In the competitive landscape of medical device marketing, the quest to effectively reach healthcare professionals and decision-makers has always been difficult.
The dynamic nature of the healthcare industry demands a strategic approach that not only showcases the technical prowess of your medical devices but also establishes trust, addresses pain points, and offers tailored solutions.
By the end of this blog, you will be able to create strategic approaches in your marketing that will help your medical devices stand out.
In this guide, we delve into five expert-level tips that can elevate your medical device marketing game. From crafting content that resonates with your buyer persona to leveraging the power of paid advertising and SEO, these strategies are designed to create a robust marketing framework that resonates with your target audience, builds credibility, and drives meaningful conversions.
One of the key pillars of successful medical device marketing is tailoring your content to your specific target audience or buyer persona. As highlighted in our article on HCP marketing, understanding the pain points, challenges, and needs of your audience is crucial.
For example, this resource by McKesson on lab solutions for urgent care facilities is a prime example of tailored content. As McKesson provides lab solutions that are related to the topic, not only are they introducing themselves as a solutions provider but they are doing it in a way that is first and foremost beneficial to the end reader by showcasing how these solutions provide faster results and better patient experience.
By developing in-depth knowledge about the healthcare professionals (HCPs) and decision-makers who are likely to engage with your medical device, you can create content that resonates with them, address their concerns, provide solutions to their problems, and showcase the benefits of your device in a language that speaks directly to their expertise.
By showing that you understand their unique challenges and can provide valuable solutions, you’re more likely to build trust and credibility.
Outsource Content Marketing for Expertise in Conversion-focused Content
While you’re an expert in medical devices, you may not be an expert at creating persuasive and effective sales copy or understanding how to utilize content marketing to drive more leads and sales.
This is where outsourcing content creation comes into play. By partnering with vendors that specialize in biotech content marketing and offer different areas of expertise – graphic design, marketing, writing, etc. – you can take your medical device marketing beyond the merits of the product itself.
For example, this resource from ThermoFisher Scientific on “Useful Numbers for Cell Culture” is a great example of conversion-focused content. Here’s why:
It provides an easy-to-use reference point for the target audience to utilize
The page ranks for over 1,100 keywords (according to Ahrefs), including “useful numbers for cell culture” which gets an estimated 2,300 searches per month alone
The resource naturally introduces relevant product categories as ThermoFisher understand that a searcher looking for appropriate cell culture dishes and flasks may need to purchase more based on this resource
Whether it’s crafting engaging articles, designing visually appealing infographics, or producing persuasive marketing copy, outsourcing ensures that your content is not only accurate but also captivating.
Your Website as Your Primary Sales Tool
In medical device marketing, your website serves as more than just an online presence; it’s a dynamic platform that can drive your sales and conversions. Your potential customers, whether they are healthcare professionals or decision-makers, often turn to your website for detailed information before making purchasing decisions.
Your website should function as an intuitive and informative hub that not only showcases the features of your medical devices but also educates visitors about its applications, benefits, and real-world user experiences.
To achieve this, focus on incorporating captivating visuals, user-friendly navigation, and compelling Calls to Action (CTAs) strategically placed throughout your website. Include detailed product descriptions, case studies, success stories, and any relevant certifications or awards that underline the credibility of your medical device. By creating a seamless online experience, you can capture leads, nurture prospects, and guide them through their decision-making process.
Let’s look at the following example from Qiagen. On their website, can easily navigate with their simple menu bar at the top, a panel of rotating images with different CTA’s, and multiple custom graphics related to applications. This home page is an example of a good sales tool as it helps funnel visitors down a path with an easy-to-use interface and site structure.
An additional aspect of using a website as a sales tool is building trust and credibility. It’s one thing to say “our products are the best” and another when other trusted references do it for you.
Throughout their website they have littered several instances of subtle social proof. For example, in their case stories section, they have multiple doctors talking about how great and effective their products are. This gives Qiagen respect and authority, resonating with their potential customers as these claims come from third-party clients.
In another social proof example, at the top of this page, we see the logos of brands Qiagen is associated with. These provide a subconscious level of social proof and credibility that a visitor would likely take comfort in should they be considering using the brand. Second, they have a blog section with informative articles that establish them as a thought leader in the space.
Leverage Paid Ads to Fill Your Sales Pipeline
Paid advertising is a strategic avenue for accelerating your medical device marketing efforts. Google Ads, as highlighted for search intent, allow you to capture the attention of ideal clients actively searching for relevant keywords related to your device(s). This ensures that your product is visible at the precise moment when potential customers are seeking solutions.
Below, we see two different ad types. The top ad with pictures are Google Shopping Ads while the second are Google Search Ads. This is valuable real estate for brands that want to get in front of searchers with purchase intent.
Additionally, LinkedIn ads are also effective for targeting Ideal Customer Profiles (ICPs) in the medical field. The platform’s advanced targeting options enable you to reach specific job titles, industries, and professional demographics.
For these ad types, it is recommended to partner with a company experienced with biotech paid media so that they can evaluate and recommend paid advertising opportunities on a case-by-case basis.
SEO for Full-Circle Sales Cycle Awareness & Lead Generation
SEO can drive organic traffic, generate leads and ensure a continuous flow of engaged prospects through the various stages of your sales funnel. For medical device sales specifically, an SEO plan should revolve around:
Product pages
Category pages (see example below)
Supporting content to drive traffic and brand awareness
For example, the below page from DRE Medical appears to have invested in some SEO in order to rank this page on ENT Equipment.
They rank number 1 for key high purchase intent keywords such as “ent medical supplies,” “ent equipment” and others related to their product offerings. This is an example of bottom-of-the-funnel SEO as it relates to purchase intent.
The site also does a good job of funneling search traffic for top-of-the-funnel searches with its medical glossary, which ranks for general searches like “nasalplasty” or “fulguration.”
If your company doesn’t have in-house staff to constantly work on developing your SEO for the medical devices, it is strongly encouraged that you partner with an agency that can help make sure your medical devices don’t slip through the cracks.
Incorporating these expert-level tips into your medical device marketing strategy can position your brand for success, resonate with your target audience, and enhance your overall marketing effectiveness.
Save Time and Get More Backlinks with these 11 Link Building Prospecting Hacks
If you’ve ever tried to do the manual outreach of link building you know how hard it can be. You can do email outreach to dozens or 100’s of sites and get little to no responses.
More often than not, I’ve learned that the reason for this is that you have chosen a poor site to perform outreach too.
In today’s video, (which is something of an advanced SEO tutorial) I’ll show you 11 quick link prospecting hacks — in part based on Google’s Panda Questionnaire — that will save you time, help you filter your link building prospecting sites more quickly, and ultimately, give you more outreach success, resulting in better rankings and more traffic.
What is the Panda Questionnaire?
Before we begin, here is some context to using the Google Panda Questionnaire and why the questions that were used to help people vet “high-quality” sites are some of the same ones we use for building high-quality links.
Here’s how this process came to be:
Google gave questions to a group of people, had them assess a bunch of websites, and then ran machine learning algorithms on top of the human data. In effect, these questions helped move up or down search results based on human feedback. The primary factory of “what makes a quality website” was incorporated into Google’s Panda algorithm.
You can use variations of these same questions when link prospecting to ensure you are getting the most value out of your link building efforts. These are some of those Panda questions mixed in with some of our own link prospecting questions.
1. Does the site contain contextually relevant content
Is the site’s content you want to build links from similar in scope or nature to that of your site? In other words, is the link going to be contextually relevant? If so, that means it is likely a strong link candidate. Now, not all sites have to cover the same types content as yours, but it definitely is a preference.
For example, if you run a fitness website, you could make a connection with a nutrition website as the two main focuses of content — fitness and nutrition — are related.
2. Would you trust information from this website?
Does the site’s aesthetic meet your professional “website sixth sense?”
You can easily tell if a site looks credible or not. If it doesn’t, don’t waste your time prospecting it.
3. Would you recognize this site as an authority?
Sites that cover all sorts of different, irrelevant content are usually a waste of time and link farms. On the other hand, if the content seems very credible, well-researched, and professionally made, then it likely makes for a good link prospect.
4. Would you give this site your credit card info?
We’ve all been to websites that sell products or services that we instantly have a sense of trust with. Some of these trust signals may include an SSL certificate, professional design, and a strong brand presence.
If the site doesn’t pass the “smell test” of one that you’d make a purchase from, scratch it from your link outreach list.
5. Does the domain rating match what you are looking for?
At Digital Elevator, we use the Ahrefs Chrome extension to quickly see the Domain Rating (DR) of a website. You can also use the MozBar which displays Domain Authority.
Internally, when we do link prospecting, we’ll generally set a floor for the DR of the sites we want to get links from. For example, often this floor is a DR 30 meaning that a site with a DR under 30 will be thrown out immediately.
This is especially true if you are using guest posting as a link building strategy – you don’t want to dedicate a bunch of time to a site that demands 1,000 word posts when they have a low domain authority.
The idea is to prospect quickly, and that also means that you don’t want to waste time on a site that may give you a link if the link is weak and doesn’t provide the SEO value that you want in your link building efforts.
6. Is the site written by subject matter experts?
Does the site seem to let anyone guest post? Do the writers seem to conduct thorough research and have insightful content?
Read through a blog or two to get an idea of the quality. If it is choppy and littered with grammar errors, it probably is a poor outreach partner for you.
7. Does the site get any traffic for relevant keywords?
Check the keywords the target site is ranking for to determine if it actually gets any traffic. We use Ahrefs to do this, but there are a number of SEO software tools you can use. A trustworthy site will generally rank for a number of keywords whereas a spammy site will likely rank for none.
You have to watch out for spammy sites that have artificially inflated DR; these links look good on paper but are unlikely to help your efforts.
8. Does the site regularly post or are they an active brand?
There are a few ways you can do this:
See if they publish blogs regularly
If not, check their social media feeds to see if they are active
On that note, see if their content actually gets any social shares (an indication of some sort of following)
9. Is there actually a person you can contact (rather than just a generic email)?
Many sites hide their email because they don’t want to get spammed. While you can use a service like ContactOut or Hunter to find emails, if there is no real contact information you may want to scratch them off the list.
10. Does the site have a “Sponsored Post” option?
This means they are big enough to get money for their posts and means, technically, it’s only an advertising opportunity. If you do outreach to these types of sites, expect them to respond with a “yes, but it will cost you ‘x’” for a post.
11. Is the site a really large brand?
Large brands typically have in-house teams that create content and are unlikely to respond to any link outreach. While you can certainly try to perform outreach to them, I generally find them unlikely to respond.
What other vetting questions do you use to prospect sites? Please let me know in the comments.
If your company has a lack of SEO talent or your current team is struggling to keep up with all your SEO campaigns, it may be time to outsource your SEO to a third-party like an agency or specialist.
While I would argue that some tasks are best left for internal teams, SEO is just one of those areas where companies of all sizes can benefit from an advanced SEO specialist or a team of SEOs whose sole focus is to help you grow traffic and sales.
Today, we are going to review a few of the nuances you’ll want to consider when outsourcing your SEO, including:
The 2 SEO Outsourcing Models
How to Approach SEO Outsourcing Based on Needs
Where to Find Outsourced SEO Companies or Partners
How Much SEO Outsourcing Costs
The 2 SEO Outsourcing Models
There are two SEO outsourcing models you’ll have to consider depending on what stage your company is in or what your current in-house team looks like:
Outsource all SEO
Combine outsourced SEO with an in-house team
Outsource all SEO
If you don’t have the budget for an SEO specialist or team (I’ll get more into costs later), the obvious choice here is to outsource all of your SEO needs. When talking about SEO tasks, we are often talking about on and off-page SEO, content writing, and the often understated importance of development and graphic design. These are super cost-intensive to perform in-house and not all SEO agencies provide all of these services, so that is something to consider when hiring (which we will discuss later when we discuss outsourcing based on needs).
Combine outsourced SEO with an in-house team
If you do have some existing marketers who need overflow help or specialized help, then it makes sense to combine your in-house team with outsourced SEO. In my experience, the best cost-savings and performance come into play when you have an existing writing team and development team and leave the heavy lifting to SEO specialists (research, link building, site speed recommendations, content audits, etc).
How to Approach SEO Outsourcing Based on Needs
At Digital Elevator, we approach SEO based on a maximum business impact methodology. This means prioritizing your SEO efforts based on whatever your most important goals are for your company.
For example, if you want to be known for a particular service or product, coming up with SEO strategies that help you rank for that service or product as a priority. Or, if you want to know where your content gaps are and what content is the most impactful, you’d prioritize a content audit.
Using that content audit example, perhaps you just want an SEO partner that specializes in SEO content audits.
If you don’t have such a specialized goal in mind and just want to increase sales, you should be able to lean on an SEO agency to help you strategize an action plan based on your goals and budget.
Whatever direction you go in, it is helpful to approach your SEO outsource partner with some specific goals, metrics, or KPIs they can back into.
Where to Find the Best Outsourced SEO Companies or Partners
Finding really good SEO outsourcing companies or partners may be the most difficult part of moving toward this marketing model.
These are the main ways you can find potential partners:
Google the specific SEO service or industry
Use a reputable directory site
Job boards
Utilize your network
Google the specific SEO service or industry
Similar to the example we covered above, looking for a “seo content audit service” and seeing companies, like Digital Elevator, who specialize in this type of service can be a good way to start some discussions and get an idea of deliverables and costs.
You can also do a search based on your industry, such as “SEO for Shopify agency” for eCommerce SEO or “seo agency for pharmaceutical industry.”
Use a reputable directory site
Clutch is probably the best directory site that helps you sift through some of the noise. You can filter SEO agencies by specific services, client budget, hourly rate, industry, reviews, and more.
I like Clutch because they generally require your clients to actually interview with them, helping to keep the quality of reviews a bit more transparent and credible.
Job boards
I’d only suggest job boards if you are trying to hire a freelance SEO. Note that with freelancers you can’t expect them to do everything really well. In other words, don’t expect an SEO freelancer to be an expert SEO, content writer, developer, and project manager. If they do all of that expect to pay a pretty penny or expect low-quality results.
That said, the best place to find SEOs on job board sites is probably Upwork.
Other notable freelance SEO job board sites include Indeed.com and Fiverr although with Fiverr, you spend a lot of time sorting through profiles of SEO generalists and may find it is only a good option if you have basic SEO needs.
Utilize your network
If you have a robust professional network, see if any of your contacts can make some recommendations of SEO agencies or specialists in your industry.
How Much SEO Outsourcing Costs
The costs of SEO outsourcing very much depend on the amount of work you need, the industry you are in, the competition, how quickly you need work done, the track record or reputation of your SEO partner, and the amount of project management time you want to invest.
If you are a small local business and you are looking for turn-key SEO services, expect to pay $1,000 to $2,000 for ongoing local SEO. If you are a regional business in a hyper-competitive market, expect to get your wallet out. I recently saw a very reputable personal injury SEO agency with project averages around $15,000 a month.
This plays into the reputation of your SEO partner as well. For companies that are really well-known for specific services or have worked with household brands, expect monthly SEO retainers in the $10k+ range, with one-off projects like site quality assessments coming in at similar rates.
In terms of project management, I have seen very successful business owners run separate teams of SEOs, developers, writers, and link builders from various regions and have total marketing costs come in at a third to a quarter cheaper than if they went all-in with one agency.
Comparing SEO Outsourcing to the Cost of Employees
One last thing I want to talk about is the cost of employees versus that of SEO outsourcing partners.
There are certainly pros to having in-house employees but I’d argue it is almost always better to have an outsourced SEO partner.
For starters, the estimated total pay for an SEO specialist is $71,600 per year according to Glassdoor. That’s not all though, according to the SBA the actual cost of an employee is 1.25 to 1.4 times their salary when you account for taxes, insurance, healthcare, and retirement plans. So that same SEO could cost you $89,500 to $100,240 in actuality.
Then there is the likelihood that your SEO is not a writer, a graphic designer, a developer, and a project manager. What do you do about those roles should you actually have the budget to hire that initial SEO?
The point is, if we divide the cost of one seasoned SEO employee into 12-months, we are looking at $7,458 to $8,353 a month that could be used for an agency. With that sort of budget you can likely get the SEO specialist and writers, graphic designers, developers, and project managers who can all fall under one agency roof.
To me, it makes a strong case to partner with an agency of specialists at the end of the day.
For local businesses looking to drive more traffic from their neighborhoods, it’s important to know what search ranking factors are the most important. Here’s some reasons why doing local SEO right is so important:
Over 90% of consumers use online searches to find local businesses
Almost half of all local searches involve clicks on the Map Pack
Let’s take a closer look at the top seven local SEO ranking factors and dive into what makes your local business rank in your neck of the woods. This data was pulled from a reputable local SEO industry study that has been going on since 2008.
Note that local SEO involves two parts- the Local Pack/Local Finder (or Map Pack) and Local Organic listings:
Here’s a sneakpeak at those local ranking factors:
Local Pack
Local Organic
1. Google Business Profile (36%)
1. On-page (34%)
2. Reviews (17%)
2. Links (31%)
3. On-page (16%)
3. Behavioral (11%)
4. Links (13%)
4. Citations (7%)
5. =Behavioral (7%)
5. =Personalization (6%)
5. =Citations (7%)
5. =GBP (6%)
7. Personalization (4%)
7. Reviews (5%)
Local Search Ranking Factors
As you can see in the table above, there are seven primary ranking factors for local SEO. These are correlational factors, so if you are going to be undertaking a local SEO campaign for your business, the recommended approach is to throw the kitchen sink at it and do everything to give your website the best chance of ranking number one in the Local Pack as well as Local Organic results for a variety of searches related to your business.
Since the ranking factors are evident across both the Local Pack and Local Organic, I’ll provide my recommended order of optimizations in terms of what to do for maximum business impact.
Google Business Profile Signals
The importance of a well-optimized Google Business Profile (aka Google My Business) cannot be overstated. Since 2017, the importance has nearly doubled as related to top rankings.
Proper business categorization is one of the most important factors, as is the use of keywords in your business name (if applicable), as is the addition of relevant categories.
Review Signals
Reviews to your Google Business Profile are next in importance, although this is an ongoing strategy that you’ll want to focus on weekly. Review quantity, review velocity, and review diversity are all areas you want to focus on.
To get reviews, usually all you have to do is ask although I do recommend the use of automated review software that is triggered by some CRM. The uniqueness of each business makes it difficult to give a blanket recommendation, but basically you’ll want to text or email your customers a review link to make things easy.
On-page Signals
On-page SEO is where things get a little spicy and best handled by a pro but you can certainly give this a stab if you know your way around a website.
As much as I’d love to show you how to do on-page SEO for a local website, that would be a massive guide. On-page signals include things like keywords in titles, the domain authority of your website, and Name, Address, Phone number (NAP) consistency with that of your Google Business Profile.
Here are some top-level factors broken down:
City, State in Landing Page Title
Above all else, the city and state of your business’ physical location should be in the title tag of the pages you are trying to rank locally. For example, click-throughs of the top three dentists in my hometown, West Palm Beach, reveal that all of them have “Dentist West Palm Beach” in the homepage title tags. This makes sense as they want to rank for a fairly generic search [dentist LOCATION] but this principle would also apply to their internal pages. Ex. “Veneers Dentist West Palm Beach” as a title tag for the veneers page of a local dentist’s site.
City, State in Landing Page H1/H2 Tags
In addition to using the location in the title tags, you should also use them on the landing page. So, our veneers dentist has “Veneers Dentist West Palm Beach” as their title tag. They should also try to use those same terms on the landing page as an H1 and perhaps some other variations in the other tags (ex. “Best Veneers Dentist in West Palm Beach”) or something perhaps a little less cheesy.
Domain Authority of Website
Domain authority is a metric that has been defined by Moz to evaluate how strong an entire domain is. It is based on several metrics including link counts, linking root domains, MozRank and MozTrust (also Moz-centric ranking factors).
The idea is that Google takes a lot of factors in to determine ranking and Moz’s domain authority is a reflection of this. Rather than focusing your efforts on all of Moz’s ranking factors you can just take a look at the other (Page Authority below is also a Moz metric) factors on this page as most of them are included in their analysis.
Page Authority of Landing Page URL
Page authority is a metric that analyzes how well an individual webpage (URL) will rank in the search engines. On one hand it is important to understand that having an authoritative domain is a good thing as is having individual pages that rank. For a local dentist for example, the above veneers example would be a page that you would want to rank for queries related to veneers in your location and is a reason why page authority would be helpful in that goal.
Product / Service Keyword in Website URL
This one is a bit confusing to a lot of marketing directors or business owners. The thing is many people have preexisting domains that don’t include the product or service keyword in their domain (ex. My website http://thedigitalelevator.com/ says nothing about SEO, web design or inbound marketing but nonetheless is a badass name). However, this does not mean that you can’t create a URL (ex. http://thedigitalelevator.com/local-seo) that includes your keywords.
Link Signals
Links are one of the most important factors for Local Organic rankings yet are one of the most difficult aspects of SEO to understand or strategize. Most SEO companies don’t even offer link building services (read: weaksauce) although links have increased in importance over the last several years.
In really competitive industries, this is simply not something you can afford to overlook.
Here are some ranking factors that are associated with link signals:
Quality/Authority of Inbound Links to Domain
Lots of inbound links (links from site A to your site B) go straight to the domain (ex. Site.com) rather than internal site pages (ex. Site.com/veneers). If people are going to be linking to your site then you want those links to come from high quality, authoritative sites. In short, get awesome links to your domain. Lots of em.
Quality/Authority of Inbound Links to Landing Page URL
See above except sub out your homepage (domain) for internal page (ex. Site.com/veneers). In short, get awesome links to the internal pages of your website you want to rank too. Lots of em.
Citation Signals
I’ll put citation building ahead of behavioral signals because citations are much easier to implement. Citation signals have decreased in importance significantly over the last few years, but at 7%, they are a must do in my book.
The quality and number of citations will play a role in how well your site ranks in the local map pack. Use Moz’s local business listing checker to claim citations that will help you rank better. Citations are sites like Google Places for Business, Yelp, FourSquare, Bing Locals, Best of the Web and many, many more.
There are many local business listings services out there as well as paid business listings suggestions. Check out this write-up from BrightLocal offering a candid comparison of the main local citation service players.
Behavioral Signals
Behavioral signals include click-through rate (CTR), mobile clicks to call, and dwell time. Behaviroal signals can best be influenced with actions geared to increase CTR or dwell time.
I have seen situations before where a website that ranked worse than competitors actually got more clicks. How can this be? Well, in the Google search engine results pages (SERPs) you have the ability to manually adjust the way your results appear. You can adjust the title tags, meta descriptions and URLs to influence click-through (within your website).
Not sure where to start? Just type in the terms you want to rank for and see what your competitors are doing. Can you craft a more compelling title tag and meta description that encourages a click more so than your competitors?
Also, the user experience (UX) on your website can influence dwell time (the length of time a person spends looking at a webpage after they’ve clicked a link on a SERP page, but before clicking back to the SERP results). If you have a beautiful, trustworthy website with clean navigation and easy-to-find information, you can increase the time visitors spend on your site, and effectively improve your chances of increasing dwell time and behavioral signals.
Personalization is at the bottom of this list but is still a prominent ranking factor because it takes into account things related to the user: search history, search location, device, etc.
While you can’t manipulate this, it’s important to know that this is also why many businesses don’t rank as well as they think they should. For example, if you are a dry cleaner in Queens but think your location is close enough to Brooklyn that you should also rank there, you are probably getting dinged by the Personalization factor.
Google takes into account a searchers proximity to your business when delivering search results and a poorly optimized business may rank better than you if their proximity is closer to the searcher.
This is related to the factor of having a Physical Address in City of Search.
This means you actually have an address in the city you are trying to rank in. If you don’t it is not likely that you’ll rank as well. Think about it. Google wants people who are looking for West Palm Beach dentists to find dentists in West Palm Beach. Sorry Lake Worth dentists, stay in your own territory!
Local SEO Rankings Takeaways
The average person (non-SEO) would likely not understand half of the above which is why getting local SEO help can be very valuable to your business.
Here is what to know about local SEO for the layperson who wants some traction:
Start with solid on-page optimization– take some time to learn about title tags, meta descriptions, and keyword usage. Implement these into every page of the site with your newly tagged city, state and product/service rolled in.
Build citations– build a sh*tload of citations. Consider using one of the citation services mentioned above. These citation metrics are analyzed by Google every six weeks and there is no telling when that six weeks begins or ends. Point is after you build all these citations it might take some time to be reflected in your rankings.
Build links– build links to your domain and links to the internal pages you want to rank. Building links is hard. Building good links is even harder. Check out this post on one website that generated tons of links and traffic using The Skyscraper Technique. This same site has lots of other great advice on building links.
It can be said that without good SaaS keyword research, most software as a service companies aren’t likely to reach their full potential. Of all the fundamental areas to focus on and get right, keyword research is arguably one of the most important because it is the driver of organic traffic, awareness, and sales.
But what are the keyword research strategies a SaaS business should implement to achieve long-term success?
At Digital Elevator, we’ve been helping SaaS companies win at SEO for over a decade, and we are going to share some of our winning strategies with you today.
We’ll cover:
The Types of SaaS Keyword Categories
Keyword Research Around Sales Funnels
Creating Product & Solution Pages Steeped in Keyword Research
SaaS Competitor Keyword Analysis
Perform Keyword Research Around These SaaS Page Types
SaaS Keyword Research Key Takeaways
And some bonus information on some brands that are killing it in SaaS SEO. Ready?
The Types of SaaS Keyword Categories
Your SaaS keyword research should identify a very fundamental, yet very necessary categorization in order to capture search volume by user intent:
Commercial
Transactional
Informational
Navigational
Note that some types of searches can overlap in the above categories, which is why we stress creating content for each of the above categories. For example, someone may type in “Walmart” and want to find the nearest store or just want to navigate to the website to shop online.
Commercial keywords
Commercial keywords provide an indication of the intent to learn more about your SaaS products. As such, these can be very valuable keywords to research and optimize your site for because they are often the step right before the transactional search.
Commercial keywords support a query to learn more about a product and are indicative of a searcher who is likely to convert in the near future.
Examples of commercial keywords:
Free project management software
Project management software features
Monday vs Basecamp
Monday reviews
These keywords can be targeted with comparison articles, certain types of how-to articles, reviews, and best of posts.
Transactional keywords
Transactional keywords are keywords with the strongest intent to purchase your product.
These searchers have more or less decided they want a product similar to yours and have their credit card in their hand ready to purchase.
Examples of transactional keywords:
Project management software prices
Buy project management software
Informational keywords
Informational keywords have little to no purchase intent and simply provide information.
These types of keywords win in search volume, but lose out in terms of helping with conversions.
Examples of informational keywords:
What is project management?
Who owns Basecamp?
Navigational keywords
Navigational keywords are simply keywords used when someone wants to get to a specific destination.
Examples of navigational keywords
Monday contact email
Monday login
Often, SaaS companies don’t need to focus on building out pages for navigational searches, but should consider how they relate to user experience (UX). For example, a search for your software customer service page is likely, and should be easy to navigate to from a UX perspective although it is very likely Google can provide this information easily and with little SEO effort on your behalf.
SaaS Keyword Research Tools
Performing the actual keyword research can be done with your favorite keyword research tool, but the intent of these keywords is generally a manual process. Our team uses Ahrefs for keyword research, but also likes the SEMRush keyword research tool because it actually provides an intent metric for you.
While this tool can be very useful, I still recommend looking at the SERPs to make sure you are going after keyword intent properly.
Take for example a search for “project management software.”
This is one of those searches where you could argue intent for commercial (someone comparing PM softwares), informational (someone wanting to know the definition of project management software), or transactional (someone looking to purchase project management software).
So what does the searcher want?
Google tells us.
As we can see from the SERPs and the prominence of “best of” results, Google places the intent of this search in the commercial category.
What this exercise tells us is that if you want to rank for that search term your best bet is to create a best of post so that you are creating content that matches what Google is looking for in terms of how they interpret intent.
Keyword Research for All Stages of the SaaS Sales Funnel
We’ve clearly identified four types of intent behind keywords for our SaaS, now it’s time to consider how these work in our SaaS sales funnel and how that relates to keyword research.
When researching SaaS keywords, we want to make sure our content team is provided with the relevant topics to cover, the sub-topics which also have keyword volume, and how they can create content for all stages of the funnel.
Why is this important?
Creating content for the top, middle, and bottom of the sales funnel will allow you to attract, convert and move prospects along your sales funnel no matter what stage they enter.
If we consider top of the funnel more of a brand awareness stage, middle of the funnel a consideration stage, and bottom of the funnel the final research stage, we are covering all of our bases and giving our SaaS products the best chance to continually drive leads, demos, trials, or signups.
Let’s use the company Unbounce as an example to see how they cover the different types of keywords for different stages of their sales funnel.
SaaS Top of the Funnel Keywords
As mentioned, top of the funnel keywords and the topics that are centered around them have a lot to do with brand awareness.
They are related to brand awareness because these topics generally have a lot of search volume. Because they are not commercial or transactional in nature, they can be considered top of the funnel in terms of building trust with a prospect who finds your content and learns about your brand for the first time.
Using Unbounce as an example, some good examples of top of the funnel keywords they are ranking for are:
What is a landing page (16,000 searches a month)
Landing page design (1,300 searches a month)
Landing page best practices (450 searches a month)
The above searches have nothing to do with Unbounce itself, are not related to making a purchase or comparing software, and these users are very unlikely to make a purchase when landing on the Unbounce site.
The value of these keywords, however, is that they speak to the exact type of audience that Unbounce wants to attract – someone who wants to know what landing pages are for, how to design a landing page, or the best practices for using landing pages in their marketing.
More often than not, SaaS brands who rank for top of the funnel content will use blogs to rank for these types of searches.
While a reverse engineering of nearly any popular SaaS will reveal top of the funnel content as the top traffic-generating source, this does not mean that this should be the sole focus of your efforts.
As mentioned, traffic from top of the funnel content tends to be the highest in volume, but the lowest in conversions.
But as a SaaS in any competitive space understands, top of the funnel content can give you a seat at the table when the prospects begin to move down the funnel, because at least they will begin to associate your brand with the Products you provide.
SaaS Middle of the Funnel Keywords
Middle of the funnel content for a SaaS can prove to be some of its most important in terms of the sales funnel. These searchers are aware that there are software solutions for the problems that they have, but they haven’t really begun to narrow down their searches to any specific brands and may still be a few days, weeks or even months out from doing so.
For Unbounce, middle of the funnel keywords they rank for include:
Landing page builder (1,600 searches a month)
Landing page template (450 searches a month)
Real estate landing pages (200 searches a month)
These searches are much closer to our commercial keyword category we previously identified, and where the searchers are discovering the different types of options they have should they want to purchase a software that meets their needs.
You’ll often find that product or solution pages rank for these types of terms (more on that below), and that an understanding of your users’ needs will best position you to craft content to rank for many different types of middle of the funnel keywords.
SaaS Bottom of the Funnel Keywords
Bottom of the funnel keywords for SaaS companies are related to interest, desire, and action.
These people know there are solutions out there that meet their needs and they are narrowing down their decision before they inevitably make a purchase. They already know who you are, and will be making transactional searches to inform their final decision.
For Unbounce, this means keywords such as:
Unbounce landing page templates (100 searches a month)
Unbounce free trial (50 searches a month)
Unbounce ab testing (40 searches a month)
This may be your final chance to convince your prospects why your product is the best fit for them or has the most features for the money.
Bottom of the funnel content can take the form of several different types of content. For example, Unbounce has case studies that may help push users over the edge.
They also have free whitepapers that have content geared at using their product for some end result, rather than just for lead generation.
Other brands use webinars, reviews pages, or product update pages for extra value adds based on the perceived needs of their buyers.
So, if you were to ask me ‘Daniel, where should I start with this keyword research?” I would say with your money-making pages, which should be foundational in any SaaS website design and keyword research strategy. These are your product and solution pages.
Creating Products & Solutions Pages Steeped in Keyword Research
Keyword research doesn’t need to drive your product and solutions pages, but it can.
What I mean by that can be best explained by example.
Take the Unbounce.com site for example, starting with a look at the dropdown menu under Products.
Let’s dissect the “Templates” as well as the “Popups & Sticky Bars” pages in terms of keyword rankings for some examples.
We can tell by looking at the title tag and heading of the landing page templates page that they have clearly optimized the page for “landing page templates.”
Title tag: 100+ High-Converting Landing Page Templates | Unbounce
Heading (H1): Choose From Over 100 High-Converting Landing Page Templates
In the rankings of this page above (with branded searches removed), we can see that the page does very well for queries related to landing page templates and in fact, ranks #1 for this very competitive search.
There is also a dedicated page for Popups and Sticky Bars, which Unbounce does not dominate as well as for keywords as their landing page template page, but shows a concerted effort to do so based on the keyword targeting.
Like the landing page template title tag, we see the use of the target keyword here as well: Popup Builder | Sticky Bar Builder | Unbounce. But, we don’t see it used in the heading: Convert Better on Any Page of Your Website.
However, we can see some rankings for this page, albeit probably not aligned with what Unbounce would like to see.
Regardless, the point here is that there are separate Product pages for each of their respective products, and it seems that Unbounce has taken the time to optimize these pages based on the target keywords they have researched.
In a different example, this time on the Solutions page, we can see Unbounce has also potentially used keyword research to drive their solutions pages, or perhaps they just wanted to create a page that resonated with their users. If you can do both, that is the best of both worlds, and why we try to recommend it to our clients when we create the Solutions pages for them.
Back to the example for Unbounce’s Solution page for the Email Marketing use case.
This page, in addition to being a value add for potential visitors who may want to know if this Solution works for email marketing, also has some SEO value.
As we can see above, “email marketing landing pages” and related searches have volume.
Bonus tip: We can see potential keyword value in the market by looking at the “CPC” metric, or cost per click. As seen above, “landing page email marketing” has a CPC of $42.33, showing high transactional value and something worthy of ranking for organically.
Keyword research around Products and Solutions is a very personal and subjective type of research as it relates exclusively to your Products and Services.
However, it is very likely that you have several competitors who have similar Products that will be competing for the same keywords.
So while you may only do a little of competitor research when doing keyword research for the Products related to your SaaS, you’ll definitely want to reverse engineer your competitors best-performing keywords to get an understanding of where they are driving traffic (and potentially leads) for all of their types of content.
This type of research is called a keyword content gap analysis and can be done with a tool like Ahrefs.
Using the Ahrefs Content Gap tool we can gain insight into the keywords our competitors rank for, and then make decisions on whether we want to create content to compete with these rankings.
You may already know who your competitors are or, if not, can perform a quick search around a target solution to see who ranks and enter them into the tool.
Let’s continue with Unbounce and look for “landing page software.”
On the first page of the SERPs we see brands Leadpages, Instapage, and some roundup posts that mention brands like ClickFunnels, and Wishpond.
Let’s throw those in our tool:
Off that bat, one of the keywords I see a competitor ranking for is “what is amp?” This keyword alone ranks for 11,000 searches per month. There are also some other keywords that may lend themselves to landing page creation or some sort of problem where a landing page may be part of the solution.
These include: remarketing; funnels; cross selling
Naturally, you’d want to do a bit more research to determine the intent of these searches in the SERPs, how competitive they are, how much value they would have for your brand, and if your software solution makes logical sense in relation to the topic.
The above is just a small example of the additional 6,686 keywords that unbounce.com does not rank for. They could theoretically continue the above process over and over and review each topic to determine viability.
Another option to look at competitor keywords is to reverse engineer competitors’ sites on a case-by-case basis.
Let’s take Instapage.com since it seems to be ranking for a lot of keywords Unbounce does not.
Put the site in the Ahrefs Site Explorer tool and check out the Top pages.
Now we can sort through the top pages of Instapage.com to see the keywords they rank for along with other data such as volume of primary keyword, the estimated amount of traffic, the amount of keywords the page ranks for in total, and the value if you were to pay for the keywords in Google Ads.
Another way to look into competitor keyword research is to use a different tool inside Ahrefs. On the same sidebar of the Site Explored is a section called “Top pages” under the “Legacy” section.
This is my personal favorite way to reverse engineer competitors because it allows you to expand on ALL the keywords a URL ranks for without leaving the page. Here, you’ll see the same URLs as the above Top pages data, except with a Keywords dropdown that you can expand.
I personally like this view better because it gives me an idea of the volume of some of the secondary keywords and their potential. At Digital Elevator, we don’t select keywords in isolation, we select topics and research the possibility of ranking for 100s or even 1,000s of keywords for one page.
As you can see in the above screenshot, this AMP post from Instapage.com ranks for over 550 keywords. While the primary keyword of “what is amp” at 11,000 searches per month is very desirable, the other 553 keywords are attractive as well.
Anyhow, from a quick glance you can see that there are multiple types of keywords (and content types) that you can glean from a competitive analysis. From here it is up to the SEO team to determine which pages will have the most business impact and evaluate other SEO factors such as keyword difficulty, backlinks, content depth and quality, and other important factors that may influence rankings.
Perform Keyword Research Around These SaaS Page Types
It is likely that the majority of your SaaS keyword research will reveal keywords that are good for your Product and Solutions pages as well as your blog. However, your keyword research shouldn’t stop there, and trying to be intentional about the content you create around keywords can provide your site that extra push it needs to generate more attention.
Here are the areas you should focus on:
Product pages
These are the money-making pages that serve the bottom of the funnel searchers who are exploring all the things your software can do. This is your page to brag about yourself and infuse potential keywords into the mix that match search intent with purchase intent.
These keywords have commercial or transactional intent and should include keywords such as: software; tool; platform; solution; etc.
Solution pages
Solution pages generally serve a more specific audience and are popular for helping searches understand and answer “is this software for me?”
For example, Qualtics has an entire Solutions section dedicated to Industries and Roles.
The Qualtrics Education solution page ranks for “qualtrics for students” which has 40 searches a month as well as “educational survey” which also has 40 searches a month. In this capacity, the page serves for both branded and generic searches.
Features pages
Features are often subsets of the actual SaaS Solution, but help explain important ways the software works to aid in the site’s UX. When possible, it is recommended that these pages also be created with keyword research in mind.
The integration capabilities of a SaaS are often a major consideration for consumers when finalizing their options. In addition to creating a standalone integration page, it is also advantageous to do keyword research on your integration partners’ keywords.
For example, leadpages.com has searches dedicated to the types of integrations they support:
Pricing pages
Pricing pages generally serve branded searches and should be fairly straightforward to rank for. However, pricing page keyword research may reveal some untapped FAQ opportunities in which to ensure the traffic goes to your site versus a competitor or roundup post.
For example, the term “CRM price” gets 450 searches a month and may make for a keyword worth targeting on a CRM pricing page.
Versus pages
Versus pages are a common SaaS tactic that can be prioritized in terms of business value.
These are often funneled with direct branded search comparisons. For example, Clearbit has gone directly after their competitor data.com with this page:
Based on some of the related searches, it looks like a win:
Reviews pages
Another bottom of the funnel search is “[brand] review.” Rather than losing clicks to software review sites like G2 or Capterra try to earn some of this traffic with a review page of your own.
Case studies
I’ve come across generic “[industry] case study” or “[industry] success stories” keywords with volume. For example, check out these keywords from Keap’s case study page:
SaaS Keyword Research Key Takeaways
Understand keyword intent when optimizing pages for intent
Product and Solution pages should be focused on commercial and transactional intent, even though that likely means less volume for their keywords
Perform keyword research around top, middle, and bottom of the funnel keywords
If possible, every page on your site should be steeped in keyword research
Remember to look at the SERPs to determine intent and then decide what types of content you need to create to compete
Do a competitor keyword gap analysis to drum up quick keyword research ideas
Consider business impact, keyword difficulty, and content quality before investing in specific keyword rankings
Consider all the types of pages you can do keyword research around
Keyword research is just one piece of the puzzle for SaaS SEO. When conducting your research, don’t put all the weight on keyword volume. Consider the journey of the user, how to create content around each stage of their research, and how your research can combine with business initiatives to stay focused on the areas where you can get quick wins.
As always, if you need help with your SaaS keyword research, content marketing, or SEO, feel free to contact Digital Elevator to discuss your goals.
This is a tried and true guide to SaaS SEO for companies looking to increase their traffic, rankings, and ultimately, sales.
We’ve used this exact strategy to help countless SaaS companies get 100s of thousands of visits from SEO.
So tune in, buckle up, and enjoy the ride.
Here’s what you’ll learn:
Ensure Issue-free Technical SEO with an SEO Site Audit
Perform Keyword Research for the Top, Middle, and Bottom of the Sales Funnel
Perform an SEO Competitor Analysis to Understand the SEO Landscape
Write SEO-optimized Product, Solution, and Blog Content
Use “The Skyscraper Technique” for Content Marketing and Link Building Prowess
Ensure Issue-free Technical SEO with an SEO Site Audit
The first thing you want to do to ensure you have a strong SEO foundation for the rest of your efforts is to address any technical issues your site might have.
SEO technical audits are relatively straightforward, but your site may not rank to its full potential without addressing technical SEO issues even if you do all the other things on this list right.
The good news is that you can find any technical SEO issues your SaaS site might have with existing, free tools: Google Search Console.
After logging in, go to the Coverage area of the site to see what types of technical SEO issues your site may have.
The “Error” section shows how many pages can’t be indexed by Google. If your site looks like this one with zero issues, you are in pretty good shape.
However, I can see that 240 “Excluded” pages were intentionally not indexed. This is probably a non-issue, but I’ll want to check them out to see if I do want these pages to appear in Google.
After drilling down a little further into some of the non-indexed examples, I can get more details and decide whether or not these should be left alone or included in the index.
Any issues I see in the Coverare report should be addressed to make sure my site’s health is as good as possible.
According to the Ahrefs site the tool will help to check for issues related to:
A tool like this is great because it allows you to run automated reports, but the Google Search Console tool is highly effective as well.
Note that technical SEO increases in importance the more traffic your site receives. For new sites it may not hold as much weight, but for higher traffic sites it can be really detrimental to your success.
Now that we’ve performed an SEO technical audit of our SaaS site we can move to the next step.
Perform Keyword Research for Top, Middle, and Bottom of the Sales Funnel
Now it’s time for the fun stuff: keyword research.
The purpose of this type of keyword research for a SaaS website is to drive traffic for searchers who have varying levels of intent.
This is important because you want to attract people to your SaaS at all stages of their research and interest in products like yours.
We have a very in-depth post on SaaS keyword research that you should check out, and I also encourage you to buckle up for this extremely informative video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_G6hgqBQsYs
Let’s take a look at some of the top keyword rankings of Unbounce, a popular landing page software, to see some of the differences between each stage of the sales funnel.
Here, we can see that most of the top keywords are top of the funnel and informational:
What is a landing page
Landing page design
We also see some middle of the funnel keywords related to commercial intent:
Landing page builder
Landing page template
For a bottom of the funnel and decision making search, check out this branded search:
Unbounce ab testing
Here are some takeaways for SaaS keyword research that you can learn from the above:
Top of the funnel keywords generally have the most search volume yet have the least amount of intent for a transaction.
Ex. “What is a landing page” has 5,500 searches per month but this searcher is unlikely to be looking for landing page software at this point.
Middle of the funnel keywords have modest search volume and cater to the searcher who is discovering that there are software solutions out there that can be used.
Ex. “Landing page builder” has 1,600 searches per month but shows a high commercial intent of someone who is exploring different kinds of landing page building software.
Bottom of the funnel keywords are highly transactional in intent although they generally have very low keyword volume. These searches are often, but not always, branded.
Ex. “Unbounce ab testing” has only 40 searches per month but shows the intent of someone who is familiar with the software’s capabilities and digging in to learn more before making a purchasing decision.
Now that you understand the different types of SaaS keyword research you need to do I’ll show you an awesome shortcut to your research, starting with your competitors.
Perform a SEO Competitor Analysis to Understand the SEO Landscape
In SaaS SEO just like any SEO, the challenge behind top rankings is always about the competition.
So, before you begin creating any content and dedicating a bunch of time to it, you should see what the competition is up to.
You’ll want to perform competitor keyword research around the same areas you intend on creating content.
I’d recommend doing this around product, solution, and blog pages to start.
Start with a simple Google search of one main solution your software provides, such as “landing page software” in the case of our Unbounce example.
With this search we can see a “best of” roundup post in the top spot, a People also ask section, our site, and a top competitor, Leadpages.
Let’s use the competitor found in the roundup post, Instapage, as an example to see how they compare to Unbounce.
You’ll need a keyword ranking software for this type of reverse engineering. We’ll use Ahrefs for this example, specifically their Ahrefs Site Explorer tool and the Top pages filter:
We can sort through Instapage to gain valuable insight into what they are targeting, what they are ranking for, and more relevant information.
As you can see by looking at the URLs, most of the top pages on this site are blogs. This is consistent with our comment on top of funnel content having the most volume, and since this data is filtered based on traffic, it makes sense.
When finding this type of data, make a note of all the types of content that are relevant to your SaaS as topics to cover. Since the majority of this content is blog content, you should have a bunch of top of the funnel content you can create.
But what about product and solutions pages?
Since these types of keywords have less volume, they are buried a bit more in our keyword research tools. However, there is a shortcut to take that involves using the website folder structure of the products or solutions.
Let’s take a look at how we can do that for Instapage.
In Ahrefs, you can look at data from a prefix, or in this case, a specific folder path. All Instapage’s product pages fit nicely into this /products/ path, so I will use that to dig deeper.
Because I want to look at all keyword data from each of these pages (there aren’t too many), I like to use the Site Explorer tool called “Top pages” under the “Legacy” section.
This gives me a nice breakdown of all their product pages with keyword data:
Now, I can isolate specific product page keyword data to see if I want to use the same keyword targeting for my product pages.
Let’s isolate their landing page builder page as this is very similar to the Unbounce product.
I can see that the keyword that matches commercial intent with the most volume is “landing page builder.” If I were creating a landing page builder product page, I may consider this keyword as my primary keyword target.
I could also consider the other keywords particular to that product page for secondary keywords to place in my H2s or elsewhere in my content.
Similarly, I can do this same type of SaaS product page keyword research for Solutions pages.
Pro Tip: When doing SaaS competitor keyword research compare at least three top ranking competitors to see if there is any variety in keyword rankings. Sometimes one site will target different keywords than another and understanding why can be helpful in creating your plan.
Write SEO-optimized Product, Solution, and Blog Content
Now that you have done your keyword research around product, solution, and blog content it is time to write.
It makes the most sense to create the foundational content for your SaaS website first, so I recommend creating the content for your product and solution pages first.
These are also your money-making pages, so spend some time creating effective content that really helps your SaaS stand out amongst competitors and by optimizing it for your target keywords.
Product and solution pages are very subjective to your SaaS, but you have a bit more flexibility in creating blog content.
However, you just don’t want to find a bunch of blogs that your competitors are writing and ranking for and duplicate them.
There are multiple factors you need to consider before putting pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard).
Factors to consider before writing SaaS blog content are:
Is the topic related to a solution that my SaaS provides?
For example, check out these recent blog posts from Unbounce that are all related to a landing page solution.
Does the topic have ample keyword volume?
For example, does the primary keyword or the combination of potential keywords you can rank for add up to an attractive total.
Unbounce’s page on “What is a landing page?” targets the following keywords (and 955 in total!) making for an attractive target:
How many links do I need to rank for the primary keyword?
The competition of a primary keyword is a very important consideration in determining how much effort you want to put into going after it.
Using the same example above, let’s drill down on the top ranking keyword of “landing page” and see some data from Ahrefs.
This keyword has a Keyword Difficulty (KD) of 83 out of 100 and is estimated to take 427 links to rank in the top 10.
Consider Keyword Difficulty when analyzing content you might want to rank for.
As a good rule of thumb, early-stage SaaS websites should target topics with really low KD to give themselves the best chance of driving traffic.
Ok, now you have decided on some blog content to write and you are onto the next step.
Use “The Skyscraper Technique” for Content Marketing and Link Building Prowess
If not, it is a content marketing and link building strategy made popular by Backlinko to drive lots of traffic and backlinks to one huge content piece. According to Backlinko, the steps to execute The Skyscraper Technique are:
Step 1: Find link-worthy content
Step 2: Make something even better
Step 3: Reach out to the right people
Step 1: Find link-worthy content
Finding link-worthy content is actually quite easy based on some of the steps for finding keywords I showed you above. The same keyword research tools also show link metrics.
For example, the Top Pages report – which shows you the pages with the most organic traffic – also shows how many referring domains (RD) a URL has.
Unbounce’s “What is a Landing Page” guide has 1,377 links at the time of this writing!
This is a very linkable asset it seems. Now on to step two.
Step 2: Make something even better
The definition of “something better” is somewhat subjective. In the SEO world however, we can look at some key factors to determine how awesome a page is and why so many people link to it.
For starters, it has a clean, simple to read design with lots of graphics and even a high-quality video.
It has custom infographics like this one above on how landing pages fit into a marketing funnel.
It also answers all types of questions related to landing pages such as “What are the types of landing pages?” These sections are very intentional and versed in SEO keyword research (remember our teachings above!).
The page is also super in-depth, coming in just shy of 2,000 words.
But one thing that really makes this page awesome is that it is part of a content hub.
Unbounce, in an effort to dominate searches around landing pages, have created this section on landing page articles.
In addition to the “What is a Landing Page?” piece, they have created seven other articles to compliment this classic Hub & Spoke model of content hubs.
If your SaaS is targeting a very specific hub topic, I encourage you to create your own content hub. Check out this post for some awesome examples, or this post on a great resource hub case study.
You could say that it would be really hard to create “better” content than Unbounce has around landing pages, but you could certainly try.
According to Ahrefs, the four criteria used to assess content quality are:
Reaching out to people is perhaps the most important aspect of getting your content to rank. After all, we established that you generally need more links than your competitors to outrank them.
Basically, you want to perform outreach to site owners who have shown that they already link out to similar topics.
Here’s how to do this.
Find the top 10 sites on a topic similar to yours.
Export the links pointing to your competitors into one spreadsheet
Filter your spreadsheet down and remove links from sites that are low-value directories, forums, or sites that may not meet your Domain Rating requirements (such as sub DR15).
Send a custom email with some personalization
Here’s Backlinko’s outreach example:
Now, email outreach to sites that already link to your competitors is not the only way to perform link building. However, if you want to play the numbers game it may be a very viable approach.
You can also consider guest blogging, podcast links, press mentions, or other popular link building strategies.
One criticism of The Skyscraper Technique is that it does not take into account Domain Rating.
From Ahrefs: Domain Rating (DR) shows the strength of a website’s backlink profile compared to the others in our database on a 100-point scale.
For sites with a high DR, they may inherently be able to rank easier than you, with much fewer links than you.
So for SaaS sites with small DRs (<30) going after keywords that are dominated by sites with big DRs (>60), you’ll want to consider this before you start Skyscrapering content.
The Benefit of SaaS Content Marketing
SaaS companies who invest in long-term content marketing strategies have a lot to gain, especially when compared to other marketing channels. Some revealing data from a ProfitWell survey called “Does Content Marketing Actually Work?” provides some of the following benefits:
Admittedly, it is getting harder to stand out from all the noise as so many companies are creating good content. However, this data reveals that it is likely more costly to not invest in content marketing than it is to remain on the fence.
On to You
SaaS SEO is an investment in research, content development, and link building.
Done correctly, it can provide the best ROI of all your marketing efforts which makes it a very viable strategy to execute and get right.
If you need help with your SaaS companies’ SEO, feel free to reach out and get a free consultation.
If you want your content to rank, you will need to know the best link building strategies to use. In today’s video, Digital Elevator Founder and CEO Daniel Lofaso goes over 9 of the most popular link building strategies to use in 2022 with a breakdown of their pros and cons.
These strategies include:
1. Guest Blog Posting 2. Link Requests 3. Broken Link Building 4. Directory Links 5. Reciprocal Link Building 6. Unlinked Mentions 7. Syndication 8. Community Site Links 9. Paying for Links
After watching this video you’ll know about the various ways to approach link building and which strategies you should consider to help rank your, or your clients’, content.
Are you a marketer trying to forecast the potential SEO return on investment (ROI) for an ecommerce website but don’t know where to start?
Good news. You’re going to learn how to do that today.
Here’s a little technique you can showcase to huge ecommerce sites to let them know the potential SEO ROI they can get by ranking for some target keywords.
Here’s the other good news:
You don’t need access to their site’s analytics
You can compare their site to that of their main competitors
The whole analysis will only take you about 30 minutes
You’ll be able to communicate SEO ROI in dollars
So, before you learn how to forecast SEO ROI on ecommerce sites, let me give a little context to this particular evaluation.
Grand Western Steaks: Ecommerce SEO ROI Forecasting
Did you know that you can order steaks, seafood, poultry, and other meats straight to your door?
Of course you did, and this is actually quite a large market, particularly dominated by Omaha Steaks. Perhaps you’ve even ordered a ribeye or two. Mmm.
Anyhow, for this ecommerce SEO ROI forecasting example the focus of my example will be Grand Western Steaks, an ecommerce meat and fine foods provider that doesn’t have anywhere near the search engine results pages (SERPs) dominance of Omaha Steaks.
Because they don’t have the SERP market share of their competitors, therein lies an opportunity to see what the potential ROI of SEO can be.
To do this, I looked at the following areas:
Competitive Analysis & Traffic Value
How Context Matters in Website Optimization
A Potential Monetization Example (Post Optimization)
One thing that you’ll notice in this SEO audit of sorts is that I used some domain-level metrics as well as broke out one example of a single product for a comparison point. If you were to break down the SEO potential of each product on a site of this magnitude, you might as well just go ahead and get the authorization to perform SEO on the whole site.
Breaking out a product or two makes this sort of recommendation easier to digest for the powers that be and almost makes your job of providing this type of analysis a little bit easier.
With some imagination, it would be easy to see how much revenue potential a finely tuned SEO campaign could work across all products.
Anyhow, the first step in this SEO ROI audit is to determine who the competitors are.
Competitive Analysis & Traffic Value
Start with the below competitive analysis to identify opportunities within the search engine results pages for queries related to the products and services provided by Grand Western Steaks (or your client). Namely, high volume keyword opportunities that show buyer intent (more on this below) indicate great potential to increase sales if search engine rankings can be increased.
By evaluating the equivalent monthly cost of traffic from all keywords that the target website/URL ranks for if paid via PPC instead of ranking organically, we are able to get a sense of how valuable a domain’s keyword profile is. @daniellofasoClick to Tweet
We can also compare that to other competitors in the space to estimate how profitable their websites are due to their SEO efforts.
I use Ahrefs to get an idea of these metrics very quickly. Their Site Explorer tool provides a quick overview of the initial information we need to compare competitors.
In this case, I was already familiar with their competitors and ran them each manually through Site Explorer. However, if you are unfamiliar with the competitors of a site you are looking to compare, simply enter some keywords that your target site sells into the SERPs, document the sites that rank in the top three, and then run those sites through Site Explorer to get the below high level info.
Note: Ahrefs also has a “Competing Pages” feature you can use to see what sites they think are similar in keyword targeting.
For this approach, I don’t want to confuse non-marketer CEOs with metrics about backlinks or referring domains, so I just took a screenshot of the metrics that they would actually understand (definitions pulled from Ahrefs):
Organic keywords– Shows the total number of keywords that the target website ranks for in the top 100 organic search results.
Organic traffic– This metric estimates the total monthly search traffic to the target website from the top 100 organic search results. It is calculated as the sum of traffic from all organic keywords for which the target ranks across all countries in our database.
Traffic value– This metric shows the equivalent value of the organic search traffic, should that traffic have been acquired via Google AdWords.
With those definitions in mind, here are the screenshots of the competitors I pulled for this analysis:
Now we have a baseline for how many keywords our site and our competitors have within the top 100 results (organic keywords), how much traffic from those keywords Ahrefs estimates (organic traffic), how much the organic traffic that comes to the site would cost if paid via Google Ads (traffic value), and much Ahrefs estimates a site is paying for Ads (traffic value: PPC).
To help provide a side-by-side comparison, here’s a graph that shows those metrics.
Organic Keywords Share
Organic Traffic
Organic Traffic Value
PPC Value
Grand Western Steaks
6,400
2,100
$2,500
$93
Omaha Steaks
114,000
276,000
$193,000
$134,000
Kansas City Steaks
33,100
37,400
$46,700
$14,700
Allen Brothers
36,000
52,300
$42,800
$12,800
When you put a site up to competitors like this, it’s easy to see how Grand Western Steaks is leaving money on the table.
They have about one fifth of the keyword share as the next closest competitor (Kansas City Steaks), and about 1/18 of that of Omaha Steaks. If you’re wondering why the organic keyword share and the organic traffic share can be so far off, remember that organic keywords shows keywords that rank in the top 100 while organic traffic is an interpretation of clicks.
Solely on the above we know that there is tremendous opportunity to gain some traffic share. You can move straight on to the potential monetization example below if you’d like from here, but I want to show where, exactly, I believe this site is missing out on this traffic.
This is where context comes into play.
Context Matters in Website Optimization
One of the primary opportunities found with the site is the potential optimization of each product. For example, not optimizing for purchase-related keywords — buy, shop, order, sale, wholesale, etc — can lead to lack of rankings for potential customers who have online ordering intent, or as we have seen, lead to the ranking of paid ads where the intent for a purchase is not evident.
For example, a search for “veal cutlets” (something Grand Western Steak is targeting with ads), indicates, according to Google, the intent for a searcher to look for recipes.
Search results for “veal cutlets”
What has been identified across the board on the site, and an area for opportunity as it relates to gaining market share in search engines and better competing for more keywords and selling more products, is including buyer intent optimization to all the products.
For example, the current veal pages are not optimized for buying intent as they lack buying keywords in their title tags. In a way, this site is competing for the recipe searches rather than transactional ones the way it is currently optimized.
An example of an optimized title would be something like “Buy Veal Cutlets Online | Overnight Shipping | Grand Western Steaks”. Additional optimizations to the product pages could also be implemented to better compete for buyer intent keywords (but that is a separate blog altogether).
Potential Monetization Example (Post Optimization)
To forecast the ecommerce SEO return on investment, what I want to do now is find some product-related examples, determine their total search volume, and do some quick calculations. From there, you’d just divide the amount you’d make from the potential revenue by the amount you pay for SEO.
For example, the search “steaks online” gets around 2,900 searches per month in the US. Generally, the top three spots in the search engines get the majority of the clicks:
Rank 1: 70% of clicks = 2,030 clicks
Rank 2: 20% of clicks = 580 clicks
Rank 3: 10% of clicks = 290 clicks
Now let’s assume a 5% conversion rate of paying customers with an average order of $200.
Rank 1: 2,030 clicks x 5% (x $200) = $20,300/month
Rank 2: 580 clicks x 5% (x $200) = $5,800/month
Rank 3: 290 clicks x 5% (x $200) = $2,900/month
Of course, this is just one keyword example amongst 100s of products which demonstrates why the organic values in the chart above for the competitors are so much higher than Grand Western — the competitors have invested in SEO and have keywords that rank well that account for their larger percentage of traffic from search engines.
Rather than going after the entire site and trying to dominate rankings for each product, I’d suggest you take your/your client’s ‘s top five products. Let’s also assign your SEO investment so we can mash the numbers together to get the ROI.
In this example, let’s also assume the five products all have the same search volume, same conversion rate, and average cost of the example above (2,900 searches, 5%, and $200, respectively) for simplicity sake.
You can then calculate the potential revenue of ranking 1-3 for those five, $200 products.
Rank 1: 10,150 clicks x 5% (x $200) = $101,500/month
Rank 2: 2,900 clicks x 5% (x $200) = $29,000/month
Rank 3: 1,450 clicks x 5% (x $200) = $14,500/month
Now, let’s assume the SEO fee is $5,000 a month. We just divide the above revenues by $5,000 to get the ecommerce SEO ROI:
High end ROI: $101,500/month / $5,000 = 20.3 x ROI
Middle ROI: $29,000/month / $5,000 = 5.8 x ROI
Low ROI: $14,500/month / $5,000 = 2.9 x ROI
Of course, this doesn’t account for caveats like the fact that not every product will rank #1, 2, or 3, that these are the only keywords that will result in sales, or that ranking outside of the top three could still equate to sales, or that there will be a ramp up period.
These are just general, big picture numbers, that showcase the potential of SEO for a few select products. But as you can see with Grand Western Steaks, the potential to target some lucrative keywords can pay off.
I use this formula as sort of a proposal for bigger ticket clients and you can too.
What else would you add to this or what other techniques do you use to showcase what SEO can do?
Content Marketing Case Study: How to Find Low Competition, High Volume Keywords
If keywords are the core of SEO, why is it that so many people still go after the wrong ones?
In order to drive traffic to your website you have to utilize keyword research and content marketing strategies that actually give you a chance of ranking quickly.
In today’s post, I want to introduce a content marketing technique that allows you to rank your content with little to no links (links are still one of Google’s most highly aspects of ranking). I call this technique “Holy Grail SEO” and I covered it in-depth on a beautiful post featured on Search Engine Journal.
So what is Holy Grail SEO?
In Arthurian literature the Holy Grail is a cup that allows it’s owners to have infinite abundance. In SEO, using the Holy Grail technique will give you abundance in the form of boatloads of traffic.
The difference in the Holy Grail SEO technique and the actual Holy Grail is that you don’t need to embark on some mystical journey to find it; I’m going to show you how to rock it out right now.
Read on to learn more about how Holy Grail SEO can help you:
Understand how important low competition keywords are to your overall SEO and content marketing strategy
Identify low competition, high volume keyword resources
Utilize keyword competition data to create in-depth, high ranking blogs
The Importance of High Volume, Low Competition Keywords to Your SEO Strategy
Traffic from search engines is an obvious benefit to any website. However, generating that traffic with content that is related to your brand can often prove to be challenging, especially for sites that don’t have the luxury of being able to publish content and automatically begin to drive loads of search engine traffic to it (like some big brands can).
Don’t get caught up in the “publish and pray” approach so many content generators utilize to create content. Don’t just create content for the sake of creating content; be intentional about the content you create as it should provide a return on investment to your business based on the time and resources you put into it.
Whether you are an SEO yourself or doing SEO for your own website, your goal is the same: try to drive (relevant) as much traffic as possible as fast as possible. Because fast traffic is more of a luxury than a reality, we need to implement strategies that help us to satisfy the goals of our clients as well as our own websites. We also want to be able to pull off strategies that allow us to benefit from the search engine traffic that bigger, more established sites generate.
This is especially true for:
Startups
Brand new websites
Websites with little or no domain rating
Brands that are in super competitive industry’s
Any combination of the above
Who should go after low competition or high competition keywords?
As alluded earlier, some sites just can’t compete for certain keywords or topics and therefore may want to consider not exhausting the resources to go after them. These sites might be better off going after topics that are low competition — meaning easier to rank for — while still maintaining some degree of search volume.
So who should go after high competition keywords and why?
When it comes to search engine rankings and correlations, there tend to be a number of important factors that will dictate whether a page will rank or not. To oversimplify what these are (there are over 200 Google ranking factors), here are some of the main factors that may dictate a pages ability to rank:
Topical relevance to search query
Domain rating of the website
Links to the page
In terms of topical relevance, we can all go after any topic that we want and publish pages on them. This, of course, does not mean we will rank for them mostly based on the other two factors mentioned above.
Domain rating, a proprietary Ahrefs’ metric that shows the strength of a target website’s total backlink profile, can provide a major headstart for brands attempting to rank for certain topics. The metric is measured logarithmically from 0-100 to showcase, essentially, how popular a site is. Forbes.com for example, has a domain rating of 93.
This is why a site like Forbes can virtually publish an article on any topic and rank for it. However, smaller sites — or those with smaller domain ratings — may have to work harder at the next metric to get more attention from Google (i.e. rank better).
Links to a page is the other metric that influences how well a page can rank. Often, a page with more links will outrank a page with less links. Sometimes the page with a higher domain rating and less links will still outrank the page that is on a site with a lower domain rating. There is no exact rule for this, this is purely based on correlation.
Anyhow, you need to keep this in mind as a content creator because you should obviously be creating content with the intent of getting as many eyeballs on it as possible. The Holy Grail approach, however, accomplishes this goal by allowing you to be strategic in what topics you target, or put another way, topics you don’t.
Below I will detail how to use data to understand what topics you can potentially rank for easily and how to find them.
Using the Holy Grail SEO Technique to Find High Volume, Low Competition Keywords
Before diving into how to find high volume, low competition keywords we must first understand that the definition of “high volume” is subjective. For example, in some industries a high volume topic may be 500 searches a month, while in others a high volume topic may be 50,000. Either way, you must keep in mind long-tail traffic, which is why we will discuss how to create complete topics that rank for boatloads of keywords.
Method 1: Using Google SERPs to Reverse Engineer Results
When you want to cover a specific topic this is probably one of the best approaches to take. The second approach also allows you to target specific topics, while the third approach involves stealing topics from your competitors.
Starting with the Google search engine results pages (SERPs) to reverse engineer results is a good foray into one of the three options for finding high volume, low competition topics. Here is a case study from one of our financial planning clients, Castle Wealth Management, where we used this approach to great success.
Castle Wealth wanted to cover a blog post on trusts as many of their clients are high net worth. While we like to tackle topics that our clients want, our job as an SEO and content marketing agency is to have conversations with our clients about how to be intentional about the topics we cover. Plus, we knew a topic in the finance industry would put us up against sites like are likely to dominate the space such as Kiplinger (DR 84), Nerd Wallet (DR 86), and Forbes (DR 93).
Here’s how we, and you, can tackle this type of keyword research and determine if a topic is worth going after.
You’ll need some software to make this kind of advanced prospecting happen, and in this case, I use Ahrefs. More specifically, I use their Chrome extension for its data on Domain Rating, Referring Domains, and the Keywords a page ranks for. It’s cool because you can get data directly in the SERPs without having to visit a site or run it through the software.
Anyhow, with the software in place and the topic of trusts to evaluate, we start with some initial searches on generic queries such as “What is a trust.”
As you can see above (and as highlighted), the top result for the topic has a high Keyword Difficulty (29), has a bunch of links (Referring Domains (RD)), and is on a site with a massive Domain Rating (DR) of 89. As you may expect, a topic like this gets a lot of searches per month, 17,000 (indicated by “Volume”).
Because our goal is to be able to realistically rank within the top three search results, we decided to stay away from this topic.
Eventually, we found that the search for “Why would you put your house in a trust” was a really great candidate.
The number one ranking site had these factors that make the topic ideal for our client to go after:
The site has a DR of 31 (not much higher than what our client was at)
The post only had seven Referring Domains
The topic only had a Keyword Difficulty of 5 out of 100
The topic had a search volume of 200
While the search volume of 200 is not particularly high, something we picked up on was the total amount of keywords this post ranked for, over 1,600 (as indicated by the “KW” on the page level).
These signs all looked pretty good, but we wanted to look closer at all the potential long-tail traffic (in Ahrefs) before committing:
As the Darrow Wealth Management site ranked really well for loads of keywords that were related to trusts and many with really low Keyword Difficulty, we knew this was a win.
To summarize why this was a good topic to emulate:
It was related to our clients offerings — they provide financial advice on setting up trusts
The topic had a lot of long-tail traffic potential
The sub-topics and related keywords to the topic were all relatively low Keyword Difficulty
The top-ranking spot did not have a lot of links and was not a site with a really high Domain Rating
So, what are the next steps? Write a bigger, badder blog post!
Let’s teleport about 3-months after we published the blog for Castle Wealth Management and see how we started to compete:
As you can see, the page ranks really well for a large amount of long-tail keywords. What’s more, we only built one backlink to the page and have now benefited from high rankings for nearly 500 keywords.
Take a look at the Google Analytics traffic to see how this post for Castle Wealth continually grew:
And just to provide some silence to the negative Nancy’s out there who think this strategy only works because the target competitor (Darrow Wealth Management) had a modest Domain Rating, check out all the other sites we outrank that are way bigger in DR than Castle Wealth:
This is just one strategy to use when you have topics in mind. In addition to doing research from the Google SERPs, you can go straight to Ahrefs to do the work for you.
Method 2: Using Keyword Software to Target Specific Topics
Another excellent way to find that low hanging fruit content is to use the Ahrefs Content explorer tool. This too allows you to search by topic but offers some additional filters that make it a joy to use.
For this example, we decided to write about the topic “garment bag.”
Start by throwing your topic into the Content explorer:
For generic topics like this, you’ll likely see something like the below — a result with 1,000’s of pages in the index that you’ll want to filter down.
There are a lot of filters that can be utilized and it’s actually quite fun to play around with the tool to generate results, but there are some rules to live by to start finding topics with a lot of keyword traffic.
As you can see above, I set the organic filter to “From:500” to see pages that rank for 500 or more keywords. You can get more aggressive if you have a lot of results to shift through, and vice versa.
In this scenario, filtering out pages without at least 500 ranking keywords left us with 173 pages. Because that is still a lot of pages to review, I can apply more filters to determine if there are better options. Thus, I set an additional filter for a DR above 30. Filtering out sites with a higher DR shows results that apply to smaller sites I can likely compete with easily with good content alone.
This is not a hard and fast rule however; just because a page that lives on a site with high DR ranks well, does not mean it won’t have low competition, high volume topics. In this case, however, there are a lot of results so we have more play in what we can filter out.
Now, with filters set to organic traffic above 500 keywords and sites with a DR below 30, we now have 10 pages to review based on the “garment bag” topic:
The next thing to do is open up the Organic keywords tab on each site to see if there are low competition, high volume keywords that are Holy Grail material.
Boom! And just like that we have our first candidate meets our criteria for Holy Grail SEO:
First off, this page has about 1,200 keywords it ranks for
The page itself only has one referring domain
The volume behind a bunch of the searches compared to the KD is great. Lots of long-tail keywords to consider in our blog post that we’d likely rank for easily.
Now, I can repeat the same process with the other sites in the filtered list to document the keywords my writers should cover in the blog post.
I really like this approach, but my favorite way to find Holy Grail opportunities is analyzing competitors sites and stealing their high volume, low competition topics.
Method 3: Looking at Competitors to Find HV/LCK Keywords
So far we’ve looked at two ways to use topical analysis to find blogs. But what do you do if you don’t have a particular topic in mind or can’t seem to find anything that you like using the other approach?
You mine competitors’ sites, find their best content, and rewrite it.
Let’s check out another example in the financial industries space, an industry that is extremely competitive and full of great content everywhere you look.
To start, you’ll simply want to visit a popular site that is in the same niche as your site. For this example, I referenced NerdWallet because they are really popular in the space and rank well for a lot of topics.
Grab the NerdWallet domain and plug it into the Ahrefs Site explorer to begin the process.
Because this site is a behemoth, it is going to rank for a ton of different keywords so we want to filter down our results. First, I’m going to click on “Top pages” — pages Ahrefs is telling me ranks for a ton of keywords — and set the Keyword Difficulty filter down to 10 (although you can get more aggressive and go lower to see how many results you get).
With our Top pages and KD 10 or below filter in place, we immediately see some really good candidates such as “how to fill out a money order” and “best time to buy a tv” as potential options to cover. Of course, you want to make sure any option you choose to cover is relevant to the audience of your site.
To dive a little deeper, I can open an Organic keyword report for the pages I want to investigate and reference the Volume and Keyword Difficulty. Here’s the report for the “how to fill out a money order” post:
I can see this post ranks for a lot of high volume, low competition keywords making it a solid candidate for a similar post on my (or my clients’) site.
I can even take the main keyword a step further to see how many links I might need to build to rank for it on the first page. “How to fill out a money order’ gets 23,000 searches per month and is a KD 6! According to Ahrefs, I’ll need about seven links to rank on the first page.
Utilize Keyword Competition Data to Create In-depth, High Ranking Blogs
Now, if there is something that needs to be mentioned it’s the fact that you can’t simply publish any old blog and expect it to rank. In other words, you’ve only done some of the hard work required to give yourself the best chance of ranking. The next part is actually writing the blog you want to rank.
Great keyword research needs great writing!
While this is not a post on how to write a good blog, it is integral that you carry out good copywriting to give yourself the best chance of ranking. Here are a few resources that may help you with that:
In addition to good writing, I want to emphasize the importance of being truly exhaustive with the topics you cover. This means doing a competitive analysis of the other pages that rank for your target keyword and making something more in-depth and ultimately better.
A great way to do this is with the inclusion of keyword rich subtopics. The good news for you is that these should already be revealed when you did your initial topic research.
For example, let’s review the keyword data from the “garment bags” research to see if we can pull some sub-topics.
Ok, great.
We have a bunch of good data on volume and KD but is this alone going to make your blog rock? No, it needs a little logical thinking to ensure the post has good talking points while also being intentional about the keyword opportunities.
Let’s go with a topic for our post that is general but seems to cover the keyword opportunities we found. Something like “17 Best Garment Bags of 2019.”
Now, let’s take your keyword data and make something of an outline for the post that flows logically and still leverages the keyword data intelligently.
Best roll up garment bags
Best carry on garment bags
Best garment bags with wheels
Garment bag carry on rules
When to get a tri fold garment bag
As you can see, my keyword research has dictated my subtopics. If you think about it, it really should as volume has everything to do with interest in a topic. Thus, it makes sense to cover high volume subtopics.
Another great area to pull additional sub-topics (leaning more on the logical side) is within the Google SERPs. Check out the “People also ask” section as well as the “Searches related to” sections for inspiration:
Embark on Your Quest for Holy Grail SEO Today!
Holy Grail SEO is something that will work for every kind of site, big or small, high DR or low DR, and those with lots of human resources at their disposal and those without.
The research portion gets easier the more you do it and can actually become second nature once you get the hang of it. And while we never rule out content promotion or link building as additional was to drive traffic and exposure, it’s nice to know you can lean on Holy Grail SEO without having to dedicate a bunch of resources to social promotion or link building.
Try Holy Grail SEO yourself and enjoy the abundance it brings your website!
Automated page speed optimizations for fast site performance
