Well, a common SAAS startup story that the product is ready but sign-ups aren’t coming. Even sign ups are coming but still paid conversions are a way to less. What to do now? Shall I start with PPC?
But it’s quite costly and what is the guarantee that PPC will lead to the sales conversion.
So Hiring an SEO agency will help? Well still don’t know if it works or not. Those are the very basic and quite interesting question comes in for every SAAS startup.
Even the same story goes on for a non-SAAS start-up as well. So what is the way to move forward then?
Why Should SEO be your first sales channel?
There is a lot of discussion about getting your first 100 customers around the saas community and as we always said every business is unique and things may vary based on your industry.
But If you are running your business online which we are doing as a SAAS business it’s vital that your site or app must have better reach in google.
Also as per our experience investing time in SEO will surely boost your sales and it should be your long time investment.
As in starting days, most of your traffic will come from Search engines only so why we should not optimise our site for better reachability?
Start from Scratch
It’s super important that when you are building a SAAS App either its helpdesk system or an E-commerce store You need to leverage the SEO factor in your application.
Most of the techies understand the SEO just as link building or PPC. Nowadays SEO is everything from A/B testing to Speed Optimisation & from Rich Snippets to Rich cards everything is considered as SEO.
Also Please please please avoid articles like “how to RANK 1 in google using following tricks” for sure that is not going to work. SEO is complete science and you need to invest quite a good amount on it.
Even Lot of tech folks don’t understand the magic of SEO during building the product which is vital nowadays.
You must invest a very good amount of time in SEO during product Build. Let’s take an Example of Rich Snippets.
Rich Snippets or Schema markups – It is special snippets code which is super useful to display some unique information at Google SERP( search engine result page).
When ever you are building your SAAS apps lets say you are building an online restaurant marketplace booking platform. Where customers or users will make reviews for the restaurant.
Using Rich snippets you can display restaurant rating and reviews count on google SERP page.
So it must be in your core that means schema setup must be in your application core. As for that, you need to include JSON-LD integration with your SAAS application.
Speed Optimisation – This is another crucial factor And we also consider this part as an SEO factor as well.
Why? A lot of people say it a performance concept, not the SEO.
Well, that is not right. Anything by which user experience is changed is considered as an SEO nowadays.
Performance Optimisation and Bounce Rate.
Bounce rate plays a very major role. What is bounce rate as per Wikipedia-
Bounce rate (sometimes confused with exit rate) is an Internet marketing term used in web traffic analysis. It represents the percentage of visitors who enter the site and then leave (“bounce”) rather than continuing to view other pages within the same site.
Bounce rate is a measure of the effectiveness of a website in encouraging visitors to continue with their visit. It is expressed as a percentage and represents the proportion of visits that end on the first page of the website that the visitor sees.
If your web pages are not performing well in terms of speed that can be a reason of Bounce rate increase. Which is considered as very bad in terms of sales conversion?
Even if you are using PPC and having a high bounce rate that will kill your business and even PPC will not help you.
Why “Bounce Rate” Is highly Important for every SAAS Business?
Bounce rate is not just speed optimisation. It includes a lot of other factors as well. First, let me explain why this “bounce rate” is super bad for your business.
Let’s take an Example – You just shoot an advertisement using standard PPC concept even customer is coming from that PPC ads but somehow you are not getting sign ups or paid subscribers. In this way lot of startups waste their money in PPC.
Understanding Bounce rate is highly Important and how you can avoid it. Here are few methods which you should consider:
- The speed of the app/page must be super fast. You must invest a very good amount of time in it.
- Try to Avoid Random Popups visitors hate them.
- Don’t Add any hidden fee or charges at payment page. Pricing must be same at every page of yours.
- Try to AB test your pages and “call of action” must be visible and clickable
There are loads of other factors which you can easily find on the internet.
This article is just a summary of SEO for SAAS business in Next Article i will Try to explain topic by topic. Thanks