SEO for SaaS (Software as a Service) Websites

Welcome to another special edition of Calling Mondays. Today with me, I have the amazing Matthew Howells-Barbie, who's the Senior Director of Acquisition, and Jackie Chu, previously at Square and also Dropbox, who's now at Uber. Jackie has also a very exotic position at Uber and oh my God, I am the worst. It's Global SEO Lead?

Global SEO Lead for SEO Intelligence.

Thank you very much. We are going to speak Today we're going to speak about SEO for SaaS companies. And you of course have plenty of experience working in-house at SaaS companies. I would like to start the conversation to highlight the differences that we can find when doing an SEO process for a SaaS company versus traditional transactional inventory website type of SEO processes.

The main overarching thing that you would call out that's a big difference between, in general, with SaaS versus industries like e-com, or in particular e-com, right, is scale. They're just, they're different. They're different sizes in every aspect, whether it be from the actual size of the websites. SaaS businesses are much smaller. Like, you could run an entire SaaS business off like a 3-page website. Like, that's That can happen. You can't do that with an e-com store. Alongside that, it's typically the way people purchase. I would say overall, if I had to aggregate how much search volume you're typically going after on a website level, SaaS is usually much smaller, much more specialized, and much more commercially focused than on the e-com side, but typically the products themselves or the services, whatever that you're doing on the SaaS side, are usually a little bit more complicated and less transactional when you're thinking about the buying process. So there's often a lot more education that has to be built around all of that.

Yeah, so I think the 2 things for me that really stand out are, one, I think the funnel is really long because you're not only focusing on these product pages, but you're also trying to educate people or talk about their pain points or their security concerns. And especially for, in your case, a CRM, there's a lot of friction to changing that. So I think that people really want to do a lot of research. So you really have to capture them at all stages of the funnel. So using Square as an example, yes, of course you want to sell them point of sales, but you also want to capture the people who are talking about inventory management or how to take good product photos or how to bring in more customers. I think the other second really important aspect is, yes, the scale is much smaller, but it's also way more manual for the SEO person. Every single page you need to give attention to. So you're really working cross-functionally with everyone from engineers and product managers to PMMs and copywriters, legal, brand, design, all of these people. Every single page you make, you have to be super intentional and it's customized for the keyword that you're generally targeting. So I think that for me, those are the two really big things.

What are the tactics that you have found particularly useful for this type of scenarios? In this case, I can definitely see how content support is critical. I can imagine how in many cases there are also restrictions on resources and how much you can end up getting in and then being able to compete with many content-focused websites, aggregators, guides that have long-form content just You know, clarifying every single feature that you may have versus your competitors, right? How, how do you do it? How do you prioritize? Yeah.

So one of the things that I think is really unique to SaaS companies is how the help center plays a role in both the acquisition as well as the retention process. Because, like, again, going back to the idea that, like, SaaS companies, there's a very long lifecycle. I noticed, like, help centers actually tend to be, like, a major touchpoint for people before they activate. And I've seen that really across like industries. Um, just because, you know, a lot of times we think about a product page, it's like beautiful, it's light and lean, but it doesn't really have a lot of the meat that somebody who's like really seasoned is looking for. Right. They're looking for very specific features or very specific, like, you know, tax implications. And so, so help centers are really interesting because they also just tend to have like a lot of content. And to Matthew's point, like on one end, you need them to rank for all their keywords. Like they need to rank because, um, it's also a huge cost to be supporting people, to do customer support for for tools, tasks that are very basic, like how to download the app, which is actually like, those very basic queries actually tend to be like your number one inbound questions.

Yeah.

But then on top of that too, it's like you want them to rank, but at the same time, they have a tendency to cannibalize the actual product pages themselves. So it's like this really careful dance that you do between those 2 types of pages. Then that becomes sometimes exacerbated when there's like community. So there's always, I don't know if HubSpot has a community. Matthew, yes, Matthew's laughing. Yeah, see, this also happens. So then the solution is always like, let's have a community. People will help each other. But now you have 3 different parts of your site that are essentially competing with each other for the same keywords. And so you just really have to teach people like, okay, there's certain keywords that need to be assigned to each page and educate other people so that they can help you police what kind of content belongs where. But it's definitely a very careful balance because that's something that I found to be very unique to It's like the importance of help center in like really all stages of the acquisition funnel.

It really, it really is. And the product marketing is like the heartbeat of most SaaS businesses, right? It's like the, the real art and scale that comes with content in SaaS is the ability to like master repurposing information. It's like you have information that comes from like the product managers around specific areas of the product. That information then needs to be dissected and be used in like product page-like materials. There needs to be like content that's used within that around some of the more informational stuff, the knowledge base information, if you're answering stuff within the community. And all of this has to be really, really well mapped into the search landscape so that, yeah, you're not just going through and competing with every single page that you're producing for the same thing, right? It's like there's a big difference between someone searching for a feature of a CRM because they want to know whether a product that they're specifying in has that feature versus when they're trying to understand what a CRM actually even does and that they're like kind of searching around features. There's such a fine line between some of those things, but I think the thing that I'll go back to what you were talking about, Aleyda, around aggregators and stuff is probably one of the bigger challenges that SaaS companies definitely face. So you've got the Capterras, G2s, etc. of the world, right?

With a lot of reviews also from users and being able to mention everybody in the market that sometimes is something that you cannot do directly because companies guidelines and communication protocols, right?

Definitely. And it's just like there's a different dynamic, right? I'll compare, like a comparison that you can pull towards the e-com space, right? It's like competing with major affiliate review sites like Wirecutter and co., right? They're your aggregators, but it's just a different scale because there's so much more like niche focus. So I think the, the big thing that that I've certainly learned over the years of spending in SaaS is knowing which fights to fight. It's like there are just certain queries that people are searching for, and I see this is probably the number one area that I see people just wasting time, resources, cash, is trying to get their product pages to rank for queries that nobody wants a single vendor product page to rank for.

Right?

Like if I'm searching for the best, like best CRM software, I'm not actually looking for a page with one product on it.

Mm-hmm.

I'm in a stage right now that's way before that. This is like right near the start of the consideration process. And I'm going through and I'm like, I want a big list that I can then narrow down further and further and further. And I think that is a big area where you can shift your approach, right? It's like the way my team at HubSpot, for example, focuses on some of those queries is, sure, we'll try and brute force our way into the SERP, like page 1. Absolutely. Like, and that's just like brute force, old school link building and like intent mapping. You're still gonna do all of that, but we know it's a means to an end. We just wanna be there or thereabouts for some of those. If you're a small startup, don't even bother, right? Like you, you're not gonna act like we, we have the ability to do that with the resources we have. I wouldn't do it in other situations. The primary focus is take everything that is ranking in page 1. How can we get mentioned, right? The, the worst thing ever is if people are searching for that, it doesn't matter if your product page ranks on page 1, if you aren't listed in like those 3 or 4 listicles that are all ranking there, Boom, immediate breakdown of trust. Why is this random site appearing in page 1 but it's not in all of these lists that people are recommending? You have to be there. The way we look at those kind of keywords is less like how are we ranking and more what percentage of the search results page do we own. And we class ownership as like a mention or a feature within any of these. And some of those are paid for. Capterra, right? Make no mistake, aggregators is a pay-to-play space. Like SaaS tools.

really difficult because unlike ecommerce where you could have a lot of things you could rank for, it's such a zero-sum game because you're really only selling at most like 3, 4, or 5 different fundamental products. So you really need to own those SERPs. And to your point, like now there's like even less real estate. So for me, the thing that I found to be really successful is automating my internal linking strategy so that like whenever someone creates a help center page or they create a product page, if I can get that internal link, to point to that product page that I'm actually trying to get to rank for that head term, that usually has like a statistically significant lift on visibility for the pages that we target. Just because again, you really need to make sure all of that link equity is pointing to the pages that you really, really care about. And that's probably one of the most important things that I've seen in SaaS.

The way we look at things and the way I always try to look at it is in 3 buckets. Owned, earned, and paid, right? And basically we have like our content that we own. If we can't rank our product pages for some of those queries, can we build out listicles on the blog? Like we do this all the time where we'd be like on the HubSpot blog, we'll have the like 11 best like form builder tools. Lo and behold, HubSpot will be in that list, right? Like, but we'll also mention, right? We'll also mention—

Surprise, surprise.

Competitors as well. And like, we'll be very open about that, but that's the only way that we're going to actually be in that SERP. And a lot of people get really hung up and they're like, why are you mentioning your competitors? It's like, we need to, we need to be there.

Yeah. And something that I love that you guys said, like, much like how you have to kind of broaden your horizon and think about like other sites that are ranking for your queries, like the way that Capterra and G2 do. I think as an SEO, like one of the things I love that like you're doing is you're really into like YouTube SEO. Um, one thing that I've explored quite a bit is App Store optimization. I actually think SEO people are some of the best poised to kind of like win those games. Because when you think about people who are doing YouTube, they don't have like the deep knowledge of like how search works in the way that you do. Most of the people who do App Store optimization, they're actually gamers. Um, and they're like in the gaming vertical. And so I've actually been able to learn like App Store optimization, which, you know, really, if I'm being honest, it's just fairly basic keyword targeting. Like putting the keyword in the title, put it in the subtitle, put it in the meta keyword slot. But like for something as simple as that, like we would see like an increase of over 25% on like page views for like these really big brands, like, like, you know, the Dropbox and the Square. And that's not going to be that way for like an enterprise client. But if you are a B2B company, but you do like solopreneurs or you do like smaller businesses and you have like that offering, there are other ways that people search that you can put your product in front of those people. And I really feel like as SEOs, we are so well poised to identify those places.

Thank you very much for talking about that because realistically one of the best examples that I have found of companies trying to maximise their visibility in non-traditional ways in SERPs in this space is for example Trello or Asana. They have a lot of how-to videos that they upload on YouTube and then when anybody searches for how to work with your task management or how to improve your productivity or how to Start following the Pomodoro technique. It is Trello ranking there in a video carousel. The visibility of that inclusion is huge. And, and this is the type of content that users will prefer to consume in video.

It's all about mindshare. In SaaS, everything is about having as much visibility across everything that you do as possible. Like The search engine, like marketplaces are way more of an interest to me than just like organic search. Like App Store, for example, as you were just saying there, Jackie. But also, like I have a whole section of my team just spun up purely focused on the WordPress plugin directory. We built like a scraper tool that does like rank tracking of that. And we care loads about that. We were like, we have a huge amount of people that connect WordPress up to their HubSpot marketing-like software. And we were like, how do we get a bigger foothold in there? And we looked about 2 years ago, it's like all you see when you search for anything is Mailchimp. We were like, look at all of the mindshare Mailchimp have got in the WordPress space. So we built a WordPress plugin and then just went really heavy on trying to rank in the WordPress plugin directory. And yeah, it's basic stuff, like basic optimization, and then everything comes back to reviews. The amount of budget that I've spent over the years acquiring reviews, just to clarify what I mean by acquiring reviews, spending dollars on being able to either reach out to customers or have people at events gathering reviews for our products across different platforms. At our big conference Inbound that we usually hold each year, it's like the I would have like a team of say like 10 people going around with iPads getting like reviews on Capterra and G2 and stuff because like that is gold. You need to have reviews in all these areas all the way through to our WordPress plugin. I care more about like WordPress plugin reviews than I do links to our product page, right? It's like sacrilege to say as an SEO.

Indeed, you need to open at the end of the day. It's a means to To the end.

As an SEO person, I mean, you can just like, right? Like you're able to see like, what is the pattern of the people who are ranking? And almost always like, like search fundamentally works the same. Right. And a lot of these other search engines, whether it's, um, in the Apple, you know, the Apple, uh, App Store, or it's the, you know, Salesforce Marketplace, they don't have the years of like engineers and machine learning that like Google does. Right. Like Google as a search engine does. So they're really like back how search was in the day. And I'm sure that they'll progressively get better and better and better as time goes on. As search does, because like you need to get the best result to the user too, which is really important. That's like a lot of what these algorithms do. Um, but it is a really great opportunity, especially because people are searching in like everywhere, you know, and the funnel again is really, really, really, really long. And so you want to make sure whether that person lands on G2 Crowd, whether they're looking up for your Brand+ reviews, that like you're there and what's being said about you is good. And like as an SEO person, like you just have to make sure that to like Matthew's point, you have really good search coverage. Because the other thing that's really unfortunate is if people do have bad things to say about your company, almost always someone's going to find it. And if someone finds it, like, it's actually very important to try to do a little bit of online reputation management. If that— if there is like a negative result that has high enough visibility, like, even if you already lost that customer, even if you froze their account because they were doing something that's kind of like more like black hat, you need to at least like publicly respond. I think, so that people don't think that you're going to leave them dead in the water. Because for a company that is higher LTV too, which any company, anyone who's doing a lot of research and doing a lot of touchpoints, they tend to be higher LTV. You'll see that usually correlate with how many times they have to touch your site. One of their biggest concerns as a company is they want to have support. They want to know if something's wrong, if something's wrong with the system goes down, do you have an SLA? Where is my money in the case of Square? You're going to support them and your product is going to be there. Because most companies, don't have like a really big cushion as far as money goes. And so I think that it is really important to think about like what is the kind of ecosystem of conversations happening around you.

Exactly. So thank you very much to both of you for the insights and actionable tips. It has been so valuable. I have learned a lot and hopefully also the audience too. And please, if you have any questions, any comments, leave them out, not here because here is Jackie, but here below Jackie in YouTube. And I hope that you have also liked today's episode and very looking forward also to have you in the next one. Please remember to like the video, to subscribe to the channel in case you haven't yet done it. So this is me becoming a better YouTuber little by little. Thank you very much. Until the next episode, thank you very much, Jackie and Matthew.

See ya.

Bye-bye.