75% of users never scroll past the first page of search results. [1] But what role does SaaS technical SEO play there?
Are only well-optimized websites ranking with a 100 score on PageSpeed?
The truth is that not all websites that rank on the first page implement technical SEO best practices. However, not all websites are in competitive industries such as SaaS. So, if you want to outrank your competitors, you need to be above average in all SEO fields—technical, content, on-page, and link-building.
Technical SEO for SaaS is exactly what most of your competitors hardly understand—they hire content writers and SEO specialists, but technical SEO experts rarely make the team. That’s why we will teach you how to dominate the SERPs with a high-performing website by including technical SEO in your SaaS marketing plan.
SaaS Technical SEO Checklist
| Crawlability & Indexability | Use tools like Google Search Console to check for crawl errors.Create and submit an XML sitemap to search engines. |
| URL Structure | Use clear, descriptive URLs that include keywords.Avoid long and complex URLs with unnecessary parameters. |
| Site Speed | Use tools like Google PageSpeed Insights to identify and fix speed issues.Optimize images and use modern formats like WebP. |
| Mobile Optimization | Use responsive design to ensure your site works well on all devices.Test mobile usability with Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test. |
| Structured Data Markup | Implement structured data to enhance search results with rich snippets.Validate your structured data with Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool.[2] |
| HTML Tags | Use unique and descriptive title tags and meta descriptions for each page.Use proper heading tags (H1, H2, H3) to structure your content. |
| XML Sitemap | Ensure your sitemap is up-to-date and includes all important pages. |
If you’re not quite sure what all these things in the SaaS technical SEO checklist mean, don’t worry; we’ve got you covered with an in-depth guide on all these, with examples and tools you need to get your website ranking higher.
How to Structure a Website to Improve Technical SEO for SaaS?
The structure is the one thing you want to get right immediately because if you don’t, things will get really messy down the road. Of course, you can fix everything with more or less effort in technical SEO. But we’ll teach you how to structure your website from the homepage to blogs and specific landing pages to avoid any headaches.
Homepage
Your homepage must convey your value proposition and the main keyword you want to rank for immediately and above the fold (what users see before they scroll). It’s best to use the H1 tag for the main keyword and paragraph text for the value proposition. Of course, you want visitors to do something, so you also need to include a CTA for free trial, pricing, or demo pages.
Your homepage should also include concise headings that capture the essence of what your software offers and its benefits. The navigation menu has to be intuitive and provide easy access to key sections. For brands that have great results with SaaS inbound marketing, those are usually:
- Features
- Pricing
- Use Cases
- Blog
- Contact
Pro tip: To boost your technical SEO, make sure that your homepage links to important pages, such as product features, testimonials, and case studies, to guide users deeper into your site.
Feature Pages
Most mature SaaS products have hundreds of features. Do you need an individual page for each? No, but you need to dedicate individual pages to each main feature of your SaaS product.
The most important thing about feature pages is to use keyword-rich headings and detailed descriptions to explain the benefits of each feature.
Descriptive URLs, such as /features/feature-name, help search engines understand the content of these pages. When it comes to content, you need visual content, including screenshots, videos, and diagrams, optimized with alt text and proper file names to boost SEO.
Pro tip: Read a complete guide to B2B SaaS marketing to learn how to attract and convert customers who land on your feature pages.
Examples
For example, widely popular sales software, Pipedrive, has landing page that targets the “sales automation system” keyword and they rank in the 4th position according to Ahrefs.
They probably used tools like Ahrefs to do keyword research, see keyword difficulty, variations and traffic potential to determine whether this keyword is worth pursuing.
Blog
A well-organized blog and resources section is essential for both user engagement and SEO. Structure your blog with categories that cover topics relevant to your audience, such as tutorials, industry news, and product updates.
Additionally, you can also divide resources into categories based on use cases and industries. It all depends on your product and your buyer personas, so use that knowledge to determine which path to take when it comes to technical SEO.
Pro tip: Use a subdirectory (e.g., /blog) rather than a subdomain to host your blog. Subdirectory will tell search engines where the content belongs in terms of hierarchy and help you track the performance more accurately.
HTML Tags and Their Importance for SaaS Technical SEO
Google Bot reads code, not content. Properly utilizing HTML tags can significantly enhance your site’s visibility and search rankings—Google uses them as guidance to determine what your page is all about.
Title Tags
Title Tags are one of the most important on-page SEO elements. Each page on your website should have a unique, descriptive title tag that includes relevant keywords. This tag appears as the clickable headline in search engine results and should accurately reflect the page’s content.
For instance, if you have a features page about your product’s security, a good title tag might be “Advanced Security Features | [Your SaaS Product Name].”
Meta Description
Meta Descriptions provide a brief summary of a page’s content and appear below the title tag in search results. While not a direct ranking factor, a well-crafted meta description can improve click-through rates. Each meta description should be unique, concise (around 150-160 characters), and include target keywords.
For example, “Discover the advanced security features of [Your SaaS Product Name] that protect your data and ensure compliance.”
In the image below, we can see the Title Tag and Meta Description that Google shows people when they are searching for B2B SaaS SEO services.
Heading Tags
Heading Tags (H1, H2, H3, etc.) structure your content and help search engines understand the hierarchy and importance of the information on your page. You have to use H1 tag for the main title of the page and include the primary keyword. Use subsequent headings (H2, H3, etc.) for subheadings and organize them logically.
For example, an H1 tag might be “SaaS Security Features,” followed by H2 tags like “Data Encryption” and “Compliance Management.”
Canonical Tags
Canonical Tags help prevent duplicate content issues by specifying the preferred version of a webpage when multiple versions exist. This tag informs search engines which version of the page to index.
For example, if you have similar content on multiple URLs, use a canonical tag to indicate the primary page, such as:
<link rel=”canonical” href=”https://www.yourwebsite.com/features/security”>.
Open Graph Tags
Open Graph Tags and Twitter Cards are essential for optimizing your content for social media sharing. These tags control how your content appears when shared on platforms like Facebook and Twitter. To improve social media engagement, ensure you use these tags to define the title, description, and image for your pages.
This is what the open graph tag looks like for the SaaS lead generation agency, Nuoptima.
Structured Data and How to Implement it to Boost SaaS Technical SEO
Structured data is definitely a SaaS technical SEO opportunity you should capitalize on, as not many competitors do it right. As we already said, search engine crawlers understand code. By implementing structured data, you will help search engines understand your content better and display rich snippets, which can attract more clicks and drive more traffic to your site.
What is Structured Data?
Structured data is a standardized format for providing information about a page and classifying its content. It uses a specific vocabulary, such as schema.org, to help search engines interpret the content of your website. For SaaS websites, you can use structured data to highlight features, pricing, reviews, and other relevant details.
Which Type of Structured Data Does a SaaS Website Need?
| SoftwareApplication Schema | This schema type is specifically designed for software applications, making it highly relevant for SaaS websites. It allows you to mark up details like the name of your software, description, operating system, application category, offers (pricing), and reviews. For example, you can use this schema to provide detailed information about your SaaS product’s features and pricing plans. |
| Organization Schema | Use this schema to provide information about your company, including its name, logo, contact information, and social media profiles. |
| Article Schema | This schema provides search engines with key information about your article, enhancing its visibility and potentially leading to rich snippets in search results. |
| FAQ Schema | If you have a FAQ section, using FAQ schema can help these questions and answers appear directly in search results. |
| Review Schema | If your site has customer reviews or testimonials, implementing a review schema can enhance their visibility. This can lead to rich snippets displaying star ratings and review counts in search results, significantly boosting click-through rates. |
How to Implement Structured Data: Step-by-Step
- Create your structured data markup using tools like Google’s Structured Data Markup Helper or JSON-LD generators[3]. These tools simplify the process by allowing you to fill in the necessary details and automatically generate the corresponding code.
- Insert the generated structured data code into the HTML of the relevant pages. JSON-LD (JavaScript Object Notation for Linked Data) is the recommended format by Google due to its simplicity and flexibility.
- Place the JSON-LD script within your HTML’s <head> or <body> section.
- Use Google’s Rich Results Test and Structured Data Testing Tool to make sure you’ve implemented structured data without errors. These tools will highlight any issues that you need to address.
- After implementing structured data, monitor your pages’ performance in search results using Google Search Console. Look for improvements in click-through rates and visibility for pages with rich snippets.
How to Optimize Images to Boost Technical SEO for SaaS?
We can’t wrap up the story of technical SaaS SEO without mentioning how to optimize your images. They can literally make or break your website and, in the long run, create a series of problems that will cause you headaches.
Image Formats
While JPEG and PNG have been standard formats for years, WebP is currently the best solution for SaaS technical SEO. This format offers superior compression and quality compared to JPEG and PNG, reducing file sizes by up to 30% without compromising image clarity.
In terms of results, you’ll have faster loading times, reduced bandwidth usage, and provide users with a smooth browsing experience. There are tools that automatically convert other formats into WebP, and for WordPress website, we strongly recommend WebP Express.
P.S. After implementing the correct image formats, every image on your website shouldn’t exceed 100kb. If you convert images to WebP and it still has more than that, you need to resize them in tools like Figma and Photoshop and upload them again.
Responsive Images
Your images need to look good on all devices, and you can achieve this by using the “srcset” attribute in your HTML to serve different image sizes based on the user’s device.
Alt Text
Alt text describes the content of the image you publish, and it’s important for both accessibility and technical SEO. To boost your rankings, your images have to be relevant to the page’s topic and have descriptive, keyword-rich alt text.
For example, instead of simply writing “[Software Name] Dashboard,” use more descriptive alt text like “Secure dashboard feature of SaaS product showing real-time analytics.”
Descriptive File Names
Many people forget this, but you have to rename images with descriptive and keyword-rich file names before uploading images. Instead of generic names like “IMG_001.jpg,” use names like “saas-product-dashboard.jpg.” This practice helps search engines understand the content of the images and improves your SEO.
PageSpeed
Slow-loading pages can frustrate users and lead to higher bounce rates, while search engines, especially Google, use page speed as a ranking factor.
Content Delivery Networks (CDN)
A CDN distributes your website’s static content across multiple servers worldwide. This ensures that users access your site from a server geographically closer to them, reducing latency and improving load times. Popular CDN providers include Cloudflare, Akamai, and Amazon CloudFront.
Browser Caching
Browser caching stores static files on users’ devices, so they don’t need to be reloaded whenever the user visits your site. Configure your server to set expiration dates for static resources like images, CSS, and JavaScript files. This reduces the need for repeated downloads and speeds up page loading.
Redirects
Each redirect increases the time it takes for a page to load. Minimize the number of redirects on your site by eliminating unnecessary and ensuring direct links to your pages. When redirects are necessary, ensure they are implemented efficiently.
Pro tip: You can delete older redirects after a couple of months and once the old URL stops getting clicks, you can check this in Google Search Console.
Impact of Third-Party Scripts
Third-party scripts, such as those for analytics, ads, and social media integrations, significantly slow down your site. The first thing you need to ask yourself is “Does this script help me achieve specific business objectives?” If the answer is no, get rid of it. If the answer is yes, you can set up a delayed trigger in your Google Tag Manager and it will improve your loading speed.
Sitemaps
XML Sitemaps are the best for communicating with search engines. An XML sitemap lists all the URLs on your website and provides metadata about each URL, such as when it was last updated and how often it changes.
Your developer can manually create an XML sitemap and upload it to your Google Search Console.
However, a better and quicker option is to use tools like the Yoast SEO plugin, which automatically generates an XML sitemap. You can always access your sitemap by typing www.YourWebsiteUrl.com/sitemap.xml into the URL bar in your browser.
SaaS Technical SEO Tools
If you want to gain a competitive edge, you need to stay up to date with what’s happening at all times. The best B2B SaaS conferences will help you understand what’s happening in the market, but SaaS technical SEO tools will help you know what’s happening with your website in real-time.
Google Search Console
Google Search Console provides insights into how Google views your site and helps you identify issues that need attention.
- Track your site’s search traffic and performance metrics.
- Identify and fix indexing issues.
- Submit and manage your XML sitemaps.
- Identify mobile usability issues.
- Check individual URLs for errors and indexing status.
Screaming Frog SEO Spider
Screaming Frog is a powerful tool that simulates crawling and helps you perform in-depth technical SEO audits. It analyzes your website’s structure and identifies issues that could impact SEO.
- Crawl up to 500 URLs for free (unlimited in the paid version).
- Identify broken links, duplicate content, and other issues.
- Extract data from the HTML of web pages.
- Integrate with Google Analytics, Search Console, and PageSpeed Insights.
Ahrefs
Ahrefs is a comprehensive SEO toolset that offers site SEO audits for SaaS, among other features. It’s particularly useful for tracking SEO performance.
- Identify technical SEO issues on your site.
- Discover and analyze keywords.
- Monitor your search rankings over time.
You can also schedule site audits weekly and fix any issues that emerge before they influence your performance.
Finding all these issues manually is almost impossible, particularly when you have a large website and hundreds and thousands of URLs. Ahrefs lists the problems and helps you prioritize those with the highest impact on performance.
PageSpeed Insights
Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool analyzes the performance of your web pages and provides suggestions for improvement. It evaluates both mobile and desktop versions of your site.
- Identify opportunities to improve page speed.
- Analyze real-world user experience data.
- Get a performance score out of 100.
Yoast SEO
Yoast SEO is a popular WordPress plugin that helps you optimize your website for search engines. It provides on-page optimization features and technical SaaS SEO tools.
- Content Analysis
- XML Sitemaps
- Schema Markup
For expert advice on optimizing SaaS operations, check out the Nuoptima SaaS Podcast featuring Rob Smith from Slick.
Conclusion
Since you probably already have a website, your priority for SaaS technical SEO should be first to fix the issues you already have on your website. The best way to do it is to perform SEO audit based on the topics we’ve covered here.
When doing your audit for SaaS SEO, make sure to cover all of these aspects:
| Is my website’s structure as good as it can be? Does it communicate well with users and search engines when they visit it? If the answer is no, create and implement a structure that will do a better job and make sure to properly redirect everything to avoid further technical issues.Using tools like Screaming Frog, Google Search Console, and PageSpeed Insights, ask yourself whether you can fix some of the issues quickly and improve your performance in a short time frame. These issues can be improper tags, illogical heading structure and too long or too short title tags and meta descriptions. Find structured data that Google supports and ask yourself whether implementing these throughout your pages and posts can boost user experience alongside your performance.If you find all these tasks overwhelming and want to outperform your competitors, consider SaaS technical SEO services. |
The best course of action to speed up your website and revenue generation is hiring a SaaS SEO agency that maximizes your ROI. We say this because the SaaS industry is so competitive, and let’s face it – you don’t have the time to find and hire senior technical SEO and onboard them. The technical issues will continue to pile up and tank your rankings. When that happens, it’s too late to act.
Our SaaS technical SEO services are just part of the equation – we focus on every aspect of your marketing to speed up your growth on all fronts. Book a call with our SaaS experts and let’s create a strategy that will give you the best possible results in the shortest time frame, like we did for our client Zelt. They had a 300% organic traffic increase in only 1 month, meaning we can get you similar or even better results when you decide to work with us.
FAQ
SaaS SEO is the process of optimizing a SaaS company’s website to increase organic traffic, improve search engine rankings, and attract potential customers.
Technical SEO involves optimizing the technical aspects of a website to ensure it can be crawled and indexed effectively by search engines, improving its visibility and ranking.
Technical SEO focuses on the backend aspects of a website, such as site speed and structure, while SEO encompasses all practices, including content creation and link building, to improve search engine rankings.
Onsite SEO refers to optimizing elements on your website, like content and meta tags, while technical SEO involves optimizing the infrastructure and performance of the site to enhance crawlability and indexability.