one of the best strategies you can deploy as a SaaS company but its not as easy as it sounds. It comes with some downsides:
On the other-hand PPC although more expsensive per click does have some benefits over SEO.
There are some obvious cons of PPC such as cost
Both SEO and PPC have their advantages and disadvantages, and the best approach often depends on your specific business goals, budget, and timeline.
SEO is ideal for businesses looking for sustainable, long-term growth and can invest time and resources into building a strong online presence. It’s cost-effective in the long run and builds trust and credibility with users.
PPC is perfect for businesses needing immediate visibility and results, with a flexible budget that allows for targeted advertising. It provides measurable ROI and the ability to quickly test and adjust strategies.
SEO as a strategy is better executed when you understand the theory behind it rather than just actioning a load of steps. These strategic principles are the fundamental rules and guidelines that serve as a foundation for reasoning and decision-making about the longer-term direction of your B2B SEO strategy.
Google Search is a beast of a product and the aim of this beast is to provide its users with the most useful and relevant answers to their questions. Google feeds on content and sorts through everything to rank them in order of relevance. Don't make the mistake of writing content that you think is interesting first.
As a rule of thumb, you should create unique content for every segment of your target audience. This is because people often search for solutions in relation to their specific requirements. So rather than searching for 'accounting software' they will search for 'accounting software for small companies' as one example.
Search query data is an endless sea of valuable market research so if you are ever in doubt about what content to produce, always revert back to the data as this will tell you exactly what people are trying to find. You have all of the questions in front of you, all you need to do is provide the answers!
This is a common misconception when thinking about what an SEO strategy does. SEO is about being found by the right people. It doesn't create demand for a new product or service, it can only serve to target where there is existing demand for something, something people are already looking for online.
Once you understand SEO is about meeting demand then it's easier to understand that you need to supply the right content to meet the demand. The more demand the more content. But just like with any market, where there is high demand there is usually high competition.
Keyword data should be viewed just like any other market research data. It shows you what the market is looking for, explicitly. This is something marketers of the 90's would have dreamed of but too often this data is seen as SEO data, it's not it's usable market research data that you can build a value proposition on.
User experience (UX) and search engine optimisation are directly linked to one another. All of the elements that make a good user experience such as an easy to use website that has well written content also improves your SEO.
You should understand the difference in intent between someone looking for solutions and someone looking to educate themselves. For a business you ideally want to attract people who are looking for solutions rather than just education.
The difference between a point solution and platform is that a point solution usually only addresses one use case or application, such as "time recording", where as a platform can address multiple applications and point solutions. Below is an example of a solution map for "Agency Management Software" where there are multiple point solutions and use cases for the product's features.
Before you start your SEO strategy you need to benchmark some key stats so you can hopefully measure your success easily as you execute your own strategy. To do this you are going to need to use some popular SEO tools to help.
Using SEMRush's organic research tool you can see your SEO Performance over time and today within minutes. This tool will also provide you with your keyword rankings by country so you can specifically look at your performance in the USA vs the UK and other countries if you wish.
SEMRush is a powerful SEO tool to can provide you with tonnes of useful data.
Once you have entered your domain you should export this data as a .csv file to analysis further in Google Sheets.This data is really useful for getting an understanding of your organic search performance over time.
You can also export all of this data into a Google Sheet so you can analyse it with a bit more flexibility and conduct your own audit on the terms you rank well for and the ones you don't!
Google Analytics will tell you how much of your traffic is coming from various different channels. This gives you a good idea of the reliance on certain channels to drive traffic to your website.
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Google Analytics is a great free website analytics tools
Google Analytics will tell you how much of your traffic is coming from various different channels. This gives you a good idea of the reliance on certain channels to drive traffic to your website.
Google Search Console (GSC) is another great free tool to analyse your website organic performance online. From GSC you can see the number of impressions and clicks your website is obtaining though organic Google Search results. This excludes any impressions and clicks you may be getting from your Google Ads campaigns.
From Google Search console you can export your search data from the last 6 months into a Google Sheet. From there you can filter the data a few different ways that can be used in your keyword research. One of the key elements to understand is the percentage of impressions and clicks from branded search terms along with the volume.
A Branded keyword is a search query that includes your website’s brand name or variations of it. For instance if someone typed in "B2B Hacker" that would be a branded keyword. It also implies they are already aware of your company and brand and are therefore further down the buyer journey, if in fact they are a buyer.
A Non-branded keyword is anything other than the above basically! When it comes to SEO you are really looking to improve your rankings for non-branded keywords as you are trying to attract people who have never heard of your company before.
To review the number of branded keywords vs non-branded keyword rankings you can basically use REGEXMATCH to highlight keywords that contain certain words or phrases.
Here is a quick example of how regexmatch can work
This allows you to highlight all of the terms that are branded very quickly =REGEXMATCH(A1, "brand name|brand name 2|brand name 3")The percentage of branded organic traffic: Once you have identified these keywords you can calculate the percentage. This is something SEMRush does automatically but its accuracy is not great as it is just using the name from your domain name.
Keyword Research is the most important part of your SEO strategy. Think of it as market research rather than SEO work. Keyword research is based on real-world user data and should be viewed like any other market research data. It requires some smart thinking to ensure you are targeting the most appropriate terms for your inbound strategy.
This is really important for B2B marketers. Technology moves fast and as marketers you have to try and match existing demand to the product that you are paid to market. Often this can mean navigating the different between point solutions, platforms and use cases. It's easy to get confused!
A good example of a website where they have published pages for all their use cases.
Use case mapping creates a list of solutions your technology offers. Forget about positioning, this is all about what the software actually does.
Once you have this list you should assign a priority in terms of business strategy to each solution. We are also considering at this point you want to known potentially as a platform rather than a point solution but we just have to ignore that at this point.
A common thread that crops up with B2B SEO strategy is working with a company that has integrations with certain other tools or is a partner with a certain technology. Often people search for solutions with these technologies in mind such as "QuickBooks email integration" or "email software for QuickBooks".
An example integration directory on the Monday.com website.
Once you have your list of solutions it's time to start conducting your keyword research. Enter key phrase into Keyword Magic Tool
Tick relevant keywords and add to keyword manager - tagging the use case Check 'related keywords' tab for suggestionsRepeat until you have gone through every listUpdate all metrics and export via a .csv.
The SEMRush keyword manager tool is really useful.
Once you have all this data you can update the metrics that relate to search volume and difficulty and then you can export all of this data via a .csv file and then import this data into Google Sheets so that you can do a more detailed and custom analysis of the keyword data.
Using the above theory you can quickly start to categorise and organise your keyword research by intent using a simple REGEXMATCH formula in google sheets. This allows you to put in some target terms that you know are relevant to certain search queries. In the example below we have used terms typically used when someone is searching for software.
terms typically used when someone is searching for software.
REGEXMATCH in Google Sheets to spot relevant keywords quickly
Another useful task during keyword research is import all of your current keyword rankings into a new sheet on the Google Sheet so you can see where you are already ranking so you don't duplicate work in some instances.
Google Search Console is a hive of useful data. It will tell you which search queries are driving impressions and clicks to your website. It's often really good for spotting where you are appearing in the search engine results but perhaps you are ranking on page 3 or 4 or beyond etc.
Using the above process you can quickly start to categorise and organise your keyword research by intent using a simple REGEXMATCH formula in google sheets. The sample formula can be used below, you can add and remove the search terms as you wish to adjust the formula to suit your specific requirements.
With all this data you can start to review your current sitemap and map keywords to the relevant pages so that you are ensuring you are optimising the right pages for the right keywords. This is also an important step to ensure you do not cannibalise content which basically just means pages are not competing with each other.
There are some rules I recommend to follow when thinking about the keywords and phrases you would like to target with your SEO campaigns. For B2B technology companies these are especially vital because you rely less on brand marketing in your growth stage and therefore you need to focus on where the demand is online first and foremost.
Note: If you or your CEO is hellbent on creating a category and targeting search terms with no search volume then you also need to embark on a pretty heavy-duty PR strategy that helps promote this category, unfortunately however it always comes back to the strength of the new business model or product you have created a category for.
Technical SEO is mainly about site performance but it also covers things such as confusing acronyms like HREFlang & Canonicals but don't worry it's not actually that difficult and the good news is that B2B websites don't require as much technical SEO work as an e-commerce website does.
SEMRush has a really useful SEO auditing tool in it called 'Site Audit'. You can configure this crawler to scan your domain or subdomain and it will spit out its recommendations in order of priority for you to review and work through if required. What's really useful about this is that it prioritises the errors and tells you exactly what they are, why you should fix them and how to do so.
the SEMRush Site Audit Feature is really great for standard technical SEO audits.
SEMRush Site Audit is a guide. It's important to remember that you do not need to try and get ZERO errors, warnings and notices on this tool. Especially when it comes to notices you don't always need to fix these, it's just an SEO recommendation for you to consider. Spend most of your time working on the Errors.
Google Search Console is a free tool from Google that provides some really useful information on how your website is appearing in the Google search engine. You can see how many clicks and impressions your website is getting from Google Search organically.
Google Search Console provides some useful feedback on any errors requiring attention.
Google Core Web Vitals
The core web vitals are a way of assessing a website both technically and from a UX perspective. You can review your websites performance for these vitals within Google Search Console but also by using Google Lighthouse which is built into the Chrome browser.When in GSC you should review the core web vitals and spot if any of your pages are being flagged for poor performance.Sometimes 1 error can be flagged as multiple errors because if one page layout is bad, all the pages with that layout will also be flagged as under-performing.If you have any issues in relation to the web vitals it will be flagged in GSC and you will see something like the below for you to investigate. Often the number of URLs is just because the pages all use the same coded template.
Google Page Experience Analysis
In 2022 Google introduced the page experience analysis into GSC. The Page Experience report provides a summary of the user experience of visitors to your site. Page experience and UX is a ranking signal to Google so it's important to address any issues here and ensure you are serving web pages that provide a good experience beyond more classical SEO optimisations.
Checking your sitemap submissionsAlthough any errors with your sitemap will usually be flagged in the SEMRush Site Audit, it is always worth checking your sitemap submission in GSC to see if there are any errors. And if you haven't submitted your sitemap then definitely do this! Usually a sitemap is located at www.yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml but it can vary so its worth checking with your developers just in case.
A Google Lighthouse Report takes 2 minutes to run and can provide some really useful pointers for improving your websites performance, it's also free and built into Chrome. Results from a Google Lighthouse report are linked with the core web vitals and will provide you with specific recommendations ranging from decreasing image sizes to minimising the CSS and deferring JavaScript.
The Google Lighthouse is another great free technical SEO tool.
Running this report and having a discussion with your web developers is a straightforward way to address some common issues. Right Click within browser window > Select 'Inspect' > Select 'Lighthouse' By default the Lighthouse report will always go to Mobile first as Google uses Mobile-first indexing which means it uses the mobile version of a website for ranking and indexing.
Your website's blog is essential to SEO success. Conducting a thorough audit of your existing blog content is key when starting to build an SEO strategy. I've listed out my step by step checklist for conducting a blog audit that will help define your future SEO strategy.
One of the first things you should do is jump into your Google Analytics profile and look at your landing pages over the past 6 months. This will tell you which pages are doing the heavy lifting when it comes to generating inbound organic traffic to your website. To view the first landing page in GA4 you need to look at the 'Session_start' event under the "Event Count" column when looking at Engagement > Pages and Screens.
Google Analytics is a great tool for reviewing the engagement of the content you have published. Assuming most of your blog content is under a directory such as /blog/ you should easily be able to filter your content and review the number of page views your content is getting. You can then if you wish, remove or no-index this content to tell search engines not to crawl it. You can also choose to re-purpose this content if you wish or even combine them.
From a Screaming Frog crawl, export all of the data into a spreadsheet. From there you will be able to review all of the headings, titles and meta descriptions for all of the indexable web page. At this stage we just want to note down what they are and flag any obvious errors, such as missing titles or if the titles are very brand focused and ambiguous.
You can filter the data you exported in the performance audit from Google Search Console to only look at the blog content, from there you can see which of your blog articles are getting the most impressions and clicks on Google Search. Sometimes articles may get lots of impressions but no clicks - there are sometimes opportunities here.
This is only easy to do if your blog content is located under a subfolder such as '/blog'. Thankfully most websites have this sort of structure. If you have this you can add the subfolder URL into SEMRush to do an analyse focused just on your blog content to save you filtering out all of your other pages. This goes for any other parts of your website you would like to do some independent analysis on.
Web pages should be worth landing on with rich, useful content for the user to consume. Now there isn't any definitive answer when it comes to how many words an article or web-page has on it, but that being said a good rule of thumb I have found is to at least flag any web page that has less than 1,000 words on it.
For the pages you are ranking number 1 you can filter in SEMRush on whether or not you have obtained a featured snippet and if not if somebody else has. If they have this is a potential opportunity for you to optimise existing content to try and capture that featured snippet result from your SEO competitor. This is a useful little audit to try and optimise existing content.
Off-site SEO refers to anything that can contribute to your search engine rankings that is not part of your website itself. An example of off-site SEO elements are links to your website from other websites and elements such as Google My Business profiles. Reviewing the off-site elements of your SEO impact is an important part of the SEO audit.
The SEMRush Backlink Audit tool
SEMRush has another useful tool that reviews all of the links to your website and flags any potential errors and issues.
Google My Business is an easy to set up feature that Google provides all businesses. I'm not going to talk through how to optimise your GMB profile as it's pretty much just filling out as much of it as possible including photos, products, services and adding in your office locations. Google My Business is considered very important for Local SEO as it is integrated into tools such as Google Maps so when someone is searching online for something near them, having a GMB profile is essential
Majestic SEO is a powerful SEO tool for off-site SEO. It goes into a bit more depth when it comes to analysing links to your website. It's worth using this alongside SEMRush IMO because you can get an idea very quickly of elements such as your "topical trust flow" and your "Link Profile" which are really important to understand. You can also do an Anchor Text analyse to see which links are using which anchor text to link to your website.
What are Trust Flow & Citation Flow?
Rather than me reel off a second-hand explanation of these elements, I'll let you read the explanations from Majest
ic on what these terms mean and why they use them to monitor a website's backlink profile. If you can't be bothered to read that then basically Citation Flow measures Quantity and Trust Flow measures quality.
The link profile is a really good way of assessing a websites links by these two metrics, it gives you an idea if some links are bad for your website and which ones are good basically! Obviously you can run this analysis on competitor websites to see if there are high quality links they have that you don't currently have.Analysing individual URL link profiles in detail
You can use Majestic SEO to dig deep into the link profile of individual URLS. This is really useful if there is a specific piece of content on a competitor website that you are looking to 'out-rank'. It may be that they have obtained some great high-quality links that you may be able to replace or replicate with your own outreach programme.
A competitor analysis in SEO is two-fold. There are known competitors you are aware of in the 'real world' then there are the companies competing in search engines for the same sort of search queries that you are, and you may have never heard of them before!
Your online competition can only be discovered and identified when you start to look at your keyword research in reality. Your online competition is defined by those companies competing for the same space in the SERP (Search Engine Results Page) - this is the online version of a billboard, it's basically advertising space for your company and whoever owns that space will naturally win more business...online.
This is another quirk related specifically to technology and software marketing. Platforms vs point solutions. Often a platform will offer the same feature as a point solution but also much more. From an SEO perspective you still maybe competing with point solutions for online space because you essentially solve the same problem.A good example of this principle is HubSpot. They are more than an email marketing tool but they still provide this service and therefore still want to appear in search results for the term "email marketing tools".On the other hand their software does much more than email marketing and it can also be classed as a marketing automation platform. Remember, a search engine doesn't care how much money you make. It ranks websites purely on the website. This means the companies who are ranking on the 1st page for your key terms may not be the same companies you pitch against when trying to win business. From an SEO perspective it's important not to get too caught up in the competitors you are aware of.
A keyword gap analysis is a really useful piece of the discovery process as it compares the keywords that you and your competitors rank for and it shows you where you share keywords, what those rankings are and also where there are potential gaps. This is only as useful as the competitors' websites. If a competitor has a really poor website then you are not going to get much useful information out at this stage.
My recommendation is try and pick websites that you know rank well for very relevant terms as then you will find more opportunities and useful information. A SEMRush keyword gap analysis looks like the below. You can actually conduct this analysis for both organic keywords and Paid keywords too to give you a sense of where competitors are bidding using Google Ads.
AHREFS is a really powerful SEO tool, similar to SEMRush, they are essential bitter rivals...well I may have over egged that, but my point is a lot of people use one or other as they do the same thing.
I mainly use SEMRush just based on preference but one tool that I really like in AHREFS is the Link Intersect tool. What this tool enables you to is essentially compare multiple domains or URLs and look at the comparative backlinks. This allows you to spot potential gaps and opportunities for an overall domain or for one piece of content.
You can use this tool to create a 'Hit List' of links that you would like to obtain.In order to take advantage of this tool, enter the domains of your SEO competitors (the websites ranking in the top 3 for your main target keywords) and build a list of link opportunities. This is where they link to the other domains but don't link to your domain.
Using the organic research tab in SEMRush you can see which pieces of content are performing the best from an SEO perspective for your competitors. You then have all the information you need along with the content they have written to basically generate a hit list of content that out-performs the existing one, creating this type of content hit list means you can not only benefit from greater exposure, but also potentially taking traffic away from a competitors website.Below is an example looking at www.monday.com. I have filtered the results to only show pages that are located in the /blog subfolder of their website. This then shows me which of their articles are estimated to drive the most organic traffic to their website.
Once you have identified some top performing content from multiple competitors you can start to formulate a content plan and briefs for a content writer to follow to out-perform this content. You can also use the link intersect tool mentioned above to check if there are any important backlinks these articles have going to them.
Now we have the data from our initial audit we need to put it together into a cohesive SEO plan. Thankfully an SEO plan is based on priorities & content production and it can be pretty much templated, you just need to use the strategy and the information you have collected in the discovery phase to build out the specifics of the SEO plan.
Using your keyword research you should be able to get an idea of the questions that people are asking online and therefore you will get an idea of the content you should be producing.
A lot of the success of a b2b seo strategy comes down to content. This is purely because Google Search gives priority to the most useful websites. Useful websites can be classified as those that answer users' questions the best. This is where content comes into play.
Here is an example content plan and a template you can use.
An example of the structure of a topic cluster can be seen below in this image created by SEMRush, you can read more about them here.
Once you have created a content plan using your preferred tool such as Google Sheets or Airtable etc you should use a tool such as Surfer SEO to build AI generated content briefs so that you are creating content that will actually rank, rather than just guessing.
An SEO content brief is a brief for a content writer that tells them how to construct the page in a way that is optimised for the words in the keyword mapping document. need to use SEMRush or something similar to conduct your keyword research.
Step 1: Pick your main keyword from your keyword map
Step 2: Open up Surfer SEO and create a new AI SEO brief
That's how easy it is to create an SEO content brief. Tools like Surfer SEO now use AI to tell you which terms to use in your page, how many times to use
Create content for every audience segment. This is one of the principles mentioned at the start of this guide and this is where it comes into play. When you are designing the structure of your website you should always include a page for every segment you serve. Ignore the fact it may seem simplified and repetitive. An example landing page can be seen below on the Team4 website:
I know there is a huge amount of information on this web-page but hopefully even if a small amount of it is useful to you then it has done its job well! If you have any questions feel free to drop us a message or if you'd like us to do the work for you then of course let us know.
Create content for every audience segment. This is one of the principles mentioned at the start of this webpage and this is where it comes into play. When you are designing the structure of your website you should always include a page for every segment you serve. Ignore the fact it may seem simplified and repetitive.
I know there is a huge amount of information on this web-page but hopefully even if a small amount of it is useful to you then it has done its job well! If you have any questions feel free to drop us a message or if you'd like us to do the work for you then of course let us know.
Using your keyword mapping document
At this point with all of your keyword research data, writing the content should be straightforward. We recommend using AI tools to help you write your SEO content. You should use your content briefs.
An important thing to remember with writing content for search engines is aligning all of the elements on the page so it makes sense. This includes your page title (what you see in a browser tab), the meta description (what you see in a Google results page) and then the H1 heading (the main page heading) along with all the smaller headings on the page and then the actual content under those headings.
After all has been done it is important to measure and track your SEO performance over time. Just like any performance monitoring there are different metrics to keep track of, some leading indicators such as impressions and lagging indicators such as leads & revenue generated.
These are three SEO tools we use to measure the performance of our campaigns. Two of them are free tools (Google Analytics and Google Search Console), the other is a paid tool (SEMRush).
GSC is great for measuring leading indicator metrics such as the number of impressions and clicks you receive from Google. It is also a free tool which is great and you can get some really useful insights from it.
SEMRush is a professional SEO tool used by agencies and SEO specialists. Using it you can keep track of your technical, off-site and on-site SEO performance. You can also track your rankings for specific keywords in all the different regions of the world. It is most frequently used by SEO specialists to monitor technical SEO health and keyword rankings.
Keyword rankings in search engines are a leading indicator for the amount of traffic a website receives. A website that ranks #1 for a keyword would typically get more traffic than a website ranking #10 or outside the top 10.
That is why a ranking can be a leading indicator of traffic, especially when a website ranks outside the top 100, as it increases in rankings you will gradually assume
Google Analytics is another great free tool for measuring your Organic SEO performance as you can see your organic increase over time (hopefully). If you want some more specific advice on which metrics and KPIs to monitor over time you can read our guide on b2b metrics.
There is a lot of information in this blog post and probably too much to take in at once. The most important points to take away from this guide and the principles of B2B SEO. You should always focus on creating useful, educational content that is engaging and produced with care. Produce this content for all the available audience segments you want to attract to your website and that will provide a great foundation for your SEO strategy.
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