Welcome to my actionable roadmap for B2B SaaS SEO. In this guide, I’ll teach you the exact process I’ve used to help clients like BVNK grow organic traffic by 127% in just six months – by focusing on valuable lead-driving commercial keywords.
I’m a content strategist with over 10 years of experience in blogging, content marketing, journalism, and working with tech clients. I currently run two profitable blogs, while helping clients grow their businesses with content that drives organic leads – not just traffic.
Why Does SEO Matter For B2B SaaS Brands?
As a marketing leader in B2B SaaS, you’re always looking for ways to drive more qualified leads and grow your business.
Perhaps you’re already investing in marketing channels like paid advertising, content marketing, and social media. Is SEO worth your time and effort?
The truth is – SEO is a critical component of any successful B2B SaaS marketing strategy. Here’s why:
#1. Your target audience is searching for solutions online
It’s your job to ensure that your company’s website appears at the top of search engine results pages when potential customers search for solutions to their problems.
By investing in SEO, you can increase visibility and attract more of the right leads to your site.
#2. SEO provides long-term, scalable results
One of the biggest advantages of SEO for B2B SaaS marketers is that it provides long-term, sustainable results.
Paid advertising campaigns may bring instant results, but they stop generating leads as soon as you stop funding them. In contrast, good SEO can continue to drive organic traffic to your site for months or even years after the initial work is done.
By investing in SEO now, you can lay the foundations for a scalable, predictable source of leads and revenue for your business over the long term.
#3. SEO establishes your brand as a thought leader
Establishing your brand as a thought leader in your industry is key to building trust and credibility with potential customers.
When your website consistently ranks high in search results for relevant keywords, it sends a strong signal that you’re a knowledgeable and authoritative source of information.
Creating high-quality, informative content that addresses your target audience’s pain points and challenges is one of the best ways to position your brand as a go-to resource and attract more qualified leads to your site.
What’s Different About B2B SaaS SEO?
There’s a major difference between SEO for B2B SaaS and B2C SEO.
With B2B, you typically have to convince several key decision-makers before you make a sale. So your content has to first understand who these decision-makers are, and then target their key pain points.
In contrast, B2C content only has to convince one person: the end consumer.
Understanding The Marketing Funnel
Building your B2B SaaS SEO strategy calls for an understanding of how search behavior fits in with the marketing funnel. That includes optimizing for keyword opportunities at the top, middle, and bottom of the funnel. Here’s what that typically looks like.
Top of Funnel
At the start of the customer journey, target informational keywords to attract business searchers and build awareness. For example:
- Industry terminology
- General process keywords (“order management system”)
- Thought leadership topics
Focus on driving traffic to blog posts, ebooks, case studies, and other educational assets.
Middle of Funnel
In the consideration phase, keywords become more solution-oriented to capture those evaluating specific needs. You can optimize for terms like:
- Product/feature keywords (“inventory API”)
- Competitor brand names
- Common pain point phrases (e.g. how to improve email bounce rates”)
Then, direct this search traffic towards capability and comparison pages.
Bottom of Funnel
The keyword intent gets highly transactional when the searcher is near the final purchase stages. This is typically where you’ll convert most of your leads. To target these valuable searches, you should create pages around keywords like:
- Category comparison keywords (e.g. Best X for Y)
- Direct head-to-head comparisons (e.g. X vs Y)
- Alternatives to X / X alternatives
- Platform integrations (e.g. “works with X”)
- Pricing and free trials (e.g. “$20/month plan”)
You can often funnel these high-intent visitors to pricing pages, demo requests, and account signup forms. But keep in mind, that blog post formats can also work well for these keywords. You should always check what your competitors are doing to determine the best format before creating the content.
My Revenue-First Approach
Common SEO wisdom often recommends targeting high-volume informational keywords first, in a bid to increase your traffic. But search intent is what really matters here. Most of those informational searches don’t display buying intent. So although your traffic may go up, your leads probably won’t.
My approach to B2B SaaS SEO turns this approach on its head. When building a new strategy for a client, I start by creating a foundation of content that targets lead-driving bottom-of-the-funnel keywords.
I don’t pay much attention to their search volume, as that’s not what matters here. Empty traffic without the correct intent doesn’t drive revenue. Once these foundations are created and published, they have a decent amount of runway to start ranking in search (and driving leads for the business).
Then, once we’ve published content targeting most of the important bottom-of-the-funnel keywords, I’ll start creating more thought leadership and other informational content to drive more traffic to the website.
9-Step Roadmap For Powerful B2B SaaS SEO
Here are the steps I follow each time when I build an SEO-driven content strategy for a new B2B SaaS client – so you can implement them for your own business.
#1. Technical Audit
I start each project with a technical audit of the client’s website. This takes a pragmatic approach, focusing on any major issues that risk holding back the upcoming SEO strategy.
Here are a few of the most important things to check for:
- Duplicate content
- Thin content (less than 500 words)
- Content not targeting any keywords
- Broken internal and external links
- Lack of clear internal linking structure
- Different versions of your website both ranking in search (i.e. both the www and non-www versions – you need to pick just one and redirect the other)
- No sitemap in place
- Slow site speed (often due to overly large image files)
- SSL certificate missing
Beware of SEO agencies that sell technical audits that simply involve generating a report from Ahrefs or Semrush. These reports tend to be full of minor issues that won’t make a huge difference to your site at this stage. My approach for B2B SaaS SEO is about what moves the needle for your business.
#2. Performance Benchmarking
Next, it’s important to analyze the current search traffic performance so we can benchmark for future improvements. I do this by running historical reports in both Google Search Console and Google Analytics, usually looking at the last six months of performance.
In Google Search Console, I first run a report that excludes branded search queries (i.e. your company name) from the performance results.
Branded search queries are good because they send a positive signal to Google, but they don’t factor into an SEO strategy. So at this stage, I leave them out of the equation and focus only on the non-branded queries driving traffic to your site.
#3. Existing Content Audit
Auditing and improving your existing content is a great way to get quick results in search. I call it the “low-hanging fruit”. That’s why every B2B SaaS SEO strategy should factor in time for the improvement of existing content.
If you already have a lot of old blog posts on your site, the best way to audit them is with Google Search Console or a tool like RankIQ.
First, you should compare the performance from the current six-month period with the previous six-month period. Look for the pieces of content that have lost the most organic clicks. Focus on improving these first.
#4. Customer Research
Once we’ve taken care of old content and fixed any technical issues, we’re ready to start mapping out new content that’s going to rank in search and bring in new leads.
But before we can do that, we need to understand what our customers are really looking for. This is an essential step in creating truly helpful SaaS content that resonates with the target audience. So don’t skip it.
If you’re building your SEO strategy in-house, then I recommend you schedule some time to interview your customer-facing teams, including sales, customer success, and support teams.
Ask them questions such as the following:
- What are the most common problems that customers and prospects encounter?
- Which of these problems can the product’s various features solve?
- How do leads currently encounter your product?
- Which competitors do customers often switch from or consider when choosing your product?
- Who are the key competitors in your industry?
- What sort of issues typically lead to customer churn?
#5. Competitor Analysis
Armed with this vital information about your customers, it’s time to perform a competitor analysis.
You might think you already know who your competitors are. But your competitors in the physical world or on social media may well be different from your competitors in the SERPs.
In SEO terms, your direct competitors are the sites ranking on Google’s front page for your most important keywords.
Key areas to analyze include:
- Keywords – Run a keyword gap analysis to find promising new opportunities and optimized terms they rank for that you could target too.
- Backlinks – Review the main site linking to competitors to find new link-building prospects. Focus on securing links from similar authoritative domains.
- Content – Examine your competitors’ top-performing pages and content formats. Evaluate the quality based on expertise, authoritativeness, trustworthiness, and usefulness. Identify their successful formats to emulate or gaps to fill with your own content efforts.
For more, here’s my detailed guide to SEO competitor analysis
#6. Keyword Research
When building a strategy for B2B SaaS SEO, you should focus on keywords targeting common problems that your customers face (that your product can solve).
We call these “Jobs To Be Done” or JTBD keywords. That’s why it’s so important to do the customer research in step 4. Here’s a rundown of additional keywords to focus on. All of these are bottom of the funnel, so they can start driving leads for your SaaS as soon as possible.
Best in Category Keywords
With these keywords, searchers are looking to evaluate a range of options and narrow down which one is best for their needs.
For example:
- best email marketing tools for small businesses
- best project management software for accountants
- best seo tools for enterprise
To tackle these keywords with your content, you need to answer the search intent by providing a thoughtfully constructed round-up of key competitors in the category (and don’t forget to mention your own product and why it’s better).
Here’s an example from one of my current clients.
Competitor Comparison Keywords
These usually come in the form of “X competitor vs Y competitor”. The searcher has already heard of those two brands, but they want to find out which one is best. This indicates an already high level of purchase intent – great for your conversions!
For example:
- “your brand vs X competitor”
- “your brand vs Y competitor”
- “your brand vs Z competitor”
When creating the content, first provide a detailed (and fair!) comparison of the two competitors (this satisfies search intent), then add a thoughtful segue into the specific ways that your solution is better.
Alternatives Keywords
“Alternatives” keywords show that the searcher wants an alternative product to an existing one (suggesting that something in the existing product doesn’t suit their needs).
These keywords offer an important opportunity to present your product as the best solution – which creates strong conversion potential.
For example:
- “alternatives to X brand”
- “alternatives to Y brand”
- “alternatives to Z brand”
The best way to tackle search intent for these keywords is to first provide a list of alternative products, then include your own product in the list (and make a strong case for why it’s better).
Jobs To Be Done (“How-to”) Keywords
These keywords don’t necessarily carry obvious purchase intent. Most JTBD keywords are classed as having informational intent.
The trick is to use JTBD keywords to target the pain points of your ideal clients, show them how to solve the problem, and then segue to your product as the best solution.
For example:
- how to build an seo strategy
- how to improve email bounce rates
- how to create a logo for your business
Your content has already shown them exactly how you can solve their pain point. So why wouldn’t they take the next step and solve it more comprehensively? That’s why targeting JTBD keywords should play a key role in your SaaS content strategy.
#7. Creating Content That Ranks
Once you’ve built up a list of promising keywords to target with your content, it’s time to start creating the content itself.
First, decide whether you’ll create the content in-house or hire external freelancers to handle it. If you’re hiring a freelance writer, then you’ll need to create well-optimized content briefs for each main target keyword.
For best results, a typical brief should include the following:
- Target word count range
- Suggested title/H1 (including main keyword)
- Sugegsted URL slug
- Target persona or ideal customer
- Description of search intent
- Suggested internal links
- Helpful external resources
- Outline heading structure (H2 headings)
- Brief explanation of what to include under each heading (bullet points are ok)
Use your target keyword strategically in your content. That doesn’t mean stuffing it everywhere, but instead working it naturally into these spots (to make sure Google knows what your article is about):
- Title/H1
- URL slug
- Meta description
- First paragraph of body text
- One or two of the H2 headings
- Once or twice in the text body (this should happen naturally as you write)
#8. Internal Linking
Building a strong internal linking structure is one of the most overlooked aspects of good SEO. It helps users navigate your content and helps Google’s search bots to understand your site.
The good news is – internal linking is totally in your control. As a rule of thumb, I recommend adding at least five outgoing internal links to other relevant content in each new post you publish. Then, make sure each new post has incoming internal links from at least five pieces of existing relevant content.
Your website should not contain any “orphan pages”. Every page should have at least several incoming and several outgoing internal links.
Maintaining relevancy is critical here. Think of internal linking as providing the user with another helpful resource to expand on or support the topic they’re currently reading about.
#9. Building External Links
The final piece of the puzzle is building external links (backlinks) to your content. This helps your site gain authority in the eyes of Google, which is critical for increasing your site’s visibility.
Hence, although great content should be at the heart of every B2B SaaS SEO strategy, external links also have their role to play. But external links can be difficult to get. After all, why should other site owners link to your site? You have to give them a good reason to do so.
Here are several strategies that I recommend for driving those early links:
- Digital PR: If you’ve got the budget, running a digital PR campaign is one of the best ways to secure powerful external links from large news organizations. Done properly, your content can reach lots of journalists and spread widely across the Internet.
- HARO (Help A Reporter Out): With HARO, you can get similar results to digital PR, but on a smaller scale and done manually. It’s best for companies with much smaller budgets, as there’ll be a fair bit of manual work involved. HARO sends out journalist queries and you send in your responses. If your comment gets published, the journalist typically links to your website.
- “Link bait” content: Targeting keywords in your industry, such as “email marketing statistics “, or “email marketing benchmarks” (replace email marketing with your main category) is a good way to attract external links. Journalists and other content writers will typically link to this content from other posts, resulting in more external links for your site.
Actionable Next Steps
Building an effective B2B SaaS SEO strategy calls for a wide range of factors, from detailed customer research to content that targets appropriate search intent.
Creating the right content is the biggest success factor in B2B SaaS SEO. If you follow the steps in this guide – go after the correct search intent, focus on leads before traffic, and create solid content following a clear plan, then you should see signs of success within months.
Find out how I helped other SaaS brands achieve great results
Book a call with me to discuss how I can help you.
