For B2B SAS companies are struggling to realize results through SEL.
The most common frustrations that we hear and our conversations are one.
They're investing resources to produce SEO content.
And they'd love to see that content performing well, but progress with moving
up the search rankings and bringing in traffic and leads has been stagnant.
And to their competitors, a dominating lemon, organic search
results, and it's been hard for them to catch up and compete.
They'd love to find a way to be more competitive.
But they like additional bandwidth to figure out how.
And this episode, I'll lay out 10 underlying principles for SAS SEO content.
That will help ensure the effort you're putting into your content
will be well-received by both search engines and your target audience.
When strung together and followed properly.
These principles increase the likelihood that you'll achieve the
results that you are looking for
Marc: I'm Marc Thomas.
I'm the head of growth at powered by search.
And today I'm going to talk you through some of the best knowledge that we
have on building B2B SaaS businesses.
Now, if any of this is interesting to you and you want to read more,
you should go to our website.
It's poweredbysearch.com and check us out there.
Before diving into the principles.
Keep in mind the following as we move forward.
Very often when people refer to content in the SAS marketing space, they're
talking specifically about blogging.
But the following principles apply to all of your content from your homepage
to your product or services pages.
To your blog articles to.
Also I search engines have become more sophisticated over the years.
The fundamentals of effective SEO have changed.
Namely, it's no longer sufficient to just create content with high
volume of the right keywords.
We call that keyword stuffing.
Instead search engines are rewarding content that is of the highest
relevance and quality for the user.
So most of the following principles are focused on just that.
Let's dive in.
Number one focus your SEO keyword research on intent, not volume.
When the objective of SEO is to generate revenue, not just traffic and
Patriots, it works best to find and create content for terms that indicate
prospects are in the research or buying phase of the buyer's journey.
The benefit of focusing your content marketing efforts around
keywords that show buying intent.
Is that they produce more predictable results.
With high volume keywords while they might bring in more traffic, the
quality of that traffic will be lower.
From a conversion standpoint.
Your results will be less predictable to.
Before content creation starts, you should ask.
What are the problems, obstacles, challenges, and pain points that
your customers are experiencing related to your solution.
Then using these as a starting point.
You can use your tool of choice.
Hey, traps, SEMrush, whatever you prefer to discover keywords that have the
highest potential to drive conversions.
Number two.
Mira your customer's problems.
Most of the SAS businesses that we speak with have a deep understanding
of their customer's problems.
But when we look at the pages of their websites,
we see that that content falls short of reflecting less.
This leads to potential customers, failing to understand the
problems your product solves.
The reason that empathy is such a popular concept in marketing is
that people want to feel understood.
And one of the best ways to show that you understand and have empathy
for your target audience is to clearly communicate that problems and
pain points directly on your page.
A few ways yet to dig up specific problems, your customers face.
Interview your customers.
Interview your sales or customer success team.
Get customer feedback via review sites, customer support,
tickets, or community hubs.
Search Google for the keyword that you're targeting or problem that you're solving
and look at the people also ask questions.
If you can explain that problems better than they can describe them themselves,
your content becomes even more compelling.
Number three.
Identify the impacts of not solving the problem.
Raise the stakes in your customer's mind by illustrating the
potential problems they may face.
If the problem remains unsolved.
This is another element of creating empathetic user focused content.
For example, if you get a stone chip in your car's windshield, that's a problem.
Now the outcome of not solving that problem is that you're
going to wake up one day to a completely shattered windshield.
If the chip is not fixed.
The resulting impact is that you can't drive your car to get to
work or wherever you need to go.
By calling out what happens if your prospects don't solve that problem, you
further emphasize your understanding of that pain points and help create
the tension necessary to nudge them forward towards investing in a solution.
Number four.
Benefits over features.
We've noticed a theme where SAS companies will do a much better
job of highlighting their product features and their product benefits.
By clearly explaining the payoffs a customer would get when they choose your
product, you make it easier for them to understand how you can solve that problem.
Consider this example from our client hurdler.
There's a screenshot in the accompanying blog post, a link is in the show notes.
This section.
On the benefits of using a mileage tracking app, which handler is.
He lives just below the fold on that mileage tracker page.
And anyone reading this product page can easily see what they stand to get
out of investing in their solution.
Consider these benefits framed up against the features.
Feature.
Drive details captured automatically benefits.
Save time.
Feature.
Deductions and reimbursements captured automatically.
Benefits save money.
Feature.
Tax reports with important details, benefits stay organized.
Only after you've covered the core benefits.
Should you touch on the technology functionality or design features?
To continue with the hurdler example, further down the page.
You'll see the following screenshot again in the show notes.
Mileage tracking app features.
There is absolutely a place in your content to describe
the features of your product.
But features.
Aren't what drive people to buy.
That's why we communicate benefits first and technology functionality
or design features later.
And sir your customer's questions.
Number five.
Structuring and content or a section of it with FAQ's and
incorporating FAQ markup the schema.
Mock-up if you're wondering.
Can increase the likelihood of it appearing at the top of search
results as a featured snippet.
Not to mention.
Answering your customer's most common questions in a helpful way
to remove objections and concerns that would delay a conversion.
To do this.
You can use data that you've collected while seeking to understand
your customer's pain points.
The people also ask section in Google, as well as any frequent questions that your
sales team receives about your product.
This will usually include covering the basics.
What does your product do?
How does it work?
How does it help solve a specific problem?
Your customer has.
And where can a customer learn more about a certain feature?
Number six.
Architect pages for topics not discrete keywords.
As we alluded to earlier in the episode.
In the past, building a pager on a particular keyword was
sufficient enough to get a page to begin performing well in search.
Nowadays modern search engine algorithms care about how relevant a pages for
a topic and its related entities.
And particular the following two characteristics signal
relevance effectively.
One covering a topic comprehensively.
And to linking to different pages on your site, that all center around the topic
category you're seeking to rank for.
One way to achieve this is to use the hub and spoke model.
We do this on our own blog.
For example, for the topic of customer channel fit, we created a hub article,
customer channel fit, how to identify the right B2B SAS marketing channels.
And we also created spoke articles to support and link out to, for
example, Google ads for SAS, LinkedIn ads for SAS, Facebook ads for SAS.
Long story short.
Search engines are rewarding websites that cover that topic category comprehensively.
Number seven.
Consolidate content and update consistently.
We very often work with clients who have a number of different pieces
of content on a similar topic that ended up competing with each other.
These could be opportunities to take multiple pieces and combine them together
in a single piece of great content.
Something that's exceptional.
I'm much more likely to rank than any of the individual pages on their own.
Consolidation can also mean removing stale content from your website.
In many cases, it's better to delete it all together, to help keep both
users and search engines focused on the content that does perform.
Lastly content needs to be consistently updated.
The nature of the SEO game is that if you have content that's ranking for
high value keywords in your niche, your competitors will inevitably be trying
to create content to outrank you.
There.
By regularly updating yours, you can stay ahead of the competition.
Number eight.
Create content for authority.
Uh, not for word count.
Continuing the thread of how search engine algorithms have evolved word
count and keyword density have also become less relevant over time.
Rather writing for the user and going for quality have become the gold standard
for gaining authority in your topic.
The key ways to increase the authority of your content include.
One producing content by an individual contributor, Oprah and
with subject matter expertise.
So content that is well-researched and created for me.
Well-known industry source.
Is seen as higher quality.
Any piece that appears to be haphazardly put together.
This is especially true in regulated industries, such as medical or
legal and formal education, where credentials are an important
signal of subject matter expertise.
Number two.
And in backlinks from reputable and trustworthy websites, backlinks
from other industry experts or trusted sources will increase the
trustworthiness of your website.
Backlinks from irrelevant or spammy sources will have a negative impact.
Number three.
Creating content that is definitively authoritative.
If you produce content that isn't more comprehensive than competing pieces.
Search engines will likely favor it over everything else
that it finds on the topic.
But remember.
This doesn't necessarily translate to word count.
Or authoritative content simply just needs to be the best at explaining.
And number nine.
Don't forget user experience.
Uh, Google tracks metrics like time on page bounce rate and other user
performance stats that tell them how people are acting on your sites pages.
So if you're sending someone to a page with poor user experience, or
if you use that needs to visit 10 pages on your site before they find
what they're looking for, Hey, can be detrimental to SEO performance.
Uh, such following user experience, best practices has become important.
Both when it comes to your site's design.
On the type of content that you create.
When your website has good UX.
The metrics, the Google tracks will improve.
People will spend more time on your pages.
Bounce rates will go down and conversion rates are also likely to increase.
Do you find out more?
We have an article on our website on SAS website.
Best practices.
Where you can lend our entire framework.
We call it the authority architecture for setting up your website with
the user experience in mind.
There are a number of different channels through which SAS content marketing
can be used for lead generation and content often works best when it's
created with a channel in mind.
For example, if you're planning to drive traffic to a piece of content through
paid social media or community promotion, you might choose to create thought
leadership pieces, in-depth stories or expert interviews, unique, interesting
content that causes readers to share.
Whereas, if you're creating content for SEO, you might write list articles,
competitor comparison pieces, or in depth, how to posts, formats that search
engines tend to reward in search results.
To get a hint of what user experience your piece should provide type your target,
keyword or keywords into a search engine.
Say Google.
And look at the format of articles and pages that show up.
Top ranked links are there because Google thinks that
they provide a good experience.
Therefore it's generally a good bat to structure your content
similarly to what shows up.
And the final one,
number 10.
Conversion rate optimization and capturing the lead.
Now if the objective of your content is to generate leads and revenue
for your business, it's useful to follow CRO best practices as well
as conversion rate optimization.
Some of the CRO best practices include making a compelling,
relevant offer to the user.
Displaying a clear call to action.
Testing user behavior to optimize for conversions.
Consider an example from our client tightened GPS.
Here they efficiently make a clear call to action, communicate
the benefits of their service.
And as we covered in our article on SAS landing page, best practices, they make
it easy for that prospects to understand the next action they should take.
And by the way, that's referring to a screenshot, which is in
the accompany in blog post.
The link is in the show notes.
As Paul is altogether.
The opportunities to acquire new customers through SAS content marketing are here.
And we've seen how valuable they can be when you approach
SEO with the right strategy.
So, if you're working hard to learn how you can improve your efforts
to bring in leads through search.
We hope this episode will help you get to where you want to go.
I'll see you next time.
Marc: now, if you enjoyed that today and you want to do something
about your B2B SaaS marketing, you should get in touch with us.
You can do that by going to poweredbysearch.com and checking
out our assessment page.
Or you can browse the case studies and blogs that we have on the site.
Now if you're not ready to do that, definitely say hi anyway,
you can ping me on Twitter.
I'm @iammarcthomas that's Marc with a C.
Or you can ping our founder and CEO, @devbasu and connect with us there.
Looking forward to seeing you again for another episode.