SEO is a difficult pursuit that gets tougher for B2B SaaS companies.
Longer sales cycles, a niche and savvy audience, multiple decision-makers, product-led content vs. customer-centric information, and the good old SEO challenges – the roadblocks never end.
There are just too many intricacies involved, resulting in SEO chaos that might be difficult to navigate.
In this post, we’re sharing some of the most common B2B SaaS SEO challenges companies come to us with – and how we tackle them.
9 B2B SaaS SEO challenges and tips to tackle them
SEO is a powerful inbound marketing tactic that’s on top of every company’s priority list.
But we have found that more than 50% of the companies struggle to get even the basics of SEO right owing to their niche, industry and the different aspects of the strategy – on-page, off-page and tech.
And not to forget, the ever-changing search algorithms that are becoming harder to keep up with.
In a hurry and need to get started on your B2B SaaS SEO strategy right away? Head over to our ultimate guide on B2B SaaS SEO now.
1. Keyword research and competition
High-traffic keywords are already taken by high-profile industry giants. To outrank them is very difficult, and demands heavy investment in content and SEM.
Here’s how we tackle this:
- Focus on long-tail keywords – Find and target keywords around the problems you want to solve and the specific solutions you offer. This will help you bag highly qualified leads.
- Aim for user intent – Create content according to buyer intent that aims at all the stages of the buyer journey right from awareness to decision-making.
- Emphasize branded keywords – Optimize your content and website to rank for your brand and product names to make it easy for your clients to reach you post awareness.
2. Buyer journey and decision-makers
SaaS companies have clients with multiple stakeholders, and each of them have a different concern. These additional layers in decision-making lead to extended sales cycles and confusion about whose needs should be addressed. Without clarity on stakeholders, nurturing them to convert seems impossible.
To tackle this, we:
- Segment your audience – Identify your personas and their needs, like C-level executives, managers, and end-users. Target and nurture them individually with tailored content.
- Map content to the stages of the funnel – Produce TOFU, MOFU, and BOFU content of different formats for the awareness, consideration, and decision stages of the funnel.
- Create intent-based content – Figure out the intent behind queries i.e. informational, navigational, and transactional to create content that meets the goal of a query.
- Retarget organic visitors – Come up with unique strategies to nurture prospects that found you but did not convert.
3. Content marketing strategy
SaaS companies have a hard time defining their content strategy – should they keep it technical, product-led, or customer-centric. Oftentimes companies might also create content that adds noise to the already saturated industry without offering any value. This results in poor experience, irrelevant traffic and low engagement.
Here’s how we tackle this:
- Use technical and non-technical content – Create technical content like product demos and product explainers for your technical target group and executive content like case studies and ROI insights for the decision-makers.
- Keep it simple – Never resort to jargon and explain all the complex product features in simple terms. Use a mix of textual and visual content formats to simplify the technical aspects and make content that’s easy to consume.
- Create valuable content – Answer your ICP’s burning questions and concerns with expert insights and solutions. Talk about their pain points and offer to solve them.
4. Content and conversion optimization
Simply optimizing your content for keywords is not enough. While it gives you a chance to potentially show up on the search results, it might not lead to conversions. Driving traffic but not seeing enough conversions is a common challenge for B2B SaaS companies.
Here’s how we address this:
- Integrate SEO and CRO (conversion rate optimization) – Make sure your website is optimized for SEO and users to convert them. Use a combination of SEO best practices and CRO tactics like clear CTAs (Call-to-Actions), easy navigation, and valuable content.
- Analyze content performance – Track how your content is performing and use the data-driven insights to improvise and better optimize content.
- Optimize product pages – Optimize your product landing pages with SEO-friendly product features and add conversion elements like demo sign-up forms or trial buttons.
Also read: Complete guide to content optimization
5. Technical SEO and domain authority
Smaller SaaS companies lose SEO competition to their high-profile counterparts with a greater domain authority which is a major ranking factor. Complex websites add to the trouble of technical SEO factors such as site structure, page load speed, mobile optimization, and more.
Here’s how to tackle this:
- Address technical SEO – Create a checklist of all the technical factors and fix the shortcomings like site performance, URLs, schema markups, and more. Keep up with regular technical audits to ensure everything is at par and additional efforts are made to improve.
- Build high-quality backlinks – Have a strategy in place to obtain backlinks from reputed publications and industry blogs. Seek out guest post opportunities with websites having high domain authority.
- Expound on PR and partnerships – Create an echo of your brand by partnering with influencers, tech reviewers, and other similar strategies to also get high-quality backlinks.
- Maximize thought leadership content – Create data-driven case studies or industry insights that people would want to consume and share in their network.
6. Resources for content creation
Content and SEO go hand-in-hand. Without high-quality content created consistently, your strategy will fail. SaaS startups often struggle with creating content consistently across multiple efforts and channels because of budget constraints.
This is the best way to tackle this:
- Repurpose content – Do not start all your content pieces from scratch. Reuse your existing or new content to create content pieces of different formats and intents. For example, turn blog posts into infographics, webinars into video snippets, whitepapers into articles, and so on.
- Remix content – Find different angles to convey one solution to a problem and create multiple content pieces. This will ramp up your content production efficiently.
- Outsource SEO and content – It is a great idea to outsource SEO and content efforts to the experts in the industry instead of building an in-house team from scratch.
7. SEO ROI
Firstly, SEO is a long-term strategy that takes time to pick up. Secondly, because the sales cycle is long and requires a lot of touchpoints, it can get difficult to track if organic traffic has led to conversions and revenue generation.
Here’s how you can monitor progress:
- Choose multi-touch attribution – As opposed to the single-touch attribution that tracks the last SEO touchpoint alone, use the multi-touch attribution framework to pinpoint every SEO contribution (inclusive of the early touchpoints) to the buyer journey.
- Check out micro-conversions – Do not just check SEO’s contribution around revenue generation, but take notes of tiny conversions in the form of demo requests, eBook downloads, or email signups. They prove how effective your SEO strategy is in lead generation or otherwise.
- Integrate Google Analytics with CRM data – Integrating CRM with Google Analytics helps you find organic user behavior across sales funnels.
8. Brand identity and voice
SERPs are saturated with content that looks like a replica of each other without offering value. It is often difficult to even pick a brand’s content apart from the crowd. It is a tough job to create unique value-driven content that can attract your audience’s attention.
This is how you overcome the challenge:
- Carve out a niche – Do not create content that would get lost in the crowd. Try to find gaps in existing content, insights that are nowhere to be found, and talk about challenges your competitors have missed out on, and carve a niche for your brand.
- Focus on consistent brand voice – Create a style guide and nail down your brand voice. Ensure all the content you produce aligns with your brand voice irrespective of the channel it is written for.
- Leverage storytelling – Tell your brand story and leverage the art of storytelling to resonate with your audience’s struggle and build brand affinity.
9. Product-led SEO
SEO is not a deploy-and-detach approach where companies can execute once and benefit forever. It is difficult to keep up with the broken pieces of SEO, stay up to date with the upcoming SEO trends, and continuously adapt to them. Furthermore, product features keep evolving over time – which requires revisiting your strategy often.
Here’s how to tackle this:
- Take a content lifecycle management approach – Maintain an inventory of all content pieces. Segregate them according to product features you have to align with or add new pieces to the website and your repository.
- Refresh content – Keep up with regular SEO and content audits to ensure your content is up to date, relevant to your product features, and in line with the latest SEO best practices.
- Monitor Google algorithm updates – Stay in the loop on any changes made to the search algorithm and update your SEO and content strategy to cater to it. Execute the strategy by updating the existing content and adding fresh content.
Conclusion
Contensify is a content marketing and SEO agency that goes beyond the typical “SEO playbook.” We develop custom SEO strategies tailored to each SaaS product, understanding the unique business model, goals, and growth needs from the inside out.
Our approach has successfully helped SaaS companies achieve organic growth that aligns perfectly with their business objectives. Now, it’s your turn.
Book a call with Contensify today to start your growth journey.