Did you know that 66% of businesses plan to invest more in SEO content creation in 2022?
But what’s so valuable about content marketing that businesses worldwide are publishing more content, building dedicated content teams, and shifting their investment from other marketing channels to SEO content?
We’ll answer this question in this article by showing you the different ways content marketing and SEO can help your business grow faster.
Let’s dive in.
Table of Contents
What Is B2B SaaS SEO Content?
SEO content for B2B SaaS consists of blog posts, long-form articles, and in-depth guides optimized for search engines and designed to answer the most common questions of your audience at every stage of the marketing funnel.
In easier words, SaaS SEO content helps you target people who:
- Are actively researching the problems your product solves
- Are actively searching for different software to solve their problems
- Know your brand and want to learn more about it
- Are ready to purchase your product
SEO content is based on your audience’s search queries identified after in-depth keyword research. The keywords are organized in topic clusters, and then dedicated articles are created and optimized for each keyword.
This builds your website’s topical authority and helps your content rank for any keywords related to your target topic.
ProofHub, one of the top project management tools, is an excellent example of a SaaS company using SEO content for growth.
This article on ProofHub’s blog ranks number one for the keyword “project management tools”, which has a search volume of 53K+ per month.
Its title, sub-headings, and body content are optimized for this keyword, and it follows all the SEO content best practices.
As a result, it drives thousands of visitors per month to ProofHub.
In short, the core objective of an SEO content strategy is to attract relevant search traffic to your SaaS website, build brand authority through high-quality content, and generate free sign-ups and demo requests for your product.
Why Is SEO Content for B2B SaaS So Important
Why should SaaS companies care about SEO content? Because research shows that 68% of all online experiences start with a search engine. Without SEO content, you’ll miss out on most of those users.
But that’s just one of the many reasons SEO content is crucial for B2B SaaS companies.
Let me explain some of the other reasons in more detail.
1. Drives Organic Search Traffic to Your Site
An online business needs traffic to generate leads, customers, and revenue.
And this is where SEO content is priceless.
It helps you consistently generate traffic from Google, the world’s biggest search engine, and the users’ go-to place when looking for information.
Research shows that investing in an SEO content marketing strategy results in 434% more indexed pages in search engines.
This makes complete sense.
Most B2B SaaS companies apply some degree of SEO to their website’s homepage and features pages. But since those pages are rarely updated or changed, they provide very little content for search engines to index.
In comparison, a SaaS company that regularly creates blog posts, long-form articles, and helpful content can target different keywords to drive qualified traffic from search engines.
Hubspot is among the best examples of how SEO content can drive traffic growth for a SaaS company.
Hubspot gets 21 million+ visitors per month from search engines and ranks for more than 4 million keywords.
This growth is primarily based on Hubspot’s coordinated SEO and content marketing strategy, covering high-volume search keywords for all marketing funnel stages.
As you can see, nearly 75% of Hubspot’s target keywords are informational, driving 4.8 million visitors per month. These keywords address the various questions of your target audience and usually have a very high search volume.
How can you optimize your content for these keyword types to drive traffic to your site? By creating a content marketing funnel.
Search Traffic and the Content Marketing Funnel
A comprehensive SEO content strategy identifies the most relevant and profitable keywords in each stage of the funnel and helps you drive traffic for all user intent types.
In short, the ToFu stage attracts the most traffic and helps you convert it into leads using MoFU content. And finally, BoFU content converts those leads into customers.
Let’s examine that in more detail.
Top of the Funnel (ToFu)
In this stage, your aim is to explain the basics of your niche by targeting informational keywords with a high search volume.
These keywords drive the bulk of your traffic and feed the other marketing funnel stages. Ideally, more than 50% of your content should be created around informational keywords.
Middle of the Funnel (MoFu)
This part of the funnel targets navigational and commercial keywords. Your content in this stage educates your readers about your product and turns them into leads and free users.
Bottom of the Funnel (BoFu)
Finally, this funnel stage targets transactional keywords to attract people ready to buy your product.
These keywords have a low search volume but high purchase intent. The primary purpose of BoFu content is to drive sales, which is why it is your most profitable content with a direct ROI.
As your content library grows, it ranks for more keywords and drives more traffic.
All of this is impossible with using SEO content.
2. Creates Brand Awareness And Authority
People buy from brands they trust and perceive as experts.
What’s the best way to establish your brand’s expertise? By demonstrating your knowledge through in-depth, actionable, and high-quality SEO content.
Here’s what a recent study involving thousands of B2B marketers found.
As you can see, the top four benefits of content marketing are all related to creating brand awareness, trust, and brand loyalty.
This isn’t surprising.
The more a brand invests in creating educational content, the more people consider it an authority.
This is exactly how Close.io, a leading CRM company, developed a reputation in its niche.
But what is the authority-building process from an SEO perspective?
In SEO terms, we build brand authority by comprehensively covering a topic from various angles. Instead of targeting one broad keyword, an authority-focused SEO strategy aims to rank multiple pages for different keywords closely related to its primary topic.
This helps a brand build topical clusters that contain multiple pages optimized for different keywords under the same broad topic.
It also increases the site’s topical authority in search results and helps it dominate search rankings.
As a result, your site starts showing up for all the popular search keywords driving tons of traffic to your site and skyrocketing your brand awareness.
Here’s an illustration of a topical cluster model.
For example, a SaaS company trying to build topical authority around “project management” should ideally create optimized content around the following keywords.
- Project management tips
- Project management best practices
- Project management mistakes
- Project management ideas
- Project management software
- Project management templates
- Project management methodology
- Project management types
- Agile project management
- Waterfall project management
These are just some of the keywords that can be found while researching the topic of project management.
However, we dive much deeper when creating topical clusters for our clients.
This approach helps you generate traffic from multiple keywords, builds your search authority, and increases brand awareness.
3. Helps Your Site Get More Backlinks
To outrank your competitors for high-traffic search keywords, you need strong backlinks.
A research study by SEMRush found a direct relationship between unique backlinks and search rankings.
The best way to get backlinks? Create high-quality, actionable, and link-worthy SEO content.
Here’s how.
No website wants to link to a brand’s homepage or feature pages because that’s free publicity no one is ready to give you.
But websites are more than happy to link to actionable and high-quality content they can use as a reference to make their content look more credible.
So, the more high-quality SEO content your site has, the more links it will get. Here’s an example of that from one of the projects we work on:
You can see how the blog articles on the list all have some referring domains (backlinks). Most of those are earned naturally.
What makes content link-worthy? A study found the following reasons.
Optimizing your content for the right keywords, comprehensively answering your audience’s questions, and adding relevant link-worthy elements to your articles make them perfect resources to attract backlinks.
But that’s not the only way SEO content helps in link building.
Research shows that the higher a page ranks in search results, the faster it gets backlinks.
This makes complete sense because ranking higher means more traffic and exposure. And more traffic means more chances of getting backlinks (if your content is good enough).
So, creating SEO content starts a growth cycle for your content that keeps driving traffic to your site and helps it get more backlinks.
4. Helps Users Get More Value From Your Product
Customer retention is among the most significant business challenges for SaaS companies. A big reason customers don’t renew their subscription is the lack of value they get from a product.
Often, this lack of value is not because a product doesn’t have the right features. Instead, customers don’t realize the true potential of tech products and often lack the creativity to use them to their full potential.
This is where SEO content can be a gamechanger for your brand.
You can identify your customers’ most common challenges when using your products and address them through detailed, in-depth, and high-quality content.
Publish how-tos, step-by-step guides, and tutorials that show your customers how they can get the most value from your product.
Some of the best SaaS marketing teams do this.
For example, this ClickUp article shares different Kanban board examples to help its users understand how they can use the app’s Kanban feature.
This article by Ahrefs is another excellent example of helpful SEO content.
It’s not only optimized for a high-traffic keyword but also shares step-by-step guidelines with Ahrefs users for finding the best keywords.
You might be thinking: “But we already have a Help section on our site that describes all the features.”
Great, that’s always helpful.
But Help content is often limited to your product features and doesn’t discuss the different scenarios or use cases it can solve.
So even if you have a Help section, use SEO content to share real-world examples of how people are using your product and teach them ways to get the maximum value from it.
5. Reduces Lead Acquisition Cost
SEO content is a long-term investment that keeps on paying back even years after its creation.
Once you publish an article or a content piece on your site, it becomes your brand’s asset. The higher it ranks in search results, the more traffic, leads, and customers it generates.
So, let’s say you earn $1000 per customer per year on average. If you spend $1000 creating a detailed article optimized for your target keyword, it needs to attract only one paying customer to get your ROI.
In reality, though, there’s no limit to how much traffic, leads, and customers a well-researched and optimized article can attract to your site.
For example, Help Scout ranks number one for the keyword “best customer service software,” with a monthly search volume of around 2300.
According to research, the top-ranked page in Google SERPS gets 31.7 of the total traffic. So by that account, this page should be getting around 729 visitors per month (2300*31.7%).
Let’s say this article has a conversion rate of 1% only (that’s much lower than the average). In that case, it still gets Help Scout 7 sign-ups per month and 84 sign-ups per year.
Do you see the ROI on this?
This is in stark contrast to paid advertising campaigns.
Paid ad campaigns have their place in the marketing mix, but they only get results as long as you invest money in them.
The moment you stop funding an ad campaign, it stops driving results. Plus, it doesn’t build any search authority or long-term digital assets that can pay you back later.
SEO content is different.
Every article is a one-time investment that only grows stronger with time. Your content starts ranking higher as it gains authority and more backlinks. As a result, it attracts more traffic, more leads, and more customers on autopilot.
Your lead acquisition costs keep getting lower every month, and your ROI increases.
And ultimately, it reduces your reliance on paid media campaigns where you need to spend additional money to get traffic or leads.
Are You Ready to Invest in SEO Content for Your B2B SaaS?
We’ve only scratched the surface with these benefits of SEO content. There are numerous other ways content helps your brand get ahead of your competitors and grow faster.
However, it is a long-term investment that requires patience. Your content will take a few months to mature and start driving traffic. But like wine, it will only get better with time.
If you want to discuss your SEO content strategy with us, schedule a free consultation call today.
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