If we could sum up enterprise SaaS SEO with one phrase, that would be – bigger companies have bigger responsibilities. Most B2B marketing professionals and enterprise owners can agree that every marketing effort needs to be a) approved and b) measured and reported.
Yes, B2B SaaS SEO professionals need to work harder and smarter to justify their decisions and choices – picture a presentation of KPIs to a board of stakeholders and C’s.
Luckily, there are strategies and successful examples of enterprises that managed to scale their SEO efforts and turn dozens of web pages into “conversion machines.”
In this article, we will share the ins and outs of enterprise SEO, as well as X strategies and best practices to follow.
What is Enterprise SaaS SEO and Why Does It Matter?
Enterprise SaaS SEO is the process of boosting the presence of a larger SaaS company and building online authority and reputation while bringing in SQL and demo calls.
As for the importance of enterprise SaaS SEO – only 9% of Google searchers make it to the bottom of the first page of the search results, according to Backlinko’s case study[1].
So, being on the first page makes readers remember, trust, and buy from your brand. Keeping in mind that enterprise companies have more complex tools, longer sales processes, and bigger clients, competing for that #1 position in the competitive SERP is hard work.
To get the full picture, we’ll outline the differences and difficulties enterprise companies should be aware of before they give up on investing in SEO.
How is Enterprise SaaS SEO Different?
If you took up some SEO work, you know ranking in a low, competitive niche can be a walk in the park if you have the skills and experience.
But with the weight of an enterprise’s expectations on your back, it can easily turn into a marathon. Plus, with all the AI, Google updates and constant changes, you will need some athletic abilities.
Here are the top differentiators for enterprise SaaS SEO:
- Bigger budgets – More money doesn’t necessarily mean more space for experiments and trial/error. In an enterprise setting, bigger budgets mean longer approval times, more expectations, and clearer KPIs to target.
- Multiple personas to target – Enterprise SaaS companies usually sell their product(s) to other bigger companies, which means either multiple people (with different jobs and needs) have to make a purchasing decision, or one person (of a lower rank) needs to convince their manager that they really need that software.
- Competitive market – Dozens of similar companies with big budgets and a large workforce to compete with. Outperforming them will require effort, resources, and time. Just think about Ahrefs vs Semrush; they are always hand in hand on the SERP.
- Bigger audience/potential for more conversions – Even though positive, this can imply that every small change can have a bigger impact. For example, a one-word change increased product demo conversions by 139%, as reported in the GoCardless case study[2].
- More updates needed – It is the fifth month of 2024, and Google has already had two major algorithm changes[3]. In the world of content marketing and SEO, being flexible and constantly updating your web pages are the only ways to stay on top of your SEO efforts. The more web pages and sites/domains you have, the more time and effort it takes to constantly monitor and update them.
How to Start & Tools for Enterprise SaaS SEO
Before we jump into concrete strategies that will boost your SEO, let’s quickly outline what you need to do overall before you choose the best strategy for your company.
Keyword Research
No matter if you are starting from scratch or you have come to a certain point in your SEO marketing, keyword research should be constantly updated. With SaaS marketing tools such as Ahrefs, Semrush or Moz Pro, you can look into what competitors are doing and find the most relevant keywords your target audience is searching for.
Content Strategy
After making a list of all the keywords, you need to rank (or rank higher for) and check out the type of content the SERP shows for them. If most of them are SaaS landing pages or guides, that means your content type should be the same. You can also experiment with two different content types, such as a webinar and a guide, to attract a wider audience.
On-page Optimization
Now, outline the steps you can take to improve your on-page SEO. Update meta tags, headings, keywords, and publishing dates to provide fresh content for both search engines and readers.
Technical SEO
We will give a more detailed breakdown in the section below, but technical SEO is one of the key strategies for enterprises because of the number of pages that are on the site. Make sure your readers are getting to the resources they need easily without any unnecessary steps that would make them bounce.
Local SEO
If you have a worldwide audience or multilingual pages, local SEO should be one of your top priorities. This means conducting separate keyword research and strategies for all countries, so you appear in their local search. For enterprises, this can lead to an increase in traffic and conversions.
Link Building
Examine your link-building efforts and make sure you aren’t linking to dead websites or link farms, that will ruin your chance of becoming an authoritative website in your niche. We will write more about your SaaS link-building strategies below.
Analytics
Finally, all you do needs to lead to some conclusion. Therefore, always track GA4, GSC and your SEO tool, to see how your changes are performing. Find out more about the most important metrics below.
How To Do Enterprise SaaS SEO? 7 Strategies
If you are stuck with your SEO efforts, here are proven strategies that big players in the industry use to outperform their competitors, dominate the SERP, and meet their yearly KPIs.
1. Create Content Pillars/Clusters for Topical Authority
Finding your niche keywords is the first step of your content marketing strategy.
To create a comprehensive keyword list, you need to check for which keywords your competitors are ranking for, what your target audience is Googling, and whether there is a content or market gap you can fill. To do this, you will need SEO tools such as Ahrefs and a lot of research on review sites, social media, and forums to find potential unexplored topics.
Once your Excel sheet has reached the point of nonstop scrolling to get to the end, you can consider moving on to the next step – sorting and prioritizing keywords.
The first are the two metrics – KD (keyword difficulty) and SV (search volume). Enterprise SEO strategy experts need to focus firstly on keywords with higher SV and lower KD to acquire those first 100 keywords and signal to Google that they are entering the niche.
But what after that? You are left with highly competitive keywords and multiple topics. The worst thing you can do is publish at scale without any order or direction.
That is where pillars and clusters can organize your current content and guide your future content production. PandaDoc drove their SEO efforts to 50 mln sessions a year with this strategy.
Essentially, all articles with related or similar topics should be connected with one pillar article (the broadest topic) and other clusters (narrower topics) with internal link-building. This strategy signals to Google that you are an expert on that particular topic, and you’ve covered everything your audience is interested in.
Since companies with bigger budgets usually invest a lot in content production, make sure those efforts are not water down the drain with this simple and effective strategy.
2. Diversify Your Content
Speaking of content, creating pillars and clusters doesn’t get you stuck in a loop, but another strategy that enhances your content marketing efforts is – diversity of content.
After reviewing dozens of enterprise SaaS companies for this article, I saw that all of them invest in more than three channels. Yes, they do content marketing, but they also do YouTube, webinars, LinkedIn collaborations, social media posts, guest posts, etc.
Sometimes, these efforts are under the umbrella of content repurposing – where one piece of content is being shortened and transferred to multiple channels.
While enterprise brands usually invest in covering different topics/angles/niches and targeting diverse audiences with their content.
This strategy boosts your online presence and authority while helping you cast a wider net and explore niches and audiences your competitors might have overlooked.
Pro tip: Only start investing in one channel when you’ve had some success in another. In that way, a portion of your audience will be your fans on both channels.
Discover how to leverage customer testimonials for your marketing strategy by tuning into the Nuoptima SaaS Podcast featuring Sam Shepler from TestimonialHero.
3. Maximize your Link Building Efforts
You’ve probably heard “link building is dead” more times than any other SEO-related sentence. But it is not, and at many SEO conferences and webinars, experts talk about different methods of link building to reach a wider audience and strengthen your online reputation.
Some “organic” ways to acquire backlinks are through digital PR, guest posts, and link-worthy content assets.
Digital SaaS PR services is a term for covering your brand story on websites such as TechCrunch. You can write a press release about a new product, acquisition or success story and pitch to journalists and editors of these websites.
A slightly different approach are guest posts or appearances on noncompetitive SaaS brands, where you can tap into their target audience and share more about a topic that interests them.
Finally, a strategy that doesn’t depend on third parties is creating link-worthy content assets Those are usually statistics, case studies, or guides other blogs and websites will link to. These content assets need to be original, concise, and highly relevant so that others will find the benefit of inserting them into their content efforts.
This strategy helps you bring in organic traffic, boost your online presence and authority and help you reach uncharted territory.
The co-founder of Buffer acquired more than 100,000 customers in 9 months with guest posting, according to his interview[4].
4. Monitor Review Sites and Brand Mentions
A lot of SaaS enterprises don’t appear on review sites and don’t monitor their brand mentions. Today, a great portion of your leads need social proof to convert. Real people reviews on popular sites can help you get leads to your enterprise SaaS website and present you in more search results.
Some popular review sites are:
- G2
- SoftwareReviews
- Capterra
- TrustRadius
Make sure your SaaS enterprise is listed on those and that your satisfied customers leave reviews. You can also use these reviews on your landing pages and blogs as social proof to convert more leads.
In an enterprise company setting, there is usually a person or team in charge of brand mentions. The bigger the company, the more mentions you will have, so monitoring and requesting a backlink can help boost your link-building strategy.
To track mentions on Ahrefs, click on “More”, then “Alert” and finally “Mentions”
>>Looking for a SaaS PPC agency?<<
5. Appear in Local Search (Multilingual Pages)
Enterprise companies usually target a global audience. To appear in Google Search for a global audience you need to optimize the search for each country.
Some multilingual strategies to consider:
- Hreflang tags – help Google serve the correct language in search results
- Country-specific pages – localized content and information
- Local keywords – match the search intent of the local audience
- Metadata – adjust metadata for each target country
- Backlinks – local links to relevant websites
6. Don’t forget Technical SEO
With dozens of pages, resources and links on your SaaS enterprise website, your users might get lost easily. What helps organize your website and guides readers is technical SEO optimization.
Best practices for SEO:
- Have a clear navigation menu based on product categories or user personas.
- Invest in a clear homepage that will be an overview of your software and link to specific product pages for more information.
- Create dedicated product pages with demos, social proof, and an overview of features.
- Craft your resources section so it is relevant for all buyer personas.
- Offer an easy-to-use support section with FAQs and customer support to clear any user doubts.
7. Acquire blogs/tools in your industry
A “hidden gem” when it comes to strategies is definitely acquiring blogs and tools that have good metrics. As enterprises have bigger budgets and want effective results, this will most likely be one of the fastest strategies to reach KPIs.
Acquiring companies can occur due to numerous reasons, but apart from buying out your competition you can invest in an acquisition of companies in a similar niche or with a relevant target audience.
These companies should have a solid online presence with good metrics in order for your enterprise to cash in their marketing efforts.
It might seem like a “dirty trick,” but a lot of well-known companies have started to do it. For example, Notion acquired Skiff.
Another big player in the game (Semrush) acquired Backlinko[5].
How to Measure Enterprise SEO Efforts?
As enterprises invest a lot of resources in their SEO efforts, the metrics and KPIs should be SMART.
Here are the key metrics that should be included in your monthly progress reports and yearly performance analysis.
- SaaS ROI: Calculate the return on investment by comparing the costs of your SEO efforts to the revenue generated from them.
- Page metrics: Compare metrics such as bounce rate, conversion rate, and CTR to find the best and worst-performing content pieces
- Blog metrics: Analyze the organic search traffic, search engine rankings and DR to measure the effectiveness of your blog
- SEO impact on business goals: Look into how these efforts contribute to lead generation, customer acquisition and retention.
- Site health: Monitor crawl errors, site speed, and mobile-friendliness to optimize the user experience
5 Successful Enterprise SaaS SEO Examples
In this section, we will dive into details and create mini case studies of successful Enterprise SaaS companies and their SEO strategies.
1. Salesforce
SalesForce has a great example of how implementing the content diversification strategy in practice looks like. On their website, you can find reports, guided tours, events, webinars, and workshops, all of which bring more than four million monthly visitors.
SalesForce has also invested in press releases that boost their online reputation and strengthen authority – their DR is 92.
One last thing to note from SalesForce is their smooth website navigation. On every page, you have a sticky header that guides readers toward relevant information.
2. Zendesk
Zendesk has a perfectly designed site map, even though they have numerous web pages. They’ve divided it into three main sections so readers can easily find what they are looking for.
The fast loading time and smooth transitions add to the user experience and make Zendesk one of the top competitors in terms of best UI/UX design.
Another move from the enterprise SaaS SEO strategy playbook is dividing the webpages by product solution and by role. Zendesk’s marketers know that they are targeting multiple niches and personas within one company, so they made it super easy for each individual to get a personalized experience.
3. Dropbox sign (ex HelloSign)
DropBox now has more than 68.2K monthly visitors, and how did they get there?
A great strategy we mentioned before is acquisition. In 2019, Dropbox officially acquired HelloSign and brought it 80,000 worldwide customers and traffic.
However, Dropbox didn’t stop there when it came to leveraging other SaaS’s audience. By integrating Dropbox with numerous popular tools, like Slack, Salesforce, and HubSpot, they tapped into the audiences that are very much warm leads for them.
4. Mailchimp
Mailchimp has been around forever, so it is not unusual that they have more than five million monthly website visitors. However, they are pretty innovative when it comes to SEO approaches and tactics.
The first thing you can notice are there content pillars and clusters. You can see how they divided their blog and resources by topics and interlinked all the articles under the same topic.
This strategy is useful for both user experience and easier navigation, and it signals to Google that they covered the topics thoroughly.
One thing that is very important for enterprise companies is addressing different levels of businesses and roles. For example, Mailchip is divided into “business stages”, therefore they easily filter their different target audience and lead them to resources and products most relevant for them, ultimately increasing sign-ups.
As we mentioned before, Mailchips is rolling out innovative strategies with short films and podcasts. The video industry is getting bigger and bigger, so Mailchimp is catching the wave when it comes to content diversification.
5. Semrush
With a striking 17 million monthly visitors, Semrush has definitely won the game. Here are some of the strategies that contributed to their SEO growth.
1. First of all, we need to have a free tool that everyone will link to and mention.
2. Then, having original research and case studies that bring in backlinks and brand mentions.
3. Finally, the acquisition strategy they’ve used for Backlinko in 2022, has already paid off
Conclusion
In this article, we outlined everything you need to know if you are in charge of your enterprises SEO efforts. If you don’t know where to start, you can first analyze your current SaaS inbound marketing strategy and try to maximize your efforts in terms of content distribution, repurposing and diversification.
Make sure you are addressing different personas, niches and target audiences with your website.
If you need a helping hand on they way, NUOPTIMA has optimized dozens of SaaS websites and maximized their SEO efforts.
Book a free call with our team, and start increasing conversions today!
FAQ
Keyword research is crucial for enterprise SaaS SEO because it sets the foundation for a proper content marketing strategy. Start targeting keywords with lower KD and higher KV, but make sure the search intent is relevant.
Yes, enterprise SaaS SEO is necessary if you want to compete in a highly competitive industry and niche. All enterprises invest a lot in their SEO efforts so that they appear in the first positions of the search results and get traffic.
References
- https://frontpagedata.com/projects/backlinko/user-research/final[1]
- https://gocardless.com/blog/one-word-abtest/[2]
- https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-algorithm-history/?ver=2024[3]
- https://www.searchenginewatch.com/2012/07/26/how-guest-posting-propelled-one-site-from-0-to-100000-customers/[4]
- https://investors.semrush.com/news/news-details/2022/Semrush-Acquires-Backlinko.com-Adds-500K-in-Monthly-Traffic/default.aspx[5]
