How I work with SaaS companies to create their SEO strategy
I’ve worked with 15 SaaS companies over the past three years on SEO strategy.
That’s not surprising right? I’m a content specialist and Founders know that they need to “tick off” organic search as a growth strategy.
But what is surprising, is that in 14 out of 15 companies I am not the first person they’ve hired for an SEO strategy. Many had technical audits, lists of recommendations and keyword data that they’d paid another agency/freelancer to create.
In fact, the only company that didn’t was a brand new startup that didn’t even have a website yet (i.e. a project when you can start with SEO best practice from day one, which is rare).
Those strategies hadn’t worked (even though some were really quite good) and that’s why the companies were coming to me. I believe there are three key reasons why this is, but before I get into that, I want to explain exactly how I work with SaaS companies who are looking for an SEO strategy.
The reason why I’ve built this process is exactly that: because I want this SEO strategy to be the one that works.
Have a read through how I work with SaaS companies on their SEO strategy and hopefully it’ll become clear why I believe this is the game changer for most companies.
1. I experience your site as a user
When we’re still chatting about remit and what you’re aiming for, I go and experience your site as a user. This is because I want to see it with fresh eyes before you tell me what you’re trying to achieve.
I’ll make a page of notes of things like “bad URL structure”, “can’t find the blog” and so on, which are blindingly obvious when you’re looking at a website for the first time, but become blind to you when you’re looking at the site everyday.
2. The customer research call
This is the most insightful and important part of creating your SEO strategy. I hold a 60-90 minute call with anyone who is close to your customers. This is almost always the Founder(s) and a mix of SDRs, customer support specialists and marketing folk.
In this research call I lead a Q&A designed to find out everything you know so far about your customers or potential customers. Here are examples of two important things I’ve discovered on past customer research calls:
That while one company labelled their product as an “AI backed tool for marketing automation” almost all customers were calling it a “heatmapping tool”. This is a very important insight for SEO as if you aren’t ranking somewhere for what your customers currently call your solution, they can’t find you in search results.
That customers of one SaaS company thought they needed one type of security product, but would always later realise they actually needed another. Again, perfect SEO insight. Straight away I knew the search terms we needed to target and the education that would be needed in buyer’s guides to help bust this myth and convert customers.
In both examples above I gained insight that isn’t possible from just doing keyword research or auditing your existing website.
Therefore the customer research call provides a wealth of ideas of content topics, category titles and buyer questions that I can then go and explore further from a data perspective.
Sometimes I’ll also follow this internal call by getting on the phone with 2-3 of your actual customers. This isn’t always needed, but can prove insightful - especially if there’s a misalignment with category terms like in the examples above.
3. SEO audit (technical and/or content)
If you have any existing content (landing pages, website, blog etc.) then an audit is usually needed before we create any new content.
This is to avoid cannibalisation - one of the biggest issues I see on websites today. This is when someone (usually a blog writer) creates a ton of content on the same topics or keywords. Google struggles to know which is the master piece and the result is a bunch of low-performing content rather than one or two really strong guides, supported by related, but different, topic clusters.
For larger sites, or sites that feel as though they’re experiencing issues, a technical audit may also be required where we pick up on issues around pagination, URL structure, broken links etc.
4. Competitor research
Competitor research is a useful part of SEO strategy as I want to look at how similar companies are approaching keywords. However this certainly isn’t the main place where I go for ideas on an SEO strategy. Google results pages are very competitive and you can’t become the leader in search by just regurgitating what everyone else is doing.
You have to go after your key category terms and find opportunities that no one else is considering if you want to lead in search and use organic as a scalable engine for growth.
5. Content buckets and keyword research
At this stage I know three things:
How your customers think about buying your product and the layman terms they use when looking for a solution like yours
How your competitors are organising their sites and what keywords they’re ranking for
Which content topics might be fruitful to explore for your company
At this stage I go deep into keyword research and data. This section of the strategy usually takes me about three full working days - and about 10 Google sheets ! I need to explore 15-20 different keyword buckets and once I can see the data, I then whittle this down to the 5-10 I think are going to be most profitable for your company.
Here I’m looking for a good balance between volume, competition and relevancy.
As an example, if a keyword gets thousands of searches per month but you have zero chance of competing in the top three pages of Google for it, then the effort may not be worth the results. There’s usually a sweet spot between competition, volume and relevancy and this is where I pinpoint the opportunities to go after.
6. - Sense check -
At this stage I have a rough idea of what keywords and concepts I think your content library needs to cover and where they should live - whether that’s on your homepage, landing pages or in blog content.
I like to do a sense check here which is usually a 30-60 minute call where I walk you through my findings and doublecheck the direction of keywords and topics. You know your company best and if I’ve done my job well I find the Founders/marketers get very excited on this call. This is because as well as covering “basics” like are we ranking for your category name?, have you covered layman terms?, are most of the basic customer search questions answered in your content?, there’s also plenty of ideas beyond this too.
This is the magic for me - taking the insight from the customer research call, running the data on it and adding a little bit of creativity to come up with a content plan for your company that no competitor will be able to replicate.
7. Content plan
Now I have the green light I turn everything above into a very specific content plan. I’m usually talking about a spreadsheet that has a list of every page or blog that needs creating and exactly what goes into it including:
Article or page to create
Meta description and title of page
Keywords to target
Intent of page
URL structure
Where that page lives in relation to other content
Internal linking from that page to/from other pages
The idea here is to make it as easy and accessible as possible for you/your team to actually execute on the content strategy I’ve created.
If you have a lot of legacy content this will also detail how you need to improve, merge or cull that existing content to ensure you have the best chance of ranking possible. This can be quite complex so sometimes I’ll do a separate call with the team responsible for gatekeeping existing content to ensure they know what they’re working towards.
8. Writer briefs
I then take the content plan one step further and create individual writer briefs for each page/blog post. Here, I provide more depth around the search intent the page needs to target, what to include (for example specific questions that need answering), headings and title tag/meta description info again.
Similarly to the above, this is to make it as easy as possible for your team, or even a freelance writer, to be able to act on the strategy and write content that will actually rank.
9. Delivery of strategy
At this stage I deliver all of the materials - the content plan, the writer briefs and the raw data for you to refer back to. I also include a “keyword short list” which makes it easy for you to track the results of the strategy, or to plug into a tool like SEMRush and monitor over time.
Once delivered we usually have another quick call or an email back-and-forth so I can answer any questions you might have on the finalised strategy.
10. Follow up support?
This really depends on the company and what resource/SEO knowledge you have. For some clients I become an interim Head of Content, managing the delivery of the strategy up to the point where all of the content is live and showing results.
For other clients where they have a robust marketing team who gets SEO, they can take the strategy and deliver it with minimal support required.
Regardless of how much support a client needs I’ll always check in again six months later. After all, I need to know that my SEO strategy was the one that worked! And on that note, as I mentioned at the start of the article there are usually three reasons why my (or any) SEO strategy doesn’t work:
It gives analysis but not direction
I find that most SEO agencies/freelancers provide a list of recommendations of what needs fixing/changing on a site but not actually the guidance on how to do this. That’s why my content plan and writer briefs are essential steps in helping a company go from strategy to delivery.
The company didn’t follow through on the recommendations
I had one client come back to me a year later and say the strategy hadn’t worked. I was really saddened by this and set out to investigate what had happened. Turns out, they’d only implemented 5% of the strategy. Which is why they weren’t seeing results. SEO strategies really need commitment and follow-through and they take a bit of time to show results. Unfortunately if you can’t commit to the strategy you really won’t get much out of asking someone to create it for you.
The writing resource is poor
Unfortunately there are many writers out there who don’t understand SEO and/or are paid by the word which means they produce very thin, poor content which struggles to rank and help a company achieve its search potential. My writer briefs are designed to help mitigate this but the companies who grow well via organic search are usually the ones who have good writers on board who know the product/industry and also understand the basics of SEO.
With all of that in mind, if you’re a company who is ready to look at organic search as a serious channel for growth I would love to work with you. Despite this being a fairly long blogpost, my SEO strategies take around 6 weeks to deliver from the point of customer research call, which means that in a few months time you could be actioning the content that’s going to help more customers find you through search.
If that sounds exciting please get in touch! It’s beth@builtbycontent.com or fill in the form here.