SaaS SEO strategy: Your guide to success

SEO is a phenomenal way to grow your SaaS business.

I know, because I’ve grown my own SaaS business from scratch to 18 million organic visitors through SEO, and generated £1 million in subscription revenue.

But, If you’re considering implementing SEO into your SaaS business, it can be difficult to know where to start.

There are far too many acronyms (SEO, GEO, EEAT SERP… Yes these are all real) and a seemingly endless number of factors to learn.

So, I created this guide to give you a thorough but simple roadmap of a successful SEO strategy, that will increase traffic and revenue for your SaaS business.

What can SEO do for your SaaS business?

SEO can do wonders for SaaS businesses.

My business (StandOut CV) is a B2C CV builder app with a relatively low price point and a very small team. With SEO as it’s sole traffic source, we were able to achieve some amazing results.

Here are some of the things SEO did for us – and could do for any SaaS business.       

• Create a constant flow of qualified leads: SEO took my website from no visitors, to over 300K visitors per month at it’s peak – and all of them were potential customers for the product.
• Build trust with customers: Getting found at the top of Google or ChatGPT and providing amazing helpful content to your prospects, builds huge amounts of trust
• Increase signups and revenue: When you have thousands of people visiting your website every day and you build trust with them – this results in lots of signups and sales. At StandOut CV we generated over 23,000 SaaS subscriptions through SEO.
• Reduce CAC (customer acquisition cost): – You probably know that most paid advertising channels are very expensive, and make a huge dent in your profit margins. Once you have a steady flow of visitors coming in through SEO, you’re no longer paying high fees for every click, and the cost of acquiring your customers is massively reduced.

What is SaaS SEO?

SEO for SaaS is the process of ranking your website’s content highly in search engines (both traditional and AI tools) in order to attract visitors who are searching for the solutions your product provides.

SEO is often misconceived as being some kind of dark art, but it essentially boils down to having helpful content on your website, and making sure that search engines find it.

Is there a difference between SaaS SEO and normal SEO?

The fundamentals of search engine optimization are the same for any website – but over 10 years of building my business, I learnt that implementing SEO for SaaS websites has some important differences.

SaaS products are more complex than standard products (especially in the B2B space) so they require a lot more content to educate their audience. This provides  a great opportunity to create huge libraries of content to rank in search engines and attract visitors.

For example, an ecommerce business selling t-shirts is quite limited in the amount of relevant content it can produce about t-shirts.

And it’s safe to assume that most people know how t-shirts work, and don’t need to read educational content about them.

So, they would largely be stuck creating content around competitive buyer keywords like:

• Buy t-shirts
• Large t-shirts
• Loose-fitting t-shirts
• Blue t-shirts

But, let’s say you have an accounting software business, selling access to accounting professionals.

Your audience have far more complex problems than somebody buying a t-shirt – so you can create a plethora of guides and blog posts that speaks directly to those challenges.

For example, guides on how to manage cash flow, explain tax deductions, or automate invoicing are all highly relevant to your target customers — and each one gives you the chance to rank in search engines.

Beyond just driving traffic, this type of content builds trust, educates prospects, and nudges them closer to booking a demo or starting a trial.

That’s the key difference with SaaS SEO, it’s not just about chasing keywords for clicks, it’s about understanding your customers’ problems at every stage of their journey and using content to solve those problems.

If you do it right, it creates a steady stream of sign-ups, while positioning your SaaS as the go-to solution in your space.

Here I’ve condensed 10 years of SaaS SEO experience into a streamlined process.

By following this guide (and using my SaaS SEO checklist) any website could reach profitable levels of organic traffic within 12 months.

Typically you can expect to see notable results within 3 months, but you have to understand that SEO is long-term play. There are no shortcuts.

But once you get the ball rolling, the effects start to compound and you’ll reap the rewards for years to come.

Your SaaS SEO strategy should be broken down into the following 5 stages.

I’ll be completely honest – technical SEO is the least fun aspect of SEO.

But a good technical setup is vital for success.

Even the most amazing content will not rank if your website has a poor technical foundation.

What is technical SEO?

Technical SEO is essentially how your website is built and optimised, making it easy for both search engines and people to use.

It covers things like site speed, security, mobile friendliness, and ensuring search engines can crawl and index your pages without issues.

These are the core technical aspects you need to have in place:

Site performance & speed 🚀

Your site has to load efficiently, be easy for people use, and it has to meet a number of performance metrics set out by Google.

Page load speed

Web pages have to load quickly, or users will bounce. And if Google see that lots of users are bouncing from your content – they will quickly drop you in the rankings for providing a bad user experience. You can use free page speed testing tools like Pingdom or GTmetrix to learn how quickly your pages load, and what you need to improve.

Core Web Vitals scores

These are a set of measurements (created by Google) that check how fast, stable, and responsive your website feels for real users.

They look at how quickly the main content loads, how smoothly the page displays without shifting around, and how fast it reacts when someone clicks or taps.

You can find out your pages’ scores on Google’s PageSpeed Insight tool.

You need achieve an overall score as close to 100 as possible, by hitting all of their performance markers.

The tool highlights areas where your pages are underperforming and suggests ways to improve them.

Also under the performance and speed umbrella you need to address:

• Code optimisation: Ensuring website code is efficient by optimising CSS or reducing reliance on third-party scripts
• Image and media optimisation: Ensuring images load quickly by optimising their format and delivering via caching where possible.
• Mobile performance: Ensuring mobile visitors experience the same high levels of performance as desktop users.

Crawlability & indexation 🕷️

Search engines like Google crawl websites to find the content within them, and then they use their findings to create an index of everything on the web – which they then serve their users in the search results.

AI tools like ChatGPT also crawl websites in a similar way.

The first step to getting ranked, is getting your site indexed – and to get indexed, all of your important content must be crawlable by search engines.

If you want to know how much of your content is being crawled by search engines you can use the following tools:

• Google search console: This free tool shows you how many of your pages are currently indexed by Google and which pages are indexed.
• Screaming Frog: Screaming Frog crawls your website in the same way search engines do, and provides error reports to help you identify any issues that are stopping search engines from finding your content.

Crawlability could have a guide of its own, but ensuring that your content is indexed comes down to having the following things setup correctly:

• Robots.txt: A simple text page that tells search engines which parts of your site they’re allowed (or not allowed) to crawl.
• XML sitemaps: A structured map of your important pages that helps search engines discover and crawl them faster.
• Canonical tags: Code that signals the “master” version of a page to avoid duplicate content issues.
• Noindex / Nofollow tags: Controls which pages should not appear in search results (e.g. login pages, thank-you pages).
• Internal linking: Ensures search engines can find and pass authority through your key pages.
• URL structure & parameters: Clean, simple URLs make crawling easier.
• Crawl errors & broken pages: Fixing crawling issues like 404 errors or redirect loops.

Site architecture 🏗️

Site architecture is the way that pages are organised and labelled across the site.

It helps users to navigate your website and find the information they need, and it also helps search engines to better understand the content and hierarchy.

A good URL structure mirrors the logical hierarchy of your website, making it clear how pages are grouped and related. This helps both users and search engines understand where they are on your site.

For example, if you run an accounting SaaS platform, you might structure your website like this:

So if you had a number of guides in the bookkeeping section of your blog, they would look like this:

• www.example.com/bookkeeping/common-mistakes
• www.example.com/bookkeeping/best-practices
• www.example.com/bookkeeping/cashflow-tips

URLs also have to reflect the content of the page. e.g. /features/accounting instead of /page?id=123.

The Screaming Frog tool can also be used to check and visualise your site’s structure.

Within site architecture you also have to consider:

• Clear navigation structure: Make it easy for users and search engines to move through your site with logical menus and categories.
• Internal linking: Connect related pages so search engines can discover them and users can find more relevant content.
• Anchor text optimisation: Use meaningful link text that explains what the linked page is about. (e.g. link from “accounting guide” instead of “read more here”)
• Breadcrumbs: Add breadcrumb navigation so users (and Google) can understand where a page sits within your site.
• Avoiding orphan pages: Ensure every page is linked from somewhere so nothing gets left out of the crawl.
• Balancing link depth: Important pages (like product or feature pages) should be reachable within a few clicks from the homepage.
• Strategic link flow: Guide users from authority from high-authority pages (e.g. popular blogs) to key conversion pages (e.g. free trial, features).

Security (HTTPS)

Encrypted, secure browsing that builds trust and is a direct ranking factor.

Website security makes your site safe for users and trusted by search engines, while protecting your brand from penalties or breaches.

Security might not be the most exciting aspect of SEO, but it can’t be overlooked.

Unsecure sites are flagged by modern browsers, meaning that users and search engines won’t go near them.

Make sure you have the following security measures in place:

• HTTPS / SSL certificates: Encrypt data between your website and users to protect sensitive information and show search engines your site is secure.
• Data protection & privacy: Keep user details safe with proper form handling, cookie policies, and GDPR compliance.
• Firewall and regular site checks: Keep your site free of bad bots and hackers with a solid firewall in place.

Structured data & schema markup

Structured data & schema mark-up sound scarily complicated but they are essentially bits of background code on your pages that tells Google (and other search engines) what the page is about.

Here are a few examples:

• Product / Software schema: Highlight your SaaS product details (features, pricing, reviews) so search engines know exactly what you offer.
• FAQ / How-To schema: Mark up FAQs and step-by-step guides so they can appear directly in Google’s results.
• Article / Blog schema: Add metadata to your blog posts (author, publish date, images) to improve how they display in search.

This takes the guesswork out Google’s attempts to understand your site and allows you content to show in rich search results like snippets, product features and AI overviews.

How to optimise technical SEO 🚀

To ensure that your site is hitting all of it’s technical SEO benchmarks, these are the main things you need to have in place.

Before you start creating content for SEO, you need to identify which topics and keywords are worth writing about.

This is where keyword research comes in.

What is keyword research?

Keyword research is the process of finding out what phrases your potential customers are typing into Google, so you can create content that matches those searches.

By targeting the right keywords, you attract visitors who need your SaaS product (either right away, or in the near future) and maximise your chances of generating sales.

The goal is to create a big list of profitable keywords that can be turned into a schedule of articles to publish.

I’ll break it down into 4 steps:

Define your goals and audience 🥅

Firstly you need to clearly define who you are trying to attract to your site, and what your content is aiming to do for them.

For example, if you have a video-editing software product, your goals and audience could look like this:

Then you should create customer personas to fully understand your customers’ goals and problems – this is essential for understanding what type of content they will love.

The best way to do this is by interviewing existing customers or reviewing interactions your business has had with them (what kind of questions have they asked, what product features do they find most useful etc.)

If you don’t have any existing customers yet, you should be able to uncover a good amount of information by researching on Google and looking at competitor websites.

Here’s an example of a customer persona.

Personally I would focus more on defining their problems and goals, than demographics, because they are what will really determine the subject matter of the content.

The demographics can sometimes be difficult to pinpoint – for example, an ideal customer for video editing software could really be any age, gender, location etc.

But try to pin them down as much as you can, because they will shape the tone and voice of the content.

Brainstorm a map of seed topics

Once you know your goals and audience, the next step is to create an initial list of seed topics – sometimes called a topical map.

These are broad themes that your SaaS business is built around, and categories your potential customers are already searching for online

From there, you’ll break them down into more specific seed keywords that you can expand on later with keyword tools.

This is an example topical map I created with MindMeister. You can use a simple spreadsheet but I find this helps to visualise the topic relationships better.

A good way to do this is to start with:

• Core product features (what your software does)
• Problems your users face (the pains your product solves)
• Solutions and benefits (the outcomes users want)

If we use our video editing SaaS tool example. Your seed topics might include:

• Core features: video editing, transitions, special effects, audio editing, exporting.
• User problems: how to edit YouTube videos, how to cut clips, how to add subtitles, fix bad audio.
• Solutions/benefits: create professional videos, edit faster, collaborate online, easy editing for beginners.

From these topics, you can pull out seed keywords such as:

• “online video editor”
• “edit YouTube videos”
• “add subtitles to video”
• “best video editing software for beginners”

These seed keywords don’t need to be perfect, they’re just your starting point.

The goal is to map out the main areas your SaaS product covers and the language your audience might use, so you’ve got a strong foundation to build out a proper keyword list.

You will continually refine and update this list throughout the life of your business.   

Grow and refine your keyword list 🪴

Once you’ve mapped out your seed topics, the next step is to expand them into a detailed list of keywords that you will publish articles about.

I use a simple spreadsheet and create a tab for each of the broad topics – like this:

Start by brainstorming and adding questions or search phrases into each topic.

For example, in the video editing topic I could add:

• “how to edit videos for YouTube”
• “video editing tips for beginners”
• “how to add text to a video”
• “how to cut and trim video clips”
• “how to add background music to a video”

Then you need to determine if each keyword is worth targeting, before committing them to your content production plan.

At this stage, you will need an SEO tool like Ahrefs or SemRush – to provide you with important SEO metrics on your keywords.

For each keyword you need to use one of these tools to find out:

1. Search volume – Are enough people searching for this term to make it worthwhile?
2. Competition level – Can you realistically rank for this keyword, or is it dominated by big brands?

Here I’ve entered the word “best laptop for video editing” into Ahrefs and it shows me that:

1. It’s searched for 14,000 times per month globally
2. It has a keyword difficulty score of 12/100 – so it’s not very difficult to rank for.

So, I would definitely add this keyword to my list, because it has a very high volume of monthly searches, it wouldn’t be too hard to rank for, and it’s very likely to bring in leads for the business.

And Ahrefs also gives us more keyword ideas that we can test and potentially add to the list.

So, keep adding these keywords to your list, and record their search volume and keyword difficulty.

You can then remove any that very low search volume, or will be too difficult to rank for.

How to find more keywords 🔎

Once you get past your initial keyword ideas, it can be tricky to keep coming up with new ones.

Here are some things you can do to keep the ideas flowing in:

Ahrefs, SEMrush, and other SEO tools can expand your seed keywords into hundreds of related searches. Just enter a seed keyword and scroll through hundreds of suggestions. You can also enter your competitors websites into them, and see what keywords they are getting traffic from.

Listen to the questions they ask in demos, support tickets, blog comments or onboarding calls — they are often the same topics that they search for online.

Search your seed keyword and look at related questions Google suggests.

Start typing a phrase like “accounting software…” and see what Google fills in.

Spot which topics competitors cover (and where they’re missing content you could create).

Browse Reddit, Quora, or niche communities (e.g. r/videoediting) for recurring questions.

Check popular video titles for phrasing that matches search demand (e.g. “Video editing tips for beginners”) then look at related video titles and questions in the comments.

Build a keyword roadmap

Once you have a list of viable keywords to target (50-100 keywords is a good number) it’s time to turn it into a roadmap.

This essentially means assigning each keyword to a piece of content you will publish and deciding where it will fit into your customer journey.

So assign each keyword to one of the following stages:

And then, assign a format for the content to be written in. e.g.

• Landing page
• Pricing page
• How to guide
• Listicle
• Case study

So, let’s say you have “beginner video editing tips” in your list – you would assign that to the top-of-funnel (awareness) stage, because readers are just becoming aware of their problem if they are looking for beginner editing tips.

Then you would assign a format to it, which in this case would be listicle because a list of video editing tips would be the most suitable format for this content.

Now you have a roadmap showing exactly how you will turn this list of keywords into valuable content for your website:

Now that you have your keyword roadmap, it’s time to start planning and creating your content, and optimising it for SEO

Create a content schedule 📆

The first step is to create a schedule for publishing all of the content from your roadmap – this is also called an “editorial calendar”

You’ll want to be ambitious with your schedule, but you also have to be realistic in what you can achieve with the team and resources you have.

You also have to understand that quality vastly trumps quantity in SEO.

It’s tempting to try and pump out hundreds of articles as quickly as possible, in a bid to get the job done – but this will almost always result in poor quality articles that readers won’t find useful.

My advice would be to start slow and get the quality right first, and then you can bring in new hires, processes or tools to speed things up later.

You can always adjust the schedule as you progress.

So let’s say you only have one writer doing all of the article writing and formatting, you could aim for 5 pieces of content per month.

You would then take your keywords from your roadmap, and add them to your content schedule like this:

Keyword	Title	Category	Awareness stage	Format	Audience	Brief	URL	Deadline
how to write a video script	How to write an amazing video script	Script writing	Awareness	How-to guide	YouTube creators, marketers	Link	/script-writing/how-to-write-video-script	2025-09-15
script template for video	Free video script template for creators	Script writing	Consideration	Template	Small businesses, marketing teams	Link	/script-writing/script-template-video	2025-09-20
storytelling for video	Storytelling in video: how to engage viewers	Script writing	Awareness	How-to guide	Educators, marketers	Link	/script-writing/storytelling-for-video	2025-09-25

You will need to add a column for:

• Title – What will you head the article/page
• Category – Which of your broad categories it will fall into
• Awareness stage – Copied from roadmap
• Format – Copied from roadmap
• Audience – Which of your target persons will it be written for?
• Brief – A link to a writer brief for the article (I’ll cover how to create these next)
• URL – What URL slug will be assigned to the article (e.g. /video-editing/how-to-add-subtitles)
• Deadline – When do you want the content published by

Prioritise pillar articles (content topics which are central to your business) and low-completion keywords in the early weeks.

Create content briefs 📝

Next you have to create briefs for each piece of content, so that your writers have clear instructions and goals for each piece.

The aim of every brief is to create a piece of content that thoroughly addresses the search intent of the keywords, and is much better than all the competing content that currently appears in the search results.

Type your keyword into Google (and AI tools like ChatGPT) and review the content that is currently ranking or being cited in AI overviews.

Your aim is to beat all of this content, so you need to highlight where competitors fall short and use their content as a guide to what must be included.

Review and note down:

• What competitors consistently cover (these are the “must-haves” for your own content).
• What questions they fail to answer.
• What sub-topics do they fail to include.
• Where they are light on detail, examples, or visuals.
• Impressive features that users would find helpful (explainer diagrams, comparison tables)

Then create a brief in a sharable writing tool like Google Docs

It should cover:

• The target keywords and any secondary keywords the article should include
• The search intent: What exactly are readers looking to achieve from reading this article?
• The outline/structure with key H2 and H3 headings, plus guidance of what should be written in each section.
• The primary CTA for the article –  Writers can add subtle nudges to download a free guide or signup for a trial, as well as CTA buttons.

By creating detailed, structured briefs, you ensure every piece of content covers all of the necessary components to cover the topic thoroughly – ensuring that your content will be the best on the internet.

Writing the content 🖊️

Writing quality content is a huge subject, but I’m going to keep it brief for the purpose of this guide.

If you truly want to create awesome content that ranks in search and builds trust with your potential customers, I would recommend following these guidelines.

On-page SEO content optimisation 📃

Once your articles are written and formatted in your CMS, perform these quick on-page optimisations to help search engines find and understand the page.

• Article title: The title should contain the primary keyword and give a clear description of what the article is about.
• Title tag and Meta description: These are the 2 sections of info that are shown in search results. Include your primary keyword naturally and make the title compelling to increase clicks.
• URL slug: Tailor the page URL to match the keyword being targeted, keep it short and sharp (e.g. /how-to-edit-videos).
• Headings (H1, H2s, H3s): Ensure that subheadings contain secondary keywords for the article (this should happen naturally if the article has been well written)
• Introduction: Mention the main keyword early and explain exactly what the article will cover.
• Internal links: Link to other relevant pages or posts on your site to pass authority and guide users deeper.
• External links: Reference credible sources to back up claims and build trust.
• Image optimisation: Use descriptive filenames, keyword-focused alt text, and compress images for faster loading.
• Schema markup: Add Article, FAQ, or How-To schema to help search engines understand your content. (this is normally handled by your CMS or plugins)
• Calls-to-action (CTAs): Add relevant CTAs (trial, demo, resource) to turn readers into leads.

After publishing…

• Link to page internally – Link to the page from other related pages on your website, from anchor texts which match the primary keyword (If you don’t do this, search engines will never find the content)
• Request indexing – Submit the URL to Google Search Console to request indexing. If your site is relatively new, this can help to get your pages indexed faster.
• Distribute – Send some of your articles out to relevant users via your email list or social media platforms, or submit to community sites like Reddit to get some initial traction on your content.

Optimising your content for AI 🤖

SEO used to be exclusively aimed at getting your content to rank in Google – and it’s still the most important channel for any business, providing 63% of all web traffic referrals.

But traffic from generative AI tools like Chat GPT and even Google’s own AI mode, cannot be ignored as they continue to grow in popularity.

Luckily the fundamentals of SEO will still serve you well in this new landscape.

AI systems rely on the same signals as traditional search engines: clear structure, accurate information, and authoritative sources.

The difference is that instead of showing a list of results, AI tools are increasingly summarising and citing.

Here’s how to optimise for AI discovery:

• Use structured data – Schema markup (FAQ, How-To, Product) helps AI identify the key facts, instructions, or answers within your content.
• Write concise, direct answers – AI models often pull short, clear definitions or step-by-step instructions. Include these near the top of your content.
• Create data-rich content – Original research, statistics, and frameworks are highly attractive to AI systems that need authoritative references.
• Maintain topical authority – Cover your niche comprehensively. AI tools look for breadth and depth when deciding which sources to trust.
• Add trust signals – Author bios, references, and transparent sourcing help establish EEAT (Expertise, Experience, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness), which both search engines and AI now consider.

As you can see, most of this is largely covered by any good traditional SEO campaign, but it’s worth keeping these goals in mind if you want to maximise your AI search visibility and open up a fast-growing stream of referral traffic.

Now it’s time to earn backlinks from trusted and relevant sites to boost site authority and rankings.

What is link building?

Link building is the art of getting other websites to link back to your own.

Links to your website are an important ranking factor, because Google views links from other sites like votes of trust.

If a website links to you, it’s their way of saying “we trust this other site – check out what they’ve got to say”

Links are the main way that Google determines which sites are reputable and authoritative enough to show in their search results.

The more quality websites that link to you, the more authoritative your website will become in the eyes of search engines.

Think of it like this…

If you were at a networking event for finance staff and you said to everybody you met, that you were looking to hire an accountant – and 90% of them all recommend one person. That person would quickly become reputable in your eyes, and go straight to the top of your shortlist.

What type of links should you build? 🔗

Not all links hold equal value.

It’s not a case of just building more links than your competitors.

You have to build the right links.

You have to build links with authority and relevance.

So, you should always consider these 2 factors when approaching any link building activity.

To give you an example of how this works in practice: When link building for my business (StandOut CV) I focused on building links from 3 core groups initially.

• Small job websites: These were highly relevant to my CV builder business, so even though they weren’t hugely authoritative, they still made a big SEO impact.
• Big news websites: Sites like the Guardian, Fast Company, Yahoo and Forbes are hugely authoritative brands, so links from them carry a lot of weight.
• Big job websites: National job sites like CV Library and Total jobs hit both the authority and relevance targets for my business, so getting backlinks from them really moved the needle.

How to build links 👷‍♂️

There are lots of ways to build quality natural backlinks that will increase your domain authority and rankings.

I’ve used dozens over the years, and there are pros and cons to all of them.

However, if I was looking to build high quality links at scale, with methods that still work in 2025 – here are the 3 I would focus on:

Strategic guest posting

Guest posting is essentially writing articles for other websites in your niche.

You reach out to relevant websites, pitch them an article idea based on your expertise, that will be interesting to their audience – and in return for contributing content to their site, they let you link back to your site from your author bio.

Guest posting still works in 2025, but only if it’s done with care.

Instead of blasting out hundreds of low-quality posts to any site that will take them, focus on approaching a small number of reputable, relevant websites in your niche – and becoming a regular contributor to their blog.

Writing for these sites not only earns you strong backlinks, but also puts your brand in front of a targeted audience.

Quality always beats quantity here — a handful of links from respected industry sites will move the needle far more than thousands of weak, generic guest posts on spammy websites.

Guest posting is often the best way to get your link building off the ground as a new site, and start to grow initial domain authority.

However it’s not hugely scalable – so, once you’ve bagged a few guest contributor slots, and built some initial domain authority, I would start to incorporate one or both of the following 2 methods.

Linkable assets

One of the most scalable ways to earn links is by creating data-driven content for journalists in your industry.

These are called linkable assets (or link magnets).

They work as follows…

You create a data focused page like a piece of original research, statistics/trends roundups page, interactive tool, or analysis of industry data.

When done well, they will rank highly in search engines for the terms journalist are looking for, e.g. “email marketing statistics”

They naturally attract backlinks over time because bloggers, journalists, and other content creators use the data from them in their articles and link back to the page as the source – creating an endless flow of backlinks that often come from well-known news publications.

If you want to learn more about these, I have a case study of a linkable asset (statistics page) I created for StandOut CV that has attracted over 700 backlinks with no outreach.

The key is to build something genuinely useful or insightful that becomes the go-to resource in your space.

Digital PR

Digital PR is the process of creating newsworthy stories from your business’s core topics – in order to get press coverage and earn backlinks from news websites.

You’ve no doubt seen plenty of headlines like these before:

• 70% of Small Businesses Still Rely on Excel for Bookkeeping in 2025
• The Average Startup Burns Through £120,000 Before Reaching Profitability
• AI Will Save Businesses an Average of 10 Hours a Week by 2030

They are almost always a result of a digital PR campaign.

They normally involve commissioning data studies, publishing industry reports, or providing expert commentary or opinion.

The goal is to get featured in authoritative news sites and publications, which not only builds high-quality links, but also strengthens your brand’s credibility.

While harder to pull off than guest posting or link magnets, successful digital PR campaigns can deliver some of the most powerful links available, at massive scale.

Digital PR is usually best outsourced to a specialist agency if you don’t have the experience in-house.

What links to avoid? ❌

Avoid getting backlinks from private blog networks, link exchange schemes or anything that seems suspicious or spammy.

Google knows when websites are trying to manipulate the system, and they punish them with low rankings or even penalties.

How many links should you build?

As I said before, link quality is far more important than the number of links you build.

But, you can’t just outright ignore the quantity of links you build – you need a process that brings them in regularly.

It’s hard to set targets for the number of links you will build each month, because you are never really in control of how many links you build.

For example if you’re using Digital PR and Linkable assets, you might build no links in the first 2 months… but then get a flurry of 50 links in one week if one of your campaigns gets picked up by a few big news sites.

So it’s best to focus your targets around output initially.

Analyse the competition

Use a tool like Ahrefs to review your competitors’ backlink profiles.

The 2 most important metrics to look at are:

• Number of referring domains – How many different websites are linking to the site.
• Domain authority – A rating given by SEO tools to determine how authoritative a website is. Normally from 1-100 and names differ slightly across tools (Ahrefs calls it Domain rating)

You can also click through to the source pages of their links to see what methods of link building they are using, and how often they carry out campaigns.

By doing this analysis, you can take an educated guess at how many links you’ll need to build overall, how much link building activity you’ll need to do each month, and what level of domain authority you’ll need to achieve.

Create a schedule

Create an initial link building activity schedule to get the ball rolling for the first 3-6 months.

A simple plan like this would be good for a new site:

Month	Guest posts	Linkable assets	PR campaigns
Jan	3	1
Feb	5		1
March	8	1
April	10		1

After 3-6 months you should start to get an idea of the number of links these activities are building and the impact they are having on your SEO and you can adjust accordingly.

Monitor and optimise

Record the links your campaigns are building and also check your SEO tool regularly to see the effect they are having on your domain authority.

As you build more quality links, your domain authority will increase – and this will boost your rankings.

Here’s a screenshot of StandOut CV’s referring domains and domain rating increasing in tandem, in Ahrefs.

Our organic traffic also increased accordingly.

View these reports in your SEO tool, and if you’re happy with the pace at which your domain authority is increasing, then maintain your existing link building schedule.

If you feel the rate is a little slow, then increase the amount of link building activity you’re doing.

It’s important to measure the success of your efforts to find out what’s working and where you need to improve.

You’ll also need lots of patience in the first 3-6 months.

SEO traffic trickles in at first, but once Google starts to trust your website, it can start to take off very quickly.

Looking at the Ahrefs data for my website for the first 18 months, you can see that monthly traffic grew very slowly for the first 6 months, but then it exploded to over 60,000 visitors per month very quickly.

So it’s vital to keep your SEO efforts going for a minimum of 12 months, and continually optimise them.

Measuring

Here are the high-level metrics to track, that will give you a real idea of how successful the campaign is.

• Monthly organic traffic – Use GA4 (Google Analytics) and your SEO tool of choice to keep track of how many visitors you are bringing in via organic search.
• Keyword rankings – Track how many keywords you rank for, and which ones. This can be done in any SEO tool.
• Leads, sales and revenue – This is the most important metric to track for any SaaS business. You can setup conversion tracking in GA4 and use a good CRM (like Hubspot) or analytics tool (like Everflow) to track first and last touch clicks, to show you exactly where your sales have originated from.

Maintaining and Optimising

Once you’ve built a large content library and your pages are ranking and bringing in traffic, SEO actually becomes a little easier.

Plus, you’ll be making more sales and revenue, so you can justify allocating more budget to your SEO resources.

But, you’ll need to perform ongoing SEO maintenance to ensure that you hold your rankings, your AI search visibility, and keep bringing the organic traffic in.

These are the maintenance functions you’ll need to keep on top of:

• Content updates: Update content annually to reflect important changes in the industry, and show search engines that your content isn’t dated. Also look to improve any content that is underperforming.
• Link building: Continue to build quality links to maintain domain authority and keep your brand appearing in relevant places.
• Technical upkeep: Regularly audit your site (using a crawler like screaming frog) for crawl errors, broken links, slow-loading pages, and mobile issues. Technical glitches can creep in over time, and even small ones can harm rankings or user experience.
• Competitor monitoring: Watch what competitors are publishing and which keywords they’re targeting. If they’re outranking you, it’s usually a sign that your content needs to be updated, expanded, or made more engaging.
• Emerging keyword opportunities: Keep revisiting keyword research. New queries arise as industries evolve — spotting them early gives you a chance to be the first to create content on a new topic and gives you a competitive edge.
• Conversion rate optimisation (CRO): Once traffic is consistent, squeeze more value from it. Test CTAs, page layouts, and lead capture forms to turn more of your organic visitors into customers.
• Pruning low-value content: If you have older posts that get no traffic and add no value, consider consolidating or removing them. A leaner site often performs better than one with lots of “dead weight”.

SaaS SEO: building a growth asset, not a cost

SEO isn’t a quick win for SaaS businesses, but it’s one of the most powerful long-term growth channels you can invest in.

By laying the groundwork with solid technical foundations, creating content that solves your customers’ problems, building authority through links, and maintaining your site over time, you’ll put yourself in a position to attract consistent, qualified traffic without being tied to rising ad costs.

The steps I’ve covered from research and planning, to content creation, optimisation, link building, and ongoing maintenance ; form a repeatable process that compounds over time.

Each new article, backlink, and optimisation builds on the last, creating a vast content library and authority base that steadily increases your visibility.

For SaaS companies, where recurring revenue is key, SEO pays off in a unique way: one piece of content can bring in sign-ups and leads for months or even years after it’s published.

That makes SEO not just a marketing channel, but a true growth engine — one that scales alongside your product and continues to generate value long after the initial work is done.

Download my free SaaS SEO checklist to help you build, scale and maintain your SEO growth plan.