The B2B SaaS Marketing Blog

Our Technical SEO Strategy For B2B SaaS (Why Technical Perfection Isn’t The Answer)

by 

Mike Smith

Last updated: February 27th, 2025

“If our website is functional, do we really need to do technical SEO?”

This is a valid question.

Many B2B SaaS companies realize that investing in technical SEO doesn’t necessarily yield better rankings. 

Once you’ve done the basics, you’ll reach a plateau where optimizing for technical suggestions on an SEO dashboard provides a negligible ROI.

So we agree – optimizing for technical perfection in an SEO dashboard is NOT a good use of a SaaS company’s resources.

The real opportunity is using technical SEO as a tool to pave a smooth buyer journey.

From a tactical perspective, this means two things:

1. Can search engines easily crawl and understand what each critical page in the buyer journey is about?
2. Can users easily access and navigate each page, and does each page lead them to the next step of the buyer journey in a frictionless manner?

In this post, we’ll share the step-by-step technical SEO process we implement for clients and how you can use it as an opportunity to increase rankings in the search results and total conversions.

Why The Traditional Technical SEO Approach Doesn’t Work For Enterprise B2B SaaS

It’s important to solve major technical issues impacting the entire website immediately.

For example, if site speed is an issue across your entire website, fix it immediately, as it will negatively affect your rankings in search results and conversions.

However, most B2B SaaS companies we work with have reached a level of technical proficiency, and further optimizing the website for a perfect score on the SEO dashboard won’t meaningfully increase your ROI.

For example, fixing an obscure broken link to a random blog post that isn’t essential to the buyer journey probably won’t improve conversions or impact your website’s overall rankings in the search results.

However, if that broken link is the CTA to your demo page from a product page, it probably would cost you conversions and should therefore be a top priority to fix. 

There are also technical considerations that might not show up as an “error” on an SEO dashboard, but could negatively impact conversions.

For example, let’s say there’s a high value blog post, like a competitor comparison page.

If it doesn’t have any internal links from other high authority pages on your website, you’re missing out on a major opportunity to increase the page’s rankings for a high converting keyword.

The real problem with most technical SEO strategies is that they prioritize opportunities by error type. 

For example, broken links (404s), missing title tags, slow site speed, etc., are all considered critical technical SEO errors.

But without any context regarding the particular pages these errors impact, you probably aren’t working on the highest value optimizations.

We have a different approach.

Instead of relying on a dashboard to prioritize errors for you, we prioritize technical SEO opportunities by conversion impact. 

From a tactical perspective, here’s what that means:

Once we know that there aren’t any major sitewide errors, we look at the pages most critical to the buyer journey and then use technical SEO to remove bottlenecks on those pages.

This means looking at those pages from the perspective of both users and search engines.

For example, the page needs to be easily crawlable, contain relevant keywords in the right places (e.g., H tags, titles, content, etc.), have sufficient links from other high authority pages, etc. to ensure it ranks in search engines.

It also needs to load quickly, contain relevant CTAs, display the right messaging, etc., to ensure users can easily find the information they need to proceed in the buyer journey.

To illustrate this, we’ll outline our step by step approach to technical SEO below.

Our Step by Step Approach to Technical SEO 

“If you aren’t just using an SEO tool to identify and fix technical issues, what’s your process?”

This is a question we’ll answer below, by laying out our step by step approach to technical SEO. 

Step 1: Mapping The Customer Journey and Identifying Bottlenecks

First, we ensure there aren’t any major sitewide issues, like slow site speed across the entire website, major duplicate content issues, missing sitemaps, etc.

However, most of the companies we work with already have healthy websites.

As our philosophy is to approach technical SEO from a revenue and conversion perspective, our first step is usually looking at CRM data and mapping out the buyer journey.

We ask questions like:

• How do prospects enter the funnel? 
• What are the key pages they interact with? 
• Where do they get stuck?

Based on the answers to these questions, we make a list of pages we know are essential to the buyer journey, like:

• Product pages
• Critical BOFU blog posts (i.e., comparison pages)
• The home page

This list ensures we focus on high impact SEO optimizations rather than wasting resources fixing errors on pages that have little impact on the buyer journey. 

So, instead of optimizing by error type, we prioritize optimizing buyer journey impact. 

Step 2: Prioritizing Critical Errors And Opportunities

Once we have a list of pages that are critical to the buyer journey, we scan them using our checklist:

• Is it crawlable?
• Is it indexible?
• Is it secure?
• Is it fast?
• Is it mobile friendly?

If a critical page is missing the mark on any of these fundamentals, search engines will have a hard time crawling the page, and it’s likely delivering a negative user experience.

Either way, these errors are costing you conversions, because we know that this page is critical to the buyer journey.

To identify and solve these issues, we use Google Search Console and several third party SEO tools.

However, we aren’t just looking for errors. 

Plenty of optimizations fall within the scope of technical SEO that won’t show up as an error on a site scan, but still have a major impact on performance.

Some of these things include:

• Optimizing internal link opportunities: If a critical page struggles to rank for the intended keyword, we’ll internally link to it from another high authority page on the website (e.g., a stats page that’s earned a lot of links) to help boost its authority.
• Optimizing H tags: A site scan may tell you if you’re missing any of these tags, but we want to ensure these tags include the right semantic keywords to help the page rank.
• Combining and redirecting thin/duplicate content: If there are multiple blog posts on a similar topic, search engines won’t know which to rank, and ultimately often won’t rank any for the intended keyword. Additionally, you dilute your website’s authority if it has many low-value pages that receive little engagement. Therefore, we combine pages that cover a similar topic and redirect/remove those that are low value. 

Step 3: Implementing Optimizations Using Proven Page Templates 

Technical SEO is often considered a checklist task – you discover errors and correct them.

There’s a relatively straightforward fix to some issues, like site speed, website security, and indexation.

Yet other technical SEO opportunities have a multitude of resolution options.

For example, let’s say there’s a critical page on your website (e.g., a product page) that doesn’t have any internal links pointing towards it. 

The item on your technical SEO checklist may be to add internal links to that page. 

However, the pages you choose to internally link to and from the page you’re optimizing impact two things:

1. The authority passed to that page, which impacts search engine rankings. For example, a link from another page on your website with many high quality external links will pass much more authority than a random blog post with no external links.
2. Where prospects go after viewing that page, which impacts conversions. For example, prospects will leave your website if the page you’re optimizing doesn’t include an internal link to the next step in the buyer journey. However, internally linking to a page irrelevant to the buyer journey is almost as bad as not including an internal link at all because it won’t help prospects become customers.

Another example is thin or duplicate content.

The content you use to replace thin content, or how you combine content, greatly impacts the rankings of the new piece of content.

This is why technical SEO isn’t always a simple checklist task. 

How you resolve each opportunity on the checklist impacts the ROI of your technical SEO.

So, how do we resolve each technical SEO opportunity?

For basic technical tasks, like site speed, indexation issues, etc., we follow basic best practices to remove these errors.

For more complex tasks with many potential solution opportunities, we have a two-part strategy:

1. Customer research and buyer journey data: We use CRM data as well as customer research documents, like the SaaS positioning canvas, to inform how to better connect the buyer journey and serve the right messaging. This guides internal linking decisions, content redirect/combining decisions, keyword optimizations, and more.
2. Proven page templates: We’ve tested and optimized specific page templates for critical pages like product pages, blog posts, and landing pages. 

We have detailed resources on these exact page templates, as well as common mistakes and real examples of each. However, below are screenshots of the general templates we use for each of these pages.

Blog Posts

Landing Pages

Our landing page structure varies significantly based on the offer, the prospect, and the company. 

So, instead of showing a template, here’s a brief overview of a landing page checklist you can use:

• The Content: Use bullet points, white space, and bold headlines to make the messaging as clear as possible. Incorporate industry-specific keywords whenever possible. 
• The Form: Use a progressive profiling approach and collect only the bare minimum from prospects on their first interaction with your brand (e.g., their email address). Then, ask for more information later in the buyer journey. Use pre-filled sections whenever possible as well.
• The Design: Instead of using complex designs, keep it simple with consistent colors and fonts that match your brand’s image and use white space to keep it clear. 
• The Call-to-Action: Make sure the call to action is large, a different color from the rest of the page, and clearly a clickable button. 

Get Help Improving Your Technical SEO

Technical SEO isn’t just about correcting errors – it’s identifying and solving bottlenecks in the buyer journey.

You can use this step by step process to implement a technical SEO strategy yourself, though understanding the full buyer journey can be tricky. If you want more help identifying the highest impact opportunities, reach out to our team today. 

We can help you use SEO as a tool to not just rank higher on Google and drive more traffic, but also accelerate revenue by attracting high quality prospects and removing bottlenecks throughout the buyer journey.