Why is SEO important for selling a SaaS company?

There are a few reasons why SEO is important for selling a SaaS company. When done right, SEO can help your SaaS business to:

• Attract more buyers. When potential buyers are looking for SaaS companies to buy, they can use search engines as part of their research. If your website ranks well for business and product-relevant keywords, you’ll be more likely to show up in their search results and attract their attention. Should anyone search for a primary business keyword and you show up in search engine results, it will indicate that your SEO is working.
• Help you increase your asking price. Buyers are willing to pay more for SaaS companies that have a strong SEO foundation. This is because it will cost them less to optimize it further. It’s a completely different situation when you have to save a domain that has applied a lot of black-hat SEO tactics. Or to redo all the website content and pages because the content on the website has nothing to do with the product (it drives traffic, but does not reach the right audiences). 

In a nutshell, a well-optimized website will attract more customers and generate more revenue.

• It can help instill confidence and trust. When buyers see that your website is well-optimized, they’ll be more confident in your business and more likely to move forward with the sale. The opposite will happen if they see that you’ve used SEO tactics to appear as if your website is successful. It will look like you’ve done this to inflate your numbers because you want to sell. Your potential buyers might believe that you are trying to deceive them.

What is SEO due diligence?

• SEO due diligence is the process of evaluating a website’s SEO health and ranking potential.
• It involves checking for technical errors, content quality, and off-page factors.
• The goal is to identify any potential problems that could be hindering the website’s performance in search engines.
• It’s to determine the quality of the website traffic you are receiving and how much effort it will take to grow it further once it’s been sold.  

How do you do SEO due diligence?

Here are a few things you can do to do your SEO due diligence:

• Audit your website. Check for technical SEO issues. Review your content and keyword performance to understand if the content is actually driving value to your business, or is it purely there to generate traffic with no thought of whether relevant or irrelevant audiences are visiting your website?
• Analyze your website’s backlink profile. Link building is a common service to outsource to agencies. Not all of them offer the same quality. Even if you trust an agency to do this for you, it’s your responsibility to ensure that you are getting good quality, industry-relevant backlinks for your website.
• Check for technical SEO issues. Technical SEO issues can prevent your website from ranking well in SERPs. You can use a tool like SEMrush to check for technical SEO issues on your website.
• Get a professional SEO audit. If you’re not sure how to do your SEO due diligence, you can hire a professional SEO company to do it for you.

Doing your SEO due diligence is an important part of selling your SaaS company. By following the tips above, you can make sure that your website is in good shape and that you’re getting the most out of your SEO efforts.

The post What exactly is SEO due diligence, and why is it important for you and your investors? appeared first on saas.group.

The most likely causes are:

• Little time and resources available for content creation
• Lack of knowledge
• Not high enough importance assigned internally
• No testing and reviewing performance
• Old-school SEO tactics

I totally get how time-consuming and costly good content creation can be, so you cannot blame businesses for looking for faster and more affordable ways to create it.

ChatGPT, Jasper AI, Notion AI and Google’s new Bard, can certainly help to make content production faster, but the technologies aren’t perfect yet.

Tip: To save time with your content production, figure out how AI tools can help you with your existing process or where they can be used while your content team moves to editing and fact-checking tasks.

Before you create your content, you need to come up with good SaaS blog topics, that will be memorable, resonate with people, and stand a chance to rank in search engines. The AI tools will not be able to give you the best blog topics, yet. I explain how you can use AI tools below.

5 tactics to select better blog topics for your saas website (and what to avoid):

1. Tap into your client service data.

Your client service team can have some valuable insights for you. Ask for a list of common questions or remarks from your customers. This information makes it easy to come up with educational and how-to blog post ideas that will appeal to your target audience and help your current customers as well. These are great to share in your newsletters too.

2. Define what topics you want to be associated with and if there is a clear connection between these topics and your software.

Don’t choose blog topics simply for the purpose of selling your product. Blog content should be relatable to the people who use or want to use your product. To make your blog topics relatable, you have to understand your target audience’s problems and needs and explain how your software helps with those problems.

Don’t use AI to generate topics for your blog. Rather, ask it to list common problems or challenges that your target audience faces, and then use that as inspiration to come up with your own blog topic.

3. Do not go for broad content topics because Notion is doing so.

There are many large SaaS brands that create the “Best [insert topic] that you can use in 2023 ” posts.

An important thing to understand here is that such brands’ search volume, authority, and website are so popular that they can rank well in search engines for very broad or unrefined topics. Unfair, yes, but this is how it works.

What ends up happening is that people see that these brands rank for this type of content, and they proceed to create their own version of the same thing. So you end up saying something completely generic that the search engines already have collected about the topic.

If you aren’t such a big brand, you should spend time refining your blog topic by adding more detail and making it more specific. For example: instead of choosing a broad title like “How SaaS brands can pick better topics for their blogs” you can make it “How smaller SaaS brands can pick better topics for their blogs” or “How to choose blog topics if you are a new business in a competitive industry”.

4. Use PPA data

You can make use of Google’s People Also Ask data, but take it a step further.

Type a broader search term (we call these “seed keywords”) into Google Search and review the questions that pop up under the People Also Ask accordion. If you like a particular question, you can click on it. It will expand. More related questions will pop up on the list.

You can use the questions in this list as a QA (question and answer) blog post topic. You can either use 1 question as the topic for the whole post or select multiple questions that are closely related and then form an overarching topic around it as your blog topic.

5. Gather insights from your keyword data.

Don’t select a keyword from your keyword list to create an article about. Rather, take a step back and look for common topics and trends within the keyword data. For example, if you see that there are many terms that are about the same thing, maybe just rephrased, you could create a blog post or guide on the overall topic. Given that you ensure that the various keywords are used in specific paragraphs within the copy.

Best SEO based on your budget:

If you have a large budget, you can create more content and experiment more. In this case, you can afford (pun intended) to throw something at the wall and see what sticks. You can then double down on what works and resonates with your audience.

If you have a smaller budget you should rather opt for selecting evergreen blog topics that you can create long-form posts with. Posting five blog posts of 2000+ words with very specific topics will be more valuable than 100 blog posts of 600 words each that target broader topics.

Here’s a checklist for evaluating blog topics::

• What blog topics do you want to associate with your brand?
• Are you already an authority on some of these topics?
• If you have blog content already, which posts get the most traffic?
• Get the most engagement?
• Get both the most traffic and engagement?
• Which blog topics lead to conversions?
• When you type the blog topic into Google, what brands are ranking in the top organic search results? Can you compete with these brands?
• Does the topic address your target audience’s pain points, needs, and interests?
• Does the topic offer a unique perspective on industry trends or news?
• Does the topic address common customer questions or concerns?
• Does the topic offer solutions to challenges faced by your customers?
• Are there high-traffic keywords related to the topic that you can incorporate into your content?
• Is the topic visually appealing and easy to read?
• Does the topic fit with the overall goals and messaging of your brand?
• Does the topic align with your SEO and content marketing strategies?

By considering these factors, you can choose better blog topics that resonate with your audience and help you achieve your business goals.

Listen to an episode of saas.unbound with Geoff Roberts @Outseta where he shares how the blog has been helping the business acquire users and

The post How SaaS blogs can select content topics for their SEO goals and business objectives appeared first on saas.group.

Is keyword research still important?

Keyword research is still important for SaaS SEO, but I usually see people either focusing on it too much or not at all. Both approaches can have some bad consequences. It’s important to strike the right balance. Below are some of the outcomes if you don’t.

If you focus on keywords too much:

It’s likely that you’ll start building your content around keyword concepts instead of topics that are important to your users.

How to avoid it: You have to understand your audience and product first and foremost. Then do your keyword research. Don’t select keywords just because of search volume and keyword difficulty; select keywords that are relevant to your product and offers. This will be a lot easier when you understand the product, its features, customer needs, and pain points.

The keywords that are highly relevant to your product and that have good search volumes are your most important keywords when you start the SEO campaign. Only over time, if you track your keyword rankings and correlate them with your traffic and conversions, will you be able to identify which keywords bring in traffic, which keywords and content are more likely to generate sales, and which do both.

If you simply create content and do not focus on keywords at all

You will end up cannibalizing your own pages because you end up with too many blog posts targeting the same topic and keywords. Search engines end up crawling and indexing these posts, but then have to decide which post to serve in search results for the search queries.

How to avoid it: You can have posts about the same topic if there is a clear and different purpose for the post.

For example:

1. Structure topics like this:

• Cost-saving business software for startups
• Cost-saving business software for small businesses.

1. Do not structure topics like this:

• Cost-saving business software for startups
• Affordable business software for startups

Example A has a clear audience and purpose for the post.

Example B caters to the same audience, and the keywords “affordable” and “cost-saving” are too similar. It will be seen as the same message by search engines. Even if the content you write is slightly different, there most likely won’t be a clear, standalone purpose for each post.

You will also miss out on important pain points and information that users are looking for. Thinking you know your audience so well that you don’t need to do keyword research is a big mistake. In the many years that I’ve been doing SEO, I’m still surprised by what people search for online. I’ve learned to not make any assumptions.

Important takeaway

There is a lot to say about keyword research, but the main point is that users enter search terms into search engines. Search engines provide us (marketers) with information about the keywords (such as search volume and impressions), helping us determine which terms are more popular.

Use keywords to improve your content and monitor your search engine visibility. It should help inform your blog content creation efforts, but it should not be the only factor when it comes to choosing blog topics.

When I start an SEO campaign and it gets to the blog content creation part, I let the content strategists decide on the topics and I share the keyword insights with them. I then proceed to identify which of the existing blog posts should be improved, optimized, or removed from the website.

Over time, as you optimize the content and refine it even further, you learn what resonates with your audience and what doesn’t. This is the way to go about it if you really care about making your blog a go-to place that people want to visit, read, and even subscribe to. If that’s not your goal, and you want traffic in the shortest amount of time possible, then you do programmatic SEO.

Although, these aren’t mutually exclusive. You can do both at the same time. If you want both speed and quality, do both if your resources and budgets allow it. But you won’t know what keywords and content really work if you don’t take the time to analyze and learn from what you’ve done.

Study your data, gather insights

Use keyword insights as a guide. Blog post keywords are different from landing page keywords. The way you optimize for it is different.

How keywords can be used with blog post topics

Step 1: Choose your blog post topic, based on a combination of knowing your audience, their pain points, values, psychographics, etc. If you feel stuck here, you can look at competitor websites or use ChatGPT to help you brainstorm ideas and get your creative juices flowing. Don’t copy outright, it won’t help you create anything that resonates with your audience.

Step 2: Based on the known values, psychographics, and other characteristics of your users, select the sections of your post. Determine how your product slots into your chosen topic. Decide if this is going to be a “promotional” post or an “informational” post. If it’s promotional, mention your product more throughout the post, if it’s informational, avoid pushing the product in front of the user and naturally include it as a solution at the appropriate time by mentioning it only once or twice or not at all.

Step 3: Bring your keyword research insights and this information together. Determine the set of keywords that would best go with the topic and sections covered in the blog post. Have the SEO specialist optimize it before you publish it. You’ve created content for people that search engines will also love.

Getting the right balance takes time. Don’t believe anyone who says they know exactly what will work when they start a SaaS SEO campaign. SEO experts have experience in the field, which means they’ve probably used similar strategies before. They have learned from them, which greatly aids in saving time and money for your campaign. However, your product and audience are still unique, so it’s crucial to understand what works and what doesn’t for your readers.

Tune in to the saas.unbound episode with Stefan Avram, co-founder and Head of Growth @Wundergraph to learn how the blog has become one of the biggest user acquisition channels for the company.

The post The significance of keyword research for SaaS blogs appeared first on saas.group.

It’s a common narrative that you can’t bootstrap your business off of SEO, but the reality is actually different. Some brands have done it. But it’s a few and far between because so much has to align for you for that to happen. Let’s take a closer look.

Your industry matters

It really depends on your industry and your internal setup as a business as well. I mean, some industries just naturally get shared more, and certain products are more glamorous in the consumers’ eyes.

So for that reason, they get a lot more backlinks naturally. And again, like a lot of brand mentions, because of that, it’s not the same for every business. I mean, you can be in a business category that is classified as a boring industry. It doesn’t immediately mean that you can’t appeal to a big market. It could be the reason, however, that people don’t talk about it online as much.

Is SEO important for your brand?

• Do you think it could be easier at the same time for “boring” businesses? If a certain company is exceptionally strong in SEO and talks about stuff like accounting and CRM giving, very detailed tutorials and instructions on how to use the product and how to succeed in this kind of space. Would it still give them an advantage?

The short answer is Yes. SEO is important to do for any sort of brand or website. In terms of how much it will be prioritized, that depends on quite a few factors like your product, if you have a team, and what budgets you have.

Doing SEO on a tight budget

If you’re very, very tight on budget, that means you’re going to have to be very creative with how you’re going to access your audience and get your product in front of the right people.

In the beginning, that would mean that you would have to forego some of the bigger growth stuff like content creation, for example. That requires quite a lot of planning and resources that you’d need for that if you want to do that at scale.

On a side note, I would recommend being careful using AI tools to create content. I don’t think that will really work or add value. I just think it’s important for all sorts of brands to at least get the basics right at SEO. So that when their website is published, search engines are at least able to crawl and index them and understand what the website is about.

You can’t start with content if you don’t have the basics in place. I’m not talking about any of the more aggressive SEO growth tactics or anything, just getting the foundations and the best practices in place.

Prioritize

Depending on your industry and also your business goals, you have to get your priorities straight.

Let’s say you have a product. It’s great but not really unique. Let’s say it’s a CRM. There are a lot of CRM options available. So how do you as a new brand stand out and get organic traffic in a cluttered space? On the flip side, it’s totally different when you create something innovative. Then it’s a different challenge because there might not be search volumes for what you’ve done. Maybe it even requires new terminology. In this case, you almost have to tap into existing spaces, but then at the same time, double down on educating people about your solution.

To get to the basics, they are a must if you want your website to serve as the tool it is intended to be. Then, once you’re ready to prioritize this channel, you can go all in because half-assing it won’t do the job. And this is the best time to get SEO specialists involved, too. Not because you absolutely can’t do it alone but because they’ll save a lot of time for you. A professional SEO manager knows exactly where to look and how to develop an actionable strategy that will serve your purpose.

Take a data-first approach, never assume

• Let’s assume I’m a bootstrapping solo founder with no budget for SEO. I went to keyword.com and ahrefs.com and I know the keywords that I want to work with. What do I do next? Do I just try to use these words as much as possible on my website?

So, this is something that I’ve realized after years in the industry. Never assume you know your keywords.

You would just naturally assume that in a certain industry, people will look for certain things. Never assume, research is your best friend here. Because then when you actually go and see what people are searching for and what descriptions they are using, you’ll see that your assumptions are usually off.

The example that I’m going to give you is of a product – a nutrition drink, that I actually worked with. It’s a simple shake-and-go kind of thing, the convenience is there and the nutritional value is there, so the first assumption you make is that this product is for someone who’s into sports, maybe follows a diet, and whatnot. With this target audience in mind, we started working on the SEO campaign, only to realize that busy moms use this product, too, and a lot. It makes complete sense, right? And we were shooting ourselves in the foot, completely abandoning this huge market.

That’s why I’m saying, never assume and never just start producing a ton of content without prior research. This will help you understand the exact features people are looking to use and the problems they want to solve.

This is also something to keep in mind if you’re hiring an SEO specialist. It’s not a quick hack that they’re supposed to do. There are no quick hacks in the SEO industry. Blackhat SEO exists, of course, but there are consequences. Google may not pick up what you’re doing at first but then there are also your competitors who look at your pages, as any competitor would do.

How to select keywords when you don’t have an SEO specialist

Be very selective and transparent in SEO. You may not see the results of your work affect your audience or even the search engines immediately. But what you can do is track everything that you’re doing to make sure you know what brings the results later on and double your attention to this.

Backlinks

• What are backlinks and why is everyone talking about needing to have them (and a lot of them) for the business one way or another?

Building backlinks is a mundane task. It’s probably something that you’ll hate all the way from the start. And I’ve seen companies that have backlinks that are 100% irrelevant and even harmful to the business. It’s also something that created two rival groups within the SEO community. Some people believe exactly what Google says. And that is that their systems are clever enough to tell good lınks apart from bad ones. To the extent that you don’t have to worry about the bad ones anymore.

I have a totally different opinion on that, though. I do believe that it has an impact because I’ve seen it. I’ve definitely dealt with enough scenarios where I had to fix those things to think that Google will just ignore them.

If you follow this closely, you’ll see how Google contradicts itself regarding the best practices when it comes to bad backlinks or what to do with them. I mean, how would Google system know where it’s your SEO specialist or yourself went and bought these spammy low-quality links or if it’s the competitors that have done it for you? How would they know who went to Fiverr to buy 1000 backlinks? Anyone can log a ticket like that. So how would they know whether you ordered it or not? There’s just no way.

Unfortunately, it does happen quite often that the link-building stuff is so tricky. And from time to time there are some benefits from having even the spammy links, at least, at the very beginning. It works until it doesn’t, and then you have to go all the way to point zero and do the work you were supposed to do, anyway. Only by this time your reputation and your ranking are both under the radar.

• Should I list my project on all the websites that collect business listings to generate a lot of quality backlinks? And should I have unique descriptions for all of them?

Well, I wish it was a yes or no kind of question, but again it’s a bit more complicated than that. The first thing that I’d do is actually go to all those websites and try to analyze if it would make sense to have a listing on each particular one. Then, if you’re pressed for time and I only have one description, I’d still try and use it everywhere. Given that later on, I’ll come back to optimize those descriptions to make them relevant.

Remember, that it’s not only the relevance for the platform you’re looking for, it’s also the relevance for the audience it’s serving.

One more thing to keep in mind is that if you’re just after branded search, you want people to see the reviews for your company, exact same descriptions won’t hurt you. If a product category is what you want to focus on then have as many different descriptions as possible.

I’d say, don’t stress it too much, you can always come back to optimizing your listing later. But not doing it altogether is definitely a lost opportunity.

• Could it be something bootstrapped businesses start with to build an online presence with zero budget?

I wouldn’t consider only SEO in this case. Remember that if you list your business on every platform possible you also give people an opportunity to contact you on those platforms. Someone will have to reply to the messages and comments, and this someone is probably you. And if you abandon your listings after posting you will be criticized by allowing this to ruin the perception of your company.

This could harm you and it had nothing to do with SEO. My best advice is to keep a list of the most relevant platforms, post there, reply, and use this opportunity to grow a community and show that you care. Otherwise, you’re asking for trouble and making replying to comments your second job. And the one you’re not good at.

Choose platforms that make sense for your business. Better focus on more niche ones than try to stand out in the broader, more generic spaces.

As you can see, there are many things to consider based on your personal scenario. And it’s a cliche thing to say but whether or not SEO can be your primary source of leads depends on many different things. However, as I mentioned earlier, not doing SEO at all means shooting yourself in the foot, and who’d benefit from that?

The post SEO for bootstrapped businesses appeared first on saas.group.