Search Engine Optimization (SEO) plays a crucial role in getting your SaaS product in front of the right audience but success can be elusive, even for experienced marketers. A comprehensive SaaS SEO checklist is the key to increasing visibility and driving organic traffic in a competitive SaaS marketplace.
Great SaaS SEO ensures that your product appears when prospects are searching for solutions, increasing your chances of capturing valuable leads. Unlike paid ads, which provide short-term traffic, SEO offers long-term visibility and complements your content marketing efforts by expanding the reach of your educational resources, case studies, and blog posts. An effective SaaS SEO checklist should be broken down into three key areas:
- On-site SEO: Focuses on optimizing your website’s content, including keywords, meta tags, and internal links, to align with the search intent of your target audience.
- Off-site SEO: Involves building authority through external activities like link building, social media engagement, and influencer outreach, all of which contribute to higher search rankings.
- Technical SEO: Ensures your website meets the technical standards required by search engines, including site speed, mobile optimization, and proper indexing, to improve user experience and search engine visibility.
We’ll walk you through each of these aspects and give you best practices and tips to optimize your efforts, including recommendations for tools to help you get more done with less effort. First, let’s talk about the Google leak, which is still top of mind for many SEO specialists and other marketers.
The Google Leak and Your SaaS SEO Checklist
In 2024, the marketing world was rocked by a major Google leak that revealed internal documents and insights into how the search giant’s algorithms work. The leaked information included thousands of internal documents, emails, and reports, providing an unprecedented look into Google’s search ranking processes. While it will take years to fully analyze all the intelligence, key takeaways have already started to reshape the way some experts think about SEO and has caused a shift in how SEO strategies are being approached.
We’ve updated our SaaS SEO checklist to reflect these new insights. If you already have a checklist, you should update yours, too. Focusing on high-quality, user-centric content, relevant backlink strategies, and enhanced user experience will be more important than ever moving forward. If you haven’t created a checklist yet, now is the time to start. An effective SEO checklist will increase your online presence and help your SaaS grow.
The Bay Leaf Digital team shared some of our favorite resources around the leaks and its significance in SaaS Wire, our LinkedIn newsletter. Like everyone else, we’re still unpacking the leak and reaching new conclusions. We’ve sprinkled some of our current insights throughout the blog to ensure that we’re giving you the most up-to-date information that we’ve got to share.
SaaS SEO Checklist for Marketers
SaaS marketers have to be both fluent in time-tested strategies and current on the latest changes in an ever-evolving field. Our SaaS SEO checklist combines long-standing best practices with new recommendations that incorporate key learnings from the recent Google leak. It’s a tool to help you optimize your SEO efforts and maintain a competitive edge in 2024 and beyond.
Getting Started
Put these items on your checklist to set up a strong foundation before diving into more advanced SEO tactics.
1. Set Up Essential Tools and Accounts
- Google Search Console: Ensure your site is connected to Google Search Console to monitor performance, track search queries, and identify any indexing issues.
- Google Analytics: Set up Google Analytics to track website traffic, user behavior, and conversion rates. This will provide critical data to inform your SaaS SEO strategy.
- SEMRush/Ahrefs: Utilize tools like SEMRush or Ahrefs to conduct keyword research, track backlinks, and analyze competitor strategies.
- SEO Plugin on WordPress: If your site is built on WordPress, install an SEO plugin such as RankMath or Yoast to streamline on-page SEO tasks like meta tags and schema markup.
2. Create a Sitemap
Generate a sitemap to provide search engines with a clear roadmap of your website’s structure. This helps ensure all important pages are crawled and indexed efficiently.
3. Create a robots.txt File
Implement a robots.txt file to guide search engines on which pages or sections of your site they should or shouldn’t crawl. This will prevent the indexing of duplicate content.
4. Check Google Search Console for Manual Actions
Regularly review your Google Search Console for any manual actions or penalties that may have been applied to your site. Address these issues promptly to avoid a significant drop in rankings.
5. Check Site Indexing
Verify that all critical pages of your site are properly indexed by Google. Use the “Coverage” report in Google Search Console to identify and resolve any indexing issues.
Keyword Research
Carefully researched keywords are fundamental to great SEO and should be on any SaaS SEO checklist.
1. Pick Keyword Theme Areas
Determine the main keyword areas on which you will focus your SEO efforts. These should include terms that align with your SaaS product’s core features, industry-specific jargon, and the pain points your software addresses.
2. Conduct Competitor Analysis
Understanding what keywords your competition is ranking for and discovering gaps in their strategy can provide valuable opportunities. Use SEMRush or Ahrefs to identify valuable keywords that your competitors may have missed or are underutilizing.
What We’ve Learned About Adapting Keyword Strategies Post-Leak
The leak revealed that some keyword practices previously believed to be highly influential are not as impactful as once thought. For instance, the obsession with exact-match keywords in anchor texts seems to be less critical than the overall context and relevance of the linking content.
As a result, we’re emphasizing longtail keywords and specific questions that align with a single, clear intent. This approach will lead to content that is more precisely tailored to user needs, which will drive higher engagement and better rankings.
On-Site SEO
On-site SEO for SaaS ensures that your website is optimized to meet both user expectations and search engine requirements. Here’s what you need to do to make it happen:
1. Keep Content Updated
Offer a steady stream of unique, comprehensive content that directly addresses user queries. This content should be regularly updated with fresh, authoritative information to maintain its relevance over time. Enhance the value of your content with new data, updated statistics, revised information, and expanded topics as your industry evolves.
2. Create Content Clusters and Pillar Posts
Organize content clusters around pillar posts that serve as comprehensive guides on a particular topic and are supported by shorter posts that dive more deeply into specific subtopics. This structure improves SEO by creating a well-organized content hierarchy and helps users navigate your site more easily, finding the information they need quickly.
3. Implement Schema Markup
By adding schema markup, a form of microdata that helps search engines understand the content on your website, to your articles, FAQs, and product pages, you help search engines understand the content on your site better. This can lead to rich snippets in search results and create improved visibility that increases click-through rates and drives more targeted traffic to your site.
4. Optimize Headings, Metadata, and Images
Use clear H1 headings and well-structured subheadings to improve readability and SEO. Meta titles and descriptions should be carefully optimized with relevant keywords to ensure your content is accurately represented in search results. Optimize images with descriptive file names and alt text, and compress images to reduce load times.
What We’ve Learned About Adapting On-Site SEO Post-Leak
While we always knew content was important, the leak underscored just how much Google prioritizes content that is not only relevant but also deeply valuable to users. The emphasis is on depth, originality, and user engagement metrics, such as time on page and interaction rates. It’s also clear that marketers should avoid intent mixing. Trying to target multiple search intents within a single piece of content can harm rankings.
Another key takeaway from the Google leak is the importance of refining internal linking strategies. It’s not just about the anchor text anymore; the surrounding words also play a role in how Google interprets links.
Publish dates and authorship have also become more critical. We’re actively ensuring that blog authors bring relevant credibility to their bylines, as this can impact both user trust and search rankings. This applies to guest bloggers as well.
Finally, it’s clear how critical it is to build content within your established themes. Straying too far from your core topics can dilute your site’s authority and won’t yield the best results. We’re narrowing our focus, staying firmly within appropriate niches and deepening content around key themes to enhance relevance and ranking potential.
Off-Site SEO
Off-site SEO is the prioritization of activities outside of your website that influence your search engine rankings. It’s a critical component of your SaaS SEO checklist.
1. Establish Profiles on Social Media and Directories
Set up and optimize your social profiles to enhance your online presence and credibility. Create a presence for your SaaS on LinkedIn, Meta (Facebook/Instagram) Google Business, and any other industry-specific platforms. Get your site listed more than one SaaS directory and encourage customers to leave reviews to further enhance your credibility and visibility.
2. Acquire and Protect Backlinks
Begin with an audit to identify opportunities for acquiring high-quality links from industry-specific and authoritative sources. Prioritize these links, as they carry more weight in boosting your site’s authority and rankings. Regularly monitor for broken or lost backlinks and take steps to reclaim them, ensuring you maintain a robust backlink profile. Monitor the toxicity of your backlinks. Disavow harmful links carefully to protect your site from potential penalties.
What We’ve Learned About Adapting Off-Site SEO Post-Leak
The leak revealed that while backlinks remain a critical ranking factor, Google’s algorithm now places greater emphasis on the context and relevance of those links. This has led to a shift in how we evaluate backlinks. Links from highly relevant sources are much more impactful than those from unrelated sites, even if the latter have high domain authority. The quality of traffic from backlinking sites now matters more than the sheer quantity of backlinks. Surprisingly, unlinked brand mentions have been given more weight in Google’s ranking algorithms, so we’re monitoring and capitalizing on these mentions to boost our off-site SEO efforts.
Technical SEO
Technical SEO is the backbone of your website’s performance in search engines, ensuring that your site is easily crawlable, fast, and accessible. Here are SaaS SEO checklist items that will ensure that your technical SEO is in top shape:
1. Have a Clean Website Architecture
Create a well-organized website and a logical URL structure to make navigation intuitive for both users and search engines. Check for and remove orphan pages.
2. Prioritize a Mobile-First Website Design
Design your website with a mobile-first approach, ensuring mobile usability that meets Google’s mobile-first indexing standards.
3. Implement HTTPS
Secure your site by implementing HTTPS, which is now a standard ranking factor and essential for user trust.
4. Regularly Monitor and Optimize Core Web Vitals
Continuously monitor and optimize your site’s core web vitals such as loading speed, interactivity, and visual stability to improve user experience and search rankings.
5. Regularly Update XML Sitemap
Keep your XML sitemap updated to ensure that search engines can efficiently crawl and index your most important pages.
6. Monitor and Fix Crawl Errors
Regularly check for and resolve crawl errors in Google Search Console to ensure all important pages are properly indexed.
7. Optimize Server Response Times
Focus on optimizing server response times to improve page load speeds, particularly for mobile users, which is crucial for both user experience and SEO.
8. Regularly Audit for and Remove Duplicate Content
Conduct regular audits to identify and remove duplicate content, preventing potential penalties from search engines.
9. Check Canonical Tags
Ensure that canonical tags are correctly implemented to avoid issues with duplicate content and to consolidate link equity.
What We’ve Learned About Adapting Technical SEO Post-Leak
The Google leak has clarified the importance of keeping content dates synced across your site. We’re taking steps to ensure that Google accurately understands the age of our content, which can impact how it is ranked.
Make the Most of Your SaaS SEO Checklist
A methodical SaaS SEO checklist that leverages insights from the Google leak and applies them to keyword research along with on-site, off-site, and technical SEO best practices will keep your company competitive in an increasingly competitive SaaS marketplace. Incorporate both time-tested strategies and the latest insights to ensure your SaaS product remains visible and accessible to your target audience.
Do you need expert guidance in optimizing your SaaS SEO strategy? Contact us today to expand your online presence, build brand awareness, and drive sustainable growth.
