SaaS SEO is unforgiving: it only matters if you’re on the first search page, which is even harder now as Google displays paid ads above organic search results and eats away even more space with features like AI responses and the “People Also Ask” section.
But you can make it to the top with proper keyword research and on-page SEO.
Read on to learn to create SEO-optimized SaaS content that makes Google proud of you.
Before You Start: The Biggest SaaS SEO Secret
Not all SEO professionals want to admit this, but 90% of SEO work is about analyzing how your competitors have done this or that and whether you can do it better—or at least on the same level—to have a chance to take their place at the top of SERPs. You don’t have to invent anything—just thoroughly analyze your niche and find your opportunities there.
And one more thing: SEO is a game of probability, but it’s very logical. So, you don’t need to be a genius to become good at it—just a good analyst and a grinder.
Now that you know what it takes, let’s unwrap your best SaaS SEO guide.
Step 1 – Check Whether the Demand is There
Even if you’re just starting a SaaS business and have never created content before, you likely have at least a vague idea of the topic you’d like to cover. If so, the first step would be to analyze the demand for the topic to see if anyone is interested in your product in the first place.
The good news is that the lion’s share of SaaS SEO analysis can be done with Ahrefs, so you may not even need any other paid tool. Unfortunately, there are no free analogs to Ahrefs you can use, so you’ll need to spend $129 per month on Ahrefs (the value it provides is insane, though).
So, here’s how you can check the demand in Ahrefs:
Enter your main keyword in Keyword Explorer, which is the query for which you want users to find your product. For example, if you’re developing a paraphrasing tool, the main keywords for your business might be “paraphrasing tool,” “paraphrasing software,” “online paraphraser,” etc.
Now you have tons of information for analysis:
| Metric | Interpretation |
| Keyword Difficulty | Keyword difficulty shows how hard it is to rank in the top 10 for the chosen keyword on a 100-point logarithmic scale. For “paraphrasing tool,” we’ve got 74, which means it’s almost impossible for new businesses—or at least it will take months and possibly years and/or a bottomless budget.
In addition to the keyword difficulty score, Ahrefs shows an approximate number of domains that should link to the page so it ranks in the top 10. In our case, you’ll need 247 referring domains. |
| Search Volume | Search volume is the average monthly number of searches for the keyword for a chosen location—in our case, the United States. Likewise, Ahrefs displays the growth rate over the last 12 months—+14%—and the expected search volume dynamics for the next 12 months (+42% in our case). |
| Global Search Volume | Global search volume is the average monthly number of searches for the specified keyword globally. So, if you’re not tied to a specific country, you should use this metric instead of search volume. |
| Traffic Potential | Traffic potential is the total traffic the top-ranking webpage receives across all keywords it ranks for. Not the most applicable SEO metric, so you may not pay much attention to it for now. |
| Click Distribution | Click distribution shows how the search volume distributes across organic clicks, paid clicks, and zero clicks:
|
| Keyword Ideas | Keyword ideas are an expanded list of keywords around the chosen keyword—in our case, “paraphrasing tool”—distributed over three sub-categories: matching terms, related terms, and search suggestions. Matching terms are keywords that contain your main keyword in the exact order; for example—“free paraphrasing tool,” “paraphrasing tool online,” “best paraphrasing tool.” Related terms are keywords that are related to your main keyword but don’t necessarily include it, which is based on the analysis of the keywords that the top-ranking pages also rank for in addition to your main keyword; for example—“paraphrasing software,” “software for paraphrasing,” etc. Search suggestions are keyword ideas from Google’s autocomplete feature, which appear when you start typing your seed keyword into the search bar. |
The actual result of this preliminary research in our case would be that you cannot realistically rank for “paraphrasing tool” in the near future—again, unless you have a lot of resources and experience—and therefore have to examine easier keywords, which are long-tail keywords.
To find easier keywords, you proceed to matching terms and related terms and use traffic and keyword difficulty filters. For example, you can limit the keyword difficulty to 5 and set the minimum traffic volume of 1,000 to find out if there are any low-competition, high-traffic keywords you can use as the main keyword for your business:
You’ve got one keyword already, and you can gradually increase the keyword difficulty or lower the search volume to find the right balance between competitiveness and traffic potential.
Important: The keyword difficulty score in Ahrefs is calculated based on the number of pages referring to top URLs that rank for the keyword in question, but it doesn’t take into account the overall domain rating of the website. This is why keyword difficulty can be misleading, and you might need to combine Ahrefs data with other tools—for example, Mangools—that also factor in the strength of the website when calculating keyword difficulty.
For example, “best paraphrasing tool online free” shows zero keyword difficulty, assuming you need very few links to get ranked in the top 10 for this query. However, if you check the actual rankings, you’ll find out that the “worst” website in the top 10 has a DR of 42. In other words, it would be almost impossible to get in the top 10 if you don’t have a DR of at least, say, 40.
Step 2 – SEO Analysis of Your Niche
To understand what type of content you need to create—SEO-wise and, well, content-wise—you need to analyze the competition in the first place unless you’re creating a niche on your own or entering a very underdeveloped local market. Both cases are quite rare, so it would be fair to assume that 99% of marketers should kick things off by researching the competition.
➜A well-thought-out SEO analysis—or a SaaS SEO audit if you’re not starting from scratch—will save you tons of money on content creation and backlinks, allowing you to focus on the most cost-effective content marketing strategies.
It goes without saying that the more competitive the niche, the more important an SEO analysis is. Most SaaS niches are quite competitive, so whether you’re creating lead generation software, affiliate software, writing software, or any other popular product, you’ll almost surely need an in-depth niche analysis.
How To Analyze the Best Competitors’ Pages
Once you’ve determined your competitors, you can analyze them one by one to see what pages and keywords they’re ranking for, where they get backlinks, and whether you have a realistic chance to repeat and surpass them with the knowledge, tools, and budget you have.
SaaS SEO Competitors vs. Business Competitors
Before you start researching competitors and their strategies, it’s important to acknowledge that not all your SEO competitors are also your business competitors:
- SEO competitors are the websites that rank for the queries you want to rank for.
- Business competitors are those that rank for the queries you want to rank for AND sell a product that competes with your product.
And this is a big deal when it comes to analytics. SEO competitors take your traffic, while business competitors take your revenue, which is even more important. In practice, this means that when you analyze business competitors, you also need to analyze their product, pricing, and features to understand how you can stand out with your content. With SEO competitors, it’s a bit easier.
And now let’s get back to SEO competitor analysis.
For educational purposes, let’s imagine you’re an AI writing & plagiarism SaaS company that competes with companies like Grammarly. Having done the analysis once, you’ll be able to repeat it for all other competitors and pages you’re willing to analyze.
First, open Site Explorer and type in “Grammarly” as shown on the screen:
Proceed to “Top Pages” to see the list of pages arranged by the amount of traffic:
Now you can see all Grammarly webpages from the highest-traffic to the lowest-traffic one, which already gives you an idea of how competitive it is to create and promote a similar page.
For example, if your SaaS product is a paraphrasing tool, you might want to check the respective page with Grammarly and see the traffic and the number of backlinks for this page:
Now you can click on “Referring domains” to explore the websites linking to this webpage. Likewise, you can see how many of these links are do-follow and no-follow. The more do-follow links the page receives, the stronger it is; the more no-follow links, the easier it will be for you to beat this page.
Now you can go deeper into backlinks.
Navigate to the “Backlinks” tab to see all Grammarly backlinks:
To narrow down the research, use filters. For example, if you want to find websites where you can potentially get a backlink with content—for example, by submitting a guest post—you can use filters like “Do-follow,” “Best Links Only,” and “Backlink Type – In Content”:
If you want to search for a specific anchor in a text—for example, you’d like to check how many referring pages they’ve got for the “free paraphrasing tool” keyword—you can type it in the search bar:
Now you’ve got websites and specific pages where you can try to get quality backlinks. And you can repeat this over and over again for all other websites, pages, and specific queries you’re interested in. This simple research allows you to uncover unlimited partnership opportunities because websites that have accommodated your competitor are likely to welcome you as well.
How to Analyze SEO Competition with Content Explorer
By analyzing keywords in Content Explorer, you can identify the most cost-effective keywords you can potentially rank for without having to get many backlinks to the page. Even though not only backlinks matter, it’s still a big chunk of knowledge you can rely on.
First, enter your target keyword in Content Explorer:
Next, to find the most cost-effective pages—ones with few backlinks and high traffic—set “Referring Domains” to 1 or 0 (for some reason, “0” returned no results in my case, although it should have returned some, so I’ve set it up to 1) and traffic to, say, 5,000.
Here’s what I’ve got:
So now you see four pages worth exploring. You can hover over each of these pages and get the full lowdown on them, including the number of referring domains and—most importantly—the organic keywords that these pages rank for and the traffic each of these keywords generates.
So let’s click “Organic Keywords” and see what we’ve got:
In this case, we’ve got only branded keywords that bring traffic, so this is not representative for us—obviously, you cannot use the other brand’s name in your SaaS SEO strategy—so we should move further. But I think you’ve got the gist—find easy pages and try to surpass them in quality.
Step 3 – Analyze the Search Intent to Understand What Content You Need
Search intent has been all the rage among content creators for quite a while, and for a reason. Understanding the actual intent of the user—whether they want to make a purchase or simply search for information—is crucial to creating a cost-effective SaaS SEO content strategy.
Now, the best way to decipher the search intent behind your keyword is by analyzing the top results for this keyword. These may be homepages, landing pages, product pages, blog posts, or videos—and then you know what content is likely to rank higher for this query.
Here’s what I’ve got for “paraphrasing tool”:
The results are clear: Google prioritizes websites that provide immediate access to a paraphrasing tool—and this is likely the strategy you should follow. In practice, this means that for the “paraphrasing tool” keyword, you don’t necessarily have to try to rank with your content, but you can use this keyword for guest posts to build backlinks for your product page.
Likewise, the structure of the keyword itself oftentimes indicates the type of content you need:
| Informational Modifiers | Navigational Modifiers | Commercial Modifiers | Transactional Modifiers |
| How to, what is, why does, best way to, tips for, guide to, tutorial, examples of, benefits of, methods for, steps to, ideas for, meaning of, vs, explanation of, history of, does [product] work, alternatives to, strategies for, can you, review of, pros and cons of, statistics on, facts about | Near me, login, address of, website, contact, support, customer service, phone number, directions to, headquarters, app, careers at, jobs at, reviews of, locations of, store hours | Best, top, vs, comparison of, review, alternatives to, for [use case], recommended, affordable, cheapest, premium, luxury, under $[price], features of, is [product] worth it, where to buy, rankings of, pros and cons of, ratings | Buy, order, purchase, discount, coupon, promo code, deal on, free shipping, sale, shop, add to cart, online store, subscription, rent, book, schedule, download, apply for, sign up for, checkout, trial, best price for, pay for, same-day delivery, in stock |
In Ahrefs, analyzing the search intent of your keyword—or searching for the keywords that have the highest purchase intent—boils down to setting the “Intents” filter. Select the search intent you’d like to focus on—Informational, Navigational, Commercial, or Transactional—and exclude branded keywords to get the full list of keywords that you can potentially promote.
Now you can narrow it down with additional filters. If you’re searching for the most cost-effective keywords with the highest commercial value, you can apply filters like Keyword Difficulty, Volume, and Intents AND also specify the words that you want the query to include, such as “best” and “top.”
Now that you’ve got commercial keywords, you can repeat the search for navigational and informational keywords if you want to create content for customers at the top of the sales funnel (you surely need this type of content; actually, most of your content should be informational and educational rather than salesy).
And if you really want to go the extra mile and create a keyword list for years to come (remember, though, that demand changes, so it might not be worth it)—or at least gauge your organic rankings potential—you can analyze the best-performing websites against the list of your target keywords to identify the keywords that you’ve missed. (In Ahrefs, Traffic Share -> By Domain, then choose a website and proceed to “Top Pages” to analyze the pages that don’t contain your seed keywords.)
Step 4 – On-Page SaaS SEO: How to Create SEO-Optimized Content
Creating content in 2025 is all about satisfying the search intent rather than inserting a specific number of keywords into the text, like it was a decade ago. First of all, Google analyzes the content far beyond the face value of the keywords—it’s quite common that a page ranks for keywords that weren’t even explicitly used but are relevant by intent. Secondly, Google penalizes practices like keyword stuffing and anything else that hinders user experience.
However, there are some helpful patterns you can follow to create SEO-optimized content:
Content Length
Again, the optimal content length depends on how much content you need to cover the search intent and how verbose you are. For example, for a product page, you may only need a brief presentation of your software, an explanation of how it works, and an FAQ section.
As you can see, all pages for “paraphrasing tool” are product pages with 1,000 to 2,000 words, which isn’t much by today’s standards. While top blog posts usually contain around 3,000 words, creating a landing page of that volume might be overkill.
URL Slug
URL-wise, the best practice is to use your main keyword as the URL slug while keeping the URL clear and short. For example, a URL slug “paraphrasing-tool” would be perfect for a product page because it’s short—easier to understand for search crawlers—and gives an idea of the page.
For longer keywords, though, you might want to shorten them to around three to four words. Overly long URLs are generally inferior to their shorter analogs, so it makes sense to keep your URLs no longer than 50 characters.
Meta Title
The best practice is to start your meta title with the exact keyword and keep it under 60 characters so it doesn’t cut off when displayed to users. For a paraphrasing tool, the meta title might be something like, “Paraphrasing Tool: Rewrite Your Content Instantly.”
Meta Description
Meta description is, in fact, the place where you should promote your article while optionally adding your main keyword. Meta description doesn’t affect SEO rankings, but making it SEO-friendly is a good strategy in case Google starts using it as a ranking signal.
The recommended length for a meta description is up to 160 characters because Google usually cuts off the rest. Likewise, Google rewrites meta titles and descriptions that are too long, don’t match the search intent, or are stuffed with keywords.
Correct and Broken Keywords
One of the most common mistakes that I’m still seeing today is stuffing broken keywords without correcting them. This doesn’t make sense anymore because Google easily recognizes poorly written keywords and penalizes for the poor UX.
So, whenever you discover a juicy keyword like “paraphrasing tool best online,” make sure to rework it into a proper one like “the best online paraphrasing tool.” There are thousands of cases when the page’s best-performing keyword isn’t even mentioned on the page, which once again proves the importance of covering the search intent.
Image Name, Title, and Alt Tag
Image name, title, and alt tag help crawlers and users who have disabled the display of images to understand what the image is about.
- Image name – Use a descriptive name, like “best-paraphrasing-tool,” that contains your main keyword (for the cover image) or regular keywords (for other images).
- Image title – Image title may repeat the image name or partially repeat the longer alt tag because it doesn’t necessarily help SEO but adds more context to the image when a user hovers over it.
- Image alt tag – Use SEO-friendly text that describes the content of the image, like “Screenshot of a paraphrasing tool rewording a sentence.”
Proper image attributes may have a positive impact on SEO, but don’t expect too much from them.
Internal Links
Connecting your content pieces by context is important for user experience and to pass SEO juice. By this rule, you may want to provide links to your product pages from your homepage and sometimes even to the most important blog posts.
One of the best ways to create a comprehensive content marketing plan is to think it through so your website becomes a well-structured library where a user can naturally explore relevant content pieces and expand their knowledge.
The FAQ Section
Adding an FAQ section, even if you’re not using an FAQ schema markup (available in the paid version of plugins like Rank Math), can benefit both user experience and SEO. The obvious practice would be to explore the “Questions” section in Ahrefs and use relevant questions from there:
Alternatively, you can enter a few of your main queries in Google and check it manually (for example, you can use questions from the “People Also Ask” graph).
Rank Math SEO Optimization: Schema Markup & Focus Keyword
Much of on-page SEO optimization can be done with plugins like Rank Math or Yoast SEO. For example, you can add the FAQ section as a structured content block (as well as other schema types) so search engines can easily recognize it:
Likewise, you can set up a focus keyword for your content and see how it will look in Google after publishing:
Step 5 – Get Backlinks to Your Valuable Content Pieces
Depending on the competition, your website’s DR, and the quality of your content, it may take several weeks to months for your content to reach its peak positions in search. And if it doesn’t, you may need to try to earn some backlinks to the blog post or page in question.
Here are the most important rules to follow when earning backlinks:
- ONLY links earned organically (not paid for) are safe (otherwise, you’re violating Google’s guidelines and may potentially be penalized if caught).
- ONLY do-follow links pass SEO juice (no-follow links can still generate traffic, though).
- High-quality links from high-DR websites pass more SEO juice.
- Links from relevant websites—both page-level (UR) and domain-level (DR)—pass more SEO juice.
- Links placed at the beginning of the article pass more SEO juice.
- Links placed before other links on a page pass more SEO juice.
- Links placed within pages with fewer outgoing links pass more SEO juice.
Think of a webpage as a water reservoir and links as pipes or holes.
Think of a webpage as a water reservoir and links as pipes or holes.
Make Sure Nothing Blocks Your Content from Being Indexed
When it comes to SEO for SaaS, the devil’s truly in the details. Sometimes, a small tick that should’ve been removed from the checkbox can halt all your progress.
Here’s one example (forgot to remove the tick? You’re screwed):
Here’s how you could accidentally discourage Google from indexing your content by mistake:
- Adding a “noindex” meta tag to the webpage code. For example, if you add this meta tag in the <head> section of their webpage by mistake – <meta name=”robots” content=”noindex, nofollow”> – correct it to <meta name=”robots” content=”index, follow”>
- Disallowing Google from indexing your website in the robots.txt file. If your robots.txt file is configured like this:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
Then it will block all search engines from crawling any page on the website (the User-agent field defines the type of crawlers that the Disallow rule below applies to, with an asterisk meaning the rule applies to all crawlers; the Disallow rule, with the “/” sign, itself instructs not to crawl the pages).
Likewise, slow website loading speed can hamper SEO, which is why you should make sure to check your website and webpage loading speed with, for example, Speed Insights and compress your images with, for example, ShortPixel, especially if you have a lot of them on the page.
The good news is that if your website is new, there could only be a few potential sources of issues. And if your website already has lots of pages, you can schedule regular website audits to keep it clean at all times.
With that, I’m going to wrap it up. I hope it was helpful. See ya.
Frequently Asked Questions
How important Domain Authority is for SaaS SEO and content rankings?
Having a similar domain authority to the websites you’re competing with is crucial in order to outrank these websites. For example, if the top 10 websites have a DR of 50 on average, then you should also have a similar DR to have a realistic chance to break into the top 10. It may be possible with a lower DR if you have lots of backlinks to the page, but not if the DR is much lower.
How important are backlinks for SaaS SEO and content rankings?
Backlinks are the most important SEO and content ranking factors. Strictly speaking, the more links the website and specific webpages get, the higher they rank on Google. So, you need to earn quality backlinks to the important pages of your website to increase your positions in SERPs.
Is it possible to outrank stronger websites?
There’s a small chance you can become the lowest-DR website in the top 10 or the website with the minimum number of backlinks to the page that ranks for a specific keyword in the top 10 if your website is more relevant to the query.
For example, if your domain name is writingsoftwarereviewer.com, you might have a chance to push a less authoritative yet stronger overall website out of the top 10. But first, you have to find out whether there’s a topical relevance gap you can bridge. This works best for local products and very specific products with smaller audiences that might be overlooked by bigger brands.