The B2B SaaS Marketing Blog

SEO Roadmap for B2B SaaS: How to Get Early Wins

by 

Anderson Ferreira

Last updated: May 27th, 2024

Most agencies will tell you that SEO takes time to yield any kind of results. How long you can expect to wait depends on who you talk to. Many agencies set a ballpark range of a year, sometimes even longer. 

That’s because what most agencies attack first is basic technical SEO. They usually run through the typical checklist of the following action items:

• Run speed tests
• Optimize your images
• Look for redirects and check for broken links
• Ensure that canonical tags are in order

Don’t get us wrong. These tasks matter. But in the grand scheme of your SEO strategy, these changes are granular and work together as a collective over time. They’ll make very little impact on what you can see or measure when you’re first getting started with SEO.

In a previous article, we wrote about SEO Strategy for B2B SaaS companies, and explained how a good plan prioritizes actions based on effort and impact.

Search engines are often slow to recognize SEO efforts, which delays the ROI of your efforts. However, the delay duration depends on factors like your website’s current authority, links, and content quality.

Most of the SaaS companies we talk to already have some form of brand authority and content, so it’s often possible to see results relatively quickly by first tackling low-hanging fruit.

While these quick wins are not a replacement for a long-term SEO strategy, they leverage the resources you’ve already deployed more effectively to see better results with less effort.

Therefore, you’ll still see an ROI while we build out a solid foundation for your long-term SEO strategy.

In this post, we’ll discuss the six key items we execute at the beginning of each new client engagement and how to implement these strategies into your own SEO roadmap.

We help B2B SaaS companies grow through SEO. If you’d like to learn more about our agency, check out our SaaS marketing case studies or get your Free Marketing Plan.

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Action Item #1: Optimize Features and Benefits Pages With Our On-Page SEO Checklist

The features and benefits pages are critical to the buyer journey, and the more right-fit prospects you drive to these pages, the more conversions you’ll receive.

Yet many B2B SaaS companies we work with gloss over basic SEO principles, and as a result, these key pages don’t rank.

Here are a few specific things we look for when assessing a page’s on-page SEO health:

• Does the title tag contain the keyword, and is it under roughly 55 characters?
• Does the page contain H2s and H3s and relevant long-tail keywords within those tags?
• Are there additional long-tail keywords relevant to the topic that we can organically include?
• How well do key pages match the search intent of their target topics?

The end goal of our SEO efforts isn’t just to rank first in search engines. The real goal is to drive more sales. Therefore, we also update the copy on these pages to convert a higher percentage of the traffic driven by SEO efforts.

Updating the content on your feature pages starts with customer research and then identifying keywords that correspond with their pain points. Here’s an overview of this process:

• Learn from sales and customer success.
• Analyze your organic, paid, and CMS search data.
• Use a keyword tool such as Ahrefs or SEMRush to validate the current pool of keywords.
• Perform a competitive keyword analysis.
• Analyze Google auto-suggest and SaaS review data.

Note: You can read more about these steps in depth in our article on keyword research.

Once we’ve determined what keywords to target, the next phase is incorporating them into the content. This part of the process is more than dropping those keywords into headers and website copy.

We make a point to add more relevance about the subjects those keywords are about throughout the pages. Aside from optimizing the hero section above the fold, we’ll implement the following elements to increase depth:

• Add relevant reviews and testimonials. To do this, we use the bullseye method. This calls for the company to ask customers questions that lead to specific reviews and testimonials, telling prospects the stories they need to hear.
• Writing about features and benefits in a simple, yet focused way. We want the content we’re adding to be specific to the problems and solutions that potential customers seek to solve.
• Addressing any objections and questions that fit longer-tail searches. We’ll incorporate the questions that “People also ask” on about the specific keywords we’re targeting on Google as FAQs. More on this in the next section.

We also take a thematic and topical approach to adding depth. For example, let’s look at what we did with Bravo Business Media. They help local companies create user-focused digital products such as catalogs and other presentation materials. One of the pages we beefed up on their behalf was a feature page on showroom marketing.

For this page, specifically, we rewrote their headline copy to be more clear and concise. And we made subtle yet impactful changes to their feature descriptions by incorporating the term “showroom” into their copy — which had been previously absent.

For example, one of their descriptions read: “Pay-Per-Click Advertising Management – We handle the management, budgets, reporting and more.”

We changed it to: “Pay-per-click showroom advertising management– We handle your showroom’s management, budgets, reporting and more.”

This helps further communicate to search engines that the page’s primary topic and theme is showroom marketing.

We made these updates to each of their feature descriptions:

Just three weeks after we made these changes, this page enjoyed a measurable bump in search engine performance. Its impressions nearly doubled, and the average SERP position increased by about eight spots.

Action Item #2: Update Existing Content For On Page SEO And Depth

It’s often much easier to boost an existing piece of content a few places in the SERPs than rank an entirely new piece of content as search engines.

This is because content that’s already ranking somewhere in the SERPs is already indexed (which often takes some time, depending on the authority of the website) and may have accumulated a handful of backlinks.

So our first priority is refreshing existing content, but the piece of content updated has a significant impact on the ROI you’ll receive.

Most SaaS companies already have a substantial content library, so selecting a piece of content at random will likely produce poor results.

To produce the best ROI possible, we look at two main factors when selecting the best piece of content to update:

1. Current SERP Position: We aim for posts that are currently ranking in roughly positions 6-15 for the target keyword.
2. Relevancy: Many SaaS companies have blog content that is irrelevant to their ideal buyer and attracts the wrong audience. We exclusively update content that will attract the ideal audience.

After identifying the best pieces of content to update, we optimize them for on-page SEO, following the best practices mentioned earlier, like checking the title tag for the target keyword, adding semantically relevant keywords, and ensuring the post contains proper H2 and H3 tags.

We also look for featured snippet opportunities related to the target keyword and update the post accordingly.

It’s also important to remember that search engines aim to deliver the best user experience possible, and regardless of how algorithms change, this factor will remain constant.
Therefore, we also update the advice in the blog post to deliver the best possible answer for the target audience.

In some cases, this is adding sections to answer additional questions related to the topic. Alternatively, if some of the strategies within the article are dated, we’ll update the content accordingly with more relevant strategies.

For example, we recently updated our own SaaS link building guide as the strategies we use for link building today are different from approaches that worked several years ago. For example, we rarely use guest posting as a link building strategy today. Instead, we focus on building linkable resources, content partnerships with other SaaS companies, and earning links from integration partners.

Finally, we implement our SaaS blog design structure for each blog post we update. This structure is designed primarily to increase conversions, though implementing this increases the overall ROI of your SEO efforts as you’ll convert a higher percentage of the traffic driven through SEO.

Action Item #3: Create Internal Links to High Converting/BOTF Content

Internal links make finding your content easier for search engines and users. Therefore, directing internal links to your highest value content is one of the easiest ways to quickly increase its authority and rankings.

How We Approach Internal Linking

We start by crawling the website and compiling a list of all the high-converting/bottom-of-the-funnel pages. Next, we identify blog posts and other high authority pages where it makes sense to internally link to the selected high converting/bottom-of-the-funnel features and benefits resources.

To identify internal linking opportunities, one strategy is to simply execute this search:

Site:(www.yoursite.com) and the keyword the features/benefits resource is targeting.

Then, wherever that keyword arises, we’ll add an internal link to it.

For example, we have a blog post on content refreshing, and when I execute this search, I see several other content marketing related posts that mention content refreshing.

Therefore, I can add an internal link to the anchor text “content refreshing” that directs the reader to our blog post on content refreshing.

Additionally, the value of the internal link depends largely on the authority of the linking page.

Therefore, we often look for opportunities to add relevant internal links to key features and benefits pages from the website’s most authoritative pages. These pages are easy to find in the Ahrefs “best by links” report.

If there’s a related resource within that report, we’ll look for an opportunity to add a relevant internal link to the target page you’re trying to boost.

It’s always best to add a link to a sentence or phrase where it makes the most sense. But in some cases, there may not be a great spot to contextually add an internal link. In these instances, we create sidebars or highlight sections that include simple calls to action, encouraging readers to venture over to those feature pages.

Action Item #4: Create Competitor Comparison Pages

In the SaaS space, prospects are often looking for alternatives for products they’re either dissatisfied with or considering purchasing.
For example, if they’re currently a Salesforce user and are looking for alternatives, they may search terms like:

• HubSpot vs Salesforce
• Salesforce alternatives

Either way, these searchers are actively looking to purchase a similar product and are therefore high value prospects.

Creating content to rank for these terms is an excellent way to attain a few early SEO wins.

Many SaaS companies prefer to avoid mentioning competitors for branding reasons, though your competitors are likely already creating these pages. It’s best if you control your brand narrative rather than giving your competitors that opportunity. Additionally, you don’t need to write a biased comparison (in fact, doing so goes against our competitor comparison page strategy).

The keyword frameworks we often find to capture competitor comparison searchers usually look like this:

• “(Competitor name) vs (your brand name)”
• “(Competitor name) alternative”

But what if you’re a relatively new B2B SaaS company with little brand recognition? Is this a worthwhile exercise for you?

We say yes — because there’s an opportunity to insert yourself into the discussion about well-established competitors. Unless you’re creating a completely new category, there are key players in your space that already exist. Odds are that they have users searching for more information about them.

Action Item #5: Repurposing Sales Battle Cards into Blog Content

You’ll often face objections from potential customers, and most of these questions end up in search results as frequently asked questions.

This is especially true if you sell a product with a long sales cycle, as these tend to be high value products that require careful consideration from the buyer and will ultimately spark more objections.

When prospects enter your pipeline, they’ll usually voice these questions and objections to your sales team. Therefore, targeting keywords related to these objections attracts high quality prospects. These content pieces also help speed up the sales cycle, as prospects won’t have to ask these questions on sales calls.

How We Transform Battle Cards into FAQs

First, we identify keywords that match the objections identified from sales calls.

These specific questions often have low search volume, so even if keyword research tools show that there isn’t any volume, we’ll still look at Google’s auto suggest to see if the term receives any searches.

If the keyword is a specific FAQ, we also use schema markup to indicate to search engines that the content on the page answers the FAQ. This makes it easier for search engines to understand that it is an answer to that FAQ, increasing the likelihood that our content will be shown in the search results.

To further increase the likelihood that search engines will select our content to answer the questions, we make it a point to answer questions in a succinct and concise way. We’re not writing a novel with our FAQs so it’s important to keep answers short and sweet.

Turning battle cards into FAQs also presents us with an opportunity to double down on the previous action items we’ve discussed. Battle cards are content that can add more relevance and depth to your website. They also provide an opportunity to incorporate more internal links to existing content your company already has.

Action Item #6: De-Indexing Blog Posts That Aren’t Thematically Related to Search Intent

For companies with active blogs, we often find that they’ve written posts covering subjects that aren’t directly related to problems their SaaS product solves.

Irrelevant or vaguely relevant content creates clutter, and search engines interpret it as a lack of authoritative expertise in any particular topic.

To solve this problem, de-index these posts outside of your core topic area. Doing this can help you boost the topical authority of your website and create a focused presence that yields faster SEO results.

A post you de-index can still remain live on your website, but de-indexing means that it won’t be visible in search results as the post will no longer be crawled by search engines or appear in search results.

De-indexing content follows this three-step process:

Step 1: Data Collection

We start with an internal crawl of the website. Doing so allows us to find, collect, and curate every blog article that a company has published. An internal crawl gives us a high-level overview of what blogs are live on their site.

If our client’s website has a blog subdirectory, we filter for that in our crawl. This enables us to move much faster and more efficiently through this step of the process. We use tools such as Screaming Frog, SEMRush, or DeepCrawl, and build CSV/Excel spreadsheets where we compile this information.

Step 2: Analysis

Once we’ve gathered all their posts, we’ll then analyze everything that we’ve pulled. Our analysis starts by simply skimming through each article’s title. A quick glance is enough for us to identify the posts that have nothing to do with the main subject area of the company.

For posts with more ambiguous titles, we’ll then analyze what keywords the post ranks for. SEMRush, Ahrefs, or even Google Search Console are all tools that can provide this level of detail.

What we decide to keep or de-index falls upon a few factors.

First, we assess how well the post we’re analyzing fits the company’s messaging. We de-index any post that doesn’t match. For articles that seem to fit the theme of the website, we’ll take a look at quality metrics such as depth, freshness, and whether they generate traffic. From here, we may decide to remove the posts completely or consolidate them into other posts for a content refresh.

Step 3: Erasing

The actual de-indexing of the content itself is often just a click of a button. Many websites that run on WordPress use Yoast for SEO.

Within that plugin, there’s an option to hide pages and posts from Google indexing. But sometimes, we’ll unpublish pieces outright, too.

Under the advanced tab of the Yoast plugin, you should have an option to de-index your content.

When we delete irrelevant articles, we also consider what to do about the old permalink, too. For posts that were totally irrelevant, we’ll redirect their old links either to the home page or the main blog page. Meanwhile, for pieces that have some topical relevance, we’ll redirect them to existing, related posts.

How To Achieve Early B2B SaaS SEO Wins Now

Implementing these action items at the start of a brand new working relationship is how we get new clients early SEO wins. But it’s worth noting that long-term success isn’t solely in our hands. The clients who get the most out of SEO roadmaps are those that are committed and have the capacity to execute the items we’ve discussed.

We can deliver recommendations about what can create the most impact. But when there’s constraints around development, early wins may be few and far between. For example, when companies don’t have the internal resources to create content, it might be more difficult to build competitor comparison pages.

SEO is a long-term play, but it doesn’t have to take you over a year to see measurable results. Our methodology is designed to demonstrate that it’s possible to get wins sooner rather than later.

Tired of waiting to increase conversions through SEO? Get your Free Marketing Plan to learn how we can help you get measurable results faster.