Today’s digital marketing landscape is built on easily digestible and searchable information. The top-performing enterprise SaaS businesses are distilling the solutions to complex problems into content that can be comprehended quickly and lead users down clear paths. Enterprise users typically find that content via Google’s search results, making SEO among your largest sources of new leads.
In this article, we lay out the strategy our agency uses when implementing SEO campaigns for enterprise SaaS businesses. We’ve distilled it into 5 steps:
- Build an editorial calendar around high-value keywords
- Create the best piece of content for each keyword
- Repackage SEO content for multiple channels
- Measure & attribute results
- Use data for future marketing decisions
Build An Editorial Calendar Around High-Value Keywords
The simplest way to explain any SEO strategy is this:
Choose your highest-value keywords and create the best piece of content on the Internet for each keyword in a systematic way.
The process begins with an editorial calendar. An editorial calendar serves two functions: it organizes your content plan, and promotes consistency in your SEO deliverables. It becomes even more important if your goal is to achieve a high domain rating with Google by publishing engaging content on a weekly basis. (Doing so is currently the most important factor in Google’s algorithm.)
Here’s an example layout of an editorial calendar for an enterprise SaaS company:
| Value Rank | Keyword | Page Type | Audience | Content Plan |
| #1 | “crm benefits” | Blog Article | Operations managers, entrepreneurs, and senior company officers | Comprehensive article looking at the advantages/disadvantages of using a CRM |
| #2 | “best crm features” | Blog Article | Enterprise CMO, returning buyers looking to update their SaaS programs | Overview of the best CRM features for the coming year. Analyze how the CRMs have changed over the past 2-3 years, and what customers should expect in the future. |
| #3 | “crm implementation challenges” | SLP | Experienced enterprise managers | Briefly discuss common challenges in implementing a new CRM, and give an in depth analysis of how modern enterprises approach these challenges |
| #4 | “crm for enterprise” | Landing page | Enterprise decision makers, buyers, researchers, new customers | A conversion oriented landing page outlining the top features of our CRM, highlighting those most relevant to enterprise customers. |
Let’s take a closer look at each category.
Value Rank
Your editorial calendar should rank your keywords by their importance to your SEO campaign so that you can prioritize your efforts. This ranking should be reviewed regularly to reflect changes in both the industry search landscape, and ongoing data from your campaign.
Page Type
Your calendar should pair each keyword with its ideal page type based on its search intent and transactionality. Enterprise SaaS websites usually have landing pages linked from their header menu for each product, feature, and resource or blog page.
Audience
Each piece of content you create must have a specific persona in mind. Targeting a persona rather than a broader “target audience” keeps articles specific, and ensures that writers are crafting their articles with the correct industry voice to resonate with the reader. Notes on the persona for a piece might include a potential reader’s:
- Job title
- New, Current, or Previous Customer
- Industry
- Specialization
- Pain Points
- Search Intent
Content Plan
The content plan provides writers with an overview of what is being covered, what specific points the article needs to hit, and (if necessary) what should be avoided to ensure relevant content that answers the readers questions. This sets them up for the next step of your SEO program: writing thought leadership content.
Create the Best Content for Each Keyword
80% of business decision-makers prefer to get information through informational articles rather than targeted ads.1 https://www.themarketingblender.com/statistics-boost-sales/ This is what makes thought leadership so powerful: it offers an expert voice in the industry, supplying relevant, sales-neutral information that fosters trust in the audience.
As opposed to run-of-the-mill SEO blogs and average quality content, thought leadership emphasizes “big picture” SaaS concepts and points its audience towards high-level concerns they should keep in mind as opposed to specific products themselves. This approach:
- Demonstrates expertise by explaining complex concepts in plain language
- Prioritizes informative content favored by search algorithms, increasing visibility in the search ratings
- Optimizes your website for conversions
In this sense, thought leadership content is sales done in reverse order. Whereas ad copy presents a product followed by a list of reasons customers might want it, thought leadership content identifies these qualities outright and then provides—as neutrally as possible—the company’s product as the best possible fit to meet those qualities. Especially when it comes to thought leadership with a research focus, this kind of content generates more trust in readers, leading to higher conversion rates.
Reshape SEO Content for Multiple Channels
A benefit of well-crafted thought leadership is that it can be adapted for other marketing channels in addition to your business’s website. Whereas SEO is among the highest-ROI lead generation channels, enterprise leads must be nurtured, and complementary marketing channels like email and LinkedIn allow you to do that using the same content.
For example, your blog articles can serve as the foundation for an email newsletter, or be repackaged as articles on LinkedIn. This provides multiple touchpoints for your potential customers, increasing the number of opportunities for them to convert. The table below shows the ROI you can expect from these channels:
| Channel | ROI |
| SEO | 748% |
| Webinars | 430% |
| 312% | |
| LinkedIn Organic | 229% |
This approach isn’t limited to written content. If you have a representative speaking at an enterprise event soon, you can use an in-depth blog article as the basis for their presentation. Another use case comes up if your sales team needs thought provoking material to be used on the floor of a trade show—infographics created for your website can be used as visual aids. Whatever the case, SaaS companies who embrace a strong multichannel approach to their SEO material are far more likely to experience a more emphatic response.
Measuring Results
SEO naturally offers a much higher conversion rate than traditional marketing. But even if your website has thought provoking SEO content that is being written and published on a regular basis, you won’t generate the same level of traction as you will with strong analytic capabilities and a data-driven approach to revising your campaign. The benefits of such an approach are:
- Tracking your Google rankings allows you to reprioritize content to target the most successful keywords
- KPIs like conversion rate, bounce rate, and pages viewed per session allow you to assess and troubleshoot which keywords and pages are underperforming
- Testing different Call-To-Actions (CTAs) allows you to gain a better understanding of what resonates with enterprise decision makers
- Finally, this information informs critical information that goes on the editorial calendar, making it critical to have actionable information upon which a company can act.
This data-based approach is just as important as content quality and keyword strategy. Tracking exactly where visitors are coming from, which pages are most successful, and finding any bottleneck pages that prevent conversion allows you to build on your successes. The data you gather can then be used to plan your future marketing efforts.
Using Data for Future Marketing Decisions
Accurate marketing decisions cannot be made without a) relevant data and b) an execution plan based on a thoughtful strategy. The data from your SEO campaign provides the foundation for marketing intelligence to help guide these decisions.
For example, if a company realizes that they are generating a large amount of traffic and clicks from their social media page, it only makes sense that they would then want to spend more time curating the content that gets posted on their pages. Similarly, if they note that a particular keyword is underperforming, they may choose to opt for a different one to test an alternative strategy.
This can be a difficult process, particularly when the assumptions made when making your branding and marketing decisions aren’t borne out by the data. Creating a successful SEO campaign, however, requires flexibility in decision making and a willingness to constantly update your strategy based on contact with the real world.
Enterprise Saas SEO & Growth
We have been working with enterprise-focused SaaS companies for more than a decade, building their SEO strategy and ghostwriting content for them based on the principles of search intent. Typically, SaaS companies struggle to build an in-house team that can produce the high quality content necessary for SEO on a regular basis. To solve this problem, many choose to outsource the first 2-3 years of their SEO program, working with an external SEO agency to build a successful foundation.
If you’re interested in exploring a partnership with us, you can contact us here.
