Are Your SaaS SEO Goals Attainable?
One aspect of your SEO strategy should be evaluating whether or not your SEO goals are attainable. If they're not realistic about what you can accomplish, you're naturally setting yourself up for failure. Here are some essential KPIs that you should keep on your radar.
Organic Traffic
One of the key KPIs you should monitor is your ROI from organic search. In order to successfully gain revenue from this source, you want the content on your website to be honed in on the consumers that would benefit the most from your product. Who exactly would want to pay for the service you offer? Once you have the answer to that question, you can formulate a plan of attack as to what content should be taken as a priority for your website.
Organic traffic can yield valuable results since 53.3% of all website traffic comes from organic searches. This is why investing your time in fully optimizing your website to perform well on SERP results can significantly make a difference in your organic traffic results.
SERP Visibility
Search Engine Results Page (SERP) visibility is a measure of how often your website URL, meta descriptions, and page titles show up in search engine results. Having good SERP visibility is incredibly important for SaaS businesses because it can drive a lot of organic traffic to the website, increasing sales and revenue.
It is also important for correct indexing of vital information; search engines prioritize content that has higher SERP visibility, thus making sure your keyword optimization and relevant content get seen.
The key element to improving your visibility is to make relevant content with keywords that your audience is frequently using. You can use a variety of different SEO tools for keyword research such as SEMrush, Moz, Ahrefs, Google Search Console, and many more. When you're conducting this research and about to create optimized content, make sure you avoid keyword stuffing. Even though it sounds like a smart idea to input as many relevant keywords as possible, that can actually do more harm than good.
The best practice for optimizing for SEO is to focus on one main keyword for a singular piece of content. Then, you can support that keyphrase with other similar/relevant keywords that surround that main topic. You also want to avoid duplicating a keyword for two separate pieces of content because you'll run the risk of competing against yourself. That's why it's best to stay organized and narrow down to one keyword per page.
Traffic Volume
Traffic volume is the number of visitors coming to your website, which is an important factor when assessing SEO performance. By regularly measuring the volume of traffic flowing through the site you can get some useful insights and insight into what’s truly working in terms of SEO efforts.
If major changes hit one part of your site within Google Analytics, such as a new search engine algorithm update, a keyword change or even just making minor adjustments to content, then traffic volume will also be impacted. This influence can be either positive or negative, but SEO ebbs and flows. You have to learn to adjust the best you can to the changes that are constantly happening with Google's search engine.
Keyword Ranking
Keyword ranking is the positioning of content to reach the highest possible visibility on search engine result pages (SERPs). This is important for SaaS businesses because it ensures that potential customers are able to find your product or service when searching online. By using keyword research and analyzing data such as search volume, competition, and cost per click (CPC) for each keyword, SaaS businesses can develop an effective content marketing strategy that will target the most relevant audiences.
Leaning into your current keyword rankings and establishing techniques in which you can improve upon them can yield positive results for your conversions and revenue. Google is ever-evolving, so the best thing you can do is to narrow your list of keywords down to the best ones that complement who exactly you want to reach and what you want to accomplish.
Bounce Rate
Bounce rate is a measure of how many visitors to a website leave (or “bounce”) without completing any desired action. This can be a sign that visitors are struggling to find content relevant to them, or worse, aren’t able to interact due to poor design or failing user experience.
According to HubSpot, your bounce rate is on the high side if it reaches 56%.
Bounce rate is important for SaaS businesses because it represents the effectiveness of the website at driving conversions. If the bounce rate is high, this indicates that the website’s content and design are failing to drive user engagement and conversion. Therefore, it is important for SaaS businesses to monitor their bounce rate in order to measure progress and make the necessary changes in an effort to improve customer experience.
Conduct an audit of your site's content and load speed. This could give you valuable insight into what you could be lacking. Then, you can come up with new content ideas or strategies that would better suit your target audience.
Optimize Page Speed
Optimizing page speed helps improve visibility and rankings on Google. It also improves the user experience, which helps to reduce the bounce rate and increase conversions. Faster page loading speeds impact the time it takes for a search engine bot to index web pages, leading to higher rankings in organic search results. Additionally, page speed optimization should be used when creating mobile versions of websites since slower-loading pages can reduce visibility on various mobile devices and platforms.
According to Portent, A site that loads in 1 second has a conversion rate 3x higher than a site that loads in 5 seconds.
Ensuring that your website loads as fast as possible can better improve your overall business. From the customers that visit your website to the search engines crawling your pages, it makes you a more reliable source therefore, you'll naturally start to rank higher.
Branded Traffic vs Non-Branded Traffic
Branded traffic refers to traffic that is directed towards an organization or website by using their brand name in the search query. This type of traffic generally leads to higher conversions as users are already searching for services associated with the brand. You can utilize this through PPC or organic traffic techniques. Just keep in mind, most of the time the traffic you'll gain from this is from consumers who already know about your business and offerings.
Non-Branded Traffic refers to web traffic generated when the user searches for generic terms such as a product category or problem-solving queries – meaning they are not seeking out your specific business or brand. This is an incredible resource for SaaS businesses because it gives them a broader audience, and allows them to capture people who may be unaware of their service.
Non-branded traffic also helps increase overall web visibility and helps you build trust, as there will be more content appearing on search results related to the SaaS business that can help potential customers find information about the company’s services quicker, which increases conversions in a shorter amount of time. This is why it's crucial that you figure out your audience's search intent and create your list of keywords based on your findings.