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Tag: Software as a Service

  • 5 SEO Techniques to Help Your SaaS Business Rank in 2024 | Entrepreneur

    5 SEO Techniques to Help Your SaaS Business Rank in 2024 | Entrepreneur

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    Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

    Software as a service (SaaS) is a booming industry full of potential and innovation. However, many SaaS businesses rely heavily on paid advertising for lead generation and customer acquisition, often overlooking the incredible power of organic traffic. This leads to high customer acquisition costs, which slows down business growth.

    Search engine optimization (SEO) is the practice of optimizing your website to rank higher in search engine results pages. Investing in SEO can drive sustainable organic traffic, reduce acquisition costs and attract highly qualified buyers ready to book demos.

    In this article, I discuss five essential SaaS SEO techniques to help you rank higher, increase the number of organic website visitors and drive more conversions in 2024.

    Related: 3 Powerful SEO Techniques That Will Boost Your Website’s Search Engine Ranking

    1. Do in-depth keyword research

    In-depth keyword research helps you identify the specific terms your potential customers use to find software solutions like yours. For SaaS businesses, the main focus of keyword research should be on your target audience’s needs and more specifically, long-tail keywords.

    For example, if you offer time management software, your first instinct would be to target keywords like “time management software.” However, websites that rank well for this keyword are well-established and have great authority, so climbing to the first spot on Google would take forever.

    Instead, you should focus on more specific, long-tail keywords. In this case:

    • “Time management software for freelancers”

    • “Affordable time management software for startups”

    • “Time management apps with project tracking”

    • “Best time tracking tools for remote teams”

    Long-tail keywords typically have higher buyer intent because they are specific, indicating that the person has a clearer idea of what they are looking for. Targeting keywords with clearer user intent and less competition makes it easier to rank, as well as to attract and convert leads looking for specific features or benefits that align with your SaaS offering.

    2. Maintain high content velocity

    Publishing one blog post per week is not enough to remain relevant in the SaaS industry. To stay ahead of the competition, you should increase your content velocity and publish as much high-quality content as possible.

    Producing more relevant and informative content in your niche signals to search engines that your website is a credible source of information. This boosts your topical authority and user trust, which is especially crucial for small business SEO.

    Increasing your content velocity also provides more opportunities to include various keywords, which boosts your chances of ranking high for more search terms.

    To effectively increase your content velocity and stay competitive in the SaaS industry, consider creating a variety of content types that cater to different aspects of your audience’s needs and interests. That includes:

    3. Create product-led SEO pages

    Product-led SEO pages focus specifically on your products, which is highly effective for attracting qualified leads who are more likely to convert into customers.

    The most common examples of product-led SEO pages are:

    • Comparison pages: Create detailed comparison pages like [Competitor product] vs. [Your product] to highlight your product’s unique features, benefits and advantages over the competition.

    • Competitor comparisons: Generate pages that compare multiple competitors, such as [Competitor product] vs. [Competitor product]. This positions your brand as a knowledgeable authority in the space and can help potential customers understand what the industry has to offer.

    • Best-of lists: Create lists like “X Best [Your Niche] Tools in 2024” and include your product to establish it as a top option.

    • Niche-specific landing pages: Optimize landing pages for specific keywords, such as “time management software for freelancers.” These pages should be rich with information about your product, including features, benefits, testimonials and calls to action.

    Related: 6 Ecommerce SEO Tips to Help You Rank on Google

    4. Build high-quality backlinks

    There are more than 9,000 SaaS companies in the U.S. with around 15 billion active users across the world. The SaaS industry is more competitive than ever, and most businesses use SEO to attract more customers.

    Building high-quality backlinks to your product pages and blog posts is an SEO technique that helps improve your search engine rankings and domain authority to get an edge over the competition.

    Some of the ways you can build backlinks include:

    • Guest posting on relevant industry blogs

    • Claiming unlinked brand mentions

    • Producing high-quality content like infographics and whitepapers to attract backlinks

    • Collaborating with other companies and influencers to create mutually beneficial content that includes backlinks

    If you want your link building to work, though, you need to also focus on quality and relevance. The best approach is to acquire backlinks from established websites in your industry because they contribute more to your SEO results. Backlinks from reputable websites signal to Google that your content is trustworthy and authoritative.

    For a SaaS company, you want backlinks from technology blogs, industry publications and authoritative websites in the software niche.

    5. Develop strong internal linking

    Internal links are hyperlinks that point to other pages on your website. They help Google understand the structure of your site, the hierarchy of your pages and the importance of specific content.

    Strong internal linking can improve your website’s SEO by making it easier for search engines to crawl and index your pages, which in turn can boost your rankings.

    Include as many relevant internal links as possible with every article you write. To find all relevant pages, go to Google and type: “site:yourwebsite.com [relevant keyword].”

    The best SEO tip is to use descriptive anchor text to provide context about the linked page’s content. For example, if you’re writing an article about “time management software for freelancers” and want to link to another article talking about best tools for remote workers, you can use the anchor text “best time tracking tools for remote teams.”

    Lastly, you should regularly update older posts with new internal links to keep the SEO content fresh and improve relevance.

    Focusing on the right SEO strategies can help you reduce customer acquisition costs and attract more organic traffic to your SaaS website.

    The best approach is to:

    • Conduct in-depth keyword research

    • Maintain high content velocity

    • Create quality product-led SEO pages

    • Build high-quality backlinks

    • Develop strong internal linking

    Try these techniques to improve your rankings, drive more qualified leads, boost conversions and get better SEO results this year.

    Related: 5 Common SEO Mistakes That Are Hurting Your Rankings

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    Nick Zviadadze

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  • SaaS vs. Custom Software — Which Is Best for Your Business? | Entrepreneur

    SaaS vs. Custom Software — Which Is Best for Your Business? | Entrepreneur

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    Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

    The global SaaS market is estimated to reach $702.19 billion by 2030. It is undoubtedly a growing market that proves its benefits. Nonetheless, there are companies — and actually, entire industries — that are still reluctant when it comes to adopting a SaaS solution. Bespoke (or custom) developments have been believed to be the safest bet, but is it the case anymore?

    As a proptech company offering a SaaS product that digitalizes the real estate industry, we’ve seen both enthusiasm and skepticism regarding this business model, so I decided to get into more detail about the advantages and disadvantages of both SaaS and bespoke technologies.

    Related: 4 Ways SaaS Can Make Entrepreneurs More Efficient and Competitive

    Advantages of SaaS

    Efforts and budgets associated with SaaS product upgrades are lower, as providers grow continuously based on “community intelligence.” The product or service goes through constant improvement based on feedback and suggestions from multiple users that might have faced the same problem as you. This transforms SaaS products into live organisms that are very flexible and dynamic.

    Staying on the cost topic, it’s important to mention that SaaS acquisition is financially more productive, as the cost belongs to the OpEx category (short-term costs), whereas custom developments usually go under the CapEx category (long-term investments).

    Using a SaaS solution equals faster deployment, and it is the way to go for agile processes. Companies with a testing mentality will see the advantage in starting to use a new product and measure its impact sooner rather than later. Being an early adopter that understands the dynamic environment and changing needs of stakeholders puts a company on the fast track to success.

    It’s also worth noting that a SaaS service or product is often modular, which means that you can opt and test for parts of it that help you the most in your processes. Providers will even have multiple offerings, based on your needs, usage or company size.

    Disadvantages of SaaS

    According to McKinsey research, most large companies don’t trust SaaS providers with their security keys and prefer to hold them on-premises. But on-premise tends to become less and less an optimal solution, leaving room for private cloud, which can also be offered by SaaS companies.

    It seems like the main disadvantages that most potential clients see are related to security and ownership. Many perceive a SaaS as an external solution that isn’t as trustworthy as something they develop according to their own specific needs and not as an enhancement to their own capabilities.

    Another disadvantage of SaaS is that customization isn’t as on-point as with bespoke solutions. Some SaaS solutions do offer a certain level of customization but not to the degree that it will perfectly reflect a company’s brand, identity and values.

    SaaS solutions come with challenges on the legal side as well. Companies adopting a SaaS product most frequently have to accept that any potential legal action will have to fall under the SaaS provider’s national law and not their own.

    Related: What Makes SaaS the Go-to Option to Build a Digital Ecosystem?

    Advantages of custom development

    Probably one of the biggest advantages of custom software is that you get exactly what you want and need, you own the IP, and there are fewer security risks.

    You get to digitalize exactly the processes you want to, with little disruption among your team. This does require a company to deeply understand current and potential upcoming challenges and opportunities in the market and respond to them through state-of-the-art solutions.

    Custom-developed software could be the way to go when looking to optimize a very specific process that you know and that doesn’t change too often.

    Disadvantages of custom solutions

    Building your own custom solution takes time and considerate budgets. Research shows that “less than 10% of developers can deliver a typical software solution with basic features in less than 2 months,” not to mention the cost of failure, which “typically affects 30% to 70% of enterprise development projects.”

    Once you do have it — probably later rather than sooner — the needs of the organizations might have changed, putting you in a situation where you’ve spent a lot of time and money on a product that no one will use (it is said that “most people use only 10% of a product feature at best,” a concerning percentage for a bespoke development).

    Furthermore, one of the advantages of custom solutions — building something specifically addressing your needs — can quickly become a disadvantage if that need hasn’t been properly mapped or if it tries to solve too many specific problems for too many people.

    Building a product without having as much market knowledge as a SaaS company comes with other challenges as well: It’s not that flexible and dynamic, it can block your agility, and you have to pay for each and every update — not to mention that there is a high possibility that the team that developed the custom solution will change, which means there will be a learning curve for any new developer who has to maintain and update the bespoke solution.

    Related: Before Investing in Custom Software, Answer These 4 Questions

    A change of mentality

    Custom-built software can very well complement SaaS software, bringing that element of deep personalization. By integrating them, one can get the best of both worlds: agile, state-of-the-art technology and custom, identity-based solutions for their highly specific needs.

    It is only fair for each company to want to stand out, but we need a shift in perspective: Stop praising custom developments for the sake of ownership. After all, it’s not owning your own software that will send you to the top but rather your understanding of how you can best meet your clients’ expectations. SaaS solutions are the fuel that accelerates your rapid growth.

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    Bogdan Nicoara

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  • Hack Your SaaS Growth With These 3 Easy Strategies

    Hack Your SaaS Growth With These 3 Easy Strategies

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    Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

    Contrary to popular opinion, you don’t have to build an audience before you launch your SaaS business. SaaS affiliate programs give access to other people’s audiences. You will access tons of early users in a few weeks that would otherwise take years. Of course, it comes at some costs that this article aims to help you get ahead of.

    SaaS affiliate programs work so that when an affiliate refers a prospect that purchases your product, the affiliate gets a commission in return.

    Related: How SaaS Is Changing the Way We Work

    Three strategies to launch successful SaaS affiliate programs

    If you are planning to launch your SaaS or looking to grow your customer base fast and you’re short on cash supply and not a marketing fan, pay close attention to these strategies.

    1. Play the long game with your funnel and pricing structures

    Before deciding on your affiliate commission structure, you must determine your SaaS pricing structure and profit margin. Do you want one-time pricing or recurring pricing? Since we are all about hacking growth for a new Saas launch in this piece, a proven strategy is to combine both pricing strategies. Yes, it is counterintuitive!

    But SaaS entrepreneurs who have launched successful SaaS products at a nitro-speed mode know this is the secret sauce. The engineering of this strategy will be done in your funnel structure, where your affiliates will send traffic. Your front-end funnel will be a pay-once-access-for-life offer or lifetime deal (LTD). Lifetime deals are limited paid promotions.

    However, communicate and enforce usage limits or restrict access to certain premium features for the LTD package. Next, put a subscription upsell in place. This is very important to have to compensate for costs incurred in offering LTD. Also, remember that your recurring revenue has to outgrow your LTD revenue to keep the model sustainable. Here are a few tips to keep this on lock:

    2. Offer a limited number of lifetime accounts

    Use in-app prompts to nudge users to upgrade to a yearly subscription when they reach LTD usage limits. Use LTD customers’ first-party data to optimize advertisements for the subscription offer. You need a viral loop, as your LTD is a promotional strategy. This is where affiliates come in.

    Lifetime deals sell fast, and affiliates jump on it real quick. This fact is what the million-dollar SaaS LTD platforms and their vast affiliate network thrives on. When you throw in recurring commissions (on the back of the commission for LTD sales) to affiliates whose leads take up your subscription offer, you are in for a treat of quality leads.

    3. Find niche affiliates

    Next up is finding the affiliates that will form your viral loop. You have two options:

    1. Reach out and recruit affiliates. Think of this as making cold outreach to affiliates. So, where should you fire your cold shots? It’s best to start with blogs and review sites, content creators and influencers, online communities or brands with complementary products.
    2. Tap into an existing affiliate network. This is the growth hacking route. Of course, you have to be ready to part with some of your revenue.

    It is possible to launch on these platforms and have zero affiliate sales. This is where affiliate managers come in. They help you onboard the big whale affiliates and manage your launch in exchange for some percent of the launch revenue.

    Here are a few tips to ensure you get the best affiliates for your saas affiliate programs:

    1. Ensure they have access to your target audience
    2. Go for those who have experience promoting SaaS
    3. Verify that their traffic sources are genuine
    4. Ask how they intend to promote your SaaS to make sure your interests align

    SaaS marketing requires a lot of moving parts to achieve success. Hence, do some heavy lifting for your affiliates by providing them with marketing materials to promote your product.

    Your SaaS affiliate program promotional kit should include promotional email templates, a media kit, explainer videos, ad creatives, testimonials and case studies. You can support affiliates by hosting live webinars. All affiliates have to do is drive traffic to the webinars.

    The LTD offer in the hybrid approach to SaaS affiliate programs will give you the runway cash, the feedback and the marketing data you need to scale your subscription revenue quickly. At the same time, the recurring commissions keep your affiliates motivated.

    Related: A Quick Checklist for Building SaaS Businesse

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    Said Shiripour

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  • What SaaS Companies Need to Focus on to Survive Market Downturns

    What SaaS Companies Need to Focus on to Survive Market Downturns

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    Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

    If this is your first market downturn, you may be especially confused by the conflicting advice arising from such an event. To some, the sky is falling, and you should quickly change your model. To others, the pastures are green, and you should take advantage of the weakened landscape. Which one you are depends on what the data tells you about your business.

    Right now, the data from the venture capital world can feel bleak: Global VC funding fell 33% quarter-over-quarter in Q3 2022. SaaS, specifically, has seen valuations slide since the beginning of 2022. However, not all companies are created equal.

    The valuation decline has been the steepest for companies not focused on their data, specifically their unit economics. In those unit economics, you’ll discover whether you should bear down to weather the storm or attack the market to expand your dominance. Either way, the decisions you make now should be strongly rooted in your unit economics.

    Related: 2022’s Top Trends Impacting SaaS Company Funding and Growth

    The pendulum swing

    We all benefited from larger funds and higher valuations. A rising tide raises all ships; unfortunately, that includes the leaky ones. The glut of available capital meant companies performing at mediocre and poor levels from an efficiency perspective could still grow quickly. In some cases, investors were pushing companies to take more chances and bet on future growth, sacrificing efficiency and certainly profitability.

    Those days of “growth at all costs” seem behind us. As markets sank and capital tightened, funders scrutinized their deals harder. They now seek companies demonstrating the fundamentals of running a scalable SaaS company, with efficiency and a strong path to profitability as hallmarks.

    The metrics that matter

    To be clear, SaaS companies cannot survive without growth — dominating your space requires it. But growth can no longer come at all costs, and companies must display certain fundamental metrics to support faster growth. SaaS companies should track dozens of metrics, but to attract investment in the current market, companies must address their efficiency metrics, especially:

    • Gross retention, with a goal of 90%+;

    • Net retention, with a goal of 110%+;

    • Gross margins, with a goal of 75%+;

    • Cost of acquisition (CAC), with a payback goal of <2 years

    Achieving these efficiency metrics will help companies maintain or exceed their valuations. If you’re already achieving these metrics, then you’ve earned the right to discuss deploying more capital in exchange for growth. If you aren’t, consider slowing growth and redirecting your strategy, especially if capital is tight.

    Related: Four Ways To Ensure Your Company Will Survive A Market Downturn

    The cost of capital without efficiency

    The higher cost of capital may prove incredibly expensive for companies buying time to achieve efficient growth. Beyond tightened funding requirements and depressed valuations, investors are placing more funder-friendly structures into deals with less fundamentally sound companies, including liquidation preferences, voting rights and even board control to reduce their downside risk. In fact, overly flawed later-stage companies may struggle to find funding on acceptable terms and may have to explore an exit or consolidation. But those wanting to tough it out and buy time to see better metrics have options.

    What can leaders do now?

    Start by scrutinizing your business fundamentals and assessing the efficiency of your core operating teams, then adjust to reduce inefficient spending.

    • Sales: Review metrics like pipeline-to-bookings ratio (with a goal of 4-5x+) and average seller’s quota attainment (with a goal of 65%+). This information will focus your efforts and help you find needle-moving improvements before simply growing your sales teams without correcting underlying issues.

    • Marketing: Focus on efficiency metrics like your cost per opportunity across every channel and over-invest in high-performing channels.

    • Product teams: Consider tracking efficiency based on a product productivity benchmark and monitor user-to-issues ratios. You might invest more in customer features and platform stability over new builds to increase retention and enable higher converting upsells.

    • Customer success: Examine retention rates across various customer segmentations to understand your customer base’s strengths and weaknesses. Optimize your book of business-to-customer rep ratios, and heed customer Net Promoter Scores and other sentiment metrics.

    As you adjust, you may need to shrink your teams and rightsize your operation. It’s an unpleasant reality, but you should fill any cracks in your ship before renewing your push for growth. This can help control your burn rate and buy the time needed to convince an investor you’re on the path to efficiency.

    Related: 4 Tips To Keep Your Business Afloat in a Downturn

    Where is the funding?

    Valuations likely won’t reach 2021 numbers, but companies with strong fundamentals will find funding. Companies correcting their fundamentals and needing to buy time with capital will find tougher markets. So, where else can you go?

    Start with your current investor base. They have as much to lose as you do, and in the case of venture capitalists, they often have allocated “dry powder” for situations like these. They may also behave more moderately as bad valuations and more structure can often hurt their previous positions. Another way to avoid a down round in the short term is by raising via convertible notes.

    If equity is not an option, climbing interest rates have made debt providers more active, creating an opportunity to explore debt financing. If it’s available to you and makes sense financially, leveraging debt lets you raise non-dilutive capital that buys you time to achieve better efficiency metrics. Timing matters, however, as the debt market can ebb fast should monetary policies change further.

    The funding silver lining

    Companies that rightsize their operations and control their burn for the next year might find a funding pool at the end of the proverbial rainbow. Funds with charters to invest in private tech companies are riding out the troubled market on the sidelines. As the market improves, funds will further open their checkbooks to companies with healthy efficiency metrics.

    Valuations may not have completely rebounded by then, but companies will keep raising at good multiples if they demonstrate solid fundamentals and maintain healthy efficiency metrics alongside growth rates. These companies are best prepared to ride out the falling wave and catch the rising tide again.

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    Afif Khoury

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  • Why Are Founders Still Ignoring This Easy Way to Boost Profits?

    Why Are Founders Still Ignoring This Easy Way to Boost Profits?

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    Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

    It’s not every day that you stumble across a truly surprising statistic, but this one should shake any entrepreneur in their boots. The average SaaS company spends just 6 hours determining its pricing strategy. Now, that isn’t 6 hours every month or even every quarter. That’s 6 hours over the entire lifespan of a business. Ask any founder how long they spent choosing fonts and layouts or adjusting the logo’s size in the document’s header. The answer will, without a doubt, be orders of magnitude longer.

    Not devoting time to pricing means entrepreneurs miss out on a crucial part of optimizing their business. They already work to optimize everything else, and pricing strategy can significantly affect their company’s bottom line. The investment required to optimize it is minuscule relative to spending hours and wasting labor on choosing the perfect font.

    Related: How SaaS Is Changing the Way We Work

    A widely quoted Harvard Business Review piece published thirty years ago already made a case for optimizing pricing models, and still, founders haven’t caught up. In the article, aptly titled “Managing Price, Gaining Profit,” the authors assessed how much an increase in price affects the average company’s bottom line compared to an increase in volume. Price won out by almost four times as much.

    With such high leverage on price, even if a company’s managers are spot on in their pricing 90% of the time, there is a big payout for improving that to even 92%. Even though these results were corroborated years later in a McKinsey study, it seems founders are still coming up from behind on this issue. It also bears to note that pricing is a double-edged sword — if a 1% rise in price can improve your profits by a significant margin, then a 1% price cut can damage them.

    What is it that the price reflects?

    Companies often look at price as simply what the customer will be willing to pay, but that might be a mistake. That approach fails to consider the thousands of moving parts that need to seamlessly work in unison, almost like magic, to provide value. The price should reflect that.

    Researching pricing can be overwhelming because the sheer number of pricing models, strategies and tactics available is gigantic, so it’s almost impossible to know where to start. And frankly, there is no shortage of the mistakes you can make, i.e., pricing based solely on undercutting your competition, not segmenting customers, not trying enough price points, overcomplicating pricing presentation, and dozens more. But thankfully, in the world of tech, a conversation about pricing is brewing, and there are some surprising and exciting developments out there.

    One group of products notoriously difficult to price is legal cases. If a class action lawsuit has a 50% chance of reaching a verdict or settlement worth ten million dollars, the case has an expected value of five million dollars. However, valuations of commodified legal cases usually run on gut feelings and lawyers drawing from their own experience.

    Pricing and valuation is virtually a neglected field regarding the commodification of legal cases. An AI-powered justice intelligence platform called Darrow has seized on this and developed an algorithm that uses big data to value legal cases accurately. This platform finds a fair price and opens the door to a new suite of investment opportunities.

    As Software-as-a-Service is a relatively new concept, it makes sense to step away from old-fashioned pricing models. We’re no longer in the ’90s, and the SaaS buyer experience needs to reflect that. Software company Stigg, for example, has built software and API that gives companies fine-tuned control over what can be priced and packaged separately, helping businesses ship better plans to their customers.

    The irony of using software for pricing is that management will likely not spend more than 6 hours deciding between freemium, trials, subscriptions, usage-based pricing, etc. But at the very least, a program is doing the thinking in the executive’s place. Such software can serve executives particularly well today as companies cut costs, slow hiring, and search for ways to boost productivity.

    Thirty percent of CFOs are considering layoffs, and most expect a recession to come, according to a new Grant Thorton survey. Considering the state of the economy and rising inflation, companies can no longer afford to keep hires on board that aren’t holding their weight, and decisions to make certain pinpointed cuts make total sense. But sometimes cuts — especially in layoffs and reduced benefits — tend to hurt morale.

    Finding ways to maximize profit before resorting to cuts should be a top priority, and updating pricing is an excellent place to start. Pricing is too important to simply be left up to ad hoc decisions and gut feelings, and industry leaders would benefit from remembering that.

    Related: Don’t Try to Maximize Growth and Profitability at the Same Time. It’s Impossible.

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    Ariel Shapira

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