There is an assumption regarding SEO & content marketing that increasing organic traffic automatically means more conversions, more leads, and a bigger sales pipeline.
However, if you’re reading this article right now, you’re aware that that’s not always true, and you’re currently searching for answers to what’s going on and how to fix the issue.
Let’s make your organic traffic work better for you.
Reasons your optimized content isn’t converting into SaaS customers — yet
Typically, when we are auditing an existing content program, we run into one or more of the following six things that are holding you back:
1. Your SaaS brand is young and unknown.
2. You’re not covering enough content topics.
3. You’re using the wrong CTAs.
4. You’re placing too much emphasis on short-term results.
5. You’re targeting the wrong mix of topics.
6. You’ve siloed SEO from the larger content marketing strategy.
Below, we’ll let you in on how to fix these issues, one by one.
1) Create a recognizable, trusted brand
Imagine you’re looking for a list of the best TVs on the market for your newly renovated living room. You start with a Google search.
You immediately recognize some of the most popular brands like Samsung, Sony, and Vizio. You’ve owned some of their TVs before and liked them. Plus, you’ve seen tech articles about some of them being leaders in certain display innovations and smart technologies.
But one of the items catches your eye. It’s a brand you’ve never seen before.
They aren’t on any of the other list pages. When you look them up, the only resources you can find are coming from their own website and the page you’re on (which also happens to be created by them and hosted on their blog).
There aren’t any available customer reviews, nor are there any Reddit threads on the product.
You know about them now, but the odds of you purchasing one of these at this time are slim.
This is an example of SEO content doing its job but not resulting in a conversion (at least not one you’ll likely ever be able to measure). Your organic traffic can suffer the same fate early on when your SaaS product or company is relatively unknown within a well-established space of trusted competitors.
How you can address this
At this stage, your organic traffic generated by SEO is playing the critical role of boosting your brand’s visibility and “mindshare.” People are becoming aware of your product, and they’ll start to think of you more when they’re getting ready to make a purchase. This is a positive sign.
In addition to creating optimized content, you should focus on marketing efforts that’ll signal bottom-funnel trust:
- Seeking PR and relevant publication opportunities
- Gaining reviews and feedback from customers
- Identifying and messaging your core differentiation (price, tech advantages, number of integrations, simplicity of use, niche use cases, etc.)
- Building case studies
- Comparing your product 1:1 against competitor products
- Appearing on other companies’ or influencers’ recommended lists
Other than seeing a direct increase in conversions, you can measure if all of this is working by logging into Google Search Console and seeing if the number of people searching directly for your brand or product name is growing.
As all of these things start to come together, growing trust in your brand, you should notice your organic traffic plays a bigger role in shortening the sales cycle and driving leads for you.
Recommended Reading: The SaaS Content Marketing Guide: Building a Strategy that Increases Brand Awareness and Influences Revenue
2) Add a greater breadth of content topics
You’ve heard SEOs say, “You have to demonstrate depth and breadth” to rank your content. If you create only a few pieces of content on your website, ask yourself if you have enough to rank over another company’s content who gives users a more comprehensive experience.
Additionally, think about the type of content that keeps people on a website and coming back for more.
With optimized content, people tend to look for a complete series, lessons, and curriculums. These give them the impression that you’ve covered essential educational content on your website, and any additional content will be welcomed as a bonus or an extracurricular.
If you’re on a SaaS marketing team with a significant existing amount of content, you might also find it surprising that many of the optimized blogs have the same search intent (are about the same topic in too similar of a way).
So while you have 50 blog posts, you might only be covering 15 unique topics — making 35 of them unrankable on search engines and pointless to your audience.
How you can address this
There are a few ways:
Take the time to understand SEO and content pillars
One of the most basic things you can do to understand if you’re covering a content topic in-depth compared to the competition is to perform a search for a keyword you’d like to rank for.
Use a tool like ScreamingFrog or Ahrefs to analyze the number of articles being linked to from the blogs that your search competitors are creating.
If you notice that all the topic competitors have 12 to 18 articles in a single cluster, that’ll give you a good idea of how much content it’ll likely take to rank for that target keyword.
Map out the content pillars you’d like your brand to be an authority on (Start with 5 to 10 surrounding your product features)
For each pillar, think about all the topics you’d need to cover for someone to have a comprehensive understanding or be an authority on that subject.
Complete each pillar in its entirety before moving on to the next one
This will produce the quickest SEO results and best user experience early on, as your content offerings won’t feel fragmented.
3) Perfect the art of contextualizing CTAs
The three most common CTA-related issues within SEO content are:
- Only asking people to become a customer
- Placing your most important CTA at the very bottom of an article
- Thinking everyone on your company website wants the same next step
The people coming to your content via Google are often cold-ish users when it comes to knowing exactly who you are. Odds are that buying your SaaS product, especially if you’re in the B2B space, requires more engagement than a one-time visit to one specific blog.
How you can address this
Here are a few of the best practices for making your CTAs more impactful:
Use contextualized CTAs based on content the user is currently reading
This can be done a few different ways:
- Invite them to go more in-depth on any given topic by creating an inline CTA to a page where you have additional information.
- Ask them to be a part of your subscription-based content (newsletters, podcasts, YouTube channels, etc.) so you can control future communication frequency and topics.
- Leverage high-value, use-based CTAs like downloads or copies of templates or spreadsheets to further solve the problem they were reading about.
- Invite them to learn more about the product and its features as they relate to the content they came to your website on AND when the topic itself is lower in the funnel
Move your important CTAs up
Not everyone reads your content from beginning to end — and not all your readers will make it all the way to the end.
If they found you via organic search, they are likely looking for a very specific answer, which means they’ll skip around until they find it.
You can make sure they see your CTAs by moving them near the top and middle of your blog posts so that a higher percentage of your traffic engages with them.
Make your CTAs stand out
Some people simply use hyperlinks within a paragraph, thinking that’ll suffice as a CTA. However, if that hyperlink isn’t specific enough for a reader to understand or doesn’t stand out to someone who is skimming, you’ll find this technique is fruitless.
The lowest effort, but still impactful, way to punch up CTAs is to place them in designed quote boxes with a border around them or a background color behind them so they pop off the page.
You can also have ChatGPT or a developer help you code some custom CTA boxes, forms, and sticky-side bars that you can place within your blog template.
Give readers a variety of CTAs
While you don’t want to throw too many CTAs at your potential prospects on any one optimized article, certain CTAs play well together.
It’s very possible that a given topic could attract an array of people interested in a downloadable template, additional reading materials, and your newsletter. Test out a mix of CTAs based on where you know a user likely is in their journey with you.
4) Balance short-term needs with long-term plans
You’re responsible for delivering results and hitting a number as a SaaS marketer.
Aggressive, quarterly goals need to be hit so you can get that next promotion, better resources, and a teammate or two to help out.
What is imperative is that your SEO content plan not swing too far in the direction of short-term goals, as this can cause two potential problems:
- It doesn’t work at all because you’re only producing BoFu content, and your product doesn’t have enough demand for a pure demand capture strategy to generate a pipeline.
- It works well for this quarter and the next, but six months from now, these same pages aren’t converting as well as they did originally.
How you can address this
Let’s talk about ways you can avoid prioritizing only short-term goals:
- Remember to include content about ToFu topics, even if it is only a small percentage of your content to start. They play an important role in nurturing warmer interactions and making your MoFu and BoFu content more impactful.
- Establish leading indicator KPIs with your leadership team that you all agree represent a positive, satisfactory trend in the right direction and are not just MQLs and SQLs. This could be organic traffic growth, number of keywords ranking in the top 10, template downloads, product-page views, newsletter subscribers, etc.
5) Give your ICP the right mix of content topics
Too often, keyword research is the first step an SEO specialist takes in deciding her or his content topics of choice.
While a keyword research tool can be an interesting place to brainstorm around JTBD topics that have historical data indicating their estimated traffic volumes, this process has one major flaw:
You’re relying on your own intuition about what your customers and future prospects want to learn from you. You’re operating blindly.
Instead, you can ensure you give your ICP the right mixture of topics by combining the data you have or need to gather concerning:
- Customer pain points
- Product use and feature solutions
- Your internal subject matter experts
Then, and only then, can you do the most efficient keyword research and topic selection.
Recommended Reading: How to Choose Content Marketing Topics That Will Grow People’s Interest in Your SaaS Company
How you can address this
For customer information, you can:
- Conduct surveys.
- Schedule interviews.
- Communicate with your customer-facing cross-functional teams (Sales, CS, Product).
- Pull CRM data.
For product usage data, you can utilize the above customer data and:
- Talk to the the product team about current feature uses.
- Ask the product team about future feature releases.
- Ask the founder why the company and product was ultimately built.
- Read product reviews/testimonials.
For subject matter expertise:
- Identify a variety of people in leadership making directional product and company decisions based on the needs of certain customers, changes in industries, and experience working in the same industry and positions as your current customers.
- Interview those people, watch them on podcasts, and read the work they’ve contributed on.
With all of these, plus keyword research and an audit of your current content topic map, you should have a clear sense of which pillars or major themes should be scheduled on your content plan.
6) Integrate your SEO strategy into your larger content marketing strategy
You’re not running a “pure SEO” strategy like affiliate marketers or publishing brands that make money on ad revenue from page views.
You’re running a SaaS SEO strategy, meaning you’re balancing between your optimization wants and how they interact with various content types, different distribution channels, nurturing, product marketing, brand needs, and creating large purchase events.
SEO content for you cannot exist in a vacuum, siloed away from the rest of the larger marketing strategy, or you’re never going to create an impact on the bottom line.
How you can address this
Follow these strategies:
Create content and optimizable pages allowing you to support your other content types
For example, do you close more deals after people see a particular webinar video?
Identify topics you can create content around that will rank and support the lessons taught in that webinar. Use CTAs to invite people to view it and, when applicable, embed your webinar video or clips directly on that content.
Create content that can rank, and your cross-functional team members can distribute
Your sales team will appreciate the comprehensive comparison page you made between your product and your competitor's product. Meanwhile, our customer support team will like knowledge base articles of frequently asked questions related to your product, its category, or even your industry at large.
Create SEO content that pushes people to your newsletter, podcast pages, or Slack community
Your prospects are hungry for educational content on complicated, business-focused, and career-building topics. By finding keywords related to your expertise and their goals or interests, you can entice them to gain more value from even more of your content.
Create long-form content that ranks but also acts as a convenient source of fuel for other channels like social media, newsletters, or paid ads
Highly informative content that contains first-party data, applicable lessons, and illustrative images can be broken down, stacked, or entirely reshaped and repurposed for the use of other channels.
This helps keep messaging aligned throughout your marketing efforts and ensures your target audience hears you talking about important topics multiple times in various ways.
Recommended Reading: Yes, You Should Be Repurposing Content [+ 7 Examples To Get Started & Expand Your Reach]
Converting organic traffic is about marketing-first principles
If you follow the comprehensive list above, you’ll be well on your way to compounding growth at your SaaS company.
By creating an SEO-forward content marketing strategy that shows off your team's expertise, engages your prospects with multiple, meaningful touch points and shows off the value of your product when it matters to them, you’ll notice an impact on conversions over time.
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Helping SaaS companies with content optimization services since 2020.
