According to a study published by BrightEdge, organic searches are responsible for 53.3% of traffic on an average website. This number is close to 60% for tech companies, while for B2B overall, it reaches as high as 64.1%.

It is easy to see that SEO is crucial for SaaS companies — it allows them to capitalize on that traffic, generate leads, and convert searchers into customers.

Our friends from a web consulting service gave us five actionable SaaS-specific SEO strategies that could help you grow your online presence and tap into the well of organic traffic.

Let's get straight into it!

SaaS-Specific SEO Strategies

Although SaaS websites aren't listed in the table above, there's no denying that they belong to a category of their own.

Unlike eCommerce sites, they don't have pages upon pages of products, nor do they consist of purely informational and review-based content like affiliate sites do.

Web development companies from San Diego to New York know that because SaaS sites have a specific structure, they must also follow their own SEO strategies and tactics. Without further ado, here are the five favorites.

1) Build a Bulletproof Website Structure

If the content is the brick and mortar of a well-crafted SEO strategy, website structure is the foundation. Getting this step right will put you miles ahead of the competition, who are most likely trying to content-bomb their way to the top of the SERPs.

So, what does a well-structured SEO website look like?

Although no structure works for every website out there, we can follow some general guidelines to get started.

Let's break them down.

To begin with, all the information on a SaaS website is generally divided into three layers:

- Core layer
- SEO silos
- SEO-optimized content

We'll start with the core layer. This consists of all the pages people are likely to land on when they visit your site. They include your:

- Home Page
- About
- Contact
- Case Studies
- Blog

The next layer, SEO silos, contains clusters of similar content. A SaaS website will typically have the following silos:

- Resources about your SaaS
- Tutorials for your SaaS
- Blog content about content related to your SaaS
- Articles that compare your SaaS with competitors and review its features

While these can be represented through your website's navigation or hub pages, they don't need to be. What matters here is that you create a robust internal link building network, connecting the silos.

This means your blog posts on one topic should link to other posts about similar topics, that each tutorial should link to several others, etc.

Finally, your SEO-optimized content includes comparison posts, individual tutorials and blog posts within each of the silos you established in the previous layer. A tight site structure featuring highly relevant content can easily outrank older, high-authority websites.

2) Focus on Ranking Your Knowledge Base

The resources and tutorials we mentioned above form the knowledge base for your SaaS. An indexed, publicly available knowledge base carries a few crucial benefits:

- You can rank individual blog posts and tutorials for terms such as "how to install [Brand/Product] " or anything that applies to your SaaS, making it easier for existing customers to use your product.
- With existing customers finding the information they're looking for more quickly, your customer support team will have more time to deal with other tasks.
- If your prospects can see your SaaS product in action before signing up, your sales team will not have to face as many questions, and sales conversations will progress more quickly and efficiently.

3) Categorize Your Blog Content Intuitively

All of the content that is not part of the knowledge base will typically reside on your blog. To let your readers and Google know what the content is about, you should use clear and intuitive blog categories.

For example, a company that offers B2B learning software could have blog categories covering three main topics: learning, onboarding and sales training. Readers who would land on this hypothetical blog page could see the latest articles listed by default while also being able to choose to read company updates and select the category they're interested in exploring.

Having company updates as a separate category is vital for SaaS companies. They should strive to keep their users informed about new features and any other changes that may affect their user experience. Aside from that, company updates do a great job when it comes to giving your SaaS a human touch. This is the place to show users some behind-the-scenes action and feature team members.

4) Target Competitor Keywords

This may sound a bit counterintuitive, as most companies attempt to avoid anything that might make their competitors show up in SERPs. However, with SaaS, this is a strategy well worth exploring.

Let's imagine you've created a video conferencing app explicitly tailored to video-game studios. We're not going to get into the details of how that would work or whether it even makes sense. Let's just imagine this is the case for the purposes of this example.

People who are looking for video conferencing alternatives to Zoom (as it is the clear market leader) might use search terms such as "Zoom alternative" or even "Zoom for game developers." And that's where you come in.

The bottom line here is that if someone is using a search term that could describe your SaaS, you want to be ranking for it, even if it includes a competitor's brand name.

Keywords such as "[Brand] alternatives" or "[Brand A] vs [Brand B]" are particularly great examples, especially because affiliate marketers often target them.

If you're running a SaaS company, chances are somebody will write an article comparing you to one or more of your competitors or listing your SaaS as one of the alternatives to a big-name brand.

Ranking for those keywords puts you in the front seat, giving you the chance to create such posts yourself, outranking affiliate marketers as well as your competitors.

If this strategy smells fishy, you should know even the biggest SaaS companies out there are using it. Project management tools Jira and Asana both have blog posts comparing themselves to the other.

If you're still not convinced, there's another reason to try ranking for competitor keywords — in many cases, people searching for these terms are at the bottom of the sales funnel — they are ready to buy.

However, they are not entirely happy with the options they're familiar with and are looking for alternatives. If your product can show up with precisely what they're looking for at this moment, a sale is all but guaranteed.

5) See Each Update as Another Chance to Rank

It is safe to say that most SaaS products and companies are constantly evolving and adding new features. In fact, if you're not doing that, SEO may be the least of your worries.

You're either adding new features or existing new ones constantly.

Each of these updates gives you another opportunity to produce new content, address any potential pain points, and create tutorials on using the new feature.

The benefits of this strategy are two-fold. Firstly, you can include any new features in your keyword research.

This allows you to reach potential customers who may not have liked an earlier build of your product, but the added functionality may be just what they were looking for.

Secondly, you can fast-track certain new features over others based on what people are searching for. This way, you can keep your finger on the pulse of the industry and keep delivering a product that satisfies the needs of your customers and prospects.

Integrating SEO for SaaS into Your Overall Marketing Strategy

From raising awareness about your product but getting it near the top of the search results to generating qualified leads and boosting conversion rates through problem-solving content, search engine optimization is a marketing channel you can't afford to ignore.

SEO and organic traffic is the number one driver for most successful SaaS companies, and diverting targeted traffic to your site will likely be the engine propelling your business forward.

This makes SEO the crucial channel for attracting prospects to your website at any stage of the funnel. Building a robust and constant stream of organic search traffic is a marketing channel that can pay off like no other.

Having said all that, we should point out SEO is just that — a channel — and if you're hoping to be successful, you need to rely on a combination of marketing channels working together to drive traffic and generate leads.