SEO for B2B SaaS: 10 Tips to Drive Pipeline and Revenue

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Sam Dunning

Over the past five years, I’ve helped B2B SaaS companies like Clickhouse, WildSparq and EventsAir drive millions in pipeline and revenue through SEO. 

My lesser-known strategies have been featured by CXL, Ahrefs, The Marketing Millennials and more.

Along the way, I’ve developed an SEO playbook that B2B SaaS companies can follow (step by step) to start seeing high quality inbound leads in a matter of months. 

I’ll be breaking down my entire process below 👇

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Tip #1: Define Your Money Keywords

Most B2B SaaS companies see SEO as a checkbox on their to-do list. 

The CMO or CRO says, “Competitors are outranking us, we need to do some SEO.”

And marketers, who are already juggling a million different tasks, simply go to Semrush or Ahrefs, find some keywords with low difficulty and high search volume, throw them into ChatGPT, and publish a few articles. 

Unsurprisingly, this doesn’t yield inbound leads and has minimal impact on revenue. 

For SEO to actually drive results, you need to focus on the keywords that your dream clients are searching, or what I like to call “money keywords.”

Here’s a matrix that you can use to identify them: 

matrix to identify SEO keywords to drive pipeline and revenue

Column 1: Make a list of your main offers (ie calendar scheduling)

Column 2: Make a list of the industries you serve best (ie sales, HR, marketing, etc.)

Column 3: Make a list of your main competitors (ie Chili Piper, Calendly, HubSpot)

Column 4: Make a list of the problems you solve, or jobs to be done (ie struggling to route leads efficiently)

Now, you can use these columns to create high-intent long-tail keywords. For example: 

1. Best calendar scheduling software

2. Calendar scheduling for sales teams

3. Chili Piper alternatives

4. How to route leads more efficiently

Keep in mind, these “money keywords” will probably have a low search volume, and that’s okay. At the end of the day, you want traffic that will convert into pipeline, not a large number of visitors outside of your ICP. 

When you’re doing this exercise, make sure to involve your founder (if you’re a smaller founder-led company) or your sales team (if you’re a larger sales-led organization) – they’ll likely have great insights related to the problems you solve. 

Tip #2: Understand What’s Already Ranking 

Now that you’ve identified those money keywords, type them into Google to see what type of content is already ranking organically. 

For example, if you type in “Chili Piper alternatives” you’ll find that the top organic search results are something along the lines of “Top 10 Chili Piper alternatives to consider”, or what is commonly referred to as a product listicle. 

Search engine results page for the search Chili Piper alternatives

Look through these existing articles and think about what your company can do even better. Can you include a comparative table or social proof, and clearly demonstrate why you’re the best without sounding overly biased?

Or, if you’re creating an article on how to speed up the lead routing process, look at the guides at the top of the SERP and think: 

How can I create similar articles that are even more helpful? How can I demonstrate greater experience, expertise, authority, and trustworthiness?

Search engine results page for the search how to speed up the lead routing process

Maybe it’s by going much more in-depth, or weaving in relevant videos, or highlighting screenshots of your product. 

Pro tip: Don’t be afraid of highlighting your product throughout your articles. As marketers, we often worry about sounding too promotional, but the truth is, you need to show that your product is the obvious solution to a problem in order to drive revenue. 

Tip #3: Build a Best-in-Class Page 

Once you’ve researched what top-ranking pages are doing, it’s time to figure out how to blow them out of the water. 

If you’re creating a listicle, can you add better visuals, weave in your product more, or add relevant CTAs? 

If it’s a how-to article, can you link to a lead magnet or a YouTube video with more helpful context? 

If it’s a landing page, can you add a more comprehensive FAQ section that answers all of your prospect’s questions?

Pro tip: Always consider where your prospect might be in their journey based on their search query. For a more top of funnel how-to article, you can include more subtle CTAs and connections to your product, while for a competitor comparison article, it makes more sense to include a clear demo request CTA. 

Tip #4: Nail the basics

Technical SEO is important for e-commerce sites with thousands of pages, but most B2B SaaS websites (which are often 50 pages or less) don’t need a ton of technical SEO to win. 

Sure, you still need the basics. 

For example, let’s say you write an article related to the keyword “Best calendar scheduling software.”

You’d want your slug to be “best-calendar-scheduling-software”; you’d want to include your keyword in your H1, meta title, and meta description; and you’d want to incorporate the keyword naturally throughout your article.

You’d also want good UX, a clear menu nav, solid design and UI on both mobile and PC, some internal links to relevant topics throughout your website, and some other pages linking back to your article. 

That’s really all you need. 

After you have these basics in place, focus on producing a high volume of content that’s relevant to your prospects, and don’t lose sleep over technical optimizations. 

Tip #5: Build Quality Backlinks for $0

Even if you have the best content, ranking for your dream keywords isn’t easy, especially if your competitors have been around for decades and have extremely high domain authorities. 

To compete against the giants and set yourself up for success, you need high quality backlinks to your website. 

Here’s one of my favorite ways to get them:

1. Go to Semrush or Ahrefs, whichever keyword research tool you prefer, and paste the LinkedIn profile URLs of your thought leaders (Founder or other execs) into the backlinks tab. 

Backlinks tag in Semrush, used to identify articles where thought leaders have been mentioned

2. In the results, you’ll find a list of all the articles featuring your thought leaders and linking out to their LinkedIn profiles. 

example of list of articles in Semrush's backlinks tab

3. Message these companies and see if they can update the articles to link to your website, not just to the LinkedIn profile URL. Even better if you can get a backlink to one of your high-intent pages. 

After doing this, you can go a step further and visit the podcast search engine Listen Notes, type in your niche (ie B2B ads, recruitment, sales enablement), filter by top podcasts in your space, and make a list on a Google sheet. 

example search in the podcast search engine Listen Notes, used to identify guest speaking opportunities

Next, have your thought leaders reach out to the podcast hosts via LinkedIn. 

The message can be short and simple, such as: Hey Sam, enjoyed your recent episode on X, had an unusual idea for your show. Are you against a conversation?

From my experience, around 20% of hosts will respond, and your thought leaders will start getting featured on amazing podcasts, which will eventually lead to more backlinks to the company website. 

Pro Tip: To start seeing results quickly, aim to send 5-10 messages per week to podcast hosts in your space. 

Tip #6: Publish At Scale

With SEO, quality matters, but quantity is a massive competitive advantage. 

Larger companies are spending a lot of money on ads, content marketing, and events, but they typically have a ton of red tape. 

They may take two weeks to approve a topic, a month to plan out the content, a month for design, a month for web development, a month to publish… Which is to say, by the time they’ve published 2 or 3 pages, you could have published 30, 40, or 50 quality articles, and started stealing some of the market share. 

To start seeing results, publish as much content as possible focused on your money keywords (occasionally weaving in more top of funnel content). 

Also, remember, unless you’re a super authoritative company, it’ll usually take 2-3 months for Google to crawl your pages, so the content you publish today is setting you up for success 90 days from now. 

Tip #7: Design Pages That Convert

If you’re investing a lot of money in content, make sure you also invest in great design. The better the user experience, the more likely you are to drive conversions. 

Here are some questions to ask yourself:

  • Are your pages aesthetically pleasing?
  • Is your content skimmable on both mobile and PC?
  • Are you including screenshots, videos, or aha moments that relate to your product?
  • Can you add more social proof (customer quotes, guides, walkthroughs) to increase trust?
  • Are you sprinkling relevant CTAs throughout your content? 
  • Can you add sticky CTAs that are aligned with the funnel stage of each article (ie subscribe to newsletter for more top of funnel articles, request a demo for more bottom of funnel content)?
Examples of strong CTAs from RevenueHero's blog page

These changes, which might seem small, can lead to massive improvements in performance. 

Tip #8: Leverage sales calls, customer success calls, and customer research

You can rank pages using generic AI-generated content that says things like “turbocharge your revenue” or “10X your productivity,” but prospects will immediately bounce. 

If you want them to stay on your page – and possibly even schedule a demo – you need to write in-depth content that resonates with their exact pain points. 

Looking at customer research and listening to calls is a great starting point. Even better if you can take your sales and CS teams out to lunch, walk them through the topics you’re tackling in your content, ask for additional insights, and weave these insights into your articles. 

This way, all the content you create will be amazing for sales enablement in addition to SEO. 

Tip #9: Keep Improving

As I mentioned previously, to win with SEO, you need to publish content quickly – when it’s ready, not when it’s perfect. 

That being said, you should always be looking for ways to improve the content you’ve already published. 

About 2 or 3 months after publication, check how your article is ranking. 

For example, let’s say you write an article, and after a few months it settles at position number 7. You could look at this article more closely, and think of ways to get it closer to number 1. 

Could you add a more comprehensive FAQ section, embed a relevant YouTube video, add nicer images of your product, include more customer quotes, or earn a few high quality backlinks? 

These consistent optimizations can go a long way if you want to move up in the rankings. 

Tip #10: Scale as you grow

SEO isn’t something you can set and forget – even if you’re an established company, there’s always room for improvement. 

Once you’ve implemented tips 1-9, think of ways you can scale your efforts even further. 

Can you increase your article production by hiring more team members or working with freelancers? Or create incredible resources (such as custom tools) that will be highly valuable to your ICP?

Also, don’t just think about SEO – after all, SEO is only a piece of the marketing ecosystem – think of ways to improve your ads, your YouTube channel, your podcast, your LinkedIn page, etc. 

Improvements in all these areas will lead to greater brand awareness and trust, which will lead to more successful SEO. 

Hope you found this article helpful!

Feel free to reach out on LinkedIn with any questions, or check out the Breaking B2B website or Breaking B2B podcast for more unusual B2B/SaaS SEO insights.  

Sam Dunning
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