A solid SEO strategy is vital for any business looking to outrun competitors, yet a highly successful enterprise SaaS SEO plan seems hard to come by.
Organic searches are the dominant source of trackable web traffic and the largest digital channel, with SEO driving 1,000%+ more traffic than social media platforms. For B2B companies, organic search queries generate double the revenue of any other channel, leaving SaaS enterprises with a lot of opportunities for scalable growth.
With skyrocketing competition (SaaS solutions will make up 85% of all business software by 2025), SaaS companies in particular can’t afford to forgo an investment in SEO if they want to survive.
Here, we cover the key differentiators between enterprise SaaS SEO and normal SEO, best practices, and essential tools you need to own your digital space.
What is Enterprise SaaS SEO?
Enterprise SaaS SEO involves optimizing your website to match the relevant keywords and content your audience is searching for. When done well, enterprise SaaS SEO services boost your ranking on search engine results pages (SERP) for search engines like Google and Bing.
While it shares the same goal as traditional search engine optimization, which is to increase your brand’s visibility in online search results, enterprise SaaS SEO requires attention to the unique challenges that come with enterprise marketing, including:
- Internal process bottlenecks
- Complex or slow review processes
- Larger audiences
- Vastly more content assets
- Getting the buy-in or budget to prioritize SEO
SaaS SEO also comes with its own set of challenges, which include:
- Fierce competition
- A more specific audience
- A longer sales cycle
- Keyword cannibalization
- Receiving minimal visibility from non-branded searches
Because of these niche difficulties, SaaS enterprises need to adopt SEO best practices that account for these unique search traits to improve visibility.
Enterprise SaaS SEO vs. Normal SEO: Key Differences
The two biggest differences between enterprise SaaS SEO and normal SEO are organizational red tape preventing throughput and a higher weight of risk in decision making (startups have less to lose than established brands).
Organizational red tape
When it comes to enterprise content marketing, organizations often have trouble getting out of their own way. They may have standardization processes in place that stall their efficiency, or they might struggle with unnecessarily drawn-out revision and feedback procedures that trap their content in a “too many cooks in the kitchen” situation.
This red tape can become a barrier to implementing SEO tactics that will help serve customers better. For example, using a legacy or outdated content technology platform—which is common within many enterprises—might hinder your ability to create responsive web designs or improve mobile optimization. These issues require workarounds when it comes to improving SEO and search engine rankings.
Higher weight of risk
Large corporations are less likely to take risks than smaller companies, as the consequences can be more impactful for well-known brands than for startups. Thus, they often want tried-and-true “safe” enterprise SEO strategies that will allow them to progress without taking major leaps of faith.
This can make it difficult for SaaS enterprises to adapt to changes in the world of search. For example, implementing schema markup (also known as structured data markup) or accelerated mobile pages (AMP) can prove nearly impossible within existing technical structures. This could result in missed opportunities to better engage your target audiences.
8 enterprise SaaS SEO techniques with high leverage
Just because you may be dealing with extra barriers to typical SEO strategies within your SaaS enterprise doesn’t mean your SEO efforts are to no avail. Here’s a roundup of eight SEO techniques we’ve seen prove fruitful in large technology companies.
Barbell content strategy
At Omniscient Digital, we’re big believers in a proprietary framework we like to call the barbell content strategy. This concept, typically applied in financial investing, focuses on limiting risk to increase the likelihood of success while also opening up the potential for an unpredictable yet favorable outcome.
When applied to content marketing, the barbell content strategy centers on having 90% of your content classified as low risk, keyword-driven content while the other 10% is focused on experimental content. This experimental content has a higher risk associated with it but can also lead to much larger payoffs.
We’ve dubbed the low-risk content “product-led content” and the high-risk content as “buzzworthy content.”
Product-led content
Product-led content is produced with a content strategy that keeps your SaaS product top of mind, covering things like:
- Benefits
- Features
- Problems your SaaS product solves
- User pain points
- Case studies
The goal of this “safe” content is to drive signups or product sales.
Buzzworthy content
Buzzworthy content is speculative content that’s designed to spark a discussion. This kind of content is used to drive:
- Backlinks
- Brand attention
- Partnerships
- Social shares
- Word-of-mouth marketing
The barbell content strategy works well for most enterprise SaaS companies because it places the majority of your efforts into safe promotional content while still leaving a sliver of room for larger payoffs. This can make it easier to get your content approved quicker.
Walmart strategy
With more than 6 million blog posts published worldwide each day and the rising content quality bar, it can be a challenge for SaaS companies to stand out. To find SEO success, there are lessons that can be learned from Walmart’s early growth strategy.
Sam Walton, founder of Walmart, decided that instead of focusing on growing across large cities to reach a wider market, he’d target small rural communities that the store’s competitors were ignoring. These small towns had lower barriers to entry in terms of zoning laws and real estate prices and offered a bigger reward.
Essentially, Walmart dominated surrounding communities right outside of its competitors’ big-city domains. Customers then began driving outside of the city to benefit from Walmart’s lower prices and bigger stores.
Big-city vs. small-town keyword strategies
The moral of this story? SaaS enterprises can benefit from chasing after lower-volume keywords with a higher search intent. These “small-town” keywords are often overlooked opportunities for growth.
And while the search volume may be smaller, the search intent is greater. These searchers are more likely to engage with your product.
“Big-city” keywords have far more competition that can be hard to break through, meaning your chance of ranking for them is a lot smaller.
Small-town keywords are often long-tail search terms, which are more specific keyphrases that visitors typically use when they’re ready to buy.
Examples of long-tail keywords with high intent for SaaS enterprises include:
- “Project management software for hybrid teams”
- “SEO software for small businesses”
- “Workforce management systems for manufacturing”
HubSpot strategy
HubSpot’s website garnered nearly 59 million visits in January 2024, more than 18 million of which came from organic searches. How do they do it?
Instead of focusing on a sales funnel and creating content tied to each stage in the user’s journey, HubSpot follows what it calls the flywheel model.
The flywheel model
There’s an expectation by today’s audiences that businesses should care about more than just transactions. In response, HubSpot aligned its entire organization around delivering a remarkable customer experience.
This “flywheel” approach means that the company gains momentum by creating happy customers who then drive referrals and repeat sales to keep the business spinning. While other content strategies see customers as the outcome, HubSpot sees them as the beginning of highly valuable word-of-mouth marketing.
HubSpot does this by creating content that’s helpful to its end users’ pain points, regardless of whether it’s directly relevant to their product. For example, the company has ranked for the long-tail keyword “how to edit a PDF” alongside more brand-driven topics like “creating a 2024 SEO strategy.”
The company produces a ton of content using a hub and spoke content model, which builds authority for more competitive target keywords and topics while also developing a library of information that’s useful to customers.
Content optimization & updates
One straightforward yet overlooked content strategy is to simply create a higher output. This leans into the concept of content economics, which weighs the cost of different content types alongside your site’s authority and the amount of competition to determine the best content strategy.
Creating a large content library on your enterprise SaaS website gives you the opportunity to go after more low-hanging fruit. Producing more content is probably a better lever than building more links.
For example, we helped our AI writing software client Jasper build and scale a content program that resulted in:
- Over $4 million in blog-attributed annual recurring revenue
- An 810% growth in organic blog sessions
- Increased blog-attributed product signups by 400%
Developing a full-funnel content production process driven by content-gap analyses, competitive analyses, and keyword discovery can unlock new, relevant ranking opportunities.
Passive link assets
Passive link building involves building backlinks to your website without any active marketing efforts on your part. This is most successfully achieved when you create content that will rank and attract more organic traffic.
Passive assets tend to be a strong and sustainable form of link building that are also a nod to your content’s quality.
Examples of “buzzworthy” content formats that typically do well in passive link building include:
- Original research or statistics
- Long-form guides or tutorials
- Lists and roundups
- Shareable videos
- Attention-worthy infographics
Basically, any content across your digital marketing channels can become a passive link asset. It’s the topic and its “buzzworthiness” to your target audience that matters.
Design & UX
Enterprise websites are often more cumbersome than those of smaller businesses due to the quantity of web pages and information involved. This can quickly become overwhelming—especially when it comes to technical information relating to SaaS products.
Implementing a user-friendly web design can improve your enterprise SaaS SEO by making your website easier to navigate, which leads to:
- Longer session durations
- Lower bounce rates
- Higher click-through rates
All of these factors are considered when search engines determine rankings.
Technical SEO
Speaking of user experience: If your website doesn’t work properly, it’s not doing you any SEO favors.
Nothing drives people away from your website like broken links and error pages. You can improve your SEO simply by staying on top of basic technical SEO fixes and website architecture factors like:
- 404 and redirect errors
- Confusing site maps
- Internal links
- How easy it is for search engines to crawl (or read) your SaaS website
- URL and page title optimization
- Optimizing for mobile devices
Surround sound SEO
While I was working on user acquisition growth at HubSpot, we developed a concept known as surround sound SEO. Instead of focusing on ranking higher than the rest on a few pages, this type of SEO strategy centers on achieving favorable mentions on all pages to create a mere-exposure effect.
When a customer is conducting an exploratory search, such as “best SaaS products for small businesses,” they’re more likely to look into a recommendation that keeps popping up than a solution that is recommended once.
Surround sound SEO intertwines SEO, content marketing, brand marketing, digital PR, and more to create a “surround sound” of brand awareness.
Enterprise SaaS SEO tools
There are a number of existing SEO and keyword research tools that make it easier for large SaaS enterprises to track and manage thousands of pages and keywords. Here are a few we recommend:
- Botify
- BrightEdge
- Screaming Frog
- Ahrefs
Botify
Best for: Maximizing online discoverability
Botify is an enterprise SEO strategy and SaaS marketing automation tool that helps you identify factors that are keeping your products and services from being found. Some of its core capabilities include:
- Visibility maximization: Ensure your most valuable content is discoverable and served directly to search engines.
- Data centralization: Create a holistic SaaS search strategy with first-party, competitive, and paid search data all in one place.
- Traffic loss prevention: Proactively identify risks and opportunities to protect your traffic.
BrightEdge
Best for: Real-time SEO data
BrightEdge is the industry’s only SEO solution to provide marketers with real-time research, recommendations, and SEO rankings. Its real-time content optimization and keyword research tool, BrightEdge Instant, gives you access to:
- On-demand search data: See what customers are searching for in real time
- Trending topic research: Curate the hottest, most relevant content topics trending now
- Keyword performance: Understand how your content is performing across all global markets and search engines
- Real-time search insights: Check your rankings live at scale so you can respond to change as it happens
Screaming Frog
Best for: Auditing for common SEO issues
Screaming Frog is a website crawler that can quickly crawl large websites to help you make informed SEO campaign decisions. Its SEO spider tool helps you uncover common technical SEO issues, including:
- Broken links: Instantly find broken links across your website and download the errors and source URLs in bulk to fix them
- Page titles and meta descriptions: Identify whether a title or meta description is too long, missing, or duplicated across your site
- Duplicate content: Uncover duplicate URLs, descriptions, or headings
- Redirects: Find temporary and permanent redirect chains or loops
Ahrefs
Best for: Analyzing competitor websites
Ahrefs is an all-in-one SEO toolset that lets you analyze your competitors, audit your website, discover content opportunities, and more. This tool is great for gaining insight into the following information about competitor sites:
- Keyword rankings: Find out what keywords they’re ranking for
- SEO performance: Get in-depth information about their organic search traffic
- Website structure: Discover how many pages they have and their internal linking structure
- Paid traffic: See whether they’re using paid advertising and where they funnel paid traffic
More insights for enterprise SaaS company leaders
Omniscient Digital is an enterprise SaaS SEO agency serving B2B tech clients. We share content and SEO growth insights from our work with clients and growth leaders at some of the biggest companies in SaaS today through our newsletter.
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