The Complete Guide to Enterprise SaaS SEO

If you dig deep enough, you can find stories of SaaS companies that disclose how the right SEO strategy has been the key to their success. In fact, 61% of marketers believe that SEO is the key to online success. 

Though the fundamentals of SEO are the same for all businesses, enterprise SaaS SEO requires a more tactical and planned approach than conventional SEO. 

So, if you are a SaaS enterprise trying to drive organic traffic and conversions, get started with your enterprise SEO strategy. As per research, 

• SEO drives 1000%+ more traffic than organic social media.
• SEO leads have a 14.6% close rate.

This comprehensive SaaS enterprise SEO guide explains everything you must know about enterprise SaaS SEO. 

So, without any delay, start reading!

What is Enterprise SaaS SEO?

Enterprise SaaS SEO is a practice that involves comprehensive SEO strategies for SaaS companies owning large websites and a wide range of products and services. 

Enterprise SEO for SaaS companies is all about managing the brand’s online presence and visibility. It helps SaaS websites to rank higher in the SERPs. There are several elements to enterprise SaaS SEO – technical SEO, on-page and off-page SEO, content scaling, and more. 

Benefits of Enterprise SaaS SEO 

Enterprise SaaS SEO offers several benefits besides helping enterprise websites to rank higher in the search results. Here are a few of them. 

1. Improves brand reputation and credibility

Google processes more than 8.5 billion searches a day, and among these, branded searches are common. People search for brands at every stage of their customer journey, and these search results include

• Social media pages, websites, and other company-controlled microsites; and
• Wikipedia, news articles, third-party review sites, and other pages that companies have no control over.

Such mixed search results influence the brand image, and there’s nothing a brand can do about it except changing the brand’s online story. 

SaaS enterprise SEO uses the following strategies to positively affect a brand’s online reputation and boost its credibility. 

• Publish quality content to indicate to Google that the brand is a trusted industry expert and authoritative source. 
• Generate as many positive reviews as possible.
• Respond to negative reviews and address customer support issues as quickly as possible.

2. Reaches customers at different stages of the buyer’s journey

Enterprise SaaS SEO strategies are a combination of quality content, on-page and off-page SEO optimization, and targeted strategic outreach. 

The strategies ensure that a brand reaches its target audience at every stage of the buyer’s journey - awareness, consideration, and purchase decision with the help of quality SaaS content. This boosts brand awareness and positions the brand as a credible resource for potential customers.  

Here’s how the process goes:

• The marketing team gathers data on products and the most interested prospects.
• The SaaS enterprise SEO team utilizes the data to identify and target the ideal keywords.
• The content marketing team generates different content like blogs, eBooks, web copies, email campaigns, whitepapers, and landing pages based on the targeted keywords. 
• The content is, then, promoted across different channels to reach the targeted audience.

3. Improves lead quality and quantity

According to statistics, 68% of B2B businesses use strategic landing pages to generate quality leads, and 59% of B2B marketers think that SEO has the greatest impact on lead generation

SaaS Enterprise SEO strategies involve creating website pages that collect more leads. These pages generate more organic traffic and quality leads because;

• The pages appear in the SERP, and
• They target highly transactional keywords that make prospects more likely to provide their contact information. 

As a result, you can collect more leads than expected and ultimately bring in more customers. 

Does SEO Matter for Enterprise SaaS Companies?

Traditional SEO and enterprise SEO are not quite the same. SaaS enterprise SEO has many hassles that smaller firms do not face. 

Take, for example, content publishing. If you want to publish a piece of content on a SaaS enterprise website, you’ll need several teams to run it – product, content, marketing, legal, and compliance. 

The point here is that traditional SEO principles do not work well for SaaS enterprises, so, enterprise SaaS SEO is important. 

Here are a few reasons traditional SEO doesn’t work for enterprise SaaS companies. 

1. Traditional solutions do not work

Though the basics of SEO remain the same for SaaS enterprises, the processes are certainly different. The enterprise issues are complex, making general fixes quite tough to execute.

For instance, to replace legacy content with new pages in an enterprise website, you must consider how the change will impact domain authority and internal linking. In short, you’ll have to consider several technical issues, links, and pages. 

You will need IT, marketing, and product team resources to execute the change seamlessly. 

Not only that, the process will be time-consuming as you will need to explain the resources utilization, get sign-offs from multiple stakeholders, go through approval, and then make the changes.

2. Cut-throat competition

SaaS enterprises face strong competition from other companies that employ SEO techniques. Hence, they need enterprise SEO strategies that align with the complexity and scale of their websites. Further, many more layers of complicated processes and stakeholders must consider.

Successful enterprise SaaS SEO strategies improve the brand image, reputation, and credibility. It helps big SaaS brands to edge out the prevailing competition in a specific category and stand out. However, if enterprise SEO campaigns go wrong, they directly impact a brand’s online image and the bottom line revenue of the company as well. 

3. Cross-functional collaboration is critical

Enterprise SaaS SEO requires seamless cross-functional integration with different teams to ensure success. Stakeholders from different departments – from production and purchase to marketing and PR may be involved in finalizing the ideas, resources, and content. 

Overall, the hierarchy within the enterprise must be managed for successful SaaS enterprise SEO. Hence, a collaborative approach must be followed. 

How is Enterprise SaaS SEO Different Than “Normal” SEO? 

Traditional SEO works best for SMBs. It can offer incremental value. But enterprise SEO can make big SaaS brands lead the organic search for a specific category or industry. 

Here are a few differences between the two. 

• Enterprise SaaS SEO requires more time, planning, and patience than traditional SEO. 
• Enterprise SaaS SEO is for large-scale SaaS companies as everything – from link-building and content generation to product listings on enterprise websites - must be done on a large scale. Whereas traditional SEO is ideal for SMBs.
• SEO tools and automation platforms are a must for enterprise SaaS SEO, as manually managing thousands of web pages is not feasible. However, traditional SEO does not require as many tools as enterprise SEO. 
• Enterprise SaaS SEO, unlike traditional SEO, involves managing different websites and subdomains of a company. Hence, it requires a holistic approach. 

Challenges of Enterprise SaaS SEO

By now, we hope you have understood that SaaS enterprise SEO is an elaborate and complex process. Here, we have listed the top challenges of enterprise SEO. 

1. Technical challenges

Ask any enterprise SEO agency about the challenges of enterprise SaaS SEO; technical challenges will top the list. 

Even though you generate the best content, build link authority, and boost brand awareness and recognition, enterprise SaaS SEO will not produce desired results without technical SEO. You must consider aspects like generating canonical tags, redirecting chains, website structuring, generating robots.txt, and much more. 

Due to the complexity involved in technical SEO, companies often make the common enterprise SEO mistakes like not removing old URLs when restructuring a website, overlooking title and meta tags optimization, etc. 

But to show up higher in the SERPs, you must ensure that technical SEO is considered a priority. For SaaS enterprise SEO to work effectively for your company, you must overcome these technical challenges.

2. Making SEO a priority

Several SaaS companies know the benefits of SEO but they do not understand it enough to make it a priority for the business. As a result, there is a lack of support and understanding of SEO.

It is significant for businesses to make SaaS enterprise SEO a priority. It is through the various elements of enterprise SaaS SEO, like technical SO, on-page and off-page optimization, enterprise SEO audit, content marketing, and more, that brands can achieve sustainable success in the industry. 

If the business plans to focus on location to target its audience, it can invest in generating content specifically for local customers. And the wisest choice here would be making efforts toward local SEO strategies. 

To overcome this challenge, organizations must align different internal teams. By focusing on getting to know stakeholders and teams and transparent communication, the SEO team can become a part of the organizational priorities. 

Now, we come to our next SEO challenge, securing buy-in time.

3. Securing buy-in within a timeframe

One of the biggest struggles that enterprise SEO firms or SEO teams face is getting buy-in from key stakeholders to get the SEO work done. 

Most of the process's delays result from not considering SEO a priority. A lack of understanding of SEO often makes companies view it as a not-so-worthy investment. Moreover, stakeholders consider SEO the last thing that needs to be done. Consequently, SEO professionals are bound to demonstrate everything to get buy-in from stakeholders, which is time-consuming. 

To overcome this challenge, SEO teams must identify gaps and opportunities on the enterprise website and tweak them to improve SEO. Once they see the hike in organic traffic and revenue, it must be reported to the stakeholders. 

Establishing SaaS enterprise SEO as a significant method to improve sales and bottom-line ROI is the best way to obtain buy-in from all organizational stakeholders within the stipulated time.

4. Monitoring the effectiveness of SaaS enterprise SEO strategies

Most SEO agencies report higher rankings in the SERPs to demonstrate the effectiveness of SEO to company stakeholders. But the biggest struggle within enterprises is reporting. Most large businesses expect SEO to directly impact the revenue as everything boils down to how the organization makes by investing in SEO.

Tracking keywords to revenue or calculating revenue generated by web pages based on formula can be complex. Hence, the best way to track SEO’s effectiveness is to understand what is a priority for the business.

Many SaaS companies target to increase free signups and may have a specific revenue associated with them. Similarly, some businesses may calculate revenue per user or consider opened emails, clicking CTAs, etc. 

Hence, enterprise SaaS SEO teams need to understand what matters to the business and then use those key metrics to track the effectiveness of SEO campaigns.

Enterprise SaaS SEO Strategy 

Before getting into details, let’s understand what enterprise SaaS SEO strategy is about.

An enterprise SaaS SEO strategy is about positioning your SaaS product as a solution to your target market’s problems. 

The strategy involves identifying the right kind of people and directing them to your enterprise website as the solution to their challenge.   

Now, let’s get into the nitty-gritty of an enterprise SaaS SEO strategy. Here’s your complete guide to developing an enterprise SEO strategy. 

1. Keyword Research

Research is the primary aspect of SaaS enterprise SEO. 

Before you start your keyword research, define your buyer personas. Then, find the keywords your target buyer personas use in their search queries.  

Create buyer personas

A buyer persona represents your ideal customer – the type of customer who will benefit the most from your product. 

Source

Building buyer personas is time-consuming. It requires data from customer surveys, interviews, internal team discussions, and SaaS enterprise SEO analytics. 

There are three main aspects of the customer personas for SaaS.

• Pain points – What challenges or blockers are the customer-facing? What is preventing them from accomplishing their goal? Does their current tool lack features? Are there other alternatives? Are the other alternatives time-consuming?
• Goal – What is the customer trying to solve? How will your SaaS product help customers to meet their needs?
• Demographics – Age, Job title, market segment, gender, the organization they work in, etc.

Besides gathering the above-mentioned data for building your buyer persona, there are a few more questions you need to consider.

• Which content type works best for your ideal audience?
• How does your ideal customer explore the website? Is their experience overwhelming?
• Does your ideal customer face confusion when exploring your website pages due to unclear CTAs or navigation issues?

Further, when conducting an internal team discussion, get answers to the following questions:

• What are the prospects’ questions to the sales teams?
• Which channels do prospects prefer the most – call, email, web form, or live chat?
• Did prospects refer to any specific content when talking to the sales team?

Additionally, survey your past or existing customers to gather more data. Ask your customers about relevant demographics, how your product helped them solve their issue, specific web resources they can refer to later, and which channels they prefer for communication. Ask them to rate your website based on content, user experience, and navigability. 

Research keywords

The next step is to brainstorm and research keywords with your team. So, to get started, discover how your customers are looking for you. 

• Seed Keywords – This is the starting point of your keyword research. Step into the shoes of your customer and create a list of keywords, keyword variants, and synonyms that your customer would search for. Explore areas like topics relevant to your product, problems your product solves, people who would benefit from your product, etc.
• Competitors keywords – What keywords are your competitors ranking for? Use tools like Semrush to dig into your competitors’ data. Analyze their title tags to find keyword opportunities.
• Branded keywords – Prospects use these keywords to find out more about a brand. For example, Salesforce login, salesforce job, salesforce training, etc. Here, you need to dominate the search results to control the online narrative about your brand. Use tools like Semrush to find search terms related to your brand.

• International keywords – Global enterprises must optimize for international keywords. Hence, you may require a professional native translator to understand keyword research to find the local equivalents of your English keywords. 

Voice search optimization

Optimize for voice search to stand out from your competitors. Search for relevant voice search terms like ‘near me’ searches, easily pronounceable keywords, long-tail, and question-form keywords.

Related searches and ‘People Also Ask’ terms

These queries can give you a lot of insights into what search terms people use when inquiring about your product. 

Featured Snippets

Featured snippets appear above the fold in the Google search results. These snippets are displayed in a box and provide a short and informative response to the query. 

Long-tail keywords

Google autosuggest and tools like Ahrefs can help you find long-tail keywords. Type your product category in Google search to see what suggested long-tail keywords you get.

Map keywords

After you have prepared your exhaustive list of keywords, map the keywords to important website pages. Ensure that your content topics are mapped to relevant primary and secondary keywords. This will also help you build your content strategy well. 

2. On-page SEO

On-page SEO is updating your website pages to improve the SERPs rankings. Take the following actions to ensure the success of your enterprise SaaS SEO strategy. 

• Insert the main keyword in the title with an H1 tag.
• Display a consistent information hierarchy in your subheadings like H2, H3, and H4. Ensure your title is always H1 followed by H2 with keyword variations.
• Include your primary keyword in the meta title and create a meta description that tells users about the page's content. 
• Use short yet descriptive URLs.
• Optimize internal links and insert external links to other pages and sites related to your main keyword of the page.

One of the best ways to make your content easily accessible to users is to add a related posts widget showing similar web pages. You can also insert links to other blogs and pages in the content body. 

3. Technical SEO

Enterprise websites are massive. So, technical SEO is complicated for SaaS enterprises but is also crucial to the success of enterprise SaaS SEO. 

There are multiple jobs involved in technical SEO. Therefore, prioritization is a must. 

Here’s a list of technical SEO tasks that must be considered a priority for a few ‘quick wins’. 

Improve user experience and crawlability

Managing your crawl budget is a priority task because enterprises must get more control over crawlability. This is because search engines find it difficult to process enterprise websites.

Once you work on the website crawlability, you can take your user experience to the next level. So, do the following:

• Develop an XML sitemap if you do not have one. Collaborate with your engineering team or use an XML sitemap tool. 
• Use canonical tags to ensure that Google indexes the best version of every page.
• Use 301 redirects when removing old pages to ensure that the old URLs direct users to their current location and that they are not faced with 404-error signs. 
• Review robots.txt files to identify incorrect or missing ones. 

Build a mobile-responsive website

The global mobile phone website traffic graph has been increasing ever since the past decade. More than 60% of all web traffic came through mobile phones in 2022. 

Source: 

So, the point here is that your website should be user-friendly for mobile devices to ensure increased organic traffic. And for that, you must make your enterprise website mobile-friendly. 

Follow these steps to make your website mobile-friendly.

• Make sure that the correct hreflang codes and links exist.
• Update the metadata on your mobile site as you do for your desktop site. 
• Update all URLs to mobile URLs and add structured data to your mobile site pages. 

Use structured data and schema markups

Using structured data on your pages help search engine crawlers to understand the page and its content. Thus, the content appears in the SERPs as featured snippets that make your listing visually appealing.

• Find out the opportunities to include structured data in your pages. 
• Review Google Search Console reports daily to prevent issues with your structured data markup. 
• Add schema markup – a code that tells Google to show additional details above the meta description in the SERPs, like opening hours, address, ratings, and service areas. 

Improve page speed

Did you know website conversion rates drop by an average of 4.42% with each additional second of load time (between 0-5 seconds)?

So, to ensure higher conversions, you must keep a check on your page speed or website load time. 

Page speed impacts the overall user experience and the SaaS enterprise SEO analytics. Use Google PageSpeed Insights to track your website performance and identify the pages that are not optimized. Also, the tool provides suggestions to fix the prevailing issues. 

Try image optimization, compression, improve server response time, browser caching, etc. to improve your page speed. 

4. Content Marketing Strategy

What’s at the core of an enterprise SaaS SEO strategy?

Content, content, and content!

Generating great content that outranks the competition is what makes your SaaS enterprise SEO strategy successful (along with the other aspects, of course!)

In fact, high-quality content marketing can generate an ROI of 448% or more for SaaS brands. 

Most SaaS enterprises have a dedicated content marketing team structured to take care of all the content needs. 

Check out the steps to implement an enterprise content marketing strategy.

Develop brand content guidelines

How will your SaaS brand be presented through the content? 

Create a comprehensive guideline that clearly explains your brand’s presentation – messaging tone, brand images, fonts, color scheme, and more. This ensures uniformity in the content and helps to boost your brand recognition. 

Here’s the information you must include in your brand content guidelines.

• Value proposition
• Brand essence (tone, voice, personality)
• Color scheme and fonts
• Image specifications and format
• Taglines
• Logos
• Acceptable and unacceptable content and logo variations
• Messaging pillars
• Unique content features and CTAs

Build a Blog and Resources Page

Experiment with different content types and find out what works the best with your audience. Blogs, whitepapers, eBooks, how-to guides, and customer success stories are a few of the most common content types that SaaS brands use for their SEO strategy. 

Quality educational blogs are an asset for every SaaS business. Hence, developing a proper blog strategy is critical for the success of an enterprise SaaS SEO strategy.

• Create blogs that tell a story – make it engaging, informative, and relatable. 
• Insert CTAs in the blog.
• Link the blog to product pages, pricing pages, use cases, or other related blog posts. 

A resource page serves as a knowledge repository. It is the bridge that moves prospects from being aware of the problem to being aware of the solution. It contains links to knowledge resources like eBooks, guides, case studies, video content, webinars, podcasts, and links to relevant articles published on other websites. 

Build a pillar/ cluster content strategy

Organizing or structuring your blog with the topic cluster or pillar-cluster method will help you provide users with a positive experience. 

A pillar-cluster content structure method involves building a content hub with a pillar page and cluster pages of informational content hyperlinked to it. These cluster pages discuss content that are related to the pillar page topic. 

Source

With a pillar and cluster strategy in place, your prospects can easily find the content they want. Also, they revisit the website to gather more references. 

Create content assets for backlinks

Do you want to get credible backlinks and boost your brand’s organic visibility? If yes, create the following type of link-worthy content. 

• Original research content – In-depth research on the SaaS industry can get you full marks. So, create content with the latest SaaS industry updates, trends, insights, and facts. 
• Guides and tutorials – Help prospects learn about a topic with how-to guides and demonstration videos. Optimize with long-tail keywords and question keyword variations to generate inbound links. 
• Infographics – This content type is visually engaging and informative too. Repurpose blog posts into infographics, and share industry trends, including images, graphs, quotes, and other information in a bite-sized format. 
• Listicles/ ranking – Top 10 SEO tools or recommendations about tips, tactics, and resources backed by statistics, reports, and facts. 

Refresh content

SaaS enterprise websites are huge, with several subdomains and webpages. The site may become too massive to handle by simply adding content pages. 

Tools like Deepcrawl can help you find redundant, underperforming, or obsolete content on the website. You can then merge similar content pages, update the old ones with new information, and delete the ones that do not align with business goals. 

5. Link Building in Enterprise SEO

According to research, 13% of search experts say that link building is the most valuable SEO tactic and SEO experts say that external linking is the third most important factor for SEO. 

Moreover, Semrush revealed that backlinks are among the top 10 ranking factors for SEO. 

Source

Knowing the significance of link-building, here are a few enterprise link-building strategies to follow.

Guest Posting on well-known websites

SaaS enterprises distribute their content as guest posts to reputed industry blogs. Writing guest posts can boost your brand credibility and help you reach a new audience. 

When writing guest posts, insert a link to your website within the content. It works great for your SaaS enterprise SEO strategy.

Platforms like BuzzStream, Alexa can help you identify suitable blogs to pitch your content. 

Identify your competitor’ SEO backlinks and replicate

The sites linking to your competitors will most certainly be relevant to your niche. So, they are likely to be quality backlinks for enterprise SEO. 

You can use tools like Online Backlink Checker to find which websites link to your competitors. Once you get a list of the websites, pick the most credible and powerful opportunities and reach out to the sites with a backlink request. 

Create links with Images

Images catch attention faster. So, it makes sense to create graphics, infographics, product photos, etc., and promote them to gain more backlinks. 

However, when using images as backlinks, ensure that the links direct to a broader page where users can find content along with the image. It may be a landing page, a blog, or a free eBook but not an image directory. Directing the traffic to an image directory is like leading the users to a dead-end. The traffic goes wasted. 

Build broken links

Use tools like Scream Frog, Deepcrawl, and Semrush to find broken links on your website that directs audiences to 404 pages. These links impact the user experience adversely. Therefore, replace all broken links from your website with live links of your web pages. 

Source

6. Teams and SEO Tools

Without the right team and tools, you cannot think of building an enterprise SaaS SEO strategy. Here are a few significant aspects you must consider.

Structure the SEO team

Like all other business functions, consider structuring the SEO team properly. Having a dedicated SaaS enterprise SEO team with clear roles and responsibilities helps to make enterprise SEO a vital part of the entire corporate strategy. 

Outsource to SaaS enterprise SEO agency

Having a strong in-house SEO team is good but expecting them to manage every aspect of the enterprise website is not. Outsourcing specific tasks like SEO audit, strategizing for enterprise SEO vs local SEO, technical SEO, content marketing strategy, etc., to a specialist agency can accelerate the process and make it seamless. 

Get the best enterprise SaaS SEO tools

Executing a SaaS enterprise SEO strategy without the right tools is a recipe for disaster. 

The complexity and task volume of enterprise SEO require automation and SEO tools like BrightEdge, Semrush, and seoClarity. Without these tools, no team can handle enterprise SEO tasks manually. 

7. Track, Measure, and Report

Developing and implementing a SaaS enterprise SEO strategy is not enough. Organizations must track SEO KPIs, measure them, and create reports. 

But, why? Because, it offers the following advantages:

• Tracking, measuring, and reporting KPIs provides insights into available opportunities, content performance, and faults. 
• It highlights areas that require improvement.
• It indicates your SEO success rate.

Enterprise SEO reporting can be tricky as the strategy does not directly impact the business revenue. However, with tools like BrightEdge, you can track multiple SEO metrics or KPIs.

Primary SEO KPIs include a number of pages driving traffic, organic traffic, link profile growth, Google Analytics goals, and changes in the rate of website issues. 

Secondary SEO KPIs include repeat visits, number of bookings, demo requests, and inquiries from organic channels. 

Enterprise SEO Tools To Help Scale 

Enterprise SEO tools are those precious software solutions that make enterprise SEO a hassle-free process. 

Here are the top 5 enterprise SEO tools that are a must-have to ensure success in your SEO strategies. 

1. Semrush – Best for Conducting Keyword Research and Competitor Analysis. 

2. seoClarity – Best for performing sitewide enterprise SEO audits

3. Ahrefs – Best for generating quality backlinks

4. BrightLocal – Best for businesses focusing on local organic traffic 

5. MarketMuse – Best for improving SEO and content strategy 

Looking for a SaaS Enterprise SEO Agency? 

Congratulations! Your search for a result-driven SaaS enterprise SEO agency ends here. 

TripleDart’s SaaS enterprise SEO services have helped 70+ brands to multiply conversions and revenue. 

The diverse teams at TripleDart can take care of all your SaaS enterprise SEO needs – from performing extensive enterprise SEO audits, keyword research, and content marketing to data analysis, tracking, and creating comprehensive SEO reports. 

So, if you wish to see accelerated growth for your SaaS business, book a call with the team right away!

Final Note

At the end of the day, we know that enterprise SaaS SEO is complicated. But with a planned approach, you can win over its challenges. Just make sure to focus on a few things:

• Strategic keyword selection;
• Technical SEO;
• Content marketing strategy;
• Employing the right enterprise SEO tools; and
• Link-building. 

Build a solid in-house SEO team that can take care of the content needs, get backlinks, and resolves website issues. However, reach out to expert SEO professionals for assistance in the critical aspects.

Last but not least, success in SaaS enterprise SEO requires patience and persistence. Understand the SEO universe and partner with the best SEO agencies to create sustainable success for your SaaS business.