SaaS SEO Strategies, Guideline, and Case Study: 40x Organic Traffic Increase

SaaS (Software as a service) SEO refers to an SEO Project and effort for improving the organic search performance of a SaaS website. SaaS B2B and SaaS B2C SEOs differ from each other in terms of SEO strategies and tactics. SaaS SEO takes support from the different sub-verticals of SEO, such as Local SEO, Semantic SEO, and Technical SEO. SaaS SEO Guide explains which SEO verticals, methods, strategies, and tactics are implemented to increase the SaaS B2B and B2C companies’ organic search performance, along with user experience and conversion rates.

What to know about SaaS SEO Guide?

SaaS SEO Guide explains search engine optimization verticals such as semantic, technical, local, and brand entity reputation via real-world SEO case studies, examples, and definitive explanations. The SaaS SEO Guide involves 36 subsections with over 14,000 words to explain the Software as a Service SEO in detail such as E-A-T, Anchor Texts, Internal Links, Page Speed and Crawl Efficiency Improvements, Topical Maps and Semantic Content Networks along with thought-leadership, and trust signals for organic growth. The real-world SEO Case Studies for SaaS SEO involves two main SEO projects from network security and SMS marketing as examples of their successes. The quick organic growth with SaaS SEO strategies and tactics through real-world experienced SEO case studies are demonstrated below with Google Search Console screenshots.

The data that has been shared belongs to Sunnyvalley.io which is a SaaS Company. During the SaaS SEO Tutorial, you can see the 4 months, 3 months, and last 6 months’ organic search comparisons to understand the SaaS SEO strategies.

1 Month Later, the Project exceeded 1000 organic clicks daily, and 100,000 impressions. The source has grown over 637.5% year-over-year comparison for 3 months according to the naked Google Search Console Data.

The 6 months performance comparison of Sunnyvalley.io is visible below with an over 110% organic click, and 350% organic impression increase.

The overall 11 months of comparison with the previous month is visible below with the Google Search Console Data as stored.

Three weeks later, version of the same SaaS SEO Project is below.

Why do SaaS Businesses Need different SEO Methods?

The reasons for SaaS Businesses to use different methods are listed below.

• SEO Provides Authority for Targeted Audience of SaaS: SaaS Businesses target specific audiences with a high level of expertise.
• SEO Explains the Function of SaaS: SaaS Businesses solve a specific problem in the return for a recurring income.
• SEO Creates Difference in Competition for SaaS: SaaS Businesses have strong competitors in their own industries, thus they need branding.
• SEO Covers all Conversion Funnel Paths and Steps for SaaS: SaaS Businesses usually focus on end-of-the-funnel content and search queries, but user retention and community management are necessary perspectives for SaaS Businesses.
• SEO trains the SaaS Employees to Understanding Search Engines: SaaS Businesses have proper developers and engineers, but typically, their marketers or marketing efforts are not holistic, or omnichannel.
• SEO sets KPIs for SaaS: SEO defines the KPIs for a SaaS Company and its conversion paths. Scrolling, clicking, emailing, navigating, and other search behaviors are some different types of KPIs for analyzing the users’ preferences for the SaaS.
• SEO Defines Personas and Needs for SaaS: Every SaaS has different Personas within its targeted audience. SaaS audience personas vary based on the industry, and SEO helps in catching and converting these different personas.
• SEO helps with user retention and conversion rate optimization for SaaS: User retention for SaaS helps with community management and conversion. SEO provides better returning visitors and user loyalty for SaaS businesses by covering the surface of the relevant section of the open web.
• SEO optimizes the Landing Pages for SaaS: To help a landing page to perform its purpose, SEO helps in improving the SaaS businesses.
• SEO helps for optimization of Local Visits and Search: SEO helps with Local Search Optimization to increase the local and audience relevance of the topic.
• SEO helps with the Branding of SaaS: SEO creates branded search terms and directs traffic to the brand. SEO helps in optimizing a web entity’s other brand identity points, such as social media accounts, or advertising articles, as in surround sound campaigns.
• SEO creates direct traffic and brand search demand for SaaS: SEO provides a permanent baseline for the company to protect it from possible Broad Core Algorithm Update’s negative effects, or any kind of spam algorithm update by creating brand prominence.

How does Semantic SEO help SaaS SEO?

Semantic SEO helps SaaS SEO to create a topical map and semantic content network. SaaS SEO needs Semantic SEO because explaining the concepts from the main topic of the SaaS is a must to create brand relevance between the audience and the topic.

A search engine can understand which SaaS businesses are more authoritative for a topic, or trustworthy, by looking at the query and selection logs. Query logs contain the queries from users, while selection logs contain the selections from users for the SERP behaviors. A brand that satisfies the queries for the problems that they solve, and a brand that appears after the “generic terms” can signal topical relevance and authority faster.

Semantic SEO helps in creating a Topical Map and Semantic Content Networks for providing Topical Authority. In this context, for every SaaS business, there should be at least 1 topical map and 1 semantic content network that covers the queries, search needs, and possible search activities.

The 3 months comparison for all users from the Universal Google Analytics data is below.

The All Users increase is related to the Organic Traffic increase since the organic traffic returns to the website via other channels such as direct traffic.

The

How to Create a Topical Map for SaaS SEO?

To create a topical Map for a SaaS Business, the problem that the SaaS solves should be grasped. If the SaaS business provides a “firewall”, the topical map should take the “network security” to the center. If the SaaS business focuses on “cheap flight tickets”, “travel finance” should be at the center. But, at the same time, sometimes SaaS Businesses might need two different semantic content networks and topical maps.

To create a topical map for SaaS SEO, a main and macro context, and a micro but specific context should be chosen. The second topical map can provide a deepened context for a specific entity with different types of connections. For example, a topical map for network security can be deepened for only the “firewall types”. All the topical map nodes should be connected to the conversion points and landing pages to support them with link flow.

To create a Semantic Content Network for a SaaS Business, the semantic content network should focus on conversions and information gaps along with accuracy. Factual, and unseen information for the industry, with higher clarity, will be useful and helpful for providing a better topical authority.

Semantic SEO helps with conversions by providing factual content while removing the fluff from the text. It contains accurate factual information with concise writing. To create a better semantic content network, the NLP systems of the search engines should be understood. The semantic network that is created for a SaaS has to be richer, more accurate, and clear to digest and serve.

How to Use Technical SEO for SaaS SEO?

To use Technical SEO for SaaS SEO Project, the cost of retrieval and indexation signals should be used properly. The cost of retrieval refers to the cost that happens during the crawling and indexing process.

The cost of retrieval includes the cost of crawling, rendering, evaluating, associating, indexing, and serving a document for providing value to the users. In this context, the quality of the document in terms of content, and amount of cost balance each other. PageRank, or the quality of the information and engagement on the web page, change the cost of retrieval positively.

Technical SEO helps with crawling and indexation signals by providing lighter, and faster crawling paths to the search engine crawlers. Optimization of the SEO-related HTML Tags, by aligning the indexing signals, optimization of crawl requests, and robots.txt, sitemap, and other technical SEO elements help for SaaS SEO.

• Keep the website crawlable and cheaper to be crawled by search engines.
• Keep only the necessary URLs on the website sitemap for indexation.
• Clean all the internal links, they all should point to a 200 status code URL that can be indexed.
• Do not dilute the Ranking Signal by repeating the same topic repeatedly on different web pages.
• Do not bloat the website size with unnecessary announcements, or news articles.
• Keep the HTML Requests higher than Resource requests.
• Keep the request count lower as much as possible.
• Decrease the rendering time and cost for the web pages.
• Optimize the URL Parameters to prevent unnecessary URLs to be logged in the crawl queue.

The main Technical SEO improvements above for a SaaS project provide a better cost of retrieval, crawlability, and indexation for the websites. To learn more about the cost of retrieval, read the related Importance of Cost of Retrieval SEO Case Study.

You can compare the numeric values for SaaS SEO and Social Media Optimization effect for the SaaS SEO performance increase.

How does Local SEO help SaaS SEO?

Local SEO Helps to provide a local penetration for the brands. Local SEO is helpful for SaaS projects to provide authenticity and a real-world identity profile. A Local SEO project can provide trustworthiness for the brand with customer reviews, and employee images. A SaaS SEO Project should include the things below for Local SEO.

• Open a Google Business Profile (formerly, Google My Business) account to provide your web entity’s real-world identity.
• Put the address of the brand identity in the structured data and the footer area.
• Unite the Local Address with your brand’s social media accounts with consistency.
• Post the semantic content network content item briefs within your Google Posts by using the GMB.
• Answer the messages and questions from the GBP for providing value for your SaaS.
• Post the images of the staff, office, and business-building regularly to the GBP to keep the Brand SERP richer.
• Provide hashtags, and communication channels from GBP and your Brand SERP directly.
• Use the GBP Categories to describe your brand properly.
• Use the service area, and brand name support terms to create better local and topic relevance.
• Understand that local SEO efforts help with branding, authenticity, and overall brand relevance to a topic.
• Use other Local SEO Platforms such as Yelp, or Foursquare to provide a consistent NAP.
• Use business directories, not for stuffing the same information on the open web, but to provide consistent trust with your searchers.

Local SEO and Brand Penetration are two close terms to each other. Audience Relevance and Topic Relevance should be seen differently. Even if you are relevant to a topic, you might not be relevant to an audience. Network Security is a topic, and you can be relevant to it, but you might not be relevant to the searchers from US, or Nevada for the topic. Thus, for consolidation of authority, the audience, and topic should be united with the help of Local SEO.

How does EAT Help for SaaS SEO?

EAT refers to expertise, authority, and trustworthiness. It is a concept from Google’s Quality Rater Guides. SaaS Projects are directly YMYL, Your Money, or Your Life websites. In other words, they are commerce websites that people trust for a solution to a problem, and they pay for SaaS projects. Thus, having clear trust elements for a website, or web entity is prominent. To provide E-A-T for SaaS Projects, use the things below.

• Provide objective and possibly more positive, trustworthy customer feedback from review and complaint websites.
• Use third-party independent sources for serving your reviews, Google is able to differentiate between independent and dependent review sources.
• Use Surround Sound projects to provide the benefit of your service.
• List your product for the “best” type of listicles by communicating with other information providers.
• Use news sources and journalists with high-quality infographics and your brand identity for providing relevance to your topic.
• Publish the most possible detailed unique content for your industry from multiple platforms with multiple forms such as video, text, and image.
• Use your social media accounts more actively, by having more followers, engagement, and social crowding.
• Try to have an entity identity from Google’s Knowledge Base and Microsoft Bing’s Knowledge Base.
• Register your SaaS Business founder as an investor for different platforms.
• Publish interviews of the SaaS Business founder for different platforms.
• Create mentions and unique n-grams between your SaaS business and the SaaS Business’ founder for the topic terms.
• Create authorship for your business, and business employees by making them better authority.
• Open your address, refund policy, about us page, and brand identity for multiple web pages by explaining it explicitly.
• Try to have a Wikipedia, or Wikipedia-like source company, a web page that describes the prominence and effect of the company.
• Read Google’s “About This Source” functionality, to understand how Google chooses different sources’ definitions.

How to Use Local SEO for SaaS Companies?

Local SEO involves local search optimization for companies that target an audience for a certain region, location, or service area. Local SEO helps SaaS Companies by providing products, reviews, social media accounts, addresses, phone numbers, company descriptions, news, staff and CEO information, and services directly from a local search query in a comprehensive and accurate methodology. The Local SEO implementations for SaaS Company SEO help businesses to increase and improve their visibility, Brand SERP optimization via Local Business Panels.

The Example SaaS SEO case study subject website and company didn’t have a Google Business Profile. Thus, a Google Business Profile is opened to support local SEO, and Brand Definition and Identity in the eyes of the search engine.

Man improvements for the SaaS SEO and Local SEO connection are below.

• The Social Media Accounts of the SaaS Company (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn Accounts)are connected to the Local Business Profile with accurate information.
• The products and services are defined and added to the Google Business Profile.
• The Company description has been written in a consistent way with the “about us” page.
• The company has gained some reviews and feedback from people who know its quality and dedication to the industry values.
• The working hours, company logo, address, business place images, and website address are added for the GBP panel.
• The GBP panel “request a quote” has been opened via the My Business mobile application.

To support the company’s existence on third-party sources, Crunchbase-like authority sources are used further. The purpose of using Crunchbase is to define the company as a legit business by adding specific staff, or investors by giving open identity information of them.

To support the Crunchbase information, the LinkedIn page shows the people who work in the company, with a consistent definition of the SaaS Business. The address, or the news and latest posts to show the activity of the source have been given consistent way.

Having all these information points with consistency to define a business or service provider is helpful for the Google search engine to trust the web entity based on the real-world information and safety of the web search engine users. A company whether it is SaaS or not that doesn’t provide extensive amounts of quality, and consistent information about its identity has a risk due to YMYL (Your Money or Your Life) Algorithms.

Why is having a Proper Third-party Review and Corporate Information Points Helpful for E-A-T and SaaS SEO?

Having consistent, comprehensive, and complete third-party reviews and mentions web around the web entity to improve its digital reputation, and demonstrate its real-world authority is important. Google uses Information Quality, Literacy, and Consensus to evaluate the informativeness of a web source while suggesting it. Rather than giving answers directly on the SERP, Google started to show results based on “certain sources” by stating that “According to X Brand”. Using Brand Name over the title links on the SERP, or showing only the Brand Part of the URL in the green URL part of the snippet shows the prominence of the Source Attribute for Google. Similarly, the “About the Source” panels are significant hints to understanding what Google thinks about a website or the web source. SaaS SEO relies on YMYL industry rules and principles, thus having a mention of the best review sources, and specific evaluations by the thought leaders are needed. About the Source panel of Google demonstrates the reviews about specific companies.

Local SEO helps SaaS SEO campaigns by providing more information about the specific website or the company to make the source more reliable and visible on the surface of the web. Below, the About The Source panel of Google for Sunnyvalley.io shows a description of the Business Profile that I have created.

Google states that there is not a good or reliable enough mention for the company, which is a problem and requires further attention to improve in terms of SaaS SEO Methodologies. The brand authority of the company matters for SaaS SEO. And, Local SEO helps for improving the topical relevance and brand penetration for certain regions, and queries. Thus, when I search for “Sunnyvalley” from Turkey, Google asks me “Did you mean “sunny valley”, which shows that the brand penetration in Turkey is not enough but in the USA it is good enough.

When ı search for the “sunnyvalley”, directly the “sitelinks” and the Business Profile along with the social media accounts are visible, which is a good example of brand penetration.

When I search for the “sunnyvalley”, I also see that the “People also search for” shows results “Sunnyvalley bacon”, and “smoked meats”. This happens because there is another company with the same name. Thus, having a proper Local SEO campaign protects the brand from other relevant attributes or contexts while helping the business to protect its own SERP estate for its own brand query, which helps for branding and communicating via Google SERP directly.

The specific meat company comes slowly with its social media accounts demonstrating that the same query phrase is connected to the two different entities, and Google forages the information to provide the best possible satisfaction for the possible search behaviors. The best way to dominate a query phrase for the company name is by providing domination with third-party reviews and local business prestige. Thus, SaaS SEO leverages Local SEO by improving E-A-T signals via third-party reviews through “about the source” panels, and “people also search for” like SERP features’ results.

When the “sunny valley” is searched, the company results show “sitewide links”, with a mobile image from the source. The sitewide links and the internal link popularity are aligning with each other. But, the Italian “Mountain Lodge” company and a place from London, along with a place entity from Oregon, rank together with the brand.

When we check the auto-complete data, the meat company, the place entity, and some other entities appear from California or Los Angeles. But, the Sunnayvalley Networks appear with “login”, and “networks”, “zenarmor” and “sunny valley” queries.

The overall topical relevance is measured by the number of connected queries via people also searches, related queries, and autosuggestion of Google that are dominated by the brand itself. Thus, having a Local SEO campaign helps SaaS Companies to show Google and other search engines to prominence and visibility needs of a company, and reviews, products, services, clear definitions, mentions and lists that review and compare the SaaS companies and services help to further topical relevance and E-A-T increase.

The brand search-demand increase and brand search query distributions for multiple companies are taken from Google Ads Keyword Planner data. The brand name “sunnyvalley” which is the name of the SaaS SEO Project is searched together with different types of entity attributes such as “meats”, “ham”, and “smoked turkey”. These different attributes signal the brand name competitors, in other words, competitors that compete for dominating the brand SERP for the same brand name. Thus, having more attributes for the SaaS company with service-related attributes and query phrases is important to show the prominence of the company further. The seed query “sunnyvalley” search demand is distributed and guessed according to the prominence of the entities for the search demand, and search behaviors. Information Foraging is the process of constructing a SERP for increasing the click satisfaction of the web search engine user. The search demand for the “seed query” is processed according to the possible search activities, and the SERP is constructed with information foraging. Thus, having more resources for the web entity, with reviews, search demand, and diversified queries signal the prominence of the entity. The organic search demand changes for the English Language are given below.

The brand name search geography demonstrates the local relevance of the specific company. The autosuggestion and related search terms for the same English query, or the named entity, thus change from one geography to another. The multilingual and multiregional SEO guide explains the prominence of region and language match between the website and the searcher, along with the search query. The SaaS SEO companies should leverage local and regional relevance with their audience. The distribution of the brand name including search queries for different geographies is below.

Device distribution is important for SaaS SEO. A heavy desktop user demography for a SaaS industry requires prioritization of the desktop sessions, if a mobile user demography is higher than the desktop users, then the mobile sessions should be prioritized. In either situation, mobile-friendliness, mobile-first design, mobile usability, and mobile-only indexing are fundamental principles for SEO including SaaS SEO. Thus, even if based on the desktop and mobile, or tablet device share, the page experience algorithms’ effect might differ, the SaaS SEOs should pass the mobile-usability standards for Google and other search engines. Distribution for the devices for the brand name included search queries is below.

How to Use Social Media and Community Management for SaaS SEO?

SaaS SEO and Social Media Optimization are connected to each other. From Email Marketing to Social Media Marketing, permanent and useful community optimization and management create a better brand value and identity. Social Media Accounts are included in the definition of the web entity, but not the website.

Thus, a website’s ranking and social media accounts’ activity can be affected by each other for authenticity, or E-A-T. A website with solid social media activity can give a search engine a higher and better confidence score for being ranked. A search engine can trust faster to a SaaS website if the SaaS has much positive feedback from the search engines. Thus, in the entity-oriented search, the SaaS Projects have to define their brand identity and optimize their web entity.

The Community management for a SaaS Project provides the things below.

• Campaign success with better conversion rates.
• User retention for longer times.
• Consumer loyalty with higher engagement.
• Brand awareness and identity.
• Direct traffic for bone-like natural traffic.
• Branded queries
• Better SERP state for Brand SERP.
• Better Knowledge Panel Management and communication.
• Better and bigger Web Surface for communicating to the community and search engines.

Email Marketing and SaaS SEO

Creating a Flywheel that supports every vertical of marketing strategies is prominent for Holistic SEO. SaaS Projects need to solve the problems of the customers continuously by creating a community. And, a community might need a Slack Channel, regular webinars, or regular emails from the industry. The SaaS Project has to have a bone-like community that waits for the emails from the SaaS or cares about the CEO’s opinion for the latest updates and news.

Email Marketing and SaaS SEO are connected to each other for better user retention and low-intensity user communication. It is certain that email newsletters provide brand value, and Gmail follows and tracks email newsletters to understand their topics, content, and quality. Thus, a newsletter’s quality and existence can affect the brand identity’s look and its evaluation for the specific brand.

• Email marketing and loyal email newsletter followers can increase the authenticity of the brand.
• Diverse traffic sources help for better conversions and word of mouth.
• Engaged social media community and newsletter followers help for better brand loyalty.
• Email marketing can signal search engines a bigger brand identity and description than a simple blog website.
• Email marketing helps SaaS to have continuous communication with the community.
• Email marketing helps SaaS SEO to provide a better brand SERP and identity.

The 3 monthly later version of the Page Experience report is below.

Despite the website’s loss of its technical efficiency and page speed improvements, it continued to increase its rankings. Since, the source provided enough level of quality, trust, and comprehensiveness with positive user feedback and search demand increase for its brand name, the technical SEO improvements, or the page speed improvements were not determined for the ranking state direction. A source that tries to provide enough level of data to prove its authoritativeness for the first time needs higher Technical SEO efficiency, and page speed improvements compared to competitors, but after enough level of historical data, even if the technical improvements are lost, the website continues to protect itself unless there is not a higher authority and quality source for the same queries. The historical data’s prominence and technical SEO’s prominence for initial ranking and re-ranking is explained better for the “Topical Map Expansion” for semantic SEO projects further. For example, the Encazip.com SEO Case Study of Koray Tugberk GUBUR reached out to half a million organic clicks a month, even if it lost most of the technical SEO and page speed improvements during the project while migrating the back-end infrastructure.

The Desktop Core Web Vitals show an improvement for the SaaS SEO Project which signals higher prominence for some SaaS SEO industries since most users prefer desktop devices for using SaaS technologies for their projects, or business activities. Regardless of the device type, the Core Web Vitals scores should be passed for SaaS Projects in the context of a proper SaaS SEO result and achievement.

How do Brand SERP and Knowledge Panel Management help for SaaS SEO?

Brand SERP provides direct communication with the targeted audience, the SERP. Being able to define and position the SaaS company. A SaaS Company can target the areas below with Brand SERP Optimization and Knowledge Panel Management.

• Brand SERP Optimization provides more contextual PAA Questions that are answered by the SaaS.
• The SaaS can define itself directly from the SERP.
• SaaS can relate itself with the other competitors with different dimensions.
• SaaS can take advantage of the social media existence, business category, and authenticity signals from the Knowledge Panel.
• SaaS can control the resources on the Brand SERP to define itself better.
• SaaS businesses can open site-wide connections to make navigation easier.
• A SaaS can show positive customer reviews, phone numbers, and question answers directly.
• A SaaS can provide news, videos, and images for its own business to provide authenticity and direct reflexes.
• A SaaS can appear in other competitors’ Brand SERPs, auto-complete suggestions, and Knowledge Panels to take their loyal customers.

How do Comparison Product Reviews help for SaaS SEO?

Comparison Product Reviews are helpful for SaaS Projects and recognizing new entities from the search engine’s point of view. A Product Review shows the authenticity and authority of the review writer. Thus, Google published the product review update to differentiate the quality and non-quality reviews. And, having products on your website, and having your brand, and founder identities together with the products textually, and visually in different content formats such as audio, or video is beneficial to show the realistic side of the review.

Comparison Product Reviews are beneficial to making a SaaS Business comparison to another one by explaining its differences. It is helpful to rank the competitors’ brand names and convert the competitors’ concepts and terms. Comparison Product Review Updates help for differentiation of the business, visibility of the business, and entity-identity building of the SaaS company and product for the industry.

Having specific comparison n-grams, word proximity with superlative words, and factual information, and providing these reviews also from third-party reliable sources is useful for the businesses.

How Does PageRank Help for SaaS SEO?

PageRank help SaaS SEO by providing better rankability, brand value, and query diversity. PageRank with a quality content document ranks for more queries by expanding its relevance radius. PageRank increases the trust of a search engine for the SaaS business in regard to click satisfaction and trust. Combining all content, of the PageRank, Social Crowding, Brand Trust Elements, and Product Reviews along with Topical and Audience Authority, the SaaS SEO project increases its success chance.

To prevent Ranking Signal Dilution, the total web page count, total link count, link positions, anchor texts, and internal and external link organization should be optimized for better relevance and clear link flow.

Internal link popularity from informational content to commercial content, and from commercial content to informational content, provides a better value for the search engine’s perception of the information foraging. Information foraging is the process of constructing a satisfactory SERP. A search engine prefers a better link value proposition by linking multitasked sources for the same topic and audience. Being responsive to commercial and informational search behaviors at the same time increases user satisfaction while decreasing search engine indexing and crawling costs.

Thus, PageRank from third-party external references whether as a mention, as a link, or naked link helps a brand prove its rankability. PageRank can be transferred via links on other web pages, but authority can be transferred via mentions and reviews too.

Reddit started to clean some threads and comments after a point, thus the external references for E-A-T, Brand Authority, and providing a Barnacle SEO strategy, the external references are diversified. Esspecially, since Opnsense is one of the fundamental components of the SaaS product, and also a competitor, being associated with it naturally is important.

Three months later the Top Linking Sites are given below.

Below, you can see how “Reddit users stay on the SaaS website longer than other users that come from other sources”. The Reddit users stay more than 5 minutes on the SaaS SEO website showing that specific social media platforms such as Reddit, or LinkedIn have an important positive effect on Saas SEO.

Thus, high PageRank without any kind of mention, positive feedback, and other correlative branding signals might be normalized, and with low-quality content, it can be perceived as spammy. Thus, having a higher knowledge-based trust and semantic content network quality is a must with PageRank.

Does Exact Match Domains help for SaaS SEO?

Exact Match Domains help for SaaS SEO if only the branding value is provided. Exact Match Domains provide a better relevance for the specific topic while helping the brand rank faster. But, a good deal of SaaS tries to use exact match domains for SEO Purposes, and this creates an entity identity resolution problem. Thus, having strong branding, and brand positioning is a must while using exact-match domains. Or, the search engine won’t see the brand name as authentic, and relevant, and especially in the beginning, ranking for the specific concept will be harder.

3 Months Change of the internal link statistics for Sunnyvalley.io is below. There are more internal links for the important concepts and the web pages.

Exact Match Domain SEO refers to using a valuable phrase in the domain name, including domain extension. A SaaS with Exact Match Domain can benefit its own SEO project by using proper Semantic SEO, Local SEO, Technical SEO, and PageRank along with Branding together. Holistic SEO with multiple SEO verticals and talents is useful to provide a better justified EMD SEO Effort for SaaS SEO.

Do Exact Match Domains work for Subdomains of SaaS Websites?

Exact match domains work for subdomains to provide a better and faster-ranking possibility. Exact match domains benefit the brands that have a proper and relevant name for a topic and query. The same relevance and ranking boost happen for subdomains too. Many SaaS websites use subdomains to provide an app or forum service for the users. Subdomains can benefit SaaS websites with four different methodologies.

• Providing an exact match subdomain ranking boost for a valuable query. Exact match subdomains for the SaaS websites help them to rank for certain queries faster. But, these certain queries should be targeted from the subdomain and also from the main domain of the SaaS company. The exact match subdomains targeted query should be processed from the main entity of the SaaS website as well. Thus, better SERP Coverage and Topical Authority along with more historical data can be acquired.
• Providing more intended results on the SERP. Google provides indentation for the results from the same domain if they are all relevant to the same query. Thus, subdomain results and main domain results cover more ranking results without any ranking signal consolidation. It provides more intended results and SERP Estate Coverage. The SaaS websites can cover more SERP estate for specifically high-volume queries via subdomains so that the click count can change better for them.
• Subdomains do not dilute the ranking signals with relevance to provide a result diversity. Since the main domain and subdomain are two different domains, the subdomain and main domain do not compete with each other. If the website uses many subdomain URLs on the topic, for taking more and more coverage and impression, it can cause the subdomain to suppress the visibility of the main domain. Thus, the subdomain and the main domain should have a lean functionality, design, and topic difference for sharing the queries, and search behavior patterns. As long as the conflict between the two different web entities is minimal and necessary, Google won’t share the ranking signals among them. To consolidate the ranking signals, a SaaS domain can use internal links from a subdomain to the main domain.
• Subdomains’ success supports the main domain. The success of the main domain is prominent for the sub-domain. And, the success of the subdomain and the main domain’s success support each other. In this context, the trust in the sub-domain is reflected in the main domain. They both support each other. The main domain and subdomain share the same crawl quote, brand identity, and main purpose. Thus, using a popular and clearly defined subdomain is beneficial to support the main entity. SaaS Brands can use sub-domains to support their content networks, brand identity, and user retention via subdomains.

Note: Sub-domains and main domains should always link and support each other to create a better website border and integration. In the SaaS SEO Case Study, there are more subdomains for different functionalities. Thus, the sub-domains and main domains are linked to each other for better interconnectivity and lean functionality difference.

Should SaaS Websites have a Forum for their users and SEO?

The SaaS websites should have a forum to provide user interaction, a user-generated content platform, a user-to-user learning system, and opportunities. SaaS Websites should use a forum structure to keep the users interacting with each other. Many SaaS websites use a Facebook group since it provides a “native experience of interaction”. SaaS websites should use the forum structure to support the branding and the topical coverage, along with user retention for SaaS SEO.

The 3 months comparison for the Microsoft Bing traffic change is below to demonstrate the organic click and impression increase. From 1100 clicks to 2300 clicks, and 28400 impressions to 89800 impressions increase are acquired.

Forum SEO is the process of optimization of rankings for forum websites that have forum threads, comments, questions, answers, and more. Thus, SaaS SEO and Forum SEO are connected to each other. To support the main SaaS website, a source, or brand can have a “help” or “forum” section as Cloudflare, OPNsense and some other SaaS technologies do.

The Help Forum of Sunnyvalley.io is a subdomain under the “help.sunnyvalley.io” domain. The subdomain usage for the forums helps the CMS compatibility, and flexibility while making the subdomain technical SEO problems more distant than the actual domain. Thus, using a subdomain for the forums help with forum page indexation while making the forum pages’ overall quality more distant and less effective.

The 3 months later, the Pages Report (Google Search Console Coverage Report) of the “Help.sunnyvalley.io” subdomain is above. The impressions of the subdomain increased together with the main domain. Thus, the web entity is evaluated as a whole rather than as a host. And, the technical SEO problems of the subdomain affected the main domain less, since the main domain doesn’t link to the subdomain but the subdomain links frequently to the main domain.

In the context of SaaS and Forum SEO, repeated questions, threads, and unnecessary user profiles shouldn’t be left to be indexed.

The specific SaaS source has indexed many unnecessary web pages that decrease the overall indexation quality, and the necessity of the source. In the next sections, you can see the coverage report to examine it better. Any irrelevant web page, non-quality web page, or unnecessary web page bloats the indexation profile of the website and causes an increase in the cost of retrieval.

The membership, community, and openly submitting a request, and having professional documentations are helpful practices for SaaS companies and their expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. Because a company with a community and membership system is more reliable than companies that are closed to communication.

Should SaaS Websites have a Social Media Group on Facebook, Twitter, or Reddit?

To support the SaaS SEO efforts, SaaS websites and brands should have a social media group on Facebook, Twitter, or Reddit. Every user has a different website repository that they want to use at different times. Some users prefer Facebook groups, some prefer Subreddits. From industry to industry, the preferences of the users vary and change. Thus, to support all the SEO efforts, traffic diversity, and existence on every possible surface of the open web are necessary.

To support the Forum SEO efforts, a brand should open a Facebook group, Subreddit, and a Twitter hashtag for its own brand name. Using, TikTok, YouTube Shorts, Trustpilot, and other platforms benefit from providing more feedback on the brand’s existence, trustworthiness, and audience diversification with authenticity. If a brand doesn’t have enough money or budget to open a Facebook group or social crowding project, the SaaS project can benefit from buying a ready Facebook Group, or they can use sponsored ads. Using the existing competitor, Facebook groups and forums is another methodology for invading their surface to attract all the possible clients.

The 3 months later state of the Sunnyvalley.io Pages Report is below. Pages Report is a part of the Google Search Console as an updated version of the Google Search Console Coverage Report. The current Pages Report demonstrates that the website has higher problems with Technical SEO, but it still protects its rankings and organic traffic growth speed thanks to quality semantic SEO implementations.

Should SaaS SEO Projects use Influencer Marketing?

Social Media Optimization is part of SaaS SEO. Influencer Marketing is the intersection of micro-marketing and social media optimization. Influencer marketing benefits the SaaS projects to diversify the traffic and providing “independent third-party” references for the SaaS project. From Facebook, and Instagram to TikTok or YouTube, for SaaS Brands there are many influencer marketing opportunities. SaaS SEO projects should use influencer marketing to support their brand power, and brand awareness. YouTube Influencer Marketing provides better evergreen support of traffic acquisition with lower ROI, while Instagram and Twitter are better for short-term hype for the SaaS Project.

For the SaaS SEO Case Study, from Facebook to YouTube, or TikTok, different influencers are researched and some sample outreach campaigns and emails are planned. From overall concepts to the specific network security concepts for Sunnyvalley.io are researched for the audience perception, and the best candidates are chosen for arranging some interviews, or specific video types.

The time of the video publication, video traffic that comes from the organic search, and other search engines, videos’ audience, and engagement are researched. The same influencers’ multichannel post-sharing reach has been measured along with the “view per hour”, and “lifetime view value” metrics for YouTube SEO.

Should SaaS SEO include YouTube SEO?

Yes, SaaS SEO should support GIF SEO and Video SEO along with YouTube SEO. Short videos, long videos, or content reformatting and reposting can be used across different platforms to support SaaS SEO. Every SaaS Brand should have a proper YouTube Channel and Video Repository to support visual and audio communication with their audience. YouTube provides an evergreen indexation and traffic flow. Thanks to Video SEO, the SaaS company can be ranked on Google SERP Video Carousels. Having a YouTube SEO project is better to support the Brand SERP and trust. The latest algorithm update of the Google Product Review Update (March 2022) includes the YouTube Data API Integration because YouTube Channel ownership for a single focused topic and a high level of expertise support the real-world evidence for showing the real-world connection to the topic.

SaaS SEO and YouTube SEO provide a better full-coverage content marketing strategy, along with better user retention and audience connection. From evergreen informational video content to how-to content, or specific comparison videos, updates can be used to support the prominence and efficient communication of the SaaS brands to their own target market.

SaaS SEO Case Study had a passive YouTube Channel, and the semantic content network has been planned to be used as a video repository creation process. A semantic content network can be turned into a video content network with specific timestamps, video sections, and video flow.

SaaS SEO Case Studies and Results

SaaS SEO Case Studies involve the SaaS Companies’ SEO results with different SaaS SEO principles. SaaS SEO Case Study demonstrates the SEO Success or overall situation of the SaaS Brand’s SEO Campaign. The SaaS SEO Guide involves an SEO Case Study for a SaaS Company which is Sunnyvalley.io.

Key results and points for SaaS SEO Case Study example.

• 11,000 new queries.
• 1400% query count increase.
• Social Media Optimization and Crowdsourcing with more than 2000 sessions.
• Increasing the Brand Search Demand by 900%.
• 600% organic click increase.
• 800% organic impression increase.
• Having 400 daily clicks a day in under 5 months.

The 400% Organic Click Increase for Sunnyvalley.io with 6 months of Organic Click Increase is below.

With the impressions, the 6 monthly comparison is below.

The three months compared as YoY with the %425 Organic Click Increase of Sunnyvalley.io is below.

The same comparison as YoY 3 Months with impressions is below.

100% Organic Click increase for the last 3 months of the Sunnyvalley.io SaaS SEO Project is below.

The last 28 days comparison year over year with a 400% organic click increase graphic for the SaaS SEO case study is below.

The same comparison after 3 months shows 3 times bigger numbers for demonstrating organic search increase in the SaaS ecosystem. The Last 28 Days of YoY Comparison inside the Google Search Console for SaaS SEO Subject Website demonstrates a 633.90% increase.

The 6 months organic traffic change comparison of the SaaS SEO Case Study subject website is below.

The SEMRush graphic of the Sunnyvalley.io example SaaS SEO Case study is below.

The 3 months later version of the SEMrush traffic estimation for the SaaS SEO Case Study is below.

The Ahrefs SaaS SEO Case Study results in the graphic are below.

The 3 months later Ahrefs estimation for the SaaS SEO Case Study and Guide subject website, Sunnyvalley.io is below.

Technical SEO, and Design-Related Improvements for SaaS SEO Case Study Sample

The specific SaaS SEO Case Study has been performed mainly with the SaaS SEO efforts below.

• Contrast Value Optimization for Web Accessibility of SaaS Website
• Missing Heading Tags Optimization for SaaS Website
• Inappropriate Heading Hierarchies Optimization for SaaS Website
• Twitter Card Implementation Optimization for SaaS Website
• 404 Image Resources Optimization for SaaS Website
• Image Tags Optimization for SaaS Website
• Cumulative Layout Shift Optimization for SaaS Website
• Adding Internal Links to the Breadcrumbs Optimization for SaaS Website
• Missing Canonical Tags Optimization for SaaS Website
• Duplicate Page Titles Optimization for SaaS Website
• Pruning the Non-evergreen Content Optimization for SaaS Website
• Creating a Glossary of Terms Optimization for SaaS Website
• Implementing Organizational Structured Data Optimization for SaaS Website
• Target Blank Implementation Optimization for SaaS Website
• Nofollowing External Links Optimization for SaaS Website
• 404 to 410 Status Code Change Optimization for SaaS Website
• Implementing Site links Search Box Optimization for SaaS Website
• Duplicate Meta Description Fix Optimization for SaaS Website
• Removing Mixed Content Links
• Footer Consistency with Corporate Footer Optimization for SaaS Website
• Removing Anchorless Empty Links Optimization for SaaS Website
• Fixing Missing Alt Attribute Errors Optimization for SaaS Website
• Synchronization of URLs in Sitemap and URLs in Website Optimization for SaaS Website
• Optimization for Mobile Friendliness Optimization for SaaS Website
• Removing Irrelevant Web Pages from Sitemap Optimization for SaaS Website
• Adding Title Attributes to Images and Iframes Optimization for SaaS Website
• Adding Contact Information to the SaaS Website
• Creation of a Custom 404 Page for a SaaS Website
• Opening a GBP Account for SaaS Website
• Adding Category, Image, Address, and further optimizations to the GBP
• Adding Partners to the SaaS Website
• Fixing the Lazy load Errors on SaaS Website
• Adding all the Web Security Response Headers to the SaaS SEO Site
• Removing Unused CSS Optimization for SaaS Website
• Removing Unused JS Optimization for SaaS Website
• Cleaning internal 301 and 404 URLs Optimization for SaaS Website
• Creation of a Topical Map for the SaaS Website
• Opening and Connecting the Social Media Links for SaaS Website
• Creation of a Corporate Profile for the CEO of a SaaS Company
• Adding Canonical to the Response Headers
• Optimization of Robots.txt File for SaaS Website
• Optimization of Crawl Path for SaaS Website
• Creation of Site-wide Topicality Entries for the SaaS Website
• Creation of a Semantic Content Network for a SaaS Website
• Training Authors, Developers, and Marketers of SaaS Companies
• Automation of SEO Reports with Data Studio

The SEO Optimizations for the SaaS SEO Case Study involve multiple meetings and training sessions that focus on SEO, CRO, Branding, Social Media Optimization, and Page Speed Optimization.

The 3 monthly version of the International Targeting Tool is not visible, because International Targeting Tool is retired in Google Search Console.

What does SaaS SEO Mean?

SaaS SEO involves increasing organic search performance and rankings with SEO strategies and methodologies. SaaS SEO involves B2C SaaS and B2B SaaS SEO efforts. SaaS SEO Projects include diverse SEO efforts from Semantic SEO to Technical SEO. To improve the organic traffic of a brand that provides subscriptions with recurring fees in exchange for a service, use the “subscription model economy”. Thus, SaaS SEO requires an understanding of marketing, community management, and other intersection areas of SEO and Marketing overall.

Which SEO Verticals are better for SaaS Companies?

The SEO Verticals refers to the different types of SEO branches such as technical SEO, or on-page SEO. The SaaS Companies mainly should use the SEO Verticals below.

• Technical SEO: Technical SEO involves the optimization of the technical side of SaaS websites for better organic rankings.
• Local SEO: Local SEO includes the improvement of the Local Relevance of the SaaS brand.
• Semantic SEO: Semantic SEO involves the creation of a semantic content network and topical map to improve the topical authority of the SaaS business.
• Branding: Branding involves creating trust and brand identity for the audience of a SaaS company.
• Email Marketing: Email marketing includes recording out to the audience via email newsletters.
• Social Media Optimization: Social Media Optimization involves the usage of the social media accounts of the SaaS company to provide better reliability for the SaaS company.
• UX Optimization: UX Optimization is to improve the conversion rates and help with the SEO purposes of the SaaS Project.

From Technical SE to UX Optimization, the verticals for SEO represent the Holistic SEO strategies for SaaS Companies and Businesses.

Does Every SaaS Business need SEO?

Yes, every SaaS business needs SEO. SaaS SEO represents the SEO Efforts for creating a brand. Since, the Vincent Update of Google, the search engine Google ranks brands over websites. A SaaS Company requires E-A-T since it is a YMYL Website. Using SEO for SaaS Companies is a cost-effective and strong strategy for reaching out to the targeted audience with better ROI. Using PPC can support SEO and audience acquisition, but SEO is a better method for SaaS Companies over time.

B2B SaaS Company SEO

B2B SaaS Company SEO targets the business leaders and business commerce between companies. SaaS Companies are diverse in different industries from network security, marketing, or analytics. Thus, having a B2B SaaS Company requires a different type of keyword research or a different type of audience targeting. For example, for social media usage, LinkedIn is more important for B2B SaaS Companies.

Since the keyword search demands are lower for B2B SEO, the B2B SaaS Company needs to rely on more granular content with fewer page counts and higher PageRank value. B2B SaaS Companies need to be more conversion-focused since the audience is smaller, and conversions rarely happen, but every conversion is worth way much more.

B2C SaaS Company SEO

B2C SaaS Companies target directly consumers. Thus, B2C SaaS SEO targets a larger audience. In this context, more granular keyword research, topical map, semantic content network, and more search demand are necessary for B2C SaaS Companies. B2C SaaS Companies need community management, email marketing, and any kind of community management projects more than B2C SaaS Company SEO. Keyword (Query) research need to go deeper, and KPIs need to change from B2B SaaS SEO to B2C SaaS SEO. The B2C SaaS Companies require a stronger branding campaign, and since there are more queries that need to be targeted, the PPC is a bigger cost for those companies.

How to Train SaaS Company Teams for SEO?

To train and manage a SaaS Company team for SEO, follow the steps below.

• Being friends with the CEO, or convincing every person one by one, take a longer time. But, everyone listens to the CEO. Convince the SaaS Company CEO first for implementing the SEO tasks.
• Code with the SaaS Company Engineers, if your code is together with them, they can show you the friendly side of programming.
• Explain how the search engines work, and what are the concerns of a search engine while indexing, or crawling.
• Teach them how flywheel marketing works, and explain why it aligns every marketing step with semantic SEO and Topical Authority.
• Show them the improvements earlier, so that they can trust the steps while being motivated.
• Be explanatory as much as possible, and be patient until the SaaS team understands the basics of SEO.
• For the stubborn team members, use the card of the CEO to convince them.
• Collect all the data, and show them how the search engine reacts to the changes that the SaaS company team performs to guide them better.
• Use Google Analytics 4, Google Search Console, Ahrefs, SEMrush, and other SEO-related tools to provide data and presentations.
• Automate SaaS company SEO reports with Data Studio, and explain the KPI Metrics.
• Collect the competitors’ data from YouTube to Google and all the platforms. And, create a comparison for every numeric value. Show them the reasons for the existing situation, and create a story-telling for SaaS SEO.

How to Create a SaaS SEO Strategy?

To create a SaaS SEO Strategy, implement all the Holistic SEO principles to the existing SaaS Project. Follow the steps below for creating a SaaS SEO Strategy.

• Perform overall keyword research to understand the strength of the competitors and opportunity query groups.
• Topicalize all the queries that are collected during the SaaS SEO keyword research process.
• Perform analysis for the semantic content network and topical map.
• Configure the topical map and semantic content network for better rankings.
• Calculate the need for PageRank and Brand power for dominating the niche.
• Organize the content production and branding processes.
• Automate and improvise social media shares and community management.
• Audit, test, and improve the basic strategy steps of the SaaS SEO.
• Understand the industry of the SaaS Company, and configure the steps above for the specific SaaS SEO Project.

Why are Conversion Funnels Important for SaaS SEO?

Conversion Funnel is prominent for SaaS SEO projects because SaaS businesses implement SEO for conversions. Conversion Funnels have “middle-of-funnel”, “end-of-funnel”, and “beginning-of-funnel” parts. Middle-of-funnel focuses on research and comparison of the SaaS businesses, and end-of-the-funnel SaaS SEO focuses on direct conversion searches.

Beginning-of-funnel SaaS SEO focus on audience acquisition, and user onboarding during the initial research moment. The SaaS SEO and Conversion Rate Optimization, conversion path, and conversion funnel are closely related to each other.

To learn more about CRO and SaaS SEO connections, read the guides below.

• Conversion Path: The conversion Path involves the conversion search journey. From beginning-of-funnel to the end of the funnel, SaaS SEO covers all the conversion path searches while creating the best possible conversion path for the users.
• Conversion Funnel: The conversion Funnel contains a web page sequence to convert the users. SaaS Businesses use Conversion Funnel to provide testimonials for their businesses and convince the users.
• Conversion Rate Optimization: Conversion Rate Optimization uses SEO and UX Optimization together for SaaS Businesses.
• Moment of Truth: A moment of Truth is the moment that a person gives a decision for buying. Moment of Truth is relevant to SEO and SaaS for providing conversions.

How Long does it take to rank a SaaS Website with SEO?

SaaS SEO methods rank a SaaS website for the targeted query groups in 1-6 months successfully. SaaS Websites initially rank better based on the website’s content network, authority, quality, and historical data. SaaS Websites might need between 1 and 6 months to be ranked properly by the search engines. To improve the re-ranking and initial ranking for SaaS websites, a proper cost of retrieval and topical authority should be provided.

To learn “how Google rank”, read the related SEO Case Study.

Do SaaS Websites need too much organic traffic?

SaaS websites need traffic according to their company’s industry. The traffic need of the SaaS websites is based on their topic, and business model. A B2C SaaS company requires more organic traffic than a B2B SaaS Company. The prioritization of SEO and PPC might vary depending on the targeted audience and query diversity and size. The SaaS websites usually require organic traffic of more than monthly 10,000+, but for a B2C SaaS company with a popular industry, the organic traffic required might be over monthly 100,000+.

What are the Other SaaS SEO Campaign Examples based on SaaS Guide?

The SaaS SEO Guide of Holistic SEO involves multiple SEO Case Studies. The SaaS SEO Case Studies and organic growth campaign examples involve different projects from various industries such as automotive, email marketing, and SMS marketing. To understand the benefits of the SaaS Guide, use the SaaS SEO success examples and projects.

The next sections of the “SaaS SEO Campaign Examples” involve the SaaS SEO Case Studies from other industries to strengthen the SaaS SEO Guide and learnings.

SMS Marketing SaaS SEO Case Study with 700% Organic Click, and %224 Organic Impression Increase

The SMS Marketing SaaS SEO Case Study subject website is JookSMS.com. JookSMS.com is an SMS automation and bulk SMS texting SaaS company. To achieve higher SMS Marketing SaaS SEO traffic, a topical map is created, and social media branding, surround sound, and Barnacle SEO campaigns are used. Below, the JookSMS.com quick traffic increase as a SaaS business is below.

The specific Tweet from Koray Tugberk GUBUR to demonstrate the “Re-ranking and Initial Ranking” from the Search Engine for JookSMS.com is below.

JookSMS.com has experienced a gradual traffic increase by having positive historical data with implicit user feedback. To understand the implicit-user feedback, read the “How does Google Rank” case study of Koray Tugberk GUBUR. Implicit user feedback involves user behavior on the search engine result pages, and the clicked page. Google and other search engines follow user behaviors via cookies, browser extensions, add-ons, and plugins along with browser technologies themselves. For example, Google Chrome Data is used by Google to understand the web standards and user experience over web pages.

JookSMS.com has leveraged a semantic content network to create positive historical data that shows that the SaaS company has a higher unique information gain score with accurate and richer information for the SMS marketing and bulk testing topics. The website has experienced a re-ranking event, which means that the search engine performed a refreshment for the overall rankability of the SERP. Below, you can see another 50% organic click increase after the first re-ranking event for JookSMS.com.

The JookSMS.com SaaS SEO Company SEO Success is below with the naked Google Search Console data.

The December 2021 Broad Core Algorithm Update tested the website first time for certain queries, but during the update, the website couldn’t stay as highly ranked. Source Shadowing, or “Website Ranking Oppression” happens when the search engine finds a better website to rank for the same queries. The high impression increase during the Broad Core Algorithm Update, and then sudden normalization for the organic impression values, involve a source shadowing situation.

JookSMS.com is tested by the search engine, for the first time, during the December 2021 BCAU of Google. After the December 2021 BCAU, the overall quality of the JookSMS is increased by providing trustworthy mentions, external references, continuous quality content publication, and content pruning along with content merging. JookSMS.com started to show a positive Ranking State, which involves continuous ranking increase. The May and September 2022 Broad Core Algorithm Updates started to re-rank the source with higher rankings and visibility.

The historical data, continuous quality, and authority increase helped to trigger the Re-ranking event. SaaS SEO requires a high level of consistency in SEO practices. Because most of the SaaS industries involve high-level authority competitors or minimal search demand queries. Thus, to provide proper SaaS SEO traffic, the projects need to show enough patience and passion.

The Complex Adaptive Systems of Search Engines focus on the quality signals that show the passion and patience of the experts for an industry. For example, instead of updating and optimizing the big components of the websites, the small components might signal higher expertise and real-world authority of the web source. Because only passionate and real experts pay attention to the details. These key information points and quality signals are visible for the content’s quality or website design, and continuous publication and updates of the web source even if a broad core algorithm update didn’t rank the website.

Google and another search engine might realize that a website stops publishing new content or increasing its own quality signals if a big update doesn’t rank it, or the website loses traffic after certain updates. Especially, the backlink-related manipulative PageRank practices are realized with these types of hype-creating algorithms to detect the unnatural human intervention for the link graph. But, if a website increases its quality all the time, even if Google doesn’t rank it, it is a key quality signal to demonstrate that the website is a real expert in the complex adaptive systems of search engines.

The JookSMS.com SaaS SEO Project example’s “Pages Report from Google Search Console” demonstrates the real-world analysis of the technical SEO problems for indexation. The website has “287” non-indexed pages even if it is crawled, which is another quality issue. Most of those URLs were “FAQ” pages with thin content, and to increase the Ranking Signal Consolidation, they are merged. The Ranking Signal Consolidation involves the unification and organization of more than 22 indexing signals such as sitemaps, internal links, robots.txt commands, internal link popularity, content uniqueness and comprehensiveness, and categorically different queries.

The SaaS SEO Project for SMS Marketing has the technical SEO problems below.

• Thin content with non-indexed URLs, even if it is crawled.
• Internal redirects within the crawl path.
• Blocked URLs via Robots.txt, but still indexed due to internal links.
• 404 Pages with internal links.
• Redirection chains that block the Googlebot.
• Duplicate URLs with highly similar content with canonicalization

The proportion difference between the Indexed and Non-indexed pages for the SaaS SEO projects involves the cost-of retrieval. The cost of retrieval represents the cost of the search engine during the crawling and indexation process. Having fewer non-indexed pages with technical SEO problems helps for better search engine communication for SEO, including SaaS context. Search engine communication is the concept for describing the friendliness of a website, and web entity to communicate with a search engine with a clear structure, and consistency.

The SaaS SEO Project and Case Study for the SMS Marketing industry don’t have a proper technical SEO improvement. The website has 0% of good URLs for mobile Core Web Vitals.

The Desktop Core Web Vitals score and URLs are important for SaaS SEO growth and success. Because most SaaS technology users prefer using a desktop device. Desktop searches and overall traffic is significant, as mobile traffic in the SaaS industry. The desktop Core Web Vitals score is not good, only %2 of the URLs pass the Core Web Vitals for SaaS SEO subject website for SMS marketing.

The Crawl Stats of Google Search Console is an important and helpful report for SaaS SEO analysis and strategy audit. The crawl stats demonstrate how many times, with what byte size and average response timing, Googlebot crawls the website in SaaS or other contexts such as B2B. The SaaS SEO project has 24,000 total crawl requests and a 1.09B byte size with 399 response timing. The response time is not good for Google standards because a good response timing is lower than 200 MS according to Google.

The Crawl Stats for JookSMS demonstrate improvement compared to the previous 3 months. And, 200 Status Code URLs are increasing while 404, and 302 Status Code are decreasing. The 304 Status Code means that Googlebot used the cached resources from its own memory, which signals better communication with the search engine.

The Status Code distribution for the SaaS SEO project is given below.

• 85% 200 status code.
• %8 301 status code.
• 4% 404 status code.
• %3 304 status code.
• %1 302 status code.

A perfect status code distribution for SaaS SEO involves only 200 and 304 Status Codes, which means there is no error or internal redirection responses. The Refresh and Discovery hit from the Googlebot involve the different purposes of the Googlebot hits to the website. Google has two main fundamental crawling purposes, first is refreshing the index, and second is expanding the index with new content that is explored on the website during the crawling, which is called discovery. SaaS SEO requires staying an active website to prevent content decay. Content decay means that the content on the website is not responsive enough to the new information need, thus it needs a content update. Thus, Discovery hits should be at least over 15% for a healthy Googlebot crawl distribution for SaaS SEO and other SEO verticals.

The resource type that is requested by the Googlebot involves the crawling characters of the Googlebot for the specific website. The Crawling Characteristics for SaaS SEO should involve over 80% of the HTML Documents, 5-6% of Images, and 14% of CSS, JS, Font, Video, and Synchronization types of resource hits. The purpose of keeping the HTML Document hits higher than other resources means making most of the crawling requests for the documents that can be indexed rather than resources that are needed for rendering the specific pages. To decrease the cost of retrieval, the pages should have fewer resources, and crawlers shouldn2T be bottlenecked with unnecessary amounts of resources. The SaaS SEO websites use different frameworks and CMSes such as ReactJS, NextJS, GatsbyJS, WordPress, Drupal, and NodeJS. The front-end and back-end structures of all websites affect the crawling characteristics, patterns, and schemes of search engines, and crawlers such as Googlebot. The SaaS SEO projects should use plain source code with fewer resource requests, and unnecessary resources should be cleaned. Thus, Technical SEO helps SaaS SEO campaigns decrease the cost of retrieval.

Below, for the SaaS SEO project case study, the HTML crawling hits increase its share by over 45% for the last 3 months while increasing the traffic. It demonstrates that the Googlebot understands where to focus more, while it helps

SaaS SEO Case Study subject website from the SMS Marketing industry demonstrates an example success of the SaaS SEO guide with different strategies from Technical SEO, Local SEO, and Semantic SEO understandings that reflect the Holistic SEO mindset. In the next sections, the Local SEO implementations for JookSMS.com is explained to demonstrate the entity-oriented search importance for overall SEO strategy. JookSMS.com Google Business Profile is opened, and the company logo, name, website address, phone numbers, working hours, address information, and working hours are added.

JookSMS.com has been added to the Cupsera which is a product and SaaS service review platform. The clients are incentivized to make comments about the quality services of the company after the first order is performed. The 72 positive reviews from Cupsera for JookSMS.com demonstrate the helpfulness of the company for the client’s needs. The company’s LinkedIn Company Page is opened as a social media and business identity information point to provide further trustworthiness. The LinkedIn page and the Google Business Profile share the same explanation and description for the company to describe its brand value, mission, and pricing with consistency.

In some Google SERP experiments, Google started to demonstrate the LinkedIn staff, CEO, and headquarters information inside the Google Knowledge Panels, and People Also Ask questions and answers. Thus, LinkedIn as a template content source for certain entities is helpful for search engines to understand the factual and real-world existence of the companies. Template content with an extensive amount of information sources for certain topics helps search engines to improve their knowledge graph and database. Thus, using comprehensive and big databases like websites such as LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, and Crunchbase is helpful to create a brand identity and digital reflection of the real-world existing company. Thus, the SaaS SEO Project is added to LinkedIn to demonstrate legibility, transparency, and overall expertise. Google united the company’s LinkedIn profile inside the GBP Profile, showing that the LinkedIn page helps users to learn more about the SaaS company while recognizing the company gets easier. SaaS SEO leverages entity reputation and named entity recognition with Surround Sound and Brand Identity Information Points on the open web.

The Surround Sound and Barnacle SEO help SaaS SEO to improve the authority and expertise signals of the brand for the industry. For example, Capterra, Softwareadvice, and Getapp are some of the review sources that reviewed JookSMS as a trustworthy and reliable SaaS Company. Every review helps Google to understand and grasp the facts about the Brand Entities further to evaluate and rank the web entity on SERP within different search result features such as knowledge panels, popular products, and related entities.

The JookSMS.com About the Source Panel is richer than its competitors and their overall situation. The Business profile of JookSMS is used for feeding the About the Source information panel, as in the first SaaS SEO case study subject website. The third-party reviews from Capterra or Cupsera for JookSMS represent that Google picked these reviews up for defining the source. And, the review sources from the SERP align together with the web sources in the About the Source panel.

The External Links target most of the time the JookSMS.com homepage to demonstrate the brand value further. The second most linked page is directly about “SMS marketing”, and the third one is about “SMS spoofing” which is a threat to bulk SMS texts. The homepage links share the topical entries, contextual terms, and categorical n-grams for a specific web answer for the relevant topics. SaaS SEO involves branding, and external links, references, and mentions with a balanced distribution is a key point for distributing PageRank and overall authority.

The internal links and external links are consistent to demonstrate the most important topics, website segments, website tree, and website purpose. SaaS SEO internal links should follow the popularity and relative importance of the homepage, main website segments, and most significant informational and conceptual guides along with the services pages. The second SaaS SEO Case Study subject website from the SaaS SEO Guide, JookSMS.com has the homepage as the most popular internally linked page, and services pages and informational pages follow it. Arranging internal links properly helps search engines to understand the most essential parts of the website properly. A source that doesn’t use internal links contextually, and naturally, might not benefit the hyperlinks for ranking and communicating with the search engines. The second subject website for SaaS SEO Case Study and Guide internal links, internal link targets, and counts are given below.

The top linking websites represent the closest websites to the link target website. That highest linking website is the closest to the link target website, as long as the links are natural and contextual. Having more links and connections, or mentions from authoritative sources, help for being associated with the higher authority websites. Broad Core Algorithm Updates re-rank websites based on their classification results based on links, layout, content tonality, richness, accuracy, identity, location, language, and other metrics such as technical optimization level for lower cost of indexing and serving. The SaaS SEO second subject website top linking websites is given below.

The top linking websites and how many times they are linking signal the naturality of the specific link source. A source that links another source for the same web page in unnaturally high numbers does not represent the PageRank flow for expertise, approval, and authority, it signifies a PageRank manipulation with unnatural links. Thus, as long as the links do not represent the same entity ownership, they shouldn’t target the same web page from the same website with unnaturally high numbers. Google performs different link spam updates to recognize and clear the unnatural links from the ranking ecosystem. Thus, Disavow Tool, and Naturally Earned Quality External References are the most important attributes for SEO verticals including SaaS SEO. The problematic and spam-like updates are submitted to the Google Disavow tool.

The submitted unnatural links for Disavow File for the second subject website in the SaaS SEO Case Study and Guide are below. The unnatural links are called toxic links in many SEO resources, despite Google spokespersons stating that there is no such a term. The links are classified as natural, unnatural, quality, and non-quality. And, Google Disavow tool is for unnatural links rather than non-quality links. Thus, using the disavow tool in the wrong way might make Google ignore the disavow file that is prepared. Thus, in the SaaS SEO project, only unnatural links are placed. And, for the review sources, and naturally linking web sources, we requested them to not link frequently, or in a promoting, marketing language way to keep the web natural and nurturer for the web searchers.

The anchor text’s naturality and relevance are important, as in link naturality and quality. There are different types of anchor texts such as partial match, exact match, generic, generic, and branded anchor texts. The second SaaS SEO Project example has used the brand name for the homepage, and directly root concepts and seed query phrases for the informational and conceptual guides to relate their purpose. The review sources used the “view”, and “visit” types of CTAs within their links, and for multilingual clients, the same types of words and phrases exist by signaling the multiregional prominence of the SMS bulk texting SaaS company’s service area and the possibility of click satisfaction for multilingual users. The multiregional and multilingual websites gain more historical data to increase the confidence score of the search engines for a better and higher ranking. The multilingual anchor texts and multiregional link sources represent a higher brand authority and better user satisfaction possibility due to higher language and service region matching possibilities.

Using the “related” search operator helps SEOs to see the most related sources for a specific website. The most related websites for a specific source involve topicality, website type, intersecting links, and content similarity. Thus, having more authoritative sources from every vertical of related websites is helpful for higher rankings. JookSMS.com has been associated with “textedly.com”, “bulksms.netsavant”, “indiatimes.com”, “reach-interactive.com” and other industry websites. Google doesn’t show results for the “related” search operator for most sources. Thus having topically relevant, and prominent sources in the “related” search operator search results is a signal for authority and being evaluated by the search engine based on similarities, and consistencies for the industry websites. JookSMS.com has positive and relevant sources related to itself, most of them show positive results for spam updates, or other types of ranking updates, such as Textedly.com. Below, see the “related” search operator results for SaaS SEO second subject website, and its analysis.

The related search results’ domains are taken and researched inside the Ahrefs Batch Analysis to see their overall status. Textedly, and Textlocal are the main sources that are related to JookSMS.com inside Google’s index. The overall performance of these domains from the same industry is visible below.

The same “related” search operator is used for “textedly.com” which is a competitor SaaS company. The output results demonstrate even further authoritative sources from the same industry for Textedly.com. “Related” search activity is used for creating topical maps, and related web source chains to see how they are connected and associated with each other to overcome their authoritativeness with better semantic content networks.

The related search operator results for Textedly involve more authoritative domains, which signal that the specific topic and the index that is constructed for it has a more central prominence around textedly compared to JookSMS.com. It demonstrates where the SaaS project should lead further for topical border expansion and authority earning. The results for the Ahrefs batch analysis for the organic keywords and traffic for the specific related search operator results for the second SaaS competitor project.

The “textedly” has a broader context than the JookSMS which is another reason for higher queries and organic traffic. Thus, while expanding the topical maps and source context, it shouldn’t be distant from the primary focus of the source, or the source context. The “primary focus for the website” is a concept from the Helpful Content Update of Google, and it is a synonym for “source context” from the Koray Tugberk GUBUR’s Semantic SEO Course to explain the purpose of the brand. Thus, a brand topical map expansion can’t go away from the primary focus, thus “related” search operator should be used cautiously for SaaS SEO Analysis.

The SaaS SEO Case Study and Guide involves two example projects, Sunnyvalley.io and JookSMS.com with every vertical of the SEO as in Holistic SEO. Both projects acquired a high level of organic growth, authority, and trust increase along with a conversion amount increase. The SaaS SEO guide is created to help SaaS Companies with real-world examples for making them achieve their purposes for higher revenue, brand authority, and client loyalty by leveraging technical, semantic, local, and entity SEO.

Why is Ranking Signal Consolidation important for SaaS SEO?

How does Content Pruning Help for Ranking Signal Consolidation?

How does Technical SEO Help for Ranking Signal Consolidation?

Why Understand Ranking State for SaaS SEO?

Last Thoughts on SaaS SEO and Holistic SEO

SaaS SEO is part of Holistic SEO for reaching out o an important amount of audience and includes many verticals of Holistic SEO such as Technical SEO, or Local SEO. Thus, to provide E-A-T and convince the YMYL-related topics, the SEO projects need to be configured carefully. A SaaS Project SEO process is delicate for understanding an audience, and business model. Most of the SaaS industries have strong competitors, thus, in the beginning, the process will be harder. Especially, the education of a SaaS company for SEO is harder than usual. In this context, SaaS SEO is one of the most prominent areas in that Holistic SEO can show its effect for success. From UX, and CRO, to organic search performance analysis, local SEO, social media optimization technical SEO, and Pagespeed Improvements, SaaS SEO requires a deep understanding of SEO.

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Koray Tuğberk GÜBÜR

Owner and Founder at Holistic SEO & Digital

Koray Tuğberk GÜBÜR is the CEO and Founder of Holistic SEO & Digital where he provides SEO Consultancy, Web Development, Data Science, Web Design, and Search Engine Optimization services with strategic leadership for the agency’s SEO Client Projects. Koray Tuğberk GÜBÜR performs SEO A/B Tests regularly to understand the Google, Microsoft Bing, and Yandex like search engines’ algorithms, and internal agenda. Koray uses Data Science to understand the custom click curves and baby search engine algorithms’ decision trees. Tuğberk used many websites for writing different SEO Case Studies. He published more than 10 SEO Case Studies with 20+ websites to explain the search engines. Koray Tuğberk started his SEO Career in 2015 in the casino industry and moved into the white-hat SEO industry. Koray worked with more than 700 companies for their SEO Projects since 2015. Koray used SEO to improve the user experience, and conversion rate along with brand awareness of the online businesses from different verticals such as retail, e-commerce, affiliate, and b2b, or b2c websites. He enjoys examining websites, algorithms, and search engines.

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