3 Leading SEO Experts On Link Building and Keyword Research For SaaS Start-ups

April 25, 2018
7 min read

At Outseta almost all of our customers are early stage SaaS start-ups; in many cases just a single Founder or a small group of Co-founders. Every single one of these companies knows they “should be doing SEO,” but between building your product, incorporating your business, testing other marketing channels, and hustling to make some early sales SEO too often gets pushed by the wayside.

That’s too bad, because the sooner you start taking SEO seriously the sooner your business will realize the the benefits of sustainable organic traffic. Even if you’re investing heavily in SEO, this often takes 12-18 months.

With this very challenge in mind, I decided to ask three leading SEO experts about two of the biggest SEO related challenges I see early stage SaaS start-ups face; both of which I'm wrestling with at Outseta.  

Let’s meet our experts.

Neil Patel, Co-founder of Kissmetrics, Crazy Egg, and Neil Patel Digital

Miguel Salcido, Founder and CEO, Organic Media Group

Marty Martin, Founder and CEO, Adapt Partners

Let’s do it.

Question #2 - Keyword selection in established, competitive categories

Geoff Roberts: At Outseta we offer a platform that integrates CRM, subscription billing, email marketing, help desk and knowledge base, and reporting tools. “CRM,” “Email marketing,” and “Subscription billing” are insanely competitive keywords - to the extent that I feel like it’s not even worth us really targeting them. Also, we sell a platform solution that isn’t nicely categorized as “marketing automation,” for example. As a result, I haven’t been very deliberate in selecting keywords to date; our SEO strategy has instead primarily been…

  1. The “normal” build your first few links stuff that start-ups do - building social media profiles, an Angellist profile, some start-up directories, reviews sites, etc.
  2. Creating very high quality, long form content - the idea being if the content is good enough, it will naturally build backlinks.
  3. Guest posts on other topically relevant blogs.

What’s your take on this approach? How would you recommend start-ups in established, competitive categories get more deliberate with keyword selection given these challenges?

Miguel Salcido: You are a hyper-niche B2B SaaS startup. There are no keywords to describe everything you do. So you will have to focus on the solutions your platform provides, and yes those are super competitive terms. I’d also focus on “startup” related terms (startup tools, SaaS startup tools, etc).

If you can find a similar company and see what they target, using SEMrush, then that’s a good idea for keyword research. 

Your approach so far is solid, just make sure the content is in fact really high quality and you do that by measuring engagement, email signups, links, and sharing. If you’re not getting those things, then your content is not resonating.

Neil Patel: I wouldn’t worry about keywords. Just blog about content that is super highly relevant (to your audience) and you will start to rank for terms. Next, place banners and links within blog content to landing pages to drive signups.

Finally, go into Google search console and see what pages get the most traffic. Look at the list of keywords that you are getting impressions for and then sprinkle in the keywords you haven’t mentioned on your site yet. The key isn’t to just add keywords, but it is to also expand the content.

Marty Martin: If you are starting a new niche or opportunity with your SaaS product, why not come up with a catchy industry name (think how Rand Fishkin of SparkToro and Dharmesh Shah of Hubspot coined the phrase "Inbound Marketing"), and start using that name in all of your marketing. Eventually, when people start searching for that phrase, you’ll already be the dominate player. Now, this isn’t an easy thing to do, but if it catches on, you’ll be set.

I think your approach above is time tested and can pay dividends with time, but most startups don’t have the luxury to wait for good content to become seasoned and linked to. Good, long form content can draw links over time, but it is a very slow process without outreach.

One thing that may get you more awareness is to build integrations for Zapier, IFTTT and similar services. I’ve become aware of many amazing tools just by browsing their integrations.

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Thank you to Miguel, Neil, and Marty for weighing in on these questions. For any SaaS start-up that’s resource constrained, I hope this provides some clarity on your approach to link building. And for any start-up competing in an established and extremely competitive category, hopefully the advice this group shared will help identify the keyword targeting strategy that will yield the most meaningful results for your business.

Growing SaaS start-ups

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