B2B SaaS SEO: A Comprehensive Guide

In this guide, we’ll discuss how to plan and execute a B2B SaaS SEO campaign. We’ve broken down the process into 5 parts:

1. Technical SEO: A Prerequisite for Ranking
2. How to Build an Effective B2B SEO Strategy
3. Creating High-Quality SEO Content that Ranks and Converts
4. The Importance of Regular Content Updates
5. Monitoring B2B SaaS SEO KPIs

We’ll begin by discussing technical SEO, as it is a relatively straightforward but necessary component of SEO as a whole. The meat of this guide will be in creating SEO strategy and content, as they are the lynchpins of a successful B2B SEO campaign. Finally, we address the need for regular content updates due to the bias toward recent content in Google’s modern algorithm, and discuss KPI tracking.

Technical SEO: A Prerequisite for Ranking

Backend technical factors make up approximately 30% of Google’s algorithm (content and backlinks make up the remaining 70%)—a significant but not majority percentage. Technical SEO refers to all of the work to ensure none of these backend factors hinder your ability to rank, and consists of:

• Updating meta title tags to include keywords
• Improving website mobile-friendliness
• Optimizing Core Web Vitals responses and page load speeds
• Implementing HTTPS / SSL certificates
• Including keywords in page URLs
• Implementing schema markups and structured data
• Removing duplicate pages, broken links, and missing images
• Optimizing site architecture and including internal links
• Keeping content on a single domain 

Worth noting here is that many agencies that offer SEO at low prices provide only technical SEO to their clients. While important for ranking, perfectly implemented technical SEO will not by itself earn first page placements for your website—though a poor technical foundation will prevent otherwise excellent pages from ranking well.

Implementing technical SEO will mostly fall to your web development team but note that any keyword implementation will require input from your SEO strategist and should therefore happen concurrently with early strategy development. The step by step details of technical SEO are outside the scope of this guide—indeed, most modern CMSes will handle the bulk of these activities for you—but we cover them in more depth in our primer on technical SEO vs. content SEO.

How to Build an Effective B2B SaaS SEO Strategy

The cornerstone of B2B SaaS SEO is campaign strategy. Your SEO strategy is your playbook for the entire campaign, and will outline every keyword you plan to target, what type of page should be created for that keyword, and in what order you should create those pages. Strategy development begins with identifying the right audience to target. Then, from analyzing that audience, your strategists will then determine which keywords are transactional—meaning its searchers are actively in the market for your software–and determine which of those you have a realistic chance of ranking for. These keywords are then organized into topical pillars to create discrete projects for your content team and establish niche expertise with Google.

Identifying Your Target Audience

B2B SaaS SEO strategy begins with a discovery process, in which your team determines who your SEO campaign will target. The simplest way to do is by looking to your current user demographics and identifying common industries, job types, and use cases. Each of these can be considered a potential audience, and your team can then evaluate each based on:

• The total number of potential new users in that audience
• How well your software’s value proposition matches their needs
• How profitable an average user from that audience is based on their expected acquisition cost, lifetime value, and churn rate
• Whether SEO will synergize with other marketing campaigns targeting that audience

The most valuable of these should be prioritized in your SEO campaigns, and be the focus of your initial keyword research. Note, however, that during the course of your research you may find that a particular audience is already highly targeted by competitors, and the resulting search space would be difficult to rank in. In such cases, you should consider targeting a less valuable but easier to compete for audience in order to achieve ROI more quickly, and target the more competitive audience later in your campaign when your website has a higher domain rating.

Understanding Keyword Search Intent

With your audience determined, the next step in the B2B SaaS SEO strategy is determining which keywords to target. Making this determination requires that you understand search intent.

In the B2B SaaS world, every keyword can be categorized based on how close someone searching that keyword is to converting by making a purchase or signing up for a free trial. Keywords that indicate high proximity to conversion are called transactional keywords, whereas keywords searched by people simply looking for more information are called research keywords. These are the two ends of a spectrum, as shown below:

A topical pillar is simply a cluster of keywords that are all directly related to a specific topic, and often contain the same root keyword. It is an extension of the Hub & Spoke model of SEO, and serves two main purposes:

1. Each topical pillar can form a discrete campaign project, making it more efficient to produce content for
2. Google rewards websites that it sees as niche experts, allowing them to rank higher than their domain rating would otherwise suggest

Each content pillar will also provide an array of potential keywords. While you can use dedicated SEO tools to generate keyword ideas, we recommend using the “autofill” method. First, type the pillar’s root keyword into Google (this is the shortest, most general keyword that best describes the pillar). Google will then suggest a series of commonly searched keywords in the dropdown list, as shown below:

Each of these is a potential keyword to target, so write down any that are sufficiently transactional. Then, repeat this process for your root keyword plus each letter of the alphabet, e.g.:

At the end of this process, you will have a list of anywhere from 10–50 keywords in each pillar. Evaluate each based on its search intent and potential value, assigning page types while keeping the following in mind:

• Avoid targeting keywords you already rank for. While you may wish to mark highly-ranking pages for improvements later in a campaign, your time will be initially be best spent trying to capture rankings for new keywords. We recommend moving on if your company ranks within the top five for said keyword. 

• The keywords in your pillar should be attainable. You may find that the competition for keywords in a chosen pillar is too high to reasonably rank for within 12 months. In such cases, you should try to find a more narrow pillar to begin your campaign with instead. For example, the difference between targeting “healthcare CRM” keywords and “CRM software” keywords is vast. Even for a CRM software provider that doesn’t specialize in healthcare (but still has healthcare CRM features), targeting the first can allow the company to be more competitive than it would be when targeting the latter.

• The whole root keyword doesn’t always need to be targeted. Google has become more sophisticated over the years when it comes to recognizing closely related topics. While most keywords should contain the pillar’s root, a few can stray further and still add to your website’s niche expertise.

For example, let’s continue thinking of a hypothetical CRM company that is just beginning an SEO campaign. A “healthcare crm” pillar would suggest the keywords below:

Example “Healthcare CRM” Keywords by Search Intent & Page Type

Keyword	Search Intent	Page Type	Notes
healthcare crm demo	Buy	Product Landing Page	Someone searching for a demo is very close to making a purchasing decision, and should be presented with a highly conversion-focused landing page.
crm for healthcare providers	Commit	Product Landing Page	While this keyword doesn’t contain the “healthcare crm” root, it is closely related to the topic and highly transactional.
healthcare crm reviews	Evaluate	Case Studies Page	While most searchers will be looking for a review aggregator or personalized recommendations, publishing a page filled with case studies will help sway some searchers.
best healthcare crm	Explore	Comparison Blog Article	Comparison blogs targeting explore keywords are excellent for lead generation. The other entires in a comparison blog should be selected to avoid major competitors as much as possible.
is salesforce hipaa compliant	Solve	Blog Article	How valuable solve keywords are is highly dependent on the specific topical pillar.
healthcare crm features	Clarify	Blog Article	Clarify keywords are the least transactional keywords that most B2B SaaS companies should target. Searchers will have enough familiarity with a topic to indicate some interest in making a purchasing decision down the road.
what is a healthcare crm	Learn	N/A	Learn keywords are usually not transactional enough to justify targeting—marketing resources are better spent elsewhere.

These can then be organized into a single project, which can be completed within 3-4 months. Once finished, the team then moves onto the next topical pillar. Below is an example of what this process might look like for a 12-month campaign:

With your strategy fully developed, the next step is to execute on that strategy by creating content.

Creating High-Quality Content that Ranks and Converts

The lifeblood of SEO is content, and as Google has continued to update its algorithm, it has become better and better at identifying which pages actually resonate with searchers. At the same time, more companies have invested in SEO, regularly publishing new blog articles and landing pages and leading to a flood of mediocre content. As a result, content quality has become more and more important in modern SEO—not only to rank on Google, but to actually convert searchers into leads.

While different B2B SaaS SEO campaigns will vary in the keywords they target, what makes a page truly excellent for SEO is simply that the page must provide searchers with exactly what they are looking for. Pages can do this by following the three “P”s of high quality SEO content:

• Precision: Good SEO content prioritizes the reader’s time by being narrowly focused tailored to their actual search. Avoid lengthy introductions and get address the search intent in the opening paragraph of the page. Any difficult or complex language should be presented in easily digestible formats. While less focused content can still show up in the search results, it is much less effective at actually converting visitors into leads.
• Personalization: The content should be personalized for the target audience. Make any examples relevant to their experiences and be sure to include common industry language that subtly communicates to them that the writer knows the topic like an industry expert should.
• Portion Size: Content should be kept to the right length for answering each search’s implicit query. A broader topic (such as this very article on B2B SaaS SEO) demands a more comprehensive article, whereas simpler queries should be answered quickly without additional embellishment.

In addition to the above, your content should also incorporate tables, graphics, and formatting to keep readers’ attention. Note how in this article, we rarely wrote more than 1-2 paragraphs without using a table, an image, or a bulleted list to add visual interest. Including these elements also helps orient a reader in longer pieces, allowing them to more quickly find the information they’re looking for.

In addition to ranking highly and sharing information your content also needs to convert readers into leads for your sales team by filling out a contact form or by signing up for a free trial. Include a clear CTA at the bottom of blog articles and landing pages, as well as mid-page CTAs where reasonable. Even when a blog article doesn’t lend itself to a strong mid-page CTA, links distributed throughout will help readers navigate to more content so you can continue to build trust with them.

While these principles are easy to understand, implementing them is much more difficult. We go into significantly more depth in our guides to creating B2B SaaS landing pages, writing SEO content, and through leadership in general.

The Importance of Regular Content Updates

After you’ve been conducting an SEO campaign for 9-12 months, you’ll find that one of the most effective ways to keep content at the top of Google SERPS is to update existing content rather than create new pages every time. This is especially true in the cases of industry reports or pages dedicated to trends, but even more static content (e.g., product pages, service pages, industry pages) should be updated periodically. We call this approach the Corpus of Content model of SEO.

On average, we recommend updating pages every 6-12 months, but your most valuable pages can be updated as often as monthly. For example, a service page may be updated as little as once a year, whereas a highly visited blog article discussing recent trends might need to be updated every month. While these updates should always be substantive enough so that Google sees that there is new content on a page, they very rarely require full rewrites. Updates you might make include:

• Updating time-sensitive content with new information (e.g. updating reports on industry trends with the latest developments)
• Updating charts and tables sharing metrics to reflect accurate information
• Updating bylines and introductions to better speak to your target audience
• Adding or removing entire sections as necessary based on new developments
• Making minor edits to create opportunities for new internal links

To aid in this process, we recommend creating and maintaining a keyword map updated that sorts every keyword by its value to your business. Below is a screenshot of our own keyword map:

This keyword map will be updated based on real world performance, which brings us to our final topic: B2B SaaS SEO KPIs.

Monitoring B2B SaaS SEO KPIs

Once you’ve begun to execute on your SEO strategy, final phase of B2B SaaS SEO is to monitor KPIS and adjust accordingly. On average, allow at least 2 months to pass before making any substantial changes to the site, assuming all of the technical SEO is running smoothly and there aren’t any erroneous edits required on existing pages.

How teams measure the success of their campaign allows them to connect their sometimes intangible goals to a tangible, concrete metric. The following table outlines the most common B2B SaaS SEO metrics and their related goals:

B2B SaaS SEO Metrics & Goals

Name	Description	Benchmarks
ROI	A high-view comparison of how much profit the campaign generates as opposed to how much spend it requires.	748%
Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)	The cost required to generate a single new customer	Organic: $942Paid: $1,907
Customer LIfetime Value	How much the company stands to gain from a customer over the course of their lifetime	Industry Dependant
LTV to CAC Ratio	How much it costs to acquire a new customer versus how much the company stands to gain from them over the course of their lifetime	4:1
Cost Per Lead	The cost required to generate a new lead which has not yet closed	Organic: $327Paid: $458
Clickthrough Rate	The number of visitors that come to the website from a single link	Dependant on ranking position

Often, B2B SaaS SEO campaigns have several goals. This means identifying the appropriate metrics is especially important, as there are typically several that apply in some way to the long-term health and success of the campaign.  

Although it can take a substantial amount of time, a good approach to measuring results is through a process called AB testing. This is a process in which team members identify a page’s lowest performing element, change it (and only it), and make the page live again for observation. If the page’s performance has improved or declined over a minimum of a month, teams can proceed accordingly.

AB Testing Example

Description	Example
Marketing notices that the main product landing page for their company’s software does not convert visitors to leads. They notice that the button leading to the contact page offers a 30 day trial period and decide that this may not be a tempting enough offer.
After consulting with Sales, Marketing alters the button to offer a new 45 day trial, altering only the number on the CTA before updating the page. They then observes the performance of the page over the next 30 days to determine if this change should be applied across every landing page.

The hard reality of SEO in general is that results take time, even when organized around topical pillars as discussed above. One common way to increase short-term leads is to utilize a PPC campaign in tandem with an SEO campaign, using PPC to gain short-term leads while building SEO in the background.

Managing Your B2B SaaS SEO strategy 

Despite the length of this article, the reality is that B2B SaaS SEO is a particularly hard needle to thread. On one hand, you have platforms which hold a captive audience and a unique ability to narrow your target marketing. On the other, there are often multiple levels of consent required before and eventual conversion can be made. For this reason, even seasoned marketers can miss the mark and cost months of additional work while they regroup and correct.

For this reason, many SaaS companies choose to work with an outside expert in order to ensure that their marketing budget stays within the company’s often narrow margins. our agency specializes in B2B SaaS SEO strategy and implementation, providing full-service SEO marketing for SaaS companies in nearly every industry. Contact us to discuss a future partnership.