Properly optimizing your SaaS website is essential for your brand’s long-term success. Here’s how to do it right.
Here, you’ll find:
- Top tips to properly optimize your SaaS website
- The important role search engine optimization (SEO) plays
- Specific ways optimize site pages
- Tools to help track your progress
From event-planning programs to video chat platforms and everything in between, the software-as-a-service (SaaS) space is booming. And with tech becoming more and more a part of our daily personal and professional lives, we don’t see the trend slowing down anytime soon.
As more players continue to enter the SaaS market, competition grows, making it harder for brands to stand out. And while you may have a good understanding of basic SaaS SEO strategies, beating out your competitors may require taking things a step further. One way to do just that: fully optimizing your SaaS website.
Technology is constantly changing. As such, your SaaS brand’s digital marketing plan and strategies need room to evolve with these changes so you can avoid getting left behind.
Check these tactical tips off your list to ensure your SaaS website is fully optimized.
Why optimize your SaaS website?
For many SaaS brands, the homepage plays a key role when marketing their service offerings.
Search Engine Journal points out that the homepage has a bigger role than just welcoming visitors. It also:
- Is the first impression of the brand
- Showcases the brand’s purpose
- Explains the value the company provides over competitors
- Guides visitors to the information they’re looking for
When first establishing your SaaS brand, your homepage attracts most of the organic links received, from press references to guest posting or podcast appearances.
Because of that, properly optimizing your SaaS website from the beginning will set you up for long-term success. Follow these six tips to optimize your SaaS website and start seeing the benefits of monitoring your progress.
Adding quality content to your SaaS website can help establish your brand as a trusted resource for industry information while building SEO. (Image via Unsplash)
1. Find the right SaaS keywords for your website
Conducting keyword research is the first step to finding the best words and phrases to optimize your SaaS website. We advise focusing on these three types of SaaS keywords:
- Brand-related: Brand-related terms, such as your company or product name, should be sprinkled appropriately throughout your SaaS website pages.
- Product category: Use keywords that best define your product’s primary category and use search phrases potential clients would use to describe your product. Add your primary product-category keyword on every page on your SaaS website if you can, such as in meta tags, a page’s H1 tag, the opening of the page’s body content, and in alt tags.
- Related to the service’s core offerings: While these won’t be primary keywords, it’s highly beneficial to include them on your SaaS website. These keywords will be other phrases used to describe your product, along with its features and functionality.
Pro tip: Use a list of your SaaS brand’s core competencies on your homepage and link each of those sections to a landing page using keywords for your product’s core offerings in the anchor text. This can help increase your website’s relevance on the search engine results page (SERP).
2. Create original, quality content
Adding quality content to your SaaS website can help establish your brand as a trusted resource for industry information while building SEO.
Original content can consist of blog posts, product demos, videos, photos, or tutorials to educate visitors about your SaaS product. Regularly publishing quality content helps drive organic traffic to your SaaS website and can increase your position in search rankings relevant to your business.
3. Optimize your page titles and meta descriptions
Page titles and meta descriptions are two important components of your website in terms of search engine ranking factors. That’s because these features provide crawler bots with helpful context when it comes to what your pages are about.
Your title tag should include your primary keywords, while the meta descriptions should also give customers a quick rundown of what to expect from a specific page. The general rule is to keep your pages’ title tags less than 65 characters and meta descriptions no more than 150 characters. You can use a tool such as TechnicalSEO’s Google SERP Simulator to preview how your titles and descriptions will appear in search results.
Pro tip: Include a call to action (CTA) in your meta description to help improve click-through rates (CTR).
4. Add alt tags to your website’s images
Another key way to optimize your SaaS website is with alternative text, also known as alt tags. Since search engines can’t “read” or understand visuals the same way as humans can, using alt tags with images gives search engines a textual translation of the photo’s content.
For alt tags, the same rules apply as with any SEO optimization: avoid keyword stuffing, and keep tags short and to the point. You can optimize your website images further by choosing a descriptive file name before uploading to the page.
Whether you’re a SaaS start-up or a well-established brand, competition in the market isn’t getting any less fierce as technology continues to evolve. (Image via Unsplash)
Need more help with your SaaS marketing? Let’s chat.
5. Enhance the user experience (UX)
Two main factors to enhance your SaaS website UX are decreasing page load times and having a mobile-friendly website. Visitors expect pages to load lightning fast these days. And if it doesn’t? Visitors will likely bounce and move on to the next site with the product or service that meets their needs.
Besides lowering bounce rates, page speed also can affect your website’s search rankings. The data is clear: with over 60% of organic site visits coming from mobile devices, having a mobile-friendly website is more important than ever before.
6. Consistently monitor your progress
Taking the time to optimize your SaaS website isn’t a “one and done” project. Rather, it’s important to monitor your results consistently and optimize regularly to stay ahead of the game.
You can leverage website tracking tools such as Google Analytics to see detailed reports on metrics like your website’s traffic and conversions. From there, you can determine the best strategies for further optimizing. Just be sure to note any significant changes you make to your site to compare which tactics are working and which are not.
The takeaway
Optimizing your SaaS website is more than just aiming to rank for the right keywords. Whether you’re a SaaS start-up or a well-established brand, competition in the market isn’t getting any less fierce as technology continues to quickly evolve.
Optimizing your SaaS website for long-term success includes preparation for even unexpected industry changes and will help you build a strong foundation so your site can continue to appear in search results.
