Most successful businesses are built on top of a brilliant idea. Of course, you’ll need to work hard to actually build on top of the idea and make it a success.
Failure to execute is the reason that less than 25% of new businesses make it longer than 15 years.
Specific areas of failure can include faulty marketing execution, lack of knowledge about modern marketing techniques, and improper definition of who the target audience is in the first place.
You won’t find a single solitary foolproof measure to ensure your business works out. But there is plenty you can do to increase the chances you’ll survive in the long run.
Here are some of the achievements you can put in place to build your business for future success:
- Correctly identifying and profiling your potential target market
- Developing an integrated marketing plan that delivers a consistent message about your business to the target market
- Establishing and monitoring the marketing budget
- Evaluating which marketing mediums impact the business’s growth and profitability, and then taking corrective action where needed
- Ensuring there is a balance between conventional and digital marketing mediums when promoting the business.
For that final item, the balance is highly subjective and dependent on the product or service the company is providing, as well as the audience you are targeting.
In conventional marketing, the primary mediums of marketing include advertising, trade marketing activities, and new product trials. These are all aimed at lead generation and conversion of the customer to the business’s product or service.
Alternatively, digital marketing includes things like paid advertising, third party recommendations, social media & influencer marketing, and Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
These items are more focused on attaining growth and stability.
What is SaaS?
SaaS is the abbreviation for Software as a Service. This is a means of making software available to users via a third-party distribution model.
A third party platform hosts multiple software applications on its domain to be used or downloaded by users worldwide.
SaaS only permits approved users on a particular network base to login to the application for their use.
Any updates or new developments on a specific application are made available to all customers who have permission to use the actual application.
SaaS can also be merged with localized applications and can then be provided to its users using an Application Programming Interface (API).
The benefits of SaaS for an organization includes the following:
Access to Top of the Line Applications
Once you sign up for a SaaS, you will not need to buy or maintain any other applications separately. SaaS is built, operated secured, and even regularly updated all on the “cloud.”
No Hidden Payments
With SaaS products, there are no hidden payments. You will only pay for the software you use, and in some cases, you only pay for how much you use the software (as bandwidth, queries, modules, etc.).
The Software for your Client Users is Free
The SaaS applications are developed to run on any web browser. No additional software on the client computer will need to be purchased in order to run it.
Increased Mobility
Since SaaS applications can be used from any location, they provide a high level of mobility to the users. The only limiting factor is whether or not they have sufficient bandwidth on their internet connection.
Any good SaaS platform will have been tested for compatibility on multiple systems, platforms, and device types. In this way, users should enjoy a smooth and easy user experience on computers and mobile phones alike.
SaaS also provides very high data security for all access and storage of user data on the application.
Provision of Cloud Storage Service
Similar to the software itself, all application and user related data is stored safely and securely on the cloud, where it is accessible from any location that has internet access.
How SaaS SEO Can Help Grow Your Business
SaaS represents one of the biggest breakthroughs in the software industry recently. Over time, a large number of SaaS platforms and software have been developed and made available to businesses as well as the general public.
Every new or updated SaaS solution offers new features and increased compatibility, helping them better differentiate from competitive offerings.
Because of the competitive nature of SaaS markets, smart software vendors are leaning on SaaS SEO to help enhance their brand visibility and generate leads on small budgets.
It is no longer enough to offer the best features to the user. Your SaaS product must also appear among the top search results on the most relevant SERPs for your solution.
SaaS SEO Definition
Search Engine Optimization is an organic means of promoting a business via organic listings on search engines. When done properly, SEO will play a pivotal role in overall revenue growth.
Alternatively, only the most niche-based SaaS products will be able to succeed without any presence in the search results.
How to Hire SaaS SEO Help
If you search for help from a SaaS SEO expert or consulting group, you will most certainly find a range of possible options. After all, they’re SEO companies, so they know how to get their own websites ranked!
Choose carefully, because not all SEO businesses are the same.
Make sure you find a vendor who operates with all White Hat principles, who is highly transparent about their offerings, and who NEVER promises specific traffic or ranking gains.
No one knows when Google will change their algorithm in ways that will help or hurt any specific website, so guarantees of anything aside from the strategies, actions, and tactics sold to you are snake oil when it comes to the SEO industry.
How to Measure SaaS SEO Performance
If you plan to invest in ranking your website, take care to track the right SaaS SEO metrics to understand whether or not you are moving in the right direction. These include the following:
Website Engagement
This measures how the individuals who visit your SaaS platform interact with it, the amount of the time they spend on your website, and what the most engaging content is for them on your website.
It also tracks the number of pages a user visits, as well as what they click on your SaaS platform.
At times customers may not read all of the content on a page and click the back button instead. This is also a component of this metric.
If your website engagement score is high, your website is appealing to visitors and appears easily among Google’s search results.
Link Score
This metric analyzes the links within your website between different pages, the presence of other high-quality third party links on your platform, and the presence of links pointed at your website from other reliable platforms.
If your website performs well on these components, it will have a high link score.
This score will in turn improve the standing of your SaaS platform among the search results.
Content on Your SaaS Platform
Your website’s content is one of SEO’s most integral components.
This includes the use of keywords relevant to your business in the content, the length of the text, its readability score, visuals like images and videos, and interactive elements.
User-Friendliness and Website Infrastructure
An easy-to-use SaaS platform coupled with a well-established infrastructure always ranks better on Google’s search results.
Growing a SaaS Business With SEO
Once your SaaS platform’s digital marketing strategy has been completed by using SEO, it has much higher likelihood of growth and success.
This is because SEO improves a SaaS platform’s user experience relative to competitors. And it also helps you appear amongst the top searcher results on Google.
With so many options among SaaS platforms, you simply MUST get SEO right to compete, grow, and generate steady ongoing revenue streams.
Once this happens, you’ll grow overall traffic to the website, many of whom you should be able to convert to paying customers.
Of course, there are additional metrics worth tracking if you want to truly understand the business impact of your SEO efforts, including the following:
Organic Traffic
This metric will show you the trends regarding visitors who come to your website by clicking on Google’s organic search results.
You will find a range of tools available for tracking organic traffic. Google Analytics is the most common analytics platform you see on websites, and it just happens to be free (for the base version; Google also offers a paid enterprise version called Analytics 360).
With recent changes in regulations, specifically GDPR, many websites are allowing users to opt out of cookies. This can hinder Google Analytics’ ability to report accurate numbers.
Several marketing platforms like Hubspot have started to include robust internal analytics, so consider this type of solution if your business can afford to take it on.
Keyword Rankings and Movement
Any successful SEO campaign will result in improvement with keyword rankings.
That said, the old way of ranking a website for the top 10-20 keywords is no longer the way to go. That will only represent a small fraction of overall traffic with semantic search leading the way for intent-based matching within Google’s AI engine.
So you’ll need to track a larger list of semantic topic clusters. If you do this correctly, you’ll see the following in the order provided:
- Increase in overall number of keywords ranking
- Improvement in overall keyword ranking over the site
- Larger number of keywords appearing on page one
- Improved rankings for your most important keywords
So aim to keep tabs on total number of keywords ranking, and even perhaps ranks gained or lost, on a regular basis (monthly or quarterly). But also figure out how to generate the second and third metric, while tracking your top priority keywords as a secondary measure.
You will find that these numbers should all improve as you continue to work on better and better SEO for your domain.
New Visitors
Higher number of visits to your platform is an excellent indicator of your business’s growth.
But keep in mind that not ever visitor will purchase your SaaS product.
Still, you want to see the volume of new visitors increase.
If you get more visitors and can convert them to customers at a similar rate, you’ll be growing your bottom line throughout.
Conversions
As we just mentioned, you want to attract more visitors who will buy.
You should be tracking both total number of conversions/purchases as well as what conversion rate you’re seeing among those visitors, according to SEO Hamilton.
If you see increases on both metrics, you’re getting the SEO right.
However, if you see both decreasing, step back and re-evaluate your approach to determine how you need to pivot to fix it.
Conclusion
A business needs revenue to grow and remain successful over a period of time.
Whether it is a conventional business that operates in the “brick and mortar world, or more prominent in the digital domain like SaaS, you will need consistent earnings to sustain growth.
The marketing strategies summarized above should form the SaaS platform’s digital marketing strategy. If done correctly, they will play vital roles in making the business succeed over time.
Feature Image Credit: CC 0; Public Domain. Feature Image sourced from pxfuel.com
Disclaimer: The views and opinions stated in this post are that of the author, and Return On Now may or may not agree with any or all of the commentary.
This guest post brought to you courtesy of Return On Now, Professional Austin SEO and PPC Services Company.
Sehrish Yunus
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