4 Most Important SEO Practices

Search engines have completely changed the way people seek answers, solutions, and even entertainment.

For that reason, businesses (including software companies) now use search engines as one of the primary channels for getting in front of their target customers.

To get some perspective, check out these stats:

• Google processes more than 63,000 search queries every second
• Over 53% of all website traffic comes from organic search results

While search engines offer great business potential, it’s not easy to carve out a piece of that pie. That’s because search engines rank results on the basis of relevancy, quality, and hundreds of other factors, and not a lot of people will go beyond the first search engine results page (SERP). 

In fact, only around 0.78% of searchers click on results from the second page on Google. 

For that reason, as a business, your goal should be to show up as one of the first results whenever your customer searches for something.

That’s where search engine optimization (SEO) comes in – the strategic process of setting your website and overall online presence up in a way that helps you rank higher in search engine results for relevant search queries. 

SEO, if done right, can bring in some massive returns. For B2B SaaS companies, the average ROI for SEO is a whopping 702%.

If you’re currently in the process of solidifying an SEO strategy for your SaaS brand, keep reading. In this guide, we’ll break down the 4 essential components of SEO, including:

• Strategy
• Website
• Content 
• User Experience (UX)

Let’s jump right in.

1. Strategy

Before anything else, start off by creating a thorough SEO strategy. 

It can provide a solid roadmap, vision, and the specific tactics you need to execute along the way.

Here’s a step-by-step blueprint of all that it entails.

Come Up with a List of Content Ideas

Content is the heart and soul of SEO.

In addition to several other ranking factors, search engines mainly rank websites based on the quality of their content and how well it all answers the questions people ask.

To get your content right, you first need to come up with informative, insightful, and/or entertaining ideas.

Here are some quick tips to help you get started:

• Involve Internal Teams – Specifically, involve people from marketing, sales, and customer experience to brainstorm content ideas. As a software company, you should also involve subject matter experts (SMEs).
• Peep at Your Competitors – Snoop around your competitor’s blog to see what they’ve been up to. Try to come up with better, more creative angles.
• Stay Active on Social Media – Join groups, follow channels, and connect with thought leaders in your industry. A quick, daily scroll through different social channels may give you some ideas for fresh content.
• Follow News – Keep up with industry trends and the latest developments. For instance, if you offer a payment gateway solution to your customer, follow news related to fintech.

For this purpose, you can use SEO tools (like Ahrefs or Semrush), content research platforms (such as BuzzSumo), and team collaboration software (like Trello or Asana).

Find Lucrative Keywords

Keywords are the queries that people type into search engines to get the information they need.

Creating content around the keywords that your target audience searches, and ranking as high as possible for those keywords in SERPs, is the goal of SEO. 

Here’s what you need to know about that.

Types of Keywords

We classify keywords based on search (or user) intent – the goal with which a user begins their search. As marketers, it’s our responsibility to figure out that intent and create content around it.

Based on that, keywords can be divided into the following 3 types:

• Transactional – These keywords indicate high intent to purchase something. Examples include “Buy HubSpot,” “Stripe pricing” etc.
• Commercial – This intent indicates that the user is evaluating options, but isn’t quite ready to make a transaction just yet. For example, “best email automation tools” or “MicroMain benefits."
• Informational – As the name suggests, these keywords indicate the intent to learn about something. For example, “how to set up a drip campaign” or “what is SEO,” etc.

However, intent can have also have additional layers to it, such as:

• Educational – The searcher is looking for resources or information that they can start practically applying in their career or personal life. For example, “inbound marketing courses” or “writing resources,” etc.
• Entertaining – The user is looking for entertaining content. Even SaaS companies can cater to this intent. Finding creative angles to take with your content is key here.
• Inspirational – Finally, the user may be looking for resources that inspire them. Examples include “cold call scripts,” “creative marketing strategies,” or "best product page design," etc.

Pinpointing the exact intent(s) behind any keyword will help you map it more accurately to a reasonable content idea and create something meaningful.

Discover and Shortlist Keywords

With a list of content ideas at your disposal, you can begin finding keywords that align with them. 

This is simply referred to as keyword research.

For this, you’ll need an SEO or standalone keyword research tool.

Here are some tactics you can use:

• Type in a seed keyword in your SEO tool to discover related search terms and keywords. It can be any broad term related to your industry. For instance, if you’re a SaaS company selling an automated payroll system, a seed term could be “payroll.”
• Look at the list of keywords that your competitors are ranking for with your SEO tool (the content gap analysis tool on Ahrefs can help).
• Analyze the conversations that your sales and support teams have with leads and customers. Look for recurring terms or questions and see if they are worth chasing.

Discovering keywords is the easy part.

Shortlisting the ones worth going after can be tricky though. The easiest way to determine those keywords is to look at the following metrics:

• Keyword Difficulty – A score (from 0 to 100) that estimates how difficult it would be to rank on the first page for that keyword. 
• Search Volume – The total number of Google searches a keyword gets on a monthly basis.

Look for keywords that have high search volumes and low difficulty levels. Those are the ones that can easily bring in the most traffic.

Set Up a Blog

A blog is a repository of content on your website that can help you generate traffic, teach or inspire your readers, and lead them to subscribe, sign up, or buy.

Here are some quick tips on setting up a blog the right way:

• Have a clear vision for what you want your blog to be about.
• Create categories of topics to organize your content (for instance, if you’re selling an AI-enabled data analytics platform, you can write content on topics like “statistics” or “machine learning").
• Focus on design to stand out, but also to be clear about how your platform helps, to guide users, and to create a seamless experience. 

In addition, work with your content marketers to create a plan to promote your blog.

Make a Game Plan for Link Building

When a website links to another website, they are seen as votes of confidence by a search engine. 

If a significant number of credible websites link to your website, search engines will think of your website as credible, as well.

That’s because links (or backlinks) transfer something known as “link equity” (or link juice). The more links you receive from other websites, the more authoritative your website’s domain will become over time, and the easier it will be for you to rank higher for more difficult keywords.

The process carried out to create more links that lead back to your website is known as link building – a critical component of any SEO strategy.

How to Build Backlinks

Since search engines tend to give backlinks higher value than any other ranking factor, you need a detailed game plan to acquire them.

Here are some tactics that work:

• Build Linkable Assets – Appealing infographics, round-up articles, statistics posts, and original studies can help naturally build links back to your website.
• Contribute as a Guest Blogger – Search for blogs that accept posts from guest bloggers in exchange for links. Search for SaaS publications that accept guest posts.
• Broken Links – When a page gets deleted or moved somewhere, any backlinks that it might have received become “broken.” This is a great opportunity to swoop in and claim those links. To do this, check the backlinks of competitor websites on an SEO tool, look for broken links, create similar content, and request the webmasters to link to it instead.

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. 

There are a lot of other link building tactics that work just as well.

Make sure that you hire a proper link builder to handle everything. If you’re outsourcing, ensure that they understand your business objectives and the type of websites you want links from.

Solidify an Auditing Process

Lay down a process (or framework) for conducting SEO audits.

An SEO audit is an overall “check-up” of your website to see where it currently stands and whether or not it’s on its way to achieve your SEO goals.

Audits mainly concern:

• The Content – To see how it’s performing i.e. is it getting any traffic, how many keywords is it ranking for, etc.
• Backlinks – To check if you’re receiving an ample number of backlinks from credible, relevant, and appropriate websites.
• UX/UI – To see if your website is optimized to provide a positive user experience.

It’s important to create detailed checklists for how you want your team members to conduct these audits, to maintain consistency, report on relevant metrics, and see results.

2. Website

Your website is your digital storefront and the central part of your online presence.

If it isn’t properly optimized, it will have a tough time ranking in the SERPs.

In this context, here's what you need to do.

Select a Good Website Host

To make your website go live on the internet, you need to publish it on a server via a hosting platform. 

Selecting a host for your website can have a lot of implications from an SEO perspective.

The following scenarios are indicative of a problematic web hosting service:

• Frequent or Extended Server Downtimes – This is purely your web host’s fault. If your website is always down, your visitors will head on over to another website, resulting in a fall in rankings.
• High Page Load Times – Heavy coding that needs to be optimized can cause your pages to load slowly. But if you’ve done everything on your end to improve it, your web host may be to blame. 

Here are some tips on picking a good web hosting service:

• Opt for dedicated hosting (where your website gets an entire server) as opposed to shared hosting (i.e. sharing a server with multiple websites). 
• Pick a host server based on location. Determine where most of your target audience is based and pick a central or nearby location.

By ensuring the above, your website will always be available to your audience.

Build Your Site with a Proper Structure

Site structure refers to the way the content on your website is organized. 

Think of it like a flowchart of your SaaS website, with each page leading your visitors to another relevant page.

From an SEO perspective, having a logical and easy-to-navigate site structure is crucial for two reasons:

• It helps create a positive experience for your users
• It helps search engines figure out how your content is organized and prioritized

Here are some tips to help you get your site structure right:

• Create proper categories for your content to make navigation easier.
• Focus on creating a positive journey for your target audience by strategically linking to other pages on your website.

Furthermore, if you haven't already,  create an XML sitemap for your website and submit it to Google. This is a digital file that includes all the pages on your website, describes how they’re structured, and helps search engines understand that structure.

To learn more, check out this extensive guide by Google.

Use Proper URL Structures

Another key SEO factor is the way your website’s URLs look.

A URL is what appears in the address bar of your browser when you open a webpage. 

Your URLs should be easy-to-remember, logical, and made to look like they’re for humans (and not robots).

A typical URL includes:

• Your domain
• A category (the specific category that’s opened)
• (Optional) A sub-category
• Slug (the last part of your URL)

Here’s an example:

The URL shown above is a good example of URL structuring done right, because it’s memorable and includes the target keyword in the slug (a variable in SEO). 

Consider the following URLs:

• yourwebsite.com/blog/420-ApX09i4oP304-beep-boop

• yourwebsite.com/blog/marketing-automation

Option B is obviously far better.

If you’re not using a content management system like HubSpot, your website will generate a car-wreck of a URL like option A above, by default. After publishing a new page, make sure to customize its URL.

3. Content

Modern search engines are more than capable of evaluating the quality of content based on several, contextual (human) factors – using natural language processing (NLP) to make sense of what the content is about and who it's for. 

They then use that information to rank content based on their relevancy and reward pages for being in-depth.

Here’s what you need to do to get your content right.

Plan Out Your Content

Start by creating a content plan, which includes details of the assets you’re going to create, the resources you’ll utilize, and at what frequency.

Planning out your content entails:

• Creating a Content Schedule – Create a fixed content schedule that helps you consistently publish content on your website. By putting out content on a regular cadence, you’ll consistently provide your audience with insights and avoid falling behind.

• Delegating Tasks – Split the work between your content team. Depending on your budget and other resources, you can either build an in-house team, outsource to freelancers or agencies, or a mixture of both.

You can use any project or task management tool to plan out and delegate content-related tasks. 

Craft In-Depth Content

Today, putting some extra effort into creating top-level content (well-structured, targeted, and loaded with insights) is a necessity. 

This is especially true for SaaS teams. 

To give you an idea of what you’re up against – a study revealed that, out of 250 SaaS companies, only 15% didn’t have a blog. 

With so many companies potentially creating content on the same topics as you, you need to make sure that whatever you publish stands out.

Here’s a quick checklist that can help with that:

• Craft Around User Intent – Ask yourself why the reader would want to click on and read your content. For example, say you’re an SaaS marketing platform writing about “what is keyword research.” In this case, the intent is informational and your content needs to be written accordingly.
• Create an Outline – Before you begin creating your content, it’s good to collect and structure your thoughts by creating an outline. This will help you stay laser-focused and make the writing process a breeze.
• Offer Insights – Offer high-level insights to your target audience. This includes professional commentary, personal opinions, insider-tips, and practical advice.

• Share Real Data and Examples – In addition, augment your content by throwing in relevant statistics and examples to drive the message home. For instance, if you sell computerized maintenance management systems (CMMS), and you’re writing about the benefits of using a CMMS, share business statistics of having one.

It may sound like a lot of work, but that’s how you set your content up for success.

Use the Skyscraper Technique to Create Your Content

The skyscraper technique – created by Brian Dean of Backlinko – offers a framework to create content that can rack up a lot of traffic.

Under this technique, you look for competitor content that’s performing really well in the search results and creating something that’s even better by:

• Making it Longer – Long-form content tends to perform much better in the SERPs. Fill it up with insights, actionable advice, and just overall valuable substance.
• Making it Up-to-Date – No matter how good it is, outdated content will eventually get outranked in the SERPs. Make sure yours is up-to-date.
• Designing it Better – Insightful, up-to-date content that’s presented in a visually pleasing format will always perform better.
• Making it More In-Depth – Don’t create thin content and call it a day. For instance, if you’re writing a list post on the best sales automation platforms, don’t just list the tools. Instead, go one step further and provide short descriptions and quick feature overviews for each tool, tips on how to use each tool more effectively, and/or examples of how your team used the tool to find success. 

Embed the skyscraper technique into your process and establish a standard for what quality, in-depth content looks like.

Optimize Your Content

The high-level content that you create still needs to be optimized according to on-page SEO best practices.

This is only a matter of taking care of a few tactical things. Here’s a quick, universal checklist:

• Adding Keywords – Mention your target keyword naturally throughout your article (don’t overdo it though). Specifically, add it to your introduction, in the headings, and the rest of your article.
• Using Relevant Terms – In addition to your primary keyword, use related terms throughout your content. That helps search engines understand the context of your content. A content optimization tool like Clearscope can help discover those terms.
• Using Headings – It’s SEO best practice to structure your articles by breaking them with headings (H2s, H3s, H4s, and so on).
• Including Links – Link to relevant pages within your website (a process called internal linking). Similarly, link out to other websites that your user might find useful (called external linking).
• Incorporating Visuals – Add relevant images and videos to your article to increase the user-experience.
• Compressing Visuals – Whatever visuals you add in your content need to be compressed to optimize your speed (more on this shortly). Tools like TinyPNG and Clideo can help with that.
• Adding Alt Text – Alt text is a description of any image you include in your content. Its purpose is to improve accessibility for readers with visual impairment who may be using text-to-audio tools to consume your content. Make it short and descriptive.
• Optimizing the URL – Lastly, make your URLs short and memorable. Make sure to include your target keyword in the slug (the last part of your URL).

While the checklist above won’t guarantee that your content will rank at the top, it will certainly help you deliver an awesome, optimized experience for your readers.

You can use HubSpot’s SEO tool to get recommendations for optimizing your content and making it better.

Distributing Your Content

After you’re done creating your content, it’s time to distribute and promote it to your audience.

The more your newly-published content gets read and shared, the more traction it’ll gain in the race of SERPs. And it all starts with you spreading it across different channels.

Here are some quick tips for distributing your content:

• Select the channels where your target audience is the most active. Social media is a great place to start. For B2B SaaS companies, LinkedIn is an absolute must.
• Determine the time of the day when your target audience is the most active on a specific channel and share your content around that time. Tools - like HubSpot - are widely available to help gain this insight.
• Ask your colleagues, friends, and family members to share your content to pick up some traction.
• Share the content to groups, forums, and threads on different social networks. Facebook groups and sub-reddits are popular options.
• In addition to social, start building an email database of loyal readers. After a while, start distributing your content via email.

For distribution you can use HubSpot’s tools for social media management and email marketing.

Track the Performance of Your Content

Use an SEO tool to consistently monitor the performance of your content after it has been published.

Here are some metrics that you should be looking at:

• Monthly organic traffic
• Impressions (how many people see your content on the SERPs)
• Click-through rate (how many people click on your content after seeing it in the search results)
• Backlinks 
• Social shares
• Keywords (how many keywords it ranks for)
• Bounce rate (the percentage of people who leave your website without taking any action)

If the numbers seem off or you feel that they can be a bit better, tweak and optimize your content to fix the issues.

4. User Experience (UX)

Search engines primarily evaluate your rankings based on the perception of the users.

If you provide a positive experience to your users (through in-depth, relevant, and easy-to-navigate content), Google will reward you by increasing your rankings in the SERPs.

Here’s what you need to do:

Optimize for Speed

Your site speed – the speed at which your website loads – is a crucial SEO ranking factor.

Your page speed, on the other hand, is the rate at which a specific page on your website loads.

Both are equally important.

In fact, an average consumer will leave a website or web page if it takes more than 3 seconds to load.

To avoid that, try this:

• Compress the visuals on your website (if you already haven’t).
• Use content distribution networks (CDNs), which use geographically dispersed servers that split the load of your content.
• Minify your web source code. This involves removing unnecessary whitespace, commas, and other characters from your code to “clean” it.
• Compress your code with a tool like Gzip.

To check your site and page speed, you can use Google PageSpeed Insights – a free tool that rates your website’s speed on a scale of 0 to 100 and provides practical suggestions for improving it.

Make it Mobile Friendly

About 54.8% of all web traffic comes from mobile. 

For that reason, you need to optimize your website for mobile, which entails making it just as accessible, easy-to-use, and responsive on mobile devices as it is on desktop.

Here’s how you can make your website mobile-friendly:

• Switch to a responsive web design.
• Increase the size of buttons and text on your website.
• Make sure that none of the content is cut off or hidden on mobile.

To see if your website is mobile-friendly, you can use this tool by Google. Simply plug in the URL of your website into the given field and the tool will provide its verdict.

Create an Experience

Apart from everything else, just focus on building an overall positive experience for your readers.

This involves:

• Focusing on Aesthetics – Make your design appealing by incorporating vibrant colors, great looking fonts, and contemporary art styles.

• Creating a Memorable User-Journey – Structure and connect your pages in a way that delivers an experience like no other.

• Crafting Immersive Content – Create every content with the goal of hooking your readers in.

Look at How Users Behave on Your Website

Finally, gather and use web analytics data to get insights and make informed decisions about how you can:

• Further optimize your website
• Improve a better experience for your users
• Increase the likelihood of users taking desirable actions on your pages
• Improving the overall SEO performance

For instance, if analytics data shows that a significant number of people don’t click on a call-to-action button, you can consider moving it somewhere else or improving the copy leading to it.

A web analytics tool, like HubSpot or Google Analytics, can help you understand how users interact with your website and take actions accordingly.

Final Thoughts: Analyze, Optimize, Rinse, and Repeat

Search engine optimization is a data-backed science and a never-ending marathon. To get results, you have to consistently:

• Publish new content
• Analyze the performance data to see where you stand
• Act on it by optimizing it accordingly
• Repeat

That’s the beauty of it.

The point of it isn’t to get to a final destination, but to enjoy the process by experimenting with different tactics that may help you rank higher in the search results.

At Revvy, we consult businesses looking to improve their lead generation and overall marketing strategies. Feel free to reach out if you have any questions or need some help.