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The SaaS content strategy I am going to talk about isn’t meant for all businesses and industries.
I designed it specifically for B2B SaaS startups and scale-ups with a PLG motion.
The best part about the strategy is that you don’t need to wait for months to get high-quality leads; it will give you results in short-time, like so:
With my SEO strategy:
So if you want an SEO strategy that can get you 100 or even 1000s of leads per month, you must indeed put all your eggs in this one basket 😉.
I know you might be eager to know what GrowthQuake strategy is all about. So without wasting your time, let’s dive straight into it.
SaaS GrowthQuake is made up of 5 steps:
Step 1: Create Revenue Focused Content
Step 2: Build Mini Clusters Around Your Content
Step 3: Create Linkable Assets
Step 4: Run Google Ads on Revenue Focused Content
Step 5: Use Content Upgrades
Let’s dive deep into these steps and learn how to implement them correctly.
At any given moment, there are 3 types of people in the market:
What most SEOs do is target somewhat aware and most aware people and try selling them the product.
Why so?
90% of people fall in the unaware and somewhat aware categories, and so this lures SEOs into the temptation of getting high traffic, but that’s not wrong.
Let’s face it; targeting an unaware and partially aware audience, you’d get excellent traffic, there’s no doubt about it - something great to brag about at a cocktail party 🍸, sure!
But, for B2B SaaS companies, conversion is everything.
Even if you bring in 100,000 traffic monthly but have no conversions, it will be a waste of time and effort. And most SEOs focusing on somewhat aware and unaware categories end up getting fewer conversions in the long run.
💡 Tip: If you want to get the best conversions, you have to target the ‘most aware’ people in your industry.
Focusing on prospects who know about their problems and are actively searching for a solution. It is the fastest way to make sales and get your conversion rates through the roof.
It’s true that you will only be targeting 10% of your total market size - but the possibility of them buying from you will be extremely high.
This process has helped me get great results for my clients, see for yourself 👇
(Red arrow is the time when I started with this strategy)
It’s a no-brainer that people actively looking for a solution on Google have Commercial intent.
So writing around commercial intent keywords is the best way to convert your visitors into buyers.
But what are these commercial intent keywords?
There are three classes of keywords that make the best type of commercial keywords:
Let’s get to know them individually.
Writing about these keywords will help you target people who are searching for a product or service like yours.
I create a lot of listicles, especially for early-stage startups, as it leads to immediate conversions. For a B2B SaaS company, some ‘best of’ product listicle keywords can be:
What’s more, you can also combine the above-mentioned keyword types and create more listicles, here’s how:
And so on…
For example, I am looking at Trello - a popular task management software.
Check out their team category and use cases they have in their menu👇
Just from this menu, we can have 6 X 3 = 18 commercial intent keywords like:
And many more..
You can use SEO tools like Semrush or Ahrefs to find such commercial intent keywords, but that’s not the only way.
One of the easiest ways to come up with a list of commercial keywords is by using Google autocomplete like this:
💡 Pro Tip: Use Google autocomplete often, as it’s one of the most accurate SEO tool since it uses Google’s data to sort the list by keyword popularity.
Here’s a quick hack to use Autocomplete the right way.
Type in your seed keyword, for example, project management (add a keyword modifier if needed).
Next, start typing a, b, c, and so on to get autocomplete’s suggestion and to cover every keyword you can potentially create a page on.
After you have a list that you got, by putting in all the alphabets, go through it and shorten it to only the relevant keywords for your business.
This might be a little exhausting, but it's worth the effort.
Competitor comparison has two types of keywords:
Now, if I am working for a well-reputed brand in B2B SaaS like ClickUp or Trello, I’d go with 2-way comparisons:
But what if you are an early-stage startup in the project management industry, and no one knows about you?
Do you think people would be searching for you or your product from day 1?
No, they wouldn’t.
That’s where 3-way comparisons come into the picture.
You can compare your software to the other two competitors and compare your SaaS features with the other two, persuading users to take a free trial.
Many of my 3-way comparisons have ranked on top of Google and have great conversions.
That’s my blog in the featured snippet. 😬
Alternative-type articles are one of the best listicles you could rank for and sell your product. You simply have to search for your product’s competitors available in the market and write a listicle of the top alternatives for it.
Let’s take the same example we previously did. Suppose you’ve built a brand new product in the project management niche, so the alternative type keywords could be:
And so on…
👀 Note: The key to getting conversions from such articles is to place your product at the top of the listicle. For example, suppose you’re writing an article about the Top 10 Trello Alternatives. In that case, your product should be the first in the list of top 10, followed by other alternatives available in the market.
For any B2B SaaS company, mini clusters are blog posts that support your revenue-focused article.
What are your revenue-focused articles?
There are - ‘Best for’ listicles, competitor comparisons, and alternatives-type articles.
So if you don’t have much of a content background and are new to SEO, get this, articles on commercial intent keywords are often boring (yes, you read it right, boring - but boring doesn’t mean it won’t convert) and not many people would like to link to them and get your rankings up.
So what you need to do is create mini clusters of “not-so-boring” content around these boring blogs, interlink all of them, and create a link juice that will boost the ranking for your money pages.
For example, suppose I am writing about ClickUp alternatives. In that case, I will also create several blogs about ClickUp’s features, pricing, and comparison of ClickUp with other software and link them all to the alternative page to boost its ranking.
Remember this - building mini clusters isn’t just for ranking purposes. With the help of clusters, you can walk your prospects through your money pages and convert them into buyers.
Let’s now discuss how you can build mini clusters around your money pages. I am using Ahrefs for this step-by-step guide.
You can checkout the interactive demo below or continue to read step by step instructions
Everything starts with Google! So open Google and type the keyword you want to build your mini cluster around. In this case, I am building a cluster around my blog on ‘project management software.’
Next, look at the top 3 or 5 results and paste the link into Ahrefs one by one.
Click on the ‘Internal backlinks’ button from the left side menu.
This page will show you all the internal pages that are linking to Hive’s money page on project management software.
You see, there are 97 links to this page just internally. So this should give you an idea about how your competitors are building mini clusters around money pages.
Do not just hijack all their keywords, but take inspiration and do your own research to make a cluster of highly relevant keywords.
Repeat this for 3 to 5 competitor pages, and you’ll know how to do it the right way!
Now this was just one mini cluster you created, think of the effectiveness of this strategy when you do it for 50 blogs. 🤯
Here’s a video if you want to see the written guide in action:
Creating linkable assets is one of the most important strategies to boost your website’s domain rating (DR). It’s no secret that there’s a correlation between the amount of traffic a website gets and the referring domains it has.
What most marketers do is go after high volume and extremely difficult keywords and expect to rank in a week or two for it. That’s possible but will take ages. It’s similar to buying a Rolls Royce when you have a decent salary, you’d have to save for a long long time and then buy one.
If you’re in the email marketing niche and want to rank for the keyword - email marketing, you have to dethrone sites that are a decade old. See for yourself:
Look at the authority score (AS) and the number of backlinks every webpage has. A new website, even with a good amount of blogs on it, might have an AS of between 0-10 in Semrush.
Let’s face it; ranking in the top 3 of SERP for such highly competitive keywords is almost impossible.
There are two ways you to rank for such highly competitive keywords:
Both these methods help in increasing your website’s DR is one of the best investments you can make, as it will help you increase the number of keywords you rank for.
Topical authority is when a website puts efforts into becoming an expert in one or more topics in their niche.
For example, if you have an email marketing tool, you could try to become an expert in email funnels, email campaign running, or some other sub topic of email marketing.
Here’s my 2 cents when it comes to building topical authority in B2B SaaS - take one sub topic and cover it from all angles.
If you’re writing about email warmup, write about the process, when to do it, how to do it, tools used to do it, tools’ alternatives, comparisons, everything you could think of. And then move on to the next topic and repeat the same process.
Covering all sub topics at once is like putting your legs in two boats and landing nowhere (more on this later).
But now we need to find a method to increase our DR in an affordable way.
You can increase DR manually with backlinks, but the process is expensive, slow, and unscalable.
So let’s think this through - what do you need to get a higher DR? Backlinks! Okay, and what are the methods to acquire high-quality backlinks?
Most content marketing agencies and link builders only know and follow #1 and #2, asking you for hundreds of dollars just to get you one link. And it’s also not acceptable to buy backlinks according to Google’s terms and services.
If you aren’t extremely careful, every link you buy might harm your website’s DA.
Your best bet is to build links passively via the #3 method in the list - Earn them!
The best way to earn backlinks is by creating linkable assets.
Linkable assets are content pieces you create for people that help them improve their content. This means you have to make something that other blog writers in any niche might think is a great add-on to their article and will link to it.
One of the best websites doing this is - Exploding Topics. They have ~2.3 million backlinks and 18K referring domains.
Do you think Brain Dean (founder of Exploding Topics) is building these links actively one by one? 🐌
Or are people linking to his article passively just because they are so useful?
The latter makes more sense, right? And that’s true. Exploding Topics has all its blogs related to statistics. Here’s what the topics look like:
The website has hundreds of similar linkable assets, and that’s the major reason for its success.
As I said earlier, linkable assets can be any piece of content that helps other people improve their content.
Two types of linkable assets I find to be most useful are:
Statistics-type articles are the best way to build backlinks passively. As you saw in the earlier example, almost every blog on the website Exploding Topics is a statistical one.
But why do people love statistics-type blogs?
It’s because when you write 100 Best Online Business Trends in 2023, you create a guide that is useful for writers writing anything related to online business. They can take statistics from your blog and link back to it, strengthening their blog and making it look more credible.
Finding ideas for statistics and surveys
The best way to get ideas for your statistical and survey-related blog is by looking at questions in the People Also Ask boxes.
For example, here’s the PPA box for “social media users:”
You can click on the questions to open new ones.
After doing so, here’s a list of data-based questions that I got:
These are all great questions to include in your Social Media Users by Region, Demographics, and Devices Linkable Asset.
Remember this - only write about questions that are data-based.
If you’re finding it tough to decide whether to add/remove a question from your statistics guide, imagine being a data scientist. Questions like ‘how social media affects your life’ or ‘how social media is used’ aren’t your expertise, and you must not write about those.
Here’s the general procedure:
It’s pretty simple; keep going through the PPA section and compile a list of 10-15 data-based questions. Write 50-75 words answers for each question; no storytelling, no explaining. Just facts.
And you’re done.
Here’s a method I use to write statistical articles:
Step 1: Start with, brainstorming keyword ideas related to their business. If your SaaS is a project management software, start your search on Google by putting in - "project management statistics."
Step 2: Check out the top ranking results to see if they are receiving links. For this you can either copy paste the top 10 blog page links one by one in Semrush or Ahrefs.
Or you can simply type in the keyword in Semrush, and go to SERP analysis to check the number of backlinks. We do this to check if the keyword we’re writing statistics about gets backlinks or not.
If you see the backlink profile, there are 6 to 7 blog pages getting a good amount of links, meaning that writing a statistics blog on Project Management is a good idea.
Step 3: When creating the article, my process is more or less the same as the method I mentioned above. But I try to use in house data if possible. This gives me an edge by having unique content on my blog, thus increasing my chances for ranking.
👀 Note: If you don't have unique data you can use Google Datasets to find statistics.
Step 4: Create the article based on the data you found. To know what your blog structure should be, take inspiration from the top ranking results. Always think how you can make your content better than the already published blogs out there.
Step 5: Graphics are crucial when creating statistics blog posts. Apart from having graphs for the statistics you add to your blog, create a beautiful infographic summarizing your findings and embed it on the top of your article.
Step 6: If you always want to keep your data up to date, you can embed a survey to your content and ask data from your readers. Add content upgrades to your blog so that people are interested in giving their insights for content updation.
Statistical blogs aren’t written like normal blog posts where you have a primary keyword, and then you should optimize the blog post for LSIs around it. The motive for statistics-related blogs is to have a lot of headers and rank for long-tail keywords.
For example, the statistical blog below from Exploding Topics ranks on top of Google for the keyword - business trends.
It ranks for more than 700 supporting keywords.
And the majority of the keywords are long-tail keywords like these:
Glossaries and definitions-type blogs are the next best to build links passively, here’s why:
Writing a glossary doesn’t require an expert and expensive writer.
Glossary is, in a way, a collection of definitions that doesn’t require you to be creative. It also doesn’t require you to be an expert or have deep knowledge of the topic. Surface knowledge is good enough, and a half-decent writer can get that level of knowledge in 30-40 minutes.
In case you want to build backlinks manually, having a glossary is a great way to insert extra backlinks in your guest posts. No one would mind you inserting a definition-based article in their content.
Here’s a short calculation of how many links you can expect from a glossary-type post passively and the value of it.
Let’s look at the social media glossary by HubSpot:
The blog has 1500 backlinks from 213 referring domains.
Any decent link building agency would charge ~ $300 per backlink. Assuming HubSpot’s got 700 decent backlinks from 1500, their glossary generated $210,000 worth of backlinks passively.
Suppose you have a SaaS that caters to e-commerce store owners and you want to create a glossary page for all the e-commerce marketing terms and concepts. Here’s how you can take ideas from the related keyword section of Semrush to get relevant terms and concepts.
Step 1: Type a term you know is one of the concepts in e-commerce marketing. Let’s type in, “what is CRO.”
Step 2: Scroll down a bit, go to the Keyword ideas section, and click on View all [number] keywords.
Step 3: When the keyword idea page of Semrush opens, it shows you broad match keywords for the term you put in. Go ahead and change it to Related.
Step 4: Export this sheet as CSV and shortlist all the different terms you think might be a good idea to include in your glossary.
This process is, well, self explanatory. Spying on your competitors to take inspiration from their blog is a great way to stay up to date with new angels and topics people are searching for on Google.
Here’s a short guide on how to do competitor blog page analysis via Semrush:
Step 1: Paste your competitor’s website URL in Semrush.
Step 2: Click on Backlink Analytics.’
Step 3: Scroll down to the end and click on see the Top Page section. This section is all about the pages with the highest backlinks. Click “View full report.” Look specifically for blog pages so you can get topics ideas and build mini clusters around them to outperform your competitors.
And that’s it!
I know you want to get all your traffic organically, but when you’re just getting started with SEO and have a handful of blogs online, a little boost can work wonders.
This little boost can come from running Google Ads on your money pages.
Let’s say you’ve written an epic listicle on Asana alternatives. Being a new website with DA between 0-10, it will take time for your blog to rank on Page 1.
Running Google ads to drive traffic to this page is a great way to pick up sign-ups in a short time and boost page ranking.
What you need to do is, go to Google Ad campaign manager and use the exact match keyword, which in this case is, Asana alternatives, so that you don’t waste your money.
This way, people who are searching for this exact keyword will only see the ad. From this Asana alternative page, you can either take your visitors to your website’s landing page or directly to a free sign-up trial with your tool.
You can do so by introducing your SaaS as one of the best Asana alternatives in the listicle you write.
Content upgrades act like small lead magnets that help your prospects go down the funnel, one step at a time.
So how would you embed these updates in your existing content?
It’s simple, these upgrades can be in the form of a helpful PDF, quiz, checklist or any type of content that persuades people to act and, at the same time, be of great value to them.
Here’s an example to understand it better:
Look at this blog on Project Monitoring by ClickUp:
If you scroll through it, you will see that the blog has a template to help readers make a project monitoring sheet.
Now as soon as I click on ‘Download This Template,’ it redirects me to ClickUp’s sign-up page so that I can create an account and use the template on ClickUp.
This way ClickUp’s:
So this is how you can use your existing content with upgrades and get free signups quickly.
Apart from the content upgrades I just talked about, there are several other content upgrades that you can use inside blogs to increase conversion rates.
If you have a webinar or an expert interview relevant to a blog you’re writing, it’s a good idea to offer it as a bonus.
Another idea is to record a blog as an audio file and share it for free at the top of the blog. People consume information in many different ways, so it's a good idea to have several ways available.
Here’s an example of a video embed I used a little while back:
👀 Note: This is a decent performing post and the video has got ~1K views.
Suppose you’re a project manager for a decade, writing about 10 Challenges Project Managers Face When Delegating Tasks.
Working for so long in the industry you know every inch of it and might have seen almost all kinds of challenges that a person might face doing their job.
Making a report about it and attaching it to your blog could be one of the most useful content upgrades and of great value to young and new project managers reading the blog.
When you’re writing about a topic that needs listing things in some specific order, it’s a great idea to give your readers a worksheet.
Another form of content upgrade your audience would love is a template. So this blog is all about how I grew my monthly signups with content and SEO, and that’s why, in Step 1, I linked content templates that helped me increase my signups.
Case studies are the kind of content upgrades that build trust and confidence between your product and prospects. When a hot lead is on the verge of signing up for your product, but needs validation, a case study could go a long way.
If you own a SaaS product that helps in hiring writers. You could make a case study of a company that uses your SaaS to hire writers and give relevant numbers like: How your SaaS helped a company hire 10 solid writers out of 1000 applicants in just a week.
Coming soon….
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