B2B SaaS SEO: 7-Step Guide to Win in 2023

Any successful SEO strategy rests on three poles: on-page, off-page, and technical optimization.

This post teaches you how to do all that, taking into account the particularities of the B2B SaaS landscape. We’ll show you:

• Actionable steps for each stage of the strategy
• Relevant tools you can use today
• Examples you can draw wisdom from

Let’s dive in with this question:

What Makes B2B SaaS SEO Different?

B2B SaaS SEO is unique because it deals with higher audience expertise, less customer loyalty, and a longer sales funnel.

The B2B SaaS industry is also riddled with volatility; your sector constantly evolves, and your competitors constantly improve their research and product functionality.

No pressure.

Here are the key points:

• Target audience: B2B SaaS companies typically target other businesses rather than individual consumers. That means your content should attract key business decision-makers and industry content creators.
• Long-term approach: Building a B2B brand’s awareness, trust, and expertise takes longer than for a B2C brand. That’s why you should create high-quality, valuable content that educates your audience and interests your industry’s creators.
• Technical requirements: B2B SaaS companies like yours need a secure website, SSL certificates, and other security measures.
• Competitive landscape: The B2B SaaS market is highly competitive, with many companies vying for the attention of the same target audience. And your rivals are constantly innovating. That’s why your SEO strategy should help you stand out.
• Sales-oriented approach: The primary goal of B2B SaaS SEO should be lead generation. Although you can set traffic increase as an objective, your SEO strategy should focus on converting those new website visitors into customers.

Step-by-Step B2B SEO Strategy for SaaS

You now have the right mindset and know the three basic pillars of your effective SEO strategy.

This section will show you all the practical steps of your SEO campaign that you can implement as soon as you finish reading this.

Let’s begin.

1. SEO Audit

Search engine optimization solves your current SEO-related issues.

That’s why the first step is conducting an SEO audit to find possible issues. You want to understand your website’s performance, user experience, and customer behavior.

And, more importantly, where the problems lie.

Here’s how to conduct the SEO audit:

1. Define the audit’s scope and objectives.
2. Evaluate your website’s structure and content to determine how well they align with search intent.
3. Analyze your website’s navigation, meta tags, header tags, content, and internal linking.
4. Check your website’s technical performance, such as loading speed, mobile-friendliness, SSL certificates, and other technical factors.
5. Identify areas for improvement, making a list of priorities.

Pro tip: Use a B2B SEO tool like Ahrefs or SEMrush to conduct this audit.

Let’s pretend we’re Native.io and see how we’re doing according to SEMrush:

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You can then click on each such issue. SEMrush will show you more in-depth data and suggest potential solutions.

Here’s what that looks like for Native.io’s internal linking problems:

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As you can see, their overall score is great, but they need to handle those orphaned pages that aren’t interlinked properly.

2. Competitor Analysis

After finding your issues, it’s time to see how your competitors perform.

A thorough competitor analysis will help you understand:

• Where your rivals’ traffic and customers stems from
• Who links to their content
• Their productive strategies and mistakes

Again, you can use a slew of tools for competitive analysis.

Let’s play with Ahrefs this time and see what their Batch Analysis tool shows you:

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You can analyze your competitors’ keywords, traffic, domain ranking, do-follow links, and more.

Then, move on to Ahrefs Site Explorer to see who’s typically linking to your competitors.

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Knowing this will help you both with your on-site content strategy and link-building campaign. So, save this data in a spreadsheet for later.

3. Audience Research

Understanding what makes your audience tick will help you address them with the right topics that fit their search intents.

You’ll also create valuable, persuasive content according to the sales funnel stages.

Here are the steps:

• Define your target market: Focus on your key decision makers’ position, needs, and potential solutions. Demographic data like gender and age are less important for B2B SaaS SEO.

• Get data on them: Use information from your sales team, CRM, surveys, and chatbots. Understand user sentiment and the language they use.

• Run a website behavior analysis: Check how your audience interacts with your website, looking at their customer journey, visit depth, time spent on site, and clicks.

• Build your ideal customer persona: Remember to focus on needs and solutions rather than demographics.

SEMrush Audience Insights can help you:

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You can understand:

• How your audience behaves online
• Audience overlap with your competitors
• How you stack up against your rivals
• Find your customers’ favorite social media platforms
• And more

4. Set Your SEO Goals

The previous three steps helped you understand how your website performs, how your rivals are doing, and what your audience wants.

Leverage these insights to set your goals and KPIs.

Here’s an example:

Goal: Increase website traffic by 50% within 6 months.

KPIs:

• Organic search traffic
• Website traffic
• Time spent on site
• Visit depth
• Bounce rate

Notice that we’re omitting other otherwise essential metrics, such as conversion rate. But since our current objective is simply a traffic increase, we’re not yet measuring conversion.

5. On-Page Optimization

Now that we have our goal, we can move on to on-page SEO. We’ll focus on:

• Keyword research
• Content creation
• Content and website optimization

5.1. Keyword Research

It’s important to choose the right keywords according to your audience’s search intent.

Let’s pretend we have an accounting software product. Here’s how you conduct keyword research for B2B SaaS.

1. Brainstorm keywords: Brainstorm a list of relevant keywords and phrases related to your B2B SaaS product. You can use Google Autocomplete, Google Trends, and other keyword research tools to find those terms.

Google’s “People also ask” can help you begin. Add the seed keyword “accounting software” and see some suggestions:

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You can also see some good keyword ideas in SEMrush after adding this seed term:

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2. Analyze competitor keywords: Look at the content their websites rank for, as well as the content that gets them the most backlinks. This step helps you identify gaps in the competitor’s keyword strategy and opportunities for differentiation. You can use SEMrush, Ahrefs, or any other tool.

Here’s how easy it is to add your main competitors in SEMrush’s Keyword Gap Analysis Tool:

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The tool reveals all sorts of useful info, such as organic and paid keywords, keyword overlap, and top opportunities:

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3. Analyze search intent: Understand how your audience uses specific key terms, such as to research products, compare options, or purchase. You already did this step in the previous section.
4. Look at keywords’ search volumes: Keyword research tools like Google Keyword Planner or SEMrush help you identify the number of searches for each keyword and the level of competition among websites for those keywords.
5. Determine keyword competition: The keyword research tools above will also show the number of websites targeting each keyword. If most of your rivals are going after a certain key phrase, it will have a high density. That means it’s difficult to rank for it.

Here’s how the SEMrush Keyword Gap tool shows you these stats for different keywords:

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But you can also click on individual key terms for more detailed information.

6. Identify medium-tail, low-competition keywords: These terms are the easiest to rank for because they have less competition and good search volume. They also fit the search intent nicely.

Keyword research tools allow you to view these low-density keywords.

7. Prioritize keywords: Rank your list of keywords from most to least relevant and from lowest to highest competition.

5.2. Content Creation

Remember: You have two audiences to target, your B2B buyers and potential link partners.

To get in front of your B2B audience and increase search engine visibility, you need influential key opinion leaders (KOLs) writing about you.

But you also need to create high-quality content for your buying customers according to the sales funnel stage they’re in.

Pro tip: Keyword research tools show you what types of keywords you’re using:

• Informational: Best for the top of the sales funnel when people seek information about your product.

For example, “gross pay vs. net pay” is an informational keyword.

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• Commercial: These keywords fit the middle of the search funnel. Your prospects are looking to compare and assess different software solutions. Here’s an example:

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• Navigational: When using navigational keywords, people are trying to find your website or location. For example, “Xero accounting software” has both navigational and informational search intent:

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• Transactional: Transactional keywords are used by customers ready to purchase, such as “buy [product name].”

Pro tip: While your B2B customers use different keywords according to the stage of the sales funnel they’re in, your potential link partners will typically use informational and commercial key terms.

That’s because they’re most interested in innovations in your industry, neat tools, and exciting statistics.

That brings us to the next point:

The type of B2B SaaS content that works best.

You’ll want to focus on:

• Extensive guides, offering substantial information and establishing your authority
• In-depth industry research and statistics that can attract more links
• How-to articles that teach your customers to use your tools

Insider tips:

• Pay extra attention to your FAQ section instead of simply using an AI generation tool. This section responds to your customers’ specific questions, so use data from your sales team to publish the most relevant questions and answers.
• Build useful tools. Tools like free calculators generate more traffic and buzz. Opinion leaders in your niche pick them up quickly, and your prospects will understand what you can help them with.

5.3. Website and Content Optimization

The final step in your on-site SEO strategy entails properly optimizing your website and content. That entails focusing on:

• Keywords: Use the right keywords according to the search intent, but do so sparingly. Remember that Google understands topics now – you don’t need to stuff your web pages with exact key phrases to get traffic.
• Images: Screenshots, tables, infographics, and videos give structure to your content. They keep people interested, and they also fight short attention spans.
• Internal link structure: Add internal links from new articles to old ones and vice-versa. Link to the money pages that make sense as well.
• Header tags: Include your main keyword in the H1 and relevant related keywords in your H2s. Optimize header tags for mobile, ensuring they’re easy to read on smaller screens and avoiding large images or graphics that can obscure those headers.
• Meta description: Use your main keyword and ensure this short text offers an accurate, enticing preview of your content.
• Meta title: Meta titles are clickable headlines that appear in search engine results pages (SERPs). To optimize the meta title for SERP indexing, use your main keyword, and keep it attention-grabbing and concise, up to 50-60 characters. Besides, ensure all your meta titles are unique to help search engines understand your website’s structure and hierarchy.
• Alt tags: Also known as alt attributes, these tags provide alternative text for images and other non-text content on your webpage. They help search engines understand your page’s contents, making indexing easier. To optimize alt tags, use descriptive language and keywords, and keep them below 125 characters. You should also test them with Google’s Structured Data Testing to ensure they work for your website.
• URLs: URLs also help with website indexing. To let Google know what your webpage is about, use your main keyword and a consistent URL structure that follows your website’s structure. Use hyphens, keep your URL short, and avoid dynamic URLs that include information like session IDs or user IDs.

6. Technical SEO

Technical SEO is essential for B2B SaaS companies because it improves:

• Crawlability: Solving technical SEO issues means search engines can crawl your website more easily. And that leads to enhanced visibility and ranking.
• User experience: You want your website to load fast, navigate easily, and be mobile-friendly. This means your users can engage with your website better and, ultimately, convert at higher rates.
• Indexing: A properly structured, interlinked website helps search engines understand your website. As a result, they can index it correctly and rank it higher.
• Security: You want to properly secure your website against hacking and other threats, especially if you’re in B2B SaaS. Your clients need to trust you can safeguard their privacy and personal info. And remember, these people are key decision-makers in their companies.

To achieve these benefits, your SEO team should fix the following issues:

• Load speed
• Mobile-friendliness
• Navigation
• Broken links
• Security issues

7. Off-Page SEO

Off-page SEO is essential for B2B SaaS companies because your potential customers do extensive research. Your B2B clients:

• Read in-depth reviews and industry reports and follow key opinion leaders.
• Are up-to-date with industry trends and new products your competitors develop.

Off-page SEO helps you build your authority and endorsements so that you can remain a top choice for your customers.

That’s not all:

Your growing traffic and expertise are important ranking factors for Google.

Besides, this endorsement translates into links.

The more high-quality, do-follow links you get from authoritative sources, the higher Google ranks you.

To conduct off-page SEO, focus on:

• Digital PR
• Social media
• Link-building

7.1. Digital PR

In the context of off-page SEO, digital PR involves:

• Creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content, such as podcasts and expert panels
• Building relationships with key influencers and stakeholders, such as journalists, bloggers, and industry experts

For example, Zip Recruiter’s CEO, Ian Siegel, constantly participates in podcasts. This strategy generates visibility, credibility, and link juice to the Zip Recruiter website.

But Zip Recruiter takes this one step further:

The company publishes these podcasts on its blog to improve on-page SEO and get even more backlinks later:

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Pro tip: If your reputation isn’t high enough to be invited to podcasts yet, organize your own podcasts or roundup articles, inviting experts in your field to contribute.

7.2. Social Media

Social media boosts your SEO because:

• Connecting with your prospects and link partners meaningfully can generate more traffic to your website.
• Social media listening gives you more info to build a good keyword and content strategy.
• You can rank for specific key terms on social media.

Finn Partners Singapore offers a good example on their Instagram account. The firm generates more traffic by using trends such as:

• Takeovers
• How we leave the office
• What time employees get to work
• And more

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These posts showcase Finn Partners’ office culture, which is important because people buy from people. And that’s also valid for key decision-makers in your industry.

Pro tip: You can also use influencers to enhance your reach and skyrocket your traffic.

Cherwell Software offers a good example.

When the company added a new feature to its offer, it decided that influencers were the best bet to reach an audience of C-execs.

This influencer-generated content had a 342% higher click-through rate, bringing them 5.42 million in reach. Plus, 90% of website visitors were new.

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7.3. Link-Building

The last step in your SEO strategy should be link-building. That means getting relevant, do-follow links from authoritative websites in your niche.

You can do that by:

• Guest posting on relevant websites
• Broken link-building, which entails finding broken links on your potential link partners’ websites and pitching your content
• Finding unlinked brand mentions online
• Building linkable assets, such as tools or calculators for your audience

For example, accounting software Xero has an impressive array of courses and webinars:

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Monday.com offers a bevy of templates that companies can download and use:

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Wrapping Up

After going through all these steps, remember to keep an eye on your SEO campaign.

Monitor results and be ready to adapt your strategy according to your findings. For example, you can power up your SEO efforts with paid ads.

If you do all that, you’ll be well on your way to dominate SERPs.

Author bio:

David is a serial entrepreneur and CEO of Breeeze.co, an SEO services company that helps 20+ agencies and businesses succeed by providing SEO services that drive growth for their clients’ sites on Google and beyond.