Are you looking for tips for content-centered SEO for your SaaS company?
We’ve got you covered!
Just like any other business, SaaS companies need to choose the right content strategy for remarkable SEO. To make sure that the content marketing efforts don’t go in vain, marketing managers of these ventures should make smart decisions right from the start.
But first let’s answer this: why is content marketing so important for SaaS companies?
Content marketing is a powerful tool that allows SaaS companies to attract prospects, create awareness among them, and convert them into loyal customers.
If executed properly, the company can easily plan its marketing strategy around the content itself. No matter what your core focus is – building an audience or closing deals, this approach can give you the push you need to climb the ladder of success.
As the marketing manager of a SaaS company, you must know that you have to make it easy for your prospects to understand your products and services. You don’t only have to convey how your software solves their problems but also show them how they can use the tool the right way.
Nobody will be interested in your software if they don’t know what it is and how it works in their favor. This makes content really the KING for SaaS companies when it comes to marketing their products.
Here’s a complete guide with valuable tips for content-centered SEO for SaaS companies.
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1. Look at Your Customers’ Buyer Journey
Analyzing the customers’ buyer journey is a prerequisite for devising a successful content marketing plan. From the time your prospects become aware of you to when they convert into a customer, see which major milestones they go through and take notes.
The SaaS marketing funnel typically features the following phases:
- Brand/product awareness
- Lead generation
- Trial sign-ups
- Conversion to customers
- Customer retention
Once you have the information about the route your prospects take to go through the purchase funnel, you’ll be able to see how you can use your content to guide them in the desired direction.
2. Identify Topics for Each Phase of the Buyer Journey
The goal of your content marketing strategy should be to provide your prospects with valuable, easily comprehensible information at each stage of the purchase funnel. Skipping steps won’t work in your favor. Your customers need your help at each stage and you must be willing to give what they need.
One of the biggest mistakes SaaS marketers make is to assume that content is just a tool needed to create awareness and generate traffic. You must understand that content isn’t only required at the beginning of the process but throughout the marketing funnel.
If you only focus on creating top-of-the-funnel content, you would only be able to bring your prospects into the funnel but wouldn’t actually see them moving through the funnel. Thus, a full-funnel strategy is the key to executing an effective SaaS content marketing plan.
Here are some tips for you to use every touchpoint while developing your content marketing strategy.
Brand/Product Awareness
For this phase, you should focus on creating content that targets the top keywords of the industry and creates excitement around your brand and software you’re offering. For this phase, the content should be educational, exciting, and engaging. It should help you spread a wide net to catch a large group of interested people.
The target of your content marketing plan at this stage should be to promote awareness among prospects regarding your product and help more and more people discover how it can solve their problems.
Lead Generation
Once you’ve put your product out there in the market, your goal should be to foster a connection between your brand and the prospects. Try to get the engagement levels higher and earn their trust in your software.
For this phase, your focus should be on middle-of-the-funnel or MOFu strategies. You should connect with a specific group of prospects who have shown that they are interested in learning more or perhaps buying your product.
You’ll be able to generate leads by producing free, gated, and valuable content. Furthermore, you can use email drip campaigns for nurturing the leads.
Trial Sign-ups
The next step is to invite prospects to try your software so that they may decide if it’s beneficial for them.
To encourage them to make a purchase, you should focus on using bottom-of-the-funnel techniques. Offer free trials to qualified leads and see what they have to say about your product.
Conversion to Customers
When your leads are taking the free trial offer, try to convince them to buy it. During this phase, you should create content that helps them find and understand additional valuable tools within the software.
Customer Retention
The customer journey doesn’t stop after they buy your product. You must have a plan to keep them coming back to you. One of the best customer retention tricks is to help them be successful in using your software.
During this phase, you should focus your content creation strategy on including high-value information about the features of your tool and educate and guide them on how to use the product the right way to get the most out of it.
Important: Each piece of content you create during the different phases of the buying cycle supports the next. The system can’t work if even one of the pieces if missing.
3. Research Your Customers
Before coming up with content ideas and writing your content, you must clearly understand who your target audience is and how you can use your content to solve their problems. If you’re successful in offering actionable advice and valuable suggestions, your prospects will automatically trust your products and find your company reliable.
As a marketing manager of a SaaS company, your target audience is likely to be business executives who’re often stressed out and don’t have much time on their sleeves. They are looking for immediate answers and solutions. Avoid beating around the bush and using fluff-marketing tactics to make an instant impact.
You should consider the following factors to get the heart of their problems and needs:
- Biographical information: your ideal customer’s age, gender, profession, and income level
- Content source: the existing sources that they rely on to stay on top of changing trends of the industry
- issues: the problems that they are facing in running their business and ways in which you can help
Bonus tip: You can kick-start this task by building business buyer personas.
4. Come Up with Customer-focused Content Ideas
The ultimate way to guide your prospects through the buying decision process using your content is by determining and addressing their needs and problems at every step.
To make this task easier, consider creating a visual chart that your team can fill out at each stage of the process to stay on top of the rising concerns. Typically, it should include the following details:
- The name of the phase in the buying process
- Target audience
- A platform for content
- The concern or problem addressed
5. Invest in SEO and Keyword Research
If you want to create content that influences the prospects and encourages them to take action, you should pay attention to how you perform keyword research.
You should go through the following four stages while you’re on it:
Check for User Intent
User intent should be there when you’re searching for keywords for our content. Your competitors may come in handy here.
When you’re building a SaaS product, more often than not, you’ll have a popular rival in the market. Pay special attention to the keywords that have words like ‘alternatives’ and ‘vs.’ with your competitor’s name.
People who look for these alternatives are usually unhappy with the kind of products they are using. The product may be too complicated to use or pricey or perhaps certain features may be absent or limited. These prospects may not be satisfied with that particular product yet have high expectations.
This is why you should make sure that your software keeps the bar at or above the required level or else you don’t have a shot.
Check the Search Volume
When you’ve picked a keyword for your content, don’t forget to check its search volume. Find out how many times people have typed it in the search bar to get desired results.
This is a crucial step because you wouldn’t want to build your content marketing strategy around keywords that nobody is interested in searching for. If there’s no demand, it’s not worth using!
You may check the search volume of your keywords with Google Keyword Planner or by using tools, such as SEMrush.
Check the Keyword Difficulty
You may be tempted to use the most popular keywords but it’ll take you forever to rank for them when the competition is tough. Using SEMrush, check the keyword difficulty for the keywords you’ve chosen. The higher the difficulty, the more you’ll have to work to get your content ranked among the top. In other words, you’ll have to add more backlinks to your content.
The keyword difficulty will give you an idea of the competition on the first pages of search results on Google. If it’s very high, it shows that the top websites have been backed by millions of backlinks.
Ideally, you should try to strike a balance between a high search volume and low keyword difficulty score when you want to rank on search engines.
6. Allow Google to Boost Your Rankings
Google goal is to present the most relevant results on the top of the page. Hence, your goal should be to produce as much relevant content as you can while making sure you don’t drop the ball on the quality or value-adding front.
A Google SERP page features ten search results, which means that your prospects have a choice of ten solutions. You can beat the competition and stand out by adding appealing click-worthy titles to your content. The trick is to humanize the titles by adding terms, such as ‘our experience/review’, ‘we’ve tried’, and ‘what we think’.
This simple trick will instantly boost your click-through rate and ultimately your ranking.
Power tip: Incorporate keywords in your titles to help them rank higher.
7. Write Premium-quality Content
People enjoy reading articles that are based on human experiences and thereby, such articles have a better conversion rate.
Before you sit down to write an article, take some time out and try out your SaaS competitors with your team – it’ll be worth it.
Here are a few ideas to write an experience-based article:
- List the pros and cons of your competitor’s product alternatives
- Talk about your team members’ feedback
- Vote for the alternative you liked the most
- Add screenshots of the features you like and dislike in the software
- Use scores when comparing two products and announce a clear winner at the end
- Explain which products can be considered as real competitors and which ones should be included in a different niche
Important: Don’t forget to mention your own product but also make sure you don’t sound too salesy.
It goes without saying that your content should be grammatically correct and written in simple words. Don’t make it difficult to read and don’t add fluff.
8. Use Pillar Pages to Earn Trust
A pillar page is a great tool to build credibility. It’s very detailed and addresses all the questions your prospects may have. Plus, it’s great for SEO too.
A blog post can be a pillar page too. A pillar blog post is often called cornerstone content.
Pillar pages are more likely to be linked back to by many blogs and hence, you’ll attract many new prospects.
9. Get the Most Out of Your Content
Content marketing greatly helps in driving your overall SaaS promotional strategy. You can even repurpose old content and use it for other areas of your marketing strategy.
Keep the following tips in mind to get the most out of your content.
- Share the content you publish on your website on social media channels and promote it via email blasts
- While creating content, develop influencer marketing strategies to drive qualified traffic and generate leads
- Expand upon ideas by repurposing content into different media types (i.e. eBooks) and keep your leads engaged by using different platforms, including podcasts, in-person conferences, and videos
Let’s Get Started!
With these tips for content-centered SEO for SaaS companies, you can take your content marketing strategy to the next level. However, creating great content often involves some initial investments. Now, If you think you can write the content yourself, you should be willing to put in your best effort and time (and possibly sweat and tears). Alternatively, you can hire a professional digital marketing agency for content writing services – and focus on other important aspects of your business. Nao Media is a reputable name for SEO consulting and content writing services that can level up the game of SEO for SaaS companies. Contact us today to boost your content and digital engagement.
