There’s a lot on your desk.
You’ve got 98 new emails to read for your SaaS with different tasks that needs to be done.
You’re wasting time on social media for hours a day but you’re not getting new customer, let alone generating sales. It seems like you’re tired of these SaaS-thing.
How do you smile again, and become one of the success SaaS entrepreneurs in your industry?
The simple answer is SEO. I know that you’re probably thinking, “Another SEO company?”
Before you give up, I’m not going to make promises but rather I’ll show you how SaaS companies like yours are killing it with SEO. In short, Google has become their ultimate customer acquisition channel.
Applying SEO tips to your SaaS website is hard. But it’s doable.
If you’re struggling to improve search engine visibility; get more organic traffic, rank higher in Google top 10 and acquire more customers this case study will help you.
You’ll learn how 21 SaaS companies improved their search visibility by using white hat SEO tactics. Discover new ideas, learn new skills, tricks and techniques, and above all, you’ll get inspiration to grow your SaaS revenue.
Let’s dive right in.
1). Webroot
Webroot is a cloud security SaaS company for homeowners, businesses, and enterprises. The company used inbound marketing to grow its business and to increase its organic traffic.
Back in its early days, it was hard for the company to generate traffic and sales. Organic traffic was not holding the company back.
It employed a link building strategy to acquire natural white hat backlinks such as guest blogging and content marketing.
It resulted in an increase of 108% web traffic in a year.
The team at Webroot worked with professional link builders to acquire white hat links and professional SEOs to fix the technical glitches that were not letting the website get all the love from search engines.
Once it’s done, the organic traffic started to increase year after year. Of course, they were also consistent with content creation — all of these activities led to increased traffic from Google.
Key takeaway: High-quality backlinks are helpful in improving your SaaS company’s website ranking but it should begin from proper on-site SEO.
Besides, it is crucial to work with experts if you don’t know what’s holding your website back in the search engines. Your marketing team might not have all the resources and experience as a professional agency might have.
2). Sherpa Software
Sherpa Software helps all types of companies in all parts of the world with its data governance solutions.
After the company changed the website design, it negatively impacted the traffic. The site was looking more professional than before but it lost rankings.
The SaaS company optimized its landing page to boost organic traffic. All the on-site factors were taken into account and the optimization worked.
Besides, Sherpa Software also identified partners for acquiring high-quality backlinks and for outreach. The aggressive blog outreach campaign was quite useful in improving the organic traffic.
This strategy resulted in:
- 336% increase in average monthly sessions.
- 111% increase in organic sessions.
Key takeaway: If your website’s design is not optimized, you’ll start losing traffic. The search engines won’t like your website despite all having a professional website design and authority. If it is not helping readers and search engines, you’ll not rank.
Consider redesigning and optimizing your website to boost organic traffic.
Blogging outreach doesn’t just help with driving targeted traffic to your blog but it helps a lot of search engine rankings. Partner with a few leading blogs in your niche to improve the organic traffic of your SaaS company.
3). PDF Pro
PDF Pro is an online PDF editor that helps its customers in editing PDF online. It’s a SaaS startup that helps individuals in creating, converting, and editing PDF files through the cloud.
Though it is an extremely easy-to-use PDF editor that saves its users from the pain of downloading massive PDF software on the machines.
Despite all its innovativeness, PDF Pro was not doing well with search engine ranking. It was competing some large PDF editors and creating tools.
Right after it was launched, PDF Pro was facing three challenges.
- Low search engine ranking due to low domain authority
- New company in a very competitive niche
- Paid traffic channels like PPC are way too expensive
A rigorous SEO strategy with a focus on inbound marketing was created and implemented to deal with these challenges.
Here’s what the strategy looked like.
- On-page optimization of the website
- Influencer outreach campaign
- Content marketing with a focus on competitive keywords
- Guest posting backed by founder interviews
It took PDF Pro 6 months to increase its organic traffic by 106,283%. This is a massive change and worth the time and investment. The SEO campaign helped the company achieve number one ranking for several medium competitive keywords.
The white hat link building SEO campaign helped in:
- Traffic increase by a factor of over 200.
- Ranking for over 500 different keywords.
- Increasing organic traffic from 141 to 150K a month.
Key takeaway: It doesn’t matter how competitive your niche is and who your competitors are, you can always beat your competition with a solid product and a great SEO strategy.
Getting featured on some leading authority blogs in your niche will help your brand get all the exposure and traffic it needs.
4). Azendoo
Azendoo is a French startup that offers an online collaboration and team management tool. It helps businesses integrate multiple messaging and team collaboration services like Evernote, Google Drive, etc. So essentially, it is an integration app.
It was getting hard for the Azendoo to organize marketing and integrate sales and marketing. The funnel wasn’t effective and the landing pages weren’t converting at a decent rate. Their team was unable to nurture leads.
This was quite frustrating for the entire team.
Azendoo signed up with HubSpot marketing platform to create new landing pages with powerful CTAs. They created multiple landing pages for different types of content such as eBooks, videos, guides, and infographics.
Things started to improve.
This tiny change resulted in 10% increase in customers, 20% increase in leads, and the conversion rate of the landing pages increased by a whopping 20%.
Importantly, the Growth Stack by HubSpot helped Azendoo in integrating the sales and marketing teams.
Key takeaway: If you’re getting enough organic traffic but no conversions, it means something isn’t working right.
Tweaking the landing page and adding more content types in the funnel will help your company nurture leads and increase conversion rate and sales.
5). Xero
Xero is an accounting software company based in New Zealand.
While Xero was working pretty well in their hometown as well as in Australia and the UK but it was interested to expand its business in the US.
Xero had three objectives:
- Increase organic traffic in the US
- Rank high for high-volume search terms in the US
- Improve brand awareness in the US
They worked with the Wpromote.com to achieve their goal.
Wpromote developed a customized plan for Xero that focused on two things:
- They started creating high-quality content.
- Off-site link building campaign was launched to feature the brand in top authority sites in the US.
This improved overall search engine ranking of the brand. In the US, the brand moved to top three for several high competitive keywords in the US.
Key takeaway: Ranking in a whole new country is quite possible and ranking for high competition and high-volume keywords in the US is not a big deal as long as you have a solid content marketing strategy in place.
Needless to say, white hat backlinks are more important than anything else.
6). Groove
Groove is a leading help desk software that is used by all types of businesses all over the world. Over 6,000 businesses use Groove. But it wasn’t an easy journey from 0 to 6,000 customers.
Groove didn’t do any SEO because it was supposed to be scammy approach and they didn’t have enough knowledge about the SEO, according to the founder Alex Turnbull.
But soon, it realized that the conversion rate and the organic traffic wasn’t enough.
The conversion from external sources was 2.9%, 5.1% from the blog, and 9.4% from organic traffic.
Groove wanted to give a push to the organic traffic because it was converting at an exceptional rate. The other issue was that the website was ranking quite low due to a single-page website.
So it created a solid SEO foundation. Here’s how they planned to go ahead with the SEO.
- In-depth keyword research
- Wireframing
- Redesigning the website
These 3-steps lead to a massive increase in conversions and organic traffic. Conversions jumped to 6.1%.
Key takeaway: SEO isn’t always scammy. It depends on how you approach it. A single-page website is hard to rank so consider redesigning your website to improve its search engine ranking and conversions.
7). OneFile
OneFile is a leading software for learning and development. Though it is a fairly old SaaS company but it recently started focusing on inbound marketing.
In 2016, OneFile was looking for an inbound marketing automation platform that will help them target their customers in a way better. With this challenge in mind, they moved to HubSpot.
OneFile used the following inbound marketing strategy to increase website’s traffic.
- They created buyer personas.
- They created a blog.
- Multiple landing pages were created for different types of buyers based on buyer personas.
The results that OneFile achieved are phenomenal.
The organic traffic increased by 8.5%. This was achieved in as low as four months. Creating at least one specific landing page for each buyer persona improved the quality of the leads immediately.
The conversion rate of the new landing pages increased by 200%.
Key takeaway: Inbound automation is not a bad thing at all. You can do wonders with it in terms of organic traffic and conversion rate. Buyer personas are the starting point for any marketing campaign, don’t underestimate buyer personas.
8). Zapier
Zapier is one of the fastest growing SaaS companies in this list. It offers apps for busy people that helps them automate their everyday tasks.
Zapier went from zero to 600K users in only 3 years and much of it can be attributed to SEO.
Zapier used SEO and content marketing to boost its search engine traffic and to increase users.
They followed a unique approach to SEO. Instead of writing and posting about their apps, they started writing about tools that their apps connect.
Here’s an example of Groove and Jira.
This helped them bring targeted traffic to their blog.
After two years, Zapier started investing big time in content marketing.
According to the founder Wade Foster, they started looking at how the top businesses were using content marketing. They started copying it. It took a year of hard work.
Today, the Zapier blog receives over 250K monthly readers.
Key takeaway: If you cannot beat your competitors for the exact match keywords that tend to be quite competitive, take a different approach. Be innovative.
Besides, investing in content marketing should be your business’s top priority. It might not pay off quickly but it will eventually. Don’t lose hope. Follow a proven content marketing strategy.
9). Salesforce
Salesforce is the top CRM software. I’m sure it doesn’t need any introduction.
It’s an award winning cloud computing software, a CRM tool, and perfect team collaboration suite. Despite all this, Salesforce wasn’t in Google top 10 for any of its primary keywords.
It partnered with Single Grain with the primary objective of capturing top position for 3 to 4 primary keywords. It wanted to dominate its market.
The strategy that Single Grain used to rank Salesforce is stated below:
- Multiple micro-sites were created. The high-quality content was added to these micro-sites.
- A powerful link building technique was used to acquire links for the Salesforce website and for each micro-site.
- Existing Salesforce properties and domain names were used to increase the authority of the micro-sites.
Though it was tough but Salesforce started to rank for seven keywords in 8 months.
It seems quite impressive provided the time taken to rank is just eight months.
Key takeaway: Competition and keyword volume don’t matter, you can outrank your competitors with a powerful long-term SEO strategy.
Micro-sites still work. You just have to use them the right way.
10). iAdvize
iAdvize is a French SaaS company that was founded in 2010. It offers a real-time customer engagement and conversation software to businesses.
iAdvize is growing rapidly and this is where it needed a solid marketing strategy. In 2014, iAdvize registered with HubSpot.
The iAdvize team took the following steps to revise its marketing strategy:
- Created buyer personas.
- Developed landing pages for each buyer persona.
- The landing pages were content-rich and offered ebooks, whitepapers, checklists, and in-depth articles to the visitors.
- A company blog was created to increase organic traffic.
Making all these changes was time-consuming but HubSpot made it easy. With the company blog and new landing pages, the website traffic increased by 3x and lead generation increased by 4 times.
The CRM tool, A/B testing, and integration between sales and marketing helped a lot. It improved the sales funnel and resulted in a reduction of 50% in the length of the sales cycle which was previously way too lengthy.
Key takeaway: Increase in traffic and leads becomes a whole lot easier if you’re using a powerful content.
Create buyer personas and start generating content that targets buyers. Once a visitor is on your website for the first time, make sure he lands on a customized landing page.
Keep sales cycle and sales funnel fairly small to convert leads into sales.
11). Intuit
Intuit offers personal finance and tax tools for small businesses. It has multiple tools such as TurboTax, QuickBooks, Mint, and others.
Intuit offers multiple services and tools, therefore, it was challenging for the SaaS company to allocate its resource and to differentiate itself in the search results.
Intuit contacted Single Grain to improve its search ranking for primary keywords. The following strategy was used to improve search engine ranking.
- The company started posting high-quality content on its blog to identify itself as a free website builder.
- Blogging and social media were used to target the right clients for the brand.
- An in-depth competitive analysis revealed link building opportunities.
It took 7 months to achieve phenomenal results. The ranking for company’s top keywords improved significantly.
Key takeaway: Competitive analysis is still the best approach to identify link building opportunities. This is not just the best approach but a technique with best ROI. You can identify what a link worth and how much it will cost to acquire it.
12). BuildFire
BuildFire is a California-based SaaS company that offers an app building platform for small businesses.
BuildFire was launched in 2014 and after 12 months, it reached 100K page views. Interestingly, it was all organic traffic.
This wasn’t an easy journey that started something like this.
- Competitor analysis
- Identifying traffic opportunities
- Existing content audit
- Industry content analysis
The following SEO strategies were used to increase traffic.
- Parasite SEO
- Product hunt
- Influencer outreach
- Blogging
- Sponsorships
- Journalist outreach
- Link building
This is a massive marketing campaign but it worked.
The SaaS company moved from zero to a million monthly visitors in 12 months with over 1000K pageviews. Today, it’s used by more than 100K businesses.
Key takeaway: A powerful SEO and content marketing campaign can help you rank for a whole lot of high-competition keywords pretty much in any niche.
A good SEO strategy is a mix of all types of approaches and techniques ranging from parasite SEO to blogging to outreach.
Don’t stick to a single approach.
13). Qzzr
Qzzr is an online tool that helps you create amazing and highly customized online quizzes.
It’s a famous brand that is used by all types of large and small businesses. Qzzr, however, wasn’t ranking well for its primary keywords.
The team at Big Leap helped Qzzr in improving its search engine ranking for several primary keywords.
The initial audit revealed that Qzzr was ranking on the first page for 5 out of 300 keywords.
Other issues that were identified and fixed include:
- Duplicate content in the form of quizzes.
- Links weren’t redirected properly after domain migration in the past.
- JavaScript quizzes were not crawled properly by the search engine crawlers. This was fixed.
This SEO tweaks doubled organic traffic in as low as eight months. Qzzr is ranking on the first page for 130 keywords.
Key takeaway: Even if you’re a famous SaaS company that has been featured in several top authority blogs, if you’re not ranking well for your primary keywords, there is something fishy.
Fix issues with SEO, duplicate content, and other technical issues to improve search engine ranking. It’s not always about getting high-quality backlinks. If your website is not optimized for on-page SEO, you’ll lose customers.
14). Workfront
Workfront is a project management tool for enterprises. It’s a quite famous SaaS company that is used by some big names like Sony, Cisco, and others.
Workfront noticed that the conversion rate of its landing pages wasn’t impressive. It reached out to Big Leap for landing pages CRO.
The biggest issue with the landing pages was that they weren’t optimized for the right target audience. Big Leap optimized the landing pages for the different types of the target audience.
The changes included:
- Video formatting
- Landing page formatting
- Changes in the content
These changes resulted in a whopping 104% increase in conversion rate of one of the landing pages. Based on the winning landing page, a template was developed to create upcoming landing pages.
Key takeaway: Getting lots of organic traffic is of no use if the conversion rate of your landing page is poor. If your landing page doesn’t convert well, optimize it.
Check for errors. Use A/B testing to see what works.
Getting traffic isn’t the key. Generating sales is.
15). Fieldwire
Fieldwire is one of the leading construction apps that is helpful in construction management especially on a job site.
The Fieldwire had several issues related to marketing such as:
- No in-house marketing team
- Poor traffic
- Low search engine ranking
- SERPs dominated by large brands
Canirank used the following strategy to help the SaaS company:
- Optimization of high potential pages
- Content marketing strategy developed to improve traffic as well as conversions
- Influencer outreach campaign initiated
- In-house
This strategy helped Fieldwire in several ways including a $6.6 million funding. The search engine traffic and rankings improve significantly. Most importantly, the authority of the website increased by 35%.
In as low as 6 months, the Fieldwire was ranking in the top for all its primary keywords and ranking of more than 200 keywords improved significantly.
Above all, the traffic increased by 853% in just 6 months.
This is really amazing, isn’t it?
Key takeaway: Having a great product doesn’t mean you’ll rank well in SERPs and you’ll be able to compete with the large brands. You have to invest in SEO, content, and link building to beat your competitors and rule the search engines.
16). CoScale
CoScale is a new Belgian SaaS company that has a web performance monitoring tool for businesses.
CoScale, right after its launch, was having several goals that it wanted to achieve. These included:
- Right content for the right target audience.
- Nurture leads.
- Offering prospects with the right content at every stage of the funnel.
Interestingly, CoScale knew what it wanted to achieve. It quickly started using HubSpot marketing platform.
This is the marketing strategy that CoScale used to outrank its competitors.
- It created buyer personas.
- Blog development.
- They started creating extremely targeted content for its buyer personas.
- Different landing pages were created backed by useful content.
- Autoresponders were set up to communicate with the leads throughout the funnel.
CoScale increased its traffic by 165% in just 12 months, it increased leads by 250%, and a whopping increase in customers by 4x.
Key takeaway: Creating buyer personas and creating the right content for each buyer segment will help you with two things: traffic and conversions.
In order to sell your SaaS platform, you need to provide right content at every stage of the funnel and must communicate constantly with your leads.
17). Scale
Scale is an awesome resource management app for digital agencies. It helps track time, project management, profitability analysis, and more.
Scale was facing a major issue when it was launched. It wasn’t getting new customers. It wasn’t getting any traffic from search engines.
It needed leads instantly and a long-term growth strategy that will help it in getting new customers.
Cobloom created a marketing and growth strategy for Scale that included the following approaches and techniques:
- Inbound marketing strategy
- Inbound sales
- PPC campaign for instant sales
- Growth strategy for long-term success
This strategy started generating leads and sales right away. The sales increased month after month for Scale.
Social media and search engine traffic was used to target different buyer personas. This pushed Scale to the right path.
Key takeaway: If you have a strong SaaS platform and you’re still not getting any sales, try PPC to see if it is really something that customers are ready to buy.
If buyers respond, switch to inbound marketing and start focusing on organic traffic for a long-term growth strategy.
18). TrekkSoft
TrekkSoft is one of the leading SaaS for tour operators that helps them in managing online bookings.
Though it was founded in 2010 but it joined HubSpot marketing platform in 2014 for three main reasons:
- To improve organic traffic
- To increase leads
- To increase customers
Quite simple, right?
TrekkSoft took these steps after joining HubSpot platform.
- Moved its blog from WordPress to Blog App.
- Created different landing pages to collect leads using forms.
- Landing pages used different content types to collect attract visitors.
In 6 months, TrekkSoft doubled its organic traffic, expanded its team from 15 to 40 employees, new leads were increased by 109%, and a 12x increase in social media leads.
Key takeaway: WordPress is not the only blogging platform. You should go out and try other CMS too just like TrekkSoft.
Creating targeted landing pages for different target segments is the best approach to increasing leads and traffic. One of the TrekkSoft’s eBooks was downloaded 5000 times.
This shows if you’ve high-quality content for your audience, they will download it at every cost.
19). Visible Equity
Visible Equity is a SaaS platform that helps financial institutions in data warehousing and analytics.
Visible Equity was planning to switch from outbound marketing to inbound marketing because outbound marketing wasn’t working for the company.
Smartbug Media helped the SaaS company to implement a long-term inbound marketing strategy.
Here’s what the strategy included:
- Buyer persona development
- SEO strategy
- Blog development
- Content strategy
- Lead generation strategy
- Social marketing strategy
- Campaigns execution in HubSpot
It was a really long-term growth strategy that consisted of pretty much everything.
But results were visible in only 4 months.
- 100% increase in lead generation
- 44% increase in organic traffic
- 608% increase in social traffic
Key takeaway: When outbound marketing doesn’t work, shift to inbound marketing even if it seems a whole lot of work. As a SaaS company, you cannot miss inbound marketing.
20). Halo
Halo is a supply chain intelligence solution for all types of businesses.
Halo was interested in two things:
- Increase its organic traffic
- Increase conversion rate
The management knew their website was underperforming because they were not seeing a decent conversion rate.
Main Path created a detailed SEO strategy for Halo.
- Infographics and ebooks were created to provide high-quality content to the readers and to acquire backlinks from authority websites.
- Optimized landing page by tweaking it several times.
- Social media marketing and brand mentions were used to connect with authority sites.
- The website was optimized and SEO glitches were fixed.
The organic traffic increased by 77% year over year and conversion rate increased by 35%.
Key takeaway: High-quality content and a search engine friendly website are the backbone of SEO. Quality content doesn’t just drive traffic from search engines but it helps your brand acquire backlinks naturally.
21). Earth Class Mail
Earth Class Mail is an interesting SaaS company that lets its users convert paper mail into an electronic email. It’s a mail scanning, forwarding, and virtual address provider.
Earth Class Mail was acquired by Xenon Ventures in 2015. It wanted to grow Earth Class Mail since it’s not doing well.
Conversion Rate Experts conducted an in-depth analysis of the Earth Class Mail and identified its strengths and weaknesses. Previous data was used along with customer surveys to identify loopholes.
It only did two things.
- Landing page was optimized
- Pricing page was optimized
The new landing page increased leads by 61% because the value proposition was amplified and made prominent and a proof was used to increase trust.
Pricing page optimization increased leads by 57%. The new pricing page explained the services in more detail than the previous one and it also offered a money back guarantee.
Overall, these two tweaks doubled the lead generation.
Key takeaway: Optimizing your landing page, pricing page, and all other pages is also a part of SEO strategy. If the pages aren’t optimized, a million hits from search engines won’t do anything.