Almost all SaaS founders I talk to have their content marketing strategy poorly planned, and execution is even worse. Most of them would hire a small team or an agency and have 0 signups even after months of investments. Reason: They follow a traditional SEO strategy. SaaS Content marketing strategy differs (or should) from a typical content marketing strategy. Unlike traditional SEO strategy, which is focused on optimizing websites for organic search traffic, SaaS SEO is all about driving signups and, thus, revenue. There are several reasons why SaaS SEO is different from traditional SEO strategy. 1) SaaS products are typically subscription-based, meaning they must constantly be marketed and promoted to drive new sign-ups. 2) Additionally, SaaS products are often complex, with various features and pricing plans that can confuse potential customers. This means that SaaS SEO needs to be laser-focused on creating clear and concise content that highlights the key features, benefits, and pricing of the product. 3) We use the term “purchase intent” only in SaaS keyword research. These keywords being bottom of the funnel, cater to the searchers who are ready to purchase. They want to buy a product in your niche or consider your competitor, or simply try to solve a big problem that you solve. Let’s say you are an email marketing product. The target keywords would be something like “best email marketing software” or “best mailing list software.” 4) The product features have to be explained well in long-form articles. 5) SaaS products are complex. Hence more education is needed. This means creating eBooks, whitepapers, and tutorials. The long-form content needs to discuss pain points in detail and elaborate on how you solve them. I like doing lots of video tutorials inside the blogs and also screenshots of product in action. 6) Creating content that explains how to use your product for the best results. For example, how do you send 100s of cold emails using your tool? Another example - how do you manage multiple clients in a project management tool. 7) Create content about your industry and where you stand in it. Also, this includes creating your page vs. your competitors. Be very graphic in these pages like quadrants, and comparing features and pricing and your USP. 8 ) Churn is a reality in SaaS business, so we need to write many customer support articles to retain current customers. Finding the keywords around customer support can be a bit of a challenge, but once done correctly, they can also bring in lot of organic search traffic (new customers) as well satisfy current customers' questions. At the very least, this will increase retention, if not get new signups. Just look at zoho or zapier customer success articles. They not only rank but also show users how to use their product.

I would add to this great write-up that disruptive offerings, especially new value propositions, will not be searched for until there is adoption and then competition. Outreach is the only way to cultivate traction when there is no pre-existing market. Only that means will create awareness among those who feel the pain of the problem our solution solves, but would not look for the cure unless given a clue to start to expect a solution. Then comes competition in the space, and by that point, SEO would start to be a lot more important to hold ground. Take the term

social media

for example, or

microblog

... or even

blog

or

podcast

before. Now those are search terms, but originally they were not. Same for domaineering. Good luck selling a domain name when no one knows the word yet. All the marketing for a high-potential but disruptive domain name goes into creating the word itself at first. We are often in the space of creating words.