SaaS SEO KPIs: 11 Best Metrics to Track for Growth

SaaS and SEO are a match made in heaven. Effective SEO strategies allow SaaS companies to increase organic rankings, find qualified leads for conversions, and generate higher revenue. 

Unfortunately, getting these strategies to achieve the desired results requires lots of time, resources, and capital. That’s why successful businesses like Postalytics delegate their SEO efforts to agencies like MADX. 

If you’re going to do it alone, you’ll need to analyze whether these campaigns are delivering results. That involves tracking important SaaS SEO KPIs (Key Performance Indicators). But which ones do you need to track? How often? And why? 

In this guide, we’ll answer all these questions and have you leveling up your SEO game in no time. 

What We'll Cover:

Why is SEO for SaaS Important? 

While SEO is important for all industries, it’s a crucial factor that can determine the success of your SaaS business.  

Think about it. Your product is intangible. So, to make a strong impression on potential customers, you need to have good technical SEO and on-site SEO. Your content should also be easily discoverable by search engines and visitors; hence, you need engaging content with relevant backlinks and keywords. 

SaaS SEO cannot be neglected if you want to rank higher and beat the ever-increasing competition. 

How Does SEO for SaaS Actually Work? 

Let’s understand how SaaS and SEO come together. 

Software-as-a-Service as a Business Model 

A SaaS business model works around an online product that businesses or individuals pay a monthly or yearly fee to access. Most SaaS activities happen online, like subscribing to the tool, making payments, engaging with the online community, etc. A SaaS business goes through three key stages: startup, growth, and maturity. 

Because it’s not a one-time sale, SaaS companies often need to put more effort into retaining their customers for longer periods.   

The Basics of Search Engine Optimization 

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the process of growing your website’s organic visibility through carefully laid out plans and strategies. This means your website and content would rank higher in SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages), and you’ll get consistent search traffic. 

We can break down SEO into four main parts: 

• Keyword research: Discovering the phrases and search queries your target audience types in search engines like Google to discover products or helpful content.
• On-page SEO: Involves any activities you do on your website to influence rankings, say, using the right keywords and search intent for your content.
• Off-page SEO: Involves the activities conducted outside your website to influence rankings, like link-building.
• Technical SEO: Optimizes your website to help search engines understand, crawl, and index it. 

How do SaaS and SEO Connect With Each Other? 

SaaS SEO enables your team to build trust and credibility in your SaaS brand. This becomes possible by helping your website rank higher in search engines, focusing on the right keywords that bring qualified traffic, creating a more user-friendly experience for your customers online, and getting high-quality backlinks to your site. 

SaaS SEO Best Practices 

Here are three SEO best practices you should follow for your SaaS business. 

#1 Perform an SEO Audit 

You might have the best articles or perfectly inculcated keywords in your content, but if your technical SEO is not in line, your content won’t rank. 

That’s where an SEO audit comes into the picture.  

The three most important things you need to cover in this audit are: 

• Check for indexability issues: Your pages need to be in Google’s index to rank. You can easily get this report in the Ahrefs site audit.

• Check organic traffic: Google algorithm updates can affect your site traffic. To understand how they affect your traffic, you must monitor them regularly. You can use Google Search Console for that.

• Check for mobile friendliness: Mobile friendliness has been a ranking factor since 2019. You can check for mobile usability issues in Google Search Console. 

#2 Conduct Keyword Research 

Once your site is near SEO-perfect, you can conduct keyword research to create content around those keywords that your target audience is searching for. 

To find keyword ideas, you can: 

• Brainstorm a list of seed keywords 
• Conduct competitor research and see what keywords your competitors are ranking for.
• Use keyword research tools like Ahrefs and Google Keyword Planner.

You will even have to filter the keywords you find based on their business potential, search volume, search intent, and keyword difficulty. 

#3 Write High-Quality Content 

Now that you have prioritized your keywords, you need to create effective content that helps you rank high on the first page of Google. 

Study the search intent behind the keyword to create content that satisfactorily answers the reader’s query. Other notable things to consider are the type of internal linking you’ll follow, the content tone and style you use, white space, the use of LSI keywords in the headings, etc. 

Here are some best practices for creating stellar content: 

Vital SaaS SEO KPIs to Monitor 

Now that you know the basics of SaaS SEO and how to implement best practices, you must ensure your strategies get you the best results. 

That brings us to 11 SaaS SEO KPIs that you should be monitoring. 

#1 Organic Traffic 

Organic traffic for your content will help you understand the performance of each content piece and how your overall content strategy should progress. 

You can use tools like Google Analytics to measure organic traffic. 

This also gives you insights into how your target audience feels about the content your team is creating and if there’s a commonality that you can leverage. For example, if your BoFu content pieces generate more traffic and conversions, aim to include more BoFu content. If you’re seeing a drop in organic traffic across the website, it could be because of a Google update. Your team can then determine how to change your website/content so your rankings and traffic don’t suffer.

#2 Bounce Rate 

Bounce rate measures the percentage of visitors who come to your web page but leave immediately without interacting with it. 

You can use Google Analytics to set up tracking tags on web pages where you want to save bounce rate data. 

A low bounce rate could be because of three reasons: 

• Your content doesn’t satisfy the visitor,
• Your content doesn’t match the search intent for that particular keyword,
• There are technical issues like slow loading speed, page errors, or bad UX.

#3 Organic Impression 

Organic impressions measure the number of times your page appears in search results.  

Generally, this impression is counted whenever your page appears on search results, and the user does not need to click on the next page to discover it. It’s important to note that if your page ranks in the 8th or 9th spot, this metric does not take into consideration whether the user has scrolled to see your content or not. 

You can get this data for your overall website or each content piece from Google Search Console. 

#4 Site Speed 

According to Google, the probability of bounce increases by 32% as page load time goes from 1 second to 3 seconds. 

Your site speed could be why your amazing content is not performing well. Page Speed is now a direct ranking factor, so you can no longer ignore it regarding SEO and providing a good experience to your visitors.

To make your site load faster, here are four actions you can take: 

• Compress and optimize your images,
• Cache web pages,
• Reduce redirects,
• Minify Javascript, CSS, and HTML.

To get a speed report for your website, head to Google Search Console. 

#5 Backlinks 

Link building is one of the core aspects businesses focus on for off-page SEO. The more relevant and authoritative backlinks you build for your content or website, the higher the probability of rankings. 

It makes your website seem credible and trustworthy to search engines which is an important factor when deciding how high your content/website should rank. 

You can use tools like Ahrefs Backlink Checker to find the referring domains you’re getting backlinks from. 

We helped Good Annotations get 300 new backlinks in 90 days, which helped them increase organic traffic and rank for more than 5000 keywords on Google. 

Read the detailed case study here. 

#6 Conversion Rate 

Your conversion rate denotes the percentage of site visits that resulted in conversions, say free trial sign-ups or email subscribers. 

You can track “Conversion by source” to determine where your conversions originate. Knowing this lets you optimize that content or page further to increase conversions. 

This KPI allows you to guide your SEO efforts in the right direction.  

#7 Non-Branded Vs. Branded Searches 

Branded searches come from people who are already acquainted with your brand. For example, “Slack tool.” SaaS businesses often focus on non-branded searches, as an increase in non-branded search traffic denotes that your SEO strategy is working great. 

An example of a non-branded search term would be “best work communication tools.” 

Depending on how well you rank for these non-branded terms, you can identify your best-performing content and figure out ways to optimize the content that is still lagging behind. 

#8 Keyword Rankings 

This KPI measures how well your website is ranking for your target keywords. The more you rank for relevant keywords in your niche, the more traffic you can get and the more leads you can generate and convert. 

You can use Google Search Console to find the keywords that are ranking high. You can even compare the same keywords with the rank they held previously. 

Before you start linking keyword rankings with conversions, you must understand that not all keywords will have a high conversion rate. For example, informational keywords will have a lower conversion rate than commercial keywords. 

#9 Organic Click-Through-Rate 

CTR (click-through rate) measures the percentage of people who click on your link after viewing your link on a particular web page. 

If your link shows the solution your users are searching for, your CTR will be high. On the other hand, if you’re seeing a low CTR, the reason could be that your landing page or content doesn’t match the search intent of the user. 

You can get this data along with a comparison of impressions and CTR on SEO tools like AHrefs and Google Search Console. 

#10 Crawl Errors 

Search engine crawlers or bots need to crawl and index your page for it to rank properly. If you have crawl errors on your website, the effort you put into your SEO tactics will amount to nothing. These crawl errors could be duplicate content issues, broken links, server errors, etc. 

You can get a list of these errors from Google Search Console. 

While this is not necessarily a KPI, it can help you understand the reason behind your SEO efforts not working. It’s also a good practice to keep track of these errors and resolve them regularly. 

#11 Revenue 

Your end goal for any SEO strategy is conversions and revenue. Thus, this is an important KPI that lets you know whether your strategies and campaigns support your SaaS business’s long-term financial growth. 

While SEO strategies give a good return over a long period, you might want to regularly keep a track of the ROI so you’re not spending more money on campaigns that aren’t bringing any revenue. 

Best Tools to Measure SEO for SaaS 

While there are a lot of SEO tools online, we use the below four for our clients as they are comprehensive and seamlessly allow you to track all the important KPIs. 

Google Analytics 

Google Analytics is easy to set up and use, even if you’re new to SEO. The tool measures all the critical KPIs and allows you to analyze a huge set of SEO and website data to give you the insights you need to back your strategies and campaigns. 

Once you set up your Google Analytics account, you’ll get a tracking code that you can install on different web pages of your site. This will allow you to get data on the number of visitors, the device or browser they used, what they do on that web page, their demographics, interests, etc. 

You can even see rankings, page clicks and impressions, bounce rate, the conversion rate for desktop compared to mobile, best-performing pages, etc.  

Google Search Console 

Google Search Console is a free tool that helps you understand how your website performs on Google search and what you can do to improve your rankings and visibility. 

It also explains how Google crawls, indexes, and serves websites. This helps marketers optimize search performance. 

It tells you the keywords people are searching for, the content they’re finding, its rank on Google, organic clicks and CTRs, impressions, etc. You also don’t need to log in to the tool daily; it automatically sends you an email whenever Google finds an issue on your site. 

Ahrefs  

Ahrefs also offers many free SEO tools that can help you get started with keyword research, rank tracking, and more. Their paid tool offers comprehensive SEO functionalities like measuring the health of your site via site audit or finding keyword difficulty to prioritize content accordingly. 

You can even find the backlinks you’re getting, find critical SEO issues like broken links, analyze your and your competitor’s rankings, find gaps in content strategy, measure incoming traffic, and determine if your traffic is decreasing due to any Google update.  

Semrush 

Like Ahrefs, Semrush also offers a range of free SEO tools like rank tracking and keyword research. Its Site Audit tool checks for over 120 SEO issues ranging from duplicate content or broken links to deeper issues such as HTML configuration. 

The tool also integrates with Google Analytics for deeper insights. 

It also provides an automated link-building and brand-monitoring tool that lists link-building opportunities based on the keywords and competitors you enter. This functionality also allows you to conduct a backlink audit for better SEO performance. 

Final Thoughts 

The SEO industry is filled with data and insights that can help you make your campaigns and strategies more effective. While there are a lot of KPIs to track, these 11 SEO KPIs are the perfect starting point to identify areas of improvement and the pages you need to prioritize. 

If you’re new to SEO or you don’t want to spend time analyzing this data, you can use a SaaS SEO agency to find the right KPIs and SEO metrics for your business and provide you valuable insights. 

Head over to MADX to book your consultation call.