SAAS-SEO Case Study

We worked with a reputed SAAS company to increase traffic, revenue, and overall growth.

In this case study, we’re going to showcase to you an SEO client in the SaaS space who increased their organic traffic by 152% and impacted their overall growth. Also, to our delight, their team grew 3x in 6 months. A significant amount of their growth comes from organic traffic.

This SaaS company is in the short-term vacation rental industry. They are competing with huge players. Their core focus is to sell software that helps increase revenue using their AI technology. They have customers from all over the globe, with a vast majority coming from the US, UK, and Europe. They have fantastic systems that are integrated with Airbnb and many other significant players in the vacation rental industry.

We got on with them really well, and we knew this was going to be a fun and challenging project. After thorough research and analysis, we saw tons of opportunities to help them out and started putting together a strategic plan that considered their timelines and priorities. We chose steps to get the basics right and help them on their growth roadmap.

Migration to a better provider and improve the performance of the website –

The website was initially built on WordPress and hosted on a primary server that did not have a separate staging environment. First, we moved to a high-performing managed server that was stable, secure, and easily scalable. We recommended they move to Kinsta. We then helped them migrate and stabilize the basics. Read this to learn more about WordPress SEO Expert consulting.

For improving performance quickly, we configured some plugins to enhance various factors:

• Improved the speed of the website by moving serving images in next-gen image formats
• Minified the HTML, CSS, and Javascript of the website
• Dumped out a lot of unnecessary plugins before we could move to the next step
• Leveraged browser caching and configured a CDN
• Consulted client about development requirements

With these essential updates, the website saw a quick jump and numbers turned for performance and speed.

Content and Technical Audit

This SaaS business has been around for a while, building up many pages over the years. We noticed many of the pages were a reason for cannibalization and opportunities to improve OnPage optimization.

Cleaning pages for various reasons:

• Google indexed several pages, which were not needed and added no value. They were a significant cause of creating duplicates, thin content. The massive resources had to be removed. These pages had outdated content, causing issues in conversions and outranking some crucial pages
• Many posts and custom data types were also indexed, which were not supposed to be public
• These data types had the website’s domain authority shared across these pages instead of helping a few key landing pages to be ranked correctly

We acted upon these findings by cutting down these pages and removing many errors from the pages.

Next up, we evaluated the content pages by three essential factors before segregating them:

• Are the existing pages bringing in conversions? (Revenue)
• Do these pages bring in organic visitors? (Brand awareness and leads, Content Marketing)
• Do these pages have any backlinks pointing to them? (To help us rank better)
• After evaluating the factors above, we looked at the content on the page – was this valuable?

We cut down many pages and went down to the right indexable pages depending on the factors above. If the page didn’t add value, we would move it or merge it with some other pages. We also took care of the redirections for these pages and made sure they led to the relevant pages.

Technical Updates

We ran technical audits to discover the problems and fixed the website’s issues to be indexable and crawlable easily. Some fixes included:

• Got the copywriters to create missing meta and description information
• Fixed the broken links, files and images
• Handled the redirection chains
• Worked on security issues as indicated.
• Cleaned the site structure and interlinked the orphaned pages

Content Updates

We were able to get significant improvements with the actions above. There were many opportunities for improvements and updates based on the existing content:

• We identified some pages which hand to up worked up. There were sections of custom data pages we improved with updating the current content and adding a new CTA to them
• We merged pages with thin content with some existing pages to improve the significance against the competing pages
• We improved the home page and significant landing/ranking pages

An essential secret sauce of SEO is to look into the SERP with various factors and reverse engineer what already could be a factor that ranks your competitor. Yes, of course, we had to analyze, strategize, and plan to compete against them.

Here are the significant factors we decided to update to our existing landing/ranking pages and the home page so that they would perform better and outrank our competitors:

• List of keywords and topics to include and their frequency
• Word count
• On-page criteria
• Internal link improvement factors (along with anchor texts)

Using these measurements, we updated our pages and revamped our significant pages and also our homepage. The improvements in rankings were visible, as these were some low-hanging fruits.

On-Page Optimization

OnPage updates were planned using various techniques. As the website uses WordPress, the SEO updates in the plugins and pages had to be made. Learn more about our WordPress SEO expert services. The techniques used are as follows:

• Many of the headings, subheadings, titles, descriptions, meta tags had to be fixed depending on the specific scenario cases
• Home page and important pages Onpage changes were updated to get aligned with the best practice
• We acted upon the missing tags on pages. We fixed these tags with the number of characters to appear clearly in SERP (Though most were quick fixes, there were a lot of pages to fix in this project)
• We got some smart copywriters to improve the titles, descriptions, content, and search intent. This enhanced the CTR’s and helped improve our rankings further
• We planned to update the CTA’s for all the crucial positions and pages
• Many important images did not have alt tags. We got these images fixed as per the contextual requirement.
• Measurements and customizations GTM, events,

Content Gap Analysis

After analyzing top competitors, we figured there was some opportunity to create new content to start ranking for key-phrases and users’ practical search intent:

• We looked at the top 8 competitors to develop new content ideas that could create an overall impact.
• We listed, grouped, and prioritized keywords from our findings to have new content created. We set up the priorities from the most profitable(transactional) to the informational and navigational keywords. These lists helped us clear our direction further.

Content Marketing Opportunities

We had the opportunity to create new content ideas to reach out to new customers. There is a limited amount of search intent words used for direct purchase, so we knew we had to produce educational content related to the topics. All we had to do was educate and direct the users to the transactional landing pages. This would also contribute to increased brand awareness for the short-term rental vacation industry. We categorized the new content ideas into: 

• Transactional: For customers directly looking for such a product landing page.
• Informational: To build awareness about the product and brand by educating the customer with new content via the blog. 

We made sure to group the search terms into topical clusters, and then mapped them to the content topics. This enabled us to strategize clearly with our directions. 

Bringing in the right audience and making them aware of the product and brand was the goal for applying a content marketing strategy. The new ideas also served users and decision-makers to understand the insights for the product. 

Link Building Strategies

OnPage optimization and content work showed exciting results in rankings, traffic, and performance. In the short-term rental industry, this is never going to be enough. The competitors in this industry attract fantastic links from high-authority media websites. Also, some of them were well-funded companies that get excellent coverage month on month. We had to devise a plan to take advantage of link-building to improve our authority. Our website had strong authority to further our efforts in executing our overall plan:

• The client had planned many ways to leverage existing relations to get guest articles and links in various ways.
• We designed an outreach plan to get a campaign up and to run. The client’s in-house team executed these strategies well.
• The client also ran a lot of marketing activities like webinars and online events. We would continually update strategic ways to leverage our link-building plan.
• Looking into the broken links, we took advantage of creating an outreach too. These helped us in gaining natural links back to give the right signals to the search engines.

We also analyzed the high organic traffic pages of competitors, which attracted links for various reasons. These were usually resources pages, case studies, industry statistics, and others. We created more comprehensive, detailed, and better-designed premium content to help and provide an added advantage to our outreach team.

Monitor, Measure, and Iterate

As we take a creatively data-driven approach. We would continually measure, monitor and iterate using various tools. For our efforts, we would use tools for multiple purposes. As we know, there are numerous tools available. In this case, we were reliant on:

• Google Search Console, Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager, Market finder, Page Speed Insights
• Semrush, ahrefs
• Crawling Softwares
• Content ideation tools

We also helped in configuring custom events using GTM and GA. This action helped us check the performance of various CTA placements to improve CRO. This gave us more iterative, informed decisions and improved the overall conversion of the audience targeted. We did play around and did some testing to keep enhancing the techniques to reach our goals. We would continually measure, monitor, and iterate to track our specific actions to ensure the relevant tools were used.

Performance Review

All the efforts are measurable in various ways. We used various tools to measure, monitor, review, and revise the actions’ performance on an ongoing basis. We could continually review, share and iterate using various reporting tools. By the end of six months, we noticed tremendous growth in the various methods impacting its overall growth. Due to the sheer amount of changes over the last six months, it isn’t easy to pinpoint what made the biggest difference. Even the client has put in enormous efforts on various other marketing aspects. Nevertheless, we follow the basics to get our WordPress SEO consulting services process in place. In the process, we also educated the client with all our actions and details. We shared regular reports to keep them updated, and our final improvements are as follows: 

We are looking forward to building a better, more substantial, and long-term relationship with our client. We plan to keep enhancing this relation, work to become their long-term partner and act as their in-house resource to boost the business.