Losing out to your competitors in search results despite putting in a ton of effort on SaaS SEO? If your answer is yes, it could be because you organize your SaaS SEO activities the wrong way.
To help you with SEO, you can hire freelance specialists, get an in-house professional, or turn to a SaaS SEO consulting agency. But it is not only the processes but their structuring and management that define the outcomes of SEO. With a project-based approach to SaaS SEO consulting, you can receive better results for your product — and for your ROI.
In this article, we’re going to talk about the project-based approach in detail using some real-life examples. But before that, let’s discuss potential reasons why your current SaaS SEO doesn’t bring desired results.
Why your SaaS SEO doesn’t work
In a nutshell, SaaS SEO comes down to a set of practices: keyword research, backlink acquisition, content optimization, and technical audits. They all aim at improving your product’s website visibility and search engine ranking. Although there are tons of free content on how to do SEO on the web, succeeding in it is magic outside Hogwarts.
Let’s say, you have purchased some guest articles, optimized meta properties, and added keywords to your website, but your pages still don’t shine in the top-10 Google search results. This can happen due to the following reasons.
Your SEO is not collaborative
SEO doesn’t work by itself. To succeed in SEO, you need to integrate it into your SaaS product’s marketing, sales, website development, and content production processes.
You can’t choose the right keywords for your blog articles without knowing what your target audience is looking for. Same way, enhancing your website using SEO best practices would be ineffective without learning the product’s value proposition and benefits.
To come up with an effective SEO strategy, assessing your current website ranking and technical errors is not enough. SaaS SEO consulting should also take into account the product’s positioning, buyer personas, and the types of content that these buyer personas are more likely to consume.
Some companies choose to hire in-house SEO specialists, but outsourcing SaaS SEO activities is a popular and cost-effective alternative. However, when opting for outsourcing, SEO is often managed separately from other in-house activities, which doesn’t always bring the desired results. SEO should be a combined effort to work effectively in the long run.
Your SEO is unfocused
SEO “benefits” are often mistakenly perceived as “objectives”. For example: increasing traffic, acquiring backlinks, improving website usability. Let’s imagine you’re building a bridge. A bridge can increase commerce, speed up travel, promote tourism, and create more jobs. But those are all benefits. The objective is to build a bridge (duh).
Having a defined business objective, you will be able to focus your SaaS SEO activities on achieving it. On the other hand, without any clear objectives, search engine optimization won’t save the day.
Your SEO is an ongoing routine, not a campaign
On the one hand, SEO requires constant activities such as keyword research, on-page optimization and monitoring a website’s health and rankings. But on the other hand, you won’t get any results if you treat SaaS SEO as a routine and don’t specify any project goals and milestones. So, if you choose to manage SaaS SEO as a project or campaign, you will have to define your goals clearly and how to measure them, and as a result, increase the effectiveness of SEO.
All said above explains how you don’t want to manage your SEO campaigns (and we really ask you not to). But how do you manage SEO activities to get to the top of Google, then? We’re just about to explain…
Solution: Project-based approach to SEO consulting
The project-based approach means managing your SEO activities as several temporary projects instead of turning the process into a routine. A project breaks into a defined set of actions that has a start and end date, and most importantly, a measurable goal to achieve. With a project-based SaaS SEO approach, you can organize your campaigns into a transparent and consistent process with specified outcomes, clear deliverables and a coordinated workflow.
Key characteristics of an SEO project
Below are the main principles of a project-based approach to SaaS SEO consulting that we at Kaiiax apply when working on our clients’ projects.
Work break-down structure
With the work break-down structure, a SaaS SEO project is divided into a certain set of actions orchestrated to achieve a pre-defined goal. For example, one of our clients, MindK - a web and mobile app development company, turned to us with a request to help with lead generation in education and recruitment niches. Because their budget for linkbuilding was limited, we decided to go for a Tier-2 linkbuilding strategy (making links not directly to the target website's pages, but to external pages that have existing links to the website). Using this linkbuiding approach, our team enhanced the website authority and hid the SEO promotion from competitors.
We also created a content plan to write blog posts optimized for search queries in education and recruitment niches that target different types of readers (problem-aware and solution-aware). Along with the SEO campaign, the content helped increase traffic to our client’s website and the visibility of the pages that rank for our target keywords. We managed to complete our plan in three months.
As a result of our work, MindK received qualified leads from the education and recruitment industries. You can read more about this case.
Team responsibilities
Once we defined what needs to be done and came up with a team structure for each project, it’s time to clarify who does what. Well-defined responsibilities help share the workload and organize effective communication between the project team members.
Here is a matrix that shows how we divide the areas of responsibility between team members involved in the project.
Project life-cycle
A project has defined start and completion dates, and the process is divided into certain phases or steps. The lifecycle breaks down into certain stages, each with specific deliverables.
For all our SEO projects, we follow an iterative approach. After completing the SEO plan, we measure and access the outcomes. When everything works as expected, we keep on. If not, we continue only after refining and adjusting the SEO processes (reconsidering keywords, creating new content, and linkbuilding).
We measure the results of SEO by the time we plan the project to end. We also assess the outcomes every month to see if we've achieved the final goal. This process lets us keep abreast of the website traffic and changes in lead generation and adapt the SEO to them.
To illustrate, this is how we measure the pages' progress for our client Bridge - a web platform for global tech talent acquisition. We set the target date and desired keyword position and monitor the page’s progress by the end of each month.
Defined project success criteria
By success criteria, we mean specific measurable objectives to be met by the project completion date. Having defined them, you can organize your promotional activities around a practical result.
For instance, one of our SEO projects for JatApp – a full-cycle software development company – is aimed at improving the website's health to fix the problem of low traffic. We found out that the JatApp website had many spam backlinks, which hindered all SEO activities. Our team decided to fix this problem by adding links with natural anchor text and removing toxic links.
As a result of our work, the JatApp website got rid of the Google's penalties and had a nice increase in organic traffic.
Organize your SaaS SEO in an efficient way
If your SaaS SEO results leave much to be desired, maybe it’s time to change the way you organize SEO and give a try to a project-based approach. With a clear workflow, defined lifecycle, and focus on goals, a project-based approach helps you receive measurable results for your SEO campaigns.
We at Kaiiax set up, implement, and manage SEO campaigns for our clients in the tech industry. To learn more about our SEO consulting services, visit our website.
