In the last five years, I’ve worked with hundreds of SaaS companies and their founders as they think about marketing in order to get their products traction in their market. Because of my background in SEO and content in-house, agency side, and as a freelance consultant, the conversation most often goes to SEO and content.
I’ve seen some common things that get in the way of SaaS founders being successful with SEO and content, so today I want to share those with you and how I’ve helped founders get around it.
You Must Be Convinced To Be Committed
One of the questions I help companies answer is “Is SEO a real opportunity for us?”
I do this from a strict content perspective with the EditorNinja Content Analysis deliverables, but more broadly through my SEO Opportunity Analysis.
I’ve spoken with countless founders who tell me that they’re interested in or “thinking about doing some SEO,” but when I ask them if they understand where the opportunity with SEO lies, or if one even exists, most look at me with a blank stare. Many seem to be much more interested in being interested in SEO but not actually doing anything, whereas there are other founders who want to answer the question so that they know where to commit their financial resources and people moving forward.
In order to succeed with any marketing channel, you should understand if it’s viable. Are competitors actively investing in it? Are there enough people searching for the terms that most accurately describe what your product does? Are you prepared to invest for 2-3 months without seeing much progress, and then for another 6-9 months to see SEO contribute significantly to the business?
If not, SEO isn’t your channel. If so, then it might be.
SEO is Still Marketing
A lot of SaaS founders are drawn to SEO because it feels like a channel that isn’t really “marketing,” which most technical SaaS founders loathe. The problem, though, is that SEO is still marketing.
You have to create the content that your ideal customer wants to read. You have to understand their needs and what makes them tick, then write the best piece possible that then gets them to take the next step.
When building a business, you can’t get away from your customers/market and what they want. Building a product they want to use, that meets their needs and helps them accomplish their end goal, comes first. But there are many subpar products that are more successful than “better” products, simply because they know how to market well and you don’t.
(Good) SEO Involves Building a Brand
Unfortunately, you can’t just engineer your way to good rankings. Because the 3rd pillar of SEO is backlinks, you have to promote your service and website.
6-10 years ago, one could conceivably buy their way to the top by various grey and black hat means of link exchanges at scale, buying links, spinning up link networks, buying your way into link networks, buying expired domains and redirecting them in (this one still kind of works), and more.
Since then, though, things have become much harder. Since the 2020 Covid pandemic, many brands have invested a lot more in their online brand, and therefore invested in SEO a lot more than before.
This means that essentially every keyword has become more competitive and more expensive to rank for. While having the most links is not always a guarantee of ranking well, having more links will very rarely hurt you over having fewer links.
The way to get the best links, the links that count 10x more than others for ranking, is by building a brand. You can’t buy a link on the New York Times – you have to earn it. This is the same for many other reputable websites as well, the strongest sites on the Internet that most brands want to have backlinks from.
You Need To Enjoy Writing
Or, you need to hire someone who does and who knows how to write for the Internet.
Let me put it bluntly – most people don’t do things consistently and for long enough to see results if they don’t enjoy them. Writing is no different.
As someone who considers himself a writer, let me tell you that writing is work. You have to love it in order to create the needed volume of content required to see the results you need. Usually, this takes months if not years of effort.
One of the example of using content and SEO to grow a brand is Moz, who were the early SaaS movers in the SEO space. The founder, Rand Fishkin (Bluesky profile), used the Moz blog as their main marketing channel. Rand wrote daily on the Moz blog for YEARS, using it to test out his thoughts and theories. This built Moz’s reputation and business, all the way up to around $40m per year in revenue if my memory and Googling are correct.
This never would’ve happened if Rand didn’t love writing. I remember asking him one time if his way of working out what he thought about something was through writing, and he said that it was. I am similar – if I’m trying to work out a problem, I write or talk it out. If I’m writing anyways, I might as well publish those thoughts.
If you’re a SaaS founder and want to use SEO and content as a main channel, you have to love writing, sharing, and teaching. If you don’t, then you need to hire someone who does. Let me caveat that one, though. Most founders, when they don’t love doing or appreciate a channel, won’t apply enough budget to it or give it enough time to really work.
If you’re a marketing leader at a SaaS company, similar advice applies, except I’ll say that growth is your full-time job (it’s not the founder’s) and therefore it is your responsibility to apply budget to the most promising channels and empower the team to make them work. If you’re a solo marketer, then stick with the channels that you know and have budget for. But if you have a team, and various people responsible for different channels, you need to operate at a higher and more strategic level.
Should SaaS Companies Create Content and do SEO?
I’ve completed 30+ SEO Opportunity Analysis projects for SaaS companies. For all but two, I’ve said that SEO, and SEO powered by content marketing, is a viable growth channel for them and something that they could invest in, and see great results from, if they want to. The two that I didn’t say that for were in very competitive spaces with incumbents who had invested in SEO for a long time with large budgets, and thus were going to be very hard to unseat or compete against in a meaningful way.
So, for most SaaS companies, I would say that yes, SaaS companies can create content and do SEO and see great results. But that doesn’t mean that it’s a great fit every company and founder or team. Ads can work a lot faster, if you have the expertise and the budget. Content and SEO can work great if you have time and the right mix of technical, content, and promotion.
If you’re the latter and want to take your content to the next level, reach out and let’s chat about your needs and see if EditorNinja can help you expedite results with professional editing and SEO content writing.