The team at Hiperion Marketing joined up with SaaS Mag to detail exactly how you can increase SaaS sign-ups using technical SEO.
Increasing sign-ups, which leads to acquiring more market share and ultimately increasing revenue is one of the defining problems startups and SaaS companies face in 2023.
A proven solution to this problem is SEO, but more decisively, technical SEO.
Embracing technical SEO is one of the most crucial customer acquisition decisions successful SaaS companies make in their growth journey.
The Problem Many SaaS Companies Face
Once your SaaS company has overcome the obstacle of finding the right solution to a common problem, the next major obstacle is customer acquisition at scale. Should we focus on social media? Should we hire an SDR? Should we do email marketing? There are so many different acquisition channels it can be difficult for founders to make decisions that produce results.
What A Successful SEO Campaign Can Achieve
According to BrightEdge Research found within their 2022 reports that 68% of interactions begin with a search engine. The ultimate goal of an SEO campaign is to bring customers directly to the site and increase the number of conversions: in the SaaS world, it’s all about sign-ups and/or demos booked.
The foundation of SEO that sustainable and organic growth is built upon, is Technical SEO. Technical SEO is an important first step in a SaaS company’s SEO journey, aiming to increase sign-ups. You’re not only presenting a healthy and user-friendly website, but you’re playing by Google’s rules now. If done properly, Google will reward your site by increasing impressions and clicks.
Creating Your Technical SEO Roadmap
An effective technical SEO campaign starts with something we refer to as a website quality audit (WQA). A website quality audit is an assessment of the current health of your website. A few common site issues at glance are:
- 5xx errors
- 4xx errors
- Broken links
- Missing title tags & meta descriptions
- And more
A proper WQA pulls in data from multiple sources to establish an SEO roadmap to guide your team, or an outsourced team, down a path of fixing the highest priority errors first. There are a variety of tools that help run an audit of your website. We recommend either Semrush.com, Ahrefs.com or if you’re looking for a free option Hiperion Marketing’s site audit tool can be found here.
Tip: Keep the WQA simple, Google Sheets works great. No need to overcomplicate things as long as the end result is the same: all technical SEO issues are fixed.
Another resource we strongly recommend to tackle site issues is Hiperion Marketing’s 36,000-word technical SEO guide. If you are having trouble fixing any technical SEO errors on your site you can find all the answers here. The level of technical difficulty ranges from error to error. Issues could be as easy as a small broken link fix to problematic SSL or redirection errors causing low conversion: the difference would be down to the fine details that should be looked over thoroughly.
Common Site Issues That Hurt Your Site’s Health
There are 75+ technical issues a site can encounter, however here are 5 common technical SEO site issues that can majorly affect your website’s performance and health.
5xx Errors
5xx errors refer to problems with a server being unable to perform the request from a user or a crawler. They prevent users and search engine robots from accessing your web pages, and can negatively affect user experience and search engines’ crawlability. This will in turn lead to a drop in traffic driven to your website.
Investigate the causes of these errors and fix them.
These errors are caused by the server being unable to fulfill an apparently valid request from a visitor. Often, you will need the help of a server administrator to investigate them. It is also important to consider that quite often, a chain of servers is handling an HTTP request, so it may not be your server that is returning the error.
4xx Errors
A 4xx error means that a webpage cannot be accessed. This is usually the result of broken links. These errors prevent users and search engine robots from accessing your webpages, and can negatively affect both user experience and search engine crawlability. This will in turn lead to a drop in traffic driven to your website. Please be aware that crawler may detect a working link as broken if your website blocks our crawler from accessing it. This usually happens due to the following reasons:
- DDoS protection system
- Overloaded or misconfigured server
If a webpage returns an error, remove all links leading to the error page or replace it with another resource.
To identify all pages on your website that contain links to a 4xx page, click “View broken links” next to the error page.
If the links reported as 4xx do work when accessed with a browser, you can try either of the following:
- Contact your web hosting support team
- Instruct search engine robots not to crawl your website too frequently by specifying the “crawl-delay” directive in your robots.txt
Missing Title Tags
A <title> tag is a key on-page SEO element. It appears in browsers and search results, and helps both search engines and users understand what your page is about.
If a page is missing a title, or a <title> tag is empty, Google may consider it low quality. In case you promote this page in search results, you will miss chances to rank high and gain a higher click-through rate.
Ensure that every page on your website has a unique and concise title containing your most important keywords.
Broken Internal Links
Broken internal links lead users from one website to another and bring them to non-existent web pages. Multiple broken links negatively affect user experience and may worsen your search engine rankings because crawlers may think that your website is poorly maintained or coded.
Please note that crawler may detect a working link as broken. Generally, this happens if the server hosting the website you’re referring to blocks search engine crawler from accessing the website.
Please follow all links reported as broken. If a target webpage returns an error, remove the link leading to the error page or replace it with another resource.
If the links reported as broken do work when accessed with a browser, you should contact the website’s owner and inform them about the issue.
Pages Not Crawled
This issue indicates that our crawler couldn’t access the webpage. There are two possible reasons:
- Your site’s server response time is more than 5 seconds
- Your server refused access to your webpages
Please contact your web hosting technical support team and ask them to fix the issue.
Again, most technical SEO issues that exist can be found and diagnosed here.
How to Track the Benefits of Technical SEO Fixes
Tracking the positive progress after fixing technical SEO issues on your site is important so you can properly gauge your efforts. There are a variety of free and paid tools to achieve this.
Free
- Google Analytics – You can track increases in metrics such as organic traffic, conversions, time on site, session duration, and more.
- Google Search Console – GSC will give you insight into pure organic traffic, breaking down impressions, clicks, click-through rate, and more.
Paid
Semrush – Semrush is an all-in-one SEO tool that allows you to track vital metrics such as keyword rankings and run comprehensive site audits. These site audits present specifically which errors still exist and which ones have been fixed.
Ahrefs – Ahrefs, also an all-in-one SEO tool, allows you to perform a deep technical analysis of your site to assess and fix technical issues.
Outcomes of a Technical SEO
Ultimately the goal of a successful technical SEO sprint is one thing: increase your revenue. In order to do that you need to put your website in front of more potential customers. To achieve that, you need to solve technical SEO issues to increase organic growth. We have broken down where to locate concrete organic numbers and how they convert.
Good Page Experience
Good Page Experience is an organic channel that can be located in your Google Search Console account under Search Appearance. This channel can be populated after a series of technical SEO issues have been resolved.
The traffic you are seeing above was generated for a B2B SaaS client with a global demographic within just days of a successful technical SEO sprint being completed. Metrics at a glance:
Total sprint time: 22 days
Clicks generated within 30 days: 3,790
Clicks generated within 120 days: 15,100
Total sprint cost: $3,495
Total projected ROI to date: ~$90,000
How SEO Converts
The reason SEO is so beneficial to SaaS companies is because of the intent behind search. SEO traffic in many cases converts at a much higher rate than other channels such as organic social, paid ads, or referral traffic.
How to set up conversion tracking is a conversation for another day, but tracking the monetary value of conversions is the ultimate ROI factor.
What could an extra 500+ conversions do for your SaaS company in a 90-day time frame?
How to Get Technical SEO Help From Here
Hiperion Marketing has helped numerous SaaS companies dramatically increase conversion, sign-ups, and revenue with their technical SEO sprint framework. If you want to learn more about what Hiperion Marketing has to offer, check out their website for more information.
You can also book a call here.
Citation List
Research reports. BrightEdge. (2022). Retrieved from https://www.brightedge.com/resources/research-reports
Search engine market share worldwide. StatCounter Global Stats. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share
Google. (n.d.). Understanding page experience in Google Search results. Google. Retrieved August 10, 2022, from https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/experience/page-experience
