One of the main reasons SaaS blogs fail to gain bigger audiences is their lack of correct SEO optimization and buyer targeting.
When you take the time to optimize your content for SEO, you help guarantee that it will reach a wider, more targeted audience.
And an industry-specific audience will be far more likely to engage with both your content and your business, ensuring your long-term success.
There are several different methods, tips, and tricks you can follow to implement best SEO practices in your SaaS writing, but let’s take a close look at the top six you can start doing today: researching well, writing for a specific target audience, using clear language, being direct, highlighting your benefits, and implementing keyword strategies.
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Research, research, research
Perhaps the most important step in generating SEO-optimized SaaS content is performing the right market and keyword research.
By gathering the data and knowledge you need to draft successful content, you set your entire campaign up for success.
There are several different kinds of research you can perform to ensure you’re starting off on the right foot, so let’s briefly look at each of them:
Target audience research
To market anything to your audience, you have to know who they are and tailor your content to their problems and pain points.
For example, if your goal is to sell a chatbot, your target customer audience may be websites with an outdated chatbot or none at all.
You might target your campaign towards law firms one month and home services the next. Picking an industry also helps refine your SaaS content marketing and makes it more effective.
Also, think about where your market is at in the buyer journey.
At the top-of-the-funnel, you will want to publish more informational and brand awareness-type pieces.
You’ll want to educate the audience about how your SaaS product solves pain points and make them aware of their problems again to remind them of the need to fix them.
Middle-of-the-funnel content can include case studies, testimonials, demos, feature explanations, infographics with case study results, or statistics that showcase your product’s effectiveness.
Bottom-of-the-funnel topics can include comparisons to other solutions, independent reviews, testimonials or case studies with multiple calls to action, or sales brochures.
By researching your ideal customer, you can better understand what problems they face that you can help solve, the tone and style you need to communicate with them in, and what purchase barriers may be preventing them from doing business with you.
Competition research
Once you know the audience you’re marketing to, you need to understand who else is competing for their attention. Who are your competitors? What is their core message? How are they appealing to your shared audience?
Once you have answers to these questions, you’ll be better equipped to differentiate your company from theirs and market yourself to your communal audience with greater success.
And without badmouthing them, you can start publishing content that does a fair comparison of their pros and cons compared to yours to help buyers decide.
Product research
To market any product well, your writers have to understand it thoroughly. You need to make sure your writers know how it works, what its benefits are, and how it has the potential to make your customers’ lives easier.
The best way to do this is to provide your writers with unrestricted access to the product or at least a detailed demo. Access is best.
That way, they can learn its features hands-on and draft content for you that highlights all the best things your product has to offer from a knowledgeable, authoritative perspective.
Keyword research
After you have your ideal customer, competitors, and products nailed down, you can go ahead and draft whatever copy you are planning to release.
But before it’s written, take a minute to evaluate it through the final bit of research you’ll need to do: keyword research.
By researching appropriate short and long-tail SEO keywords along with those that rank well for your competitors, you can start to narrow down a target list.
Then, you can incorporate those desired keywords throughout your content in key places to ensure the highest possible Google ranking for your content is achieved.
There is much more that goes into SEO keyword optimization for SaaS content, but at minimum, you should target long tail keywords and questions at the beginning and work your way towards more competitive keywords across a period of 6-12 months.
Write for your customer, not your company
A common mistake made by copywriters and content creators is drafting the content they want to feature rather than the content their audiences want to read.
SaaS companies all around the world produce content that shows off how fantastic their product is, and how much good it will do the customer upon purchase.
But the point of high engagement SEO-optimized copy isn’t to highlight how great your product or company is.
Rather, it’s to effectively show customers how they can solve their own problems by using the product you’re marketing. This is a small, but key difference that can separate good copy from great copy.
Individuals want to be the heroes of their own lives and take charge of situations. If you claim your product is the hero, that leaves no room for the individual in the driver’s seat, and they’ll be less likely to do business with your company.
Keep your language simple
If your target audience can’t understand what you’re saying, what’s the point of writing it?
Top SaaS companies are able to communicate clearly, consistently, and effectively with their audiences, carefully considering customer research they’ve already done and applying it to their writing style.
This means that when they’re trying to market to modern, younger generations, they may use language that reflects their customer base by incorporating slang, popular phrases, and relevant tones.
And when they’re marketing to industry professionals, they use appropriate jargon and technical language designed to accommodate those fields.
Be direct
People have incredibly short attention spans, so it’s important to grab onto them quickly with clear branding, slogans, and CTAs.
These easily identify your brand identity to audiences and help them better understand who you are and what your mission is, even if they’re only on your page for a few minutes.
Benefits beat features
When you’re selling a SaaS product, focus on how it benefits your customers rather than all the amazing features you’ve jam-packed it with.
Remember, your competitors will often market products with similar features to your shared target audience, so relying on specific features to draw customers in may not work well.
Instead, focus on how your product benefits customers and makes their lives easier. Remember, all the features your product offers are likely present to help satisfy one or a few key pain points for your audience. Identify what those pain points are and what your broader benefits are, and then market that.
Make your pages readable
Webpage layouts and aesthetics are key focus points when you’re trying to draw in your SaaS audience.
If your site looks outdated, unattractive or slow and your viewers don’t like looking at it, they’ll go find the information they need somewhere else. And the more they click in and out of your site, the worse your performance will be on Google. Update your website/blog if needed in order to improve its aesthetics and loading speed.
Making your pages more readable isn’t difficult, nor does it take up a huge amount of time. All you need to do is make sure your content is broken up into smaller, more visually manageable sections, keep your paragraphs short, and feature lists and visuals wherever you can to break up the text.
Key takeaways
Optimizing your SaaS content for SEO isn’t difficult. It just takes a little bit of time, effort, and research, and before you know it, your pages will start ranking higher on Google, more people will find and enjoy your content, and your long-term business success will grow right along with it.
Guest Author: Sully Chaudhary, MBA, is an inbound/growth and content marketing expert with two self-founded businesses under his belt: WriterArmy, an award-winning premium SaaS content writing platform (and other verticals), and GrowthArmy, a growth marketing agency.
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