The SaaS Guide to Search Engine Optimization 

(SEO) 
 
By John Doherty 
CEO, GetCredo.com   

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Need to grow your SaaS company with sustainable and growing traffic through search 
engine optimization (SEO)? Then you've come to the right place. 
 
I've personally worked with dozens of SaaS companies to help them grow through 
sustainable SEO. Now Credo focuses on helping SaaS (and other) companies get connected 
with the agencies who have not only the expertise to point you in the right direction, but 
the scale to do some of the work to get you there faster. 
 
This guide is divided up into subsections that you should go through in order, starting with 
technical SEO and ending with tracking success and actually getting SEO done within your 
company. My goal is to give you the knowledge you need to grow your company through 
SEO yourself, and if you're wanting to work with an agency to make it go even faster then 
we can help you there​. 

   

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Table of Contents 

​What is SEO 6
Brief history 6
How SEO works 7
Who needs SEO 7
Who needs to be involved in the company 8
SEO Ranking Factors 10
Challenges to ranking well 11
How to rank well in the search engines 11
Basics of SEO-friendly websites 12
Why having an SEO friendly website matters 12
Technologies to use 12
Content and SEO basics 13
On-page Optimization 14
Technical SEO for SaaS 17
Definition 17
What platform to build your marketing site on 17
A note on logged-in web apps 18
Important technical SEO elements for SaaS 18
Meta elements 19
Title tag best practices 19
Meta description best practices 20
Canonical best practices 21
Meta robots best practices 22
Controlling indexation 22
Robots.txt 23
Parameter handling 23
Redirects 25
XML sitemaps 26
Tools 27
Keyword research 29
Topics not keywords 29
Informational vs transactional keywords 29
Topics not keywords 30
Brainstorming 31
Using Google Suggest 31

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 Competitive analysis 32
Similar keywords 33
Evaluating a keyword 34
Keyword intent 35
Mapping keywords to pages 36
Structuring your website so pages rank 36
Keyword Research Tools 37
What is content marketing for SaaS 38
What type content should you create? 39
Setting content goals 39
Producing content - 10x vs 5x vs 2x 40
10x content 40
5x content 40
2x content 41
Where should your content live? 42
A word about blog locations 43
Building links 44
What is link building actually? 44
Follow vs nofollow links 45
How has link building changed over the years? 46
What kinds of links matter for SaaS companies and startups? 47
Content-based 47
Guest posting 48
Surveys, studies, guides, and tools 48
PR and founder based 50
Partnerships 51
How link building succeeds 52
Tracking SaaS SEO success 53
The problem with most SEO metrics 53
Main SEO metrics for SaaS businesses 53
Visibility/share of voice 54
YoY traffic and users 55
Revenue/signups from organic 55
Directional SEO metrics for SaaS businesses 56
What to expect from SEO 57
SEO takes time 57
SEO builds your base of traffic but is not "free" 57
SEO maps to your funnel as a channel 58
Analytics and Search Console 58

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 Configuring Analytics for SEO growth 62
Supporting SEO at your company 65
How to staff an SEO investment 65
Finance/analytics 65
Product/Design 65
Engineering 66
Marketing 66
The growth team 66
How execs can best support SEO efforts at a SaaS company 67
Resources that everyone on the team should read 67
What to do next 69
Should you hire an agency or a consultant 69
How to know who to hire 70
About Credo 71

   

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What is SEO 
In this section we are going to talk about search engine optimization (SEO), including: 
 
1. a brief history, 
2. how SEO works at a high level, 
3. who needs SEO, and 
4. who at your company needs to be involved. 
 
Because this is a guide to SaaS SEO, we will focus on SaaS where possible. 

Brief history 
Search engine optimization has been around for as long as there have been search 
engines. Google was not the first search engine. That distinction goes to Archie, which 
launched in 1990 and was the first query-able search engine. In their early days, websites 
like Archie manually listed the websites that existed. 
 
Fast forward to the late 90s and a whole group of search engines, from Excite to Lycos and 
AltaVista, sprang up to give their own unique take on organizing the young web and 
allowing people to search it. So many sprang up, in fact, that a meta search engine called 
DogPile started to let people search all of the various search engines at once in hopes of 
finding what they were looking for. 
 

 
 
BackRub, which was the initial name for the company that has now become become a verb 
and synonymous with search (yes, I'm talking about Google), started in 1996 and 
revolutionized the search world because they ranked websites based off popularity and not 
the old ways of organizing information like alphabetically or pay-to-play. 
 

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In the over two decades since, Google has grown to literally billions of queries per day, their 
next largest competitor (Bing)​ ​has 5.1% market share compared to Google's 86.87%​, and 
literally billions of dollars are transacted online from searches that originate with a text 
(and increasingly voice) search online. 
 
The search engines have changed over time and continue to change with the times, 
especially as mobile has grown into likely​ ​over 60% of overall queries​. Tactics have changed 
over time as the search engines have used​ ​algorithm changes​ to crack down on spam and 
to make adjustments to improve search quality. 
 
On the SEO industry front, the latest data we have is that​ ​it is worth $65 billion per year​, 
with projections of $79 billion by 2020. Search is big money because businesses recognize 
that the traffic coming to their site can be monetized and used to build a big business. 

How SEO works 

At its core, SEO is driven off these three main areas: 
 
● Solid technical structure that allows the search engines to crawl and discover 
content and determine what the page is about; 
● Content that answers the searcher's intent and provides a great experience to them 
through quick load times, optimized flows, and ability to accomplish their task 
(whether that is information or a purchase); 
● Links from other websites that count as "votes" that the information is worthy of 
being sent visitors. 
 
If you're reading this guide and have a workable knowledge of SEO, you will note that I have 
not mentioned anything about "link juice", "canonical tags", or "title tags" among various 
other things. 
 
At the end of the day if you build a great product using a trusted technology, help your 
customers do what they came to accomplish (through content and a great experience), and 
get others online talking about and linking to your website then you will do very well with 
SEO. 
Tactics come and go and technologies change, but these three have never changed for 
SEO. 

Who needs SEO 

In the 21st century, if you do business online then you need to prioritize SEO as a viable 
growth channel for your business. If you are a software-as-a-service (SaaS) company, then 
your users are online and hopefully looking for solutions to the problems that they have. 
 

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I do not care if you make it easier for someone to run payroll or to automate their social 
media channels. Users are searching for your product and for information about how to 
solve their problem, and you have the opportunity to get your website in front of them 
exactly at the time that they are looking for someone to help them. 
 
That is the power of SEO. 
 

 
Dedicated SEO efforts on this particular site began early January 2017. Screenshot via​ ​SEMrush​. 

Who needs to be involved in the company 

SEO is a full company effort. You need all of the following involved if you are going to make 
a meaningful difference in your organic traffic and therefore your business: 
 
● Business/finance, because they sign off on the budget to invest in SEO and are the 
ultimate answer to "is the work we are doing working?" because they are intimately 
familiar with the business's bottom line; 
● Product, because they determine what actually gets built and prioritized on the site; 
● Engineering, because they are the ones actually building what needs to be done; 
● Marketing, because their work supercharges the SEO work done onsite to help it 
rank even better than before; 
● Executive team, because without their support the necessary people will not be 
assigned and progress will move slower than necessary. 
 
Over the last decade that I have worked in SEO, I have seen every type of client imaginable. 
From businesses that are going out of business and hoping to use SEO to save their 
business, to some of the fastest growing startups and publicly traded companies whose 
executives understand the power of SEO, I could point you to a hundred different case 
studies of companies who have done well and who have not. 
 
The companies that win have full-company buy-in from the top to the bottom, and the 
companies that fail to do well with SEO are not organized, deal with infighting between the 

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teams, don't trust the SEO process to work consistently, and think that they can just 
implement one part of the SEO equation and still win. 
 
SEO is a team sport. 

   

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SEO Ranking Factors 
If you do not work full time in SEO, you might think SEO is voodoo magic that someone 
behind the scenes is doing to game the search engines to get pages ranking. And in the 
mid-2000s, you would have been right. 
 
The search engines have come a long way in the last decade towards fighting SEO spam. If 
you remember the days when you'd type a query like "nike shoes" and get back some 
spammy-looking websites instead of Nike.com, then you remember the spam days of SEO. 
 
In reality it wasn't some nerd just doing random magic things, but a nerd that figured out 
how the search algorithms worked and what to do to get an unfair advantage over their 
competitors. Google and the other search engines all have their own version of Webmaster 
Guidelines (​here's Google's​), which provide a decent starter to SEO as well as what not to 
do.  
 
Things not to do include things like buying links (it may work, but you run the risk of being 
penalized by the search engine), cloaking (showing one thing to search engine bots and 
another to users) and mass autogenerated content. 
 
While there are things that the search engines say not to do, we also know from experience 
that there are many activities you can undertake that will help you rank better. In the SEO 
world these are often called "Ranking Factor Surveys", but in reality they are things that 
correlate strongly to better rankings. 
 
Note that correlation is different from causation. When something correlates, that means that it 
is present more often than not when another thing happens. For example a page that ranks high 
will have a high clickthrough rate, which means that "high clickthrough rate correlates to high 
rankings". However, there has been no official statement from search engines about clickthrough 
rates causing higher rankings. 
 
The basics of SEO are not complicated to learn. The problem is that most people want to 
learn advanced tactics before they do the basics. 
 
In most studies, these are the top things that correlate to better rankings. And through my 
experience, I can also say that they cause better rankings as well. 
 
● Keyword present in <title>; 
● Keyword present in <h1>; 
● Keyword present in <h2>; 
● Keyword present in <p>aragraphs; 
● Number of linking root domains to the root domain; 

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 ● Number of followed links to the specific page; 
● Anchor text of links to the page; 
● Internal links to the page with the target keyword term; 
● Content length; 
● Accessibility of the page from the homepage. 

Challenges to ranking well 

There are many challenges to ranking well in the search engines, and some are 
SaaS-specific. 
One challenge that many SaaS companies face is the thinking that they can engineer their 
way into ranking better. While your technology stack can absolutely keep you from ranking 
well if you do not configure it correctly (such as an Angular.js site without using Brombone 
or a similar technology to stand up crawlable individual URLs), the two reasons I most 
frequently see SaaS companies not ranking well are: 
 
1. A lack of content targeting keywords that can drive qualified traffic; 
2. A lack of links back to the site. 
 
Many SaaS startups are hyper-focused on building their product because that is the 
livelihood of their business, and rightfully so. Without a great product, all the great 
marketing you could do would be worthless. 
 
However, without marketing your product will not be found nearly as easily nor as widely. 
You must invest in your marketing site in order to rank well and convert visitors into users. 
 
If you are just focused on building a great product or tweaking things on your site to try to 
"optimize" when you have not laid a solid base and do not have any links, you will not do as 
well as you otherwise could.  
 
You need to promote your company/site as well in order to rank. 

How to rank well in the search engines 

If you build well-structured pages that load fast, are accessible from other pages on your 
site, target keywords that have search volume, invest in unique content written for users 
and conversions, and acquire links to your domain and your individual pages, then you 
have a much better chance at ranking very well. 

   

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Basics of SEO-friendly websites 
Good SEO starts with having a website that is accessible by the search engine crawlers. 
Many tech companies desire to use the latest and greatest technologies, but these often 
present large challenges to SEO if you do not know the intricacies of the technology. 
 
Your SaaS marketing site, meaning your publicly-facing site apart from your logged-in app, 
may be custom built or it may use another widely accepted CMS like WordPress, 
SquareSpace, or increasingly Craft or similar.  
 
Each of these has its own advantages and disadvantages when it comes to SEO, which 
means that doing your research ahead of time can save you time and money in the future. 

Why having an SEO friendly website matters 

Your website is the foundation of your SEO program, and ultimately your software 
business's success. If your site is not accessible to search engines, then you're going to 
have a bad time trying to rank or at least will have to tear down some work in order to 
shore it up. 
 
I rented a house once that was having foundation issues. You'd walk in our front door and 
the wood floors felt solid, but if you looked to your right you would find 6-8 boards that 
were slowly separating from each other. If you continued on to the living room and put a 
tennis ball on the floor, it would roll to the wall. We actually decided not to try to buy that 
house because we knew that it would need tens of thousands of dollars of work put into it 
to shore up the foundation. That, and the house was too small for our future. 
 
If you build your website on a cracked foundation, you will have more maintenance and 
upfront work required to even get to the same level of traffic as your competitors. But if 
you build your website right, you can use that otherwise spent time to create content to 
open up the top of your conversion funnel and then build links back to your website from 
other websites so that you can rank better for the terms that can drive you traffic and new 
users for years to come. 

Technologies to use 
Startups love to build with the latest technologies, but the latest technologies are not 
always great for SEO. The search engines are much slower to adapt to crawling new 
technologies, as their scale means that new technologies take more resources which can 
literally cost them millions or more dollars per year. 
 
Broadly speaking, the technologies that you can be sure are good for SEO are HTML/CSS, 
PHP, and anything that outputs HTML upon the DOM loading. Lots has been written about 

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JavaScript and SEO​, and while the search engines (especially Google) are improving in their 
ability to crawl JavaScript-heavy sites, many tests have proven that they still often have 
trouble. 
 
If you have a solid technical team (and I am assuming that you do), then you can probably 
implement the needed fixes to make your code crawlable. Otherwise, stick with the 
tried-and-true technologies that the search engines can crawl until they are better able to 
process the other languages. 

Content and SEO basics 

Many software companies like to use jargon. Let's be real, you've probably pitched your 
AI-enabled technology to investors so many times you dream about it. 
 
You also recognize that your customers (probably) don't care that you're using AI to do 
something. They care that they are able to solve their problem by paying you for access to 
your software. Your marketer is probably very busy here, or should be, in figuring out 
exactly how to message your product to your ideal customers. 
 
At the same time, you probably have designers who want your product to look fresh and 
build trust with your users. They're determining the specific areas of your site where you 
can have written content and where you can't, and they're giving you specific styles to 
follow when crafting marketing messaging. 
]

 
Proposify does a great job of their on-page content that helps their SEO traffic. 
 
This decision making, as you will see in the next section, about what content to put where 
and how to display it should be a collaborative effort between engineering, product, 

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marketing, and design because unique content and what that content says, as well as what 
terms you choose to highlight in your URLs, on-page HTML elements, and within your 
writing dramatically affect SEO. 

On-page Optimization 
Another SEO basic that you need to understand before moving into more advanced SEO 
strategies is on-page optimization. 
 
Across the years, I have started work with many websites where the first task we tackle is 
basic on-page optimzation, reworking templates to have all of the following on the page: 
 
● H1 targeting their main terms (or a very similar variation) 
● H2 targeting their secondary term(s) 
● H3s nested under H2s where necessary 
● Adding content with relevant information to the context of the page that also helps 
SEO 
 
The way onpage SEO works is that the search engines use different onpage elements to 
determine the page's relevance for a certain term. When combined with the links pointing 
into that page and what those links say (which we call "anchor text" in the SEO world), the 
search engines can determine relatively well what that page is about and which terms the 
page should rank for. 
 
In order of how search engines value onpage elements, your target keyword term should 
be in: 
 
1. Your <title>, preferably closer to the beginning; 
2. Your URL, preferably with hyphens between words (keyword-term, not 
keyword_term) and a canonical; 
3. Your H1 
4. Your H2 
5. Your H3 
6. Throughout your content, along with other related words that naturally appear 
when covering a topic. 
 
To give a visual example, here is a well optimized Feature page: 

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Following this, your key pages need to be linked from other main pages so that they are 
passed link equity that provides the strength they need to begin ranking. 
 
For a full dive into information architecture for SEO, check out t​ his post​. 
  

   

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Technical SEO for SaaS 
Definition 
At the highest level, technical SEO is the act of setting up your site so that it is accessible to 
search engines, tells them clearly what your site and pages are about, loads quickly for 
users and search engines, and provides a great experience through all of that. 

What platform to build your marketing site on 

There is first basic technical SEO, which involves building your site on a platform that the 
search engines can crawl and index. Some platforms, like WordPress, may not be sexy but 
they are proven and have many resources available to help you optimize it.  
 
Out of the box, the platform is pretty SEO-friendly. Similar platforms that have long been 
used and are relatively SEO-friendly out of the box are SquareSpace and Craft, though each 
has their own challenges to SEO as well. 
 
Other technologies you might use and platforms that you might run your SaaS marketing 
site on are less SEO friendly. Technologies like React and Vue, both very popular JavaScript 
frameworks, can be SEO friendly (as can Angular), but you have to know to server-side 
render any content you want indexed and then constantly keep up with changes to search 
engine crawling abilities. 
 
Google is pretty good at JavaScript these days, though server-side rendering for React/Vue 
and using something like​ ​Brombone​ ​for Angular is still necessary. Bing, on the other hand, 
can't really crawl JavaScipt. 
 
So what do we recommend for a marketing site that is SEO friendly? 
 
First,​ ​WordPress​. It's trusted, it's simple, it's easy to configure. There are security concerns 
but those are also quite easily dealt with. The great thing about WordPress is that most 
front end and full stack developers have experience on it and can learn WordPress's slightly 
unique version of PHP. You can also fairly easily find good WordPress developers should 
you be in a pinch. We recommend hosting on​ ​WPengine​ as they are dedicated to 
WordPress hosting. 
 
Second,​ ​Craft​. Craft is a relative newcomer to the CMS space, but increasingly more SaaS 
sites are using it for their marketing site for its ease of use. You have to pay for a license 
(around $299 per year) and self-host though they do have​ ​a few recommended hosts​. 
 

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Third,​ ​SquareSpace​. SquareSpace is not as extendable as WordPress, as it is not 
self-hosted. But it is simple and easy to use and has most SEO considerations baked into it. 
It's less extendable, but if you're just trying to get a site up and you don't have WordPress 
experience then this might be a good first choice. 
 
Fourth, build your own using a trusted technology like PHP. As I've already said, you can 
use whatever technology you want but each has its own challenges. I rarely recommend 
doing this as the other three mentioned above work so well and require vastly less upkeep. 

A note on logged-in web apps 

One area that I constantly have to clarify with SaaS teams is this - s​ earch engines do not 
crawl your logged in application​. If you put content behind a log in or paywall, then you 
do not have to worry about them crawling those URLs. 
 
Conversely, if you want content to be crawled then do not put it behind a login wall! Sure 
there are ways to show that you have logged in content that can still be accessed 
sometimes by logged out users (think about news publications with paywalls), but 99.9% of 
SaaS apps do not have to think about this. 
 
If you are concerned about your web app being crawled, then there are ways to ensure 
that it is not crawled such as: 
 
1. Put it on a subdomain and block that subdomain in robots.txt; 
2. Put any logged in pages in a subfolder that you can then block in robots. txt (eg 
site.com/app/ and then Disallow: /app/) 
 
I see many SaaS companies use something like WordPress for their "marketing site", and 
then a custom web app on a subdomain. This is a great way to handle your dual needs and 
not harm your SEO. 

Important technical SEO elements for SaaS 

Let's talk for a while about technical and on-page SEO. We'll also talk about some tools that 
you can use for diagnosing onsite errors and issues where you can improve your site to get 
more traffic. This section should also be taken in concert with the following chapter on 
keyword research, because all the technical SEO in the world without great keyword 
research is meaningless. 
 
I am covering technical SEO before keyword research because most SaaS companies are 
very technically driven. I want to lay the groundwork of how to think about SEO and what 
matters before we get into driving SEO growth with keyword research, content, and link 
building. 

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Meta elements 
For every page on your site, there are meta elements in your documents's <head> that 
should be present to help the search engines understand what your page is about. Note 
that these are separate from the onpage SEO elements mentioned above, such as H1s/H2s. 
 
The meta elements you need to have on each page on your site are: 
 
1. <title> - this is the text that shows in the search engines results pages (SERPs) 
2. <meta name="description"> - the text that shows below the <title> in the SERPs 
3. <link rel="canonical"> - to tell the search engines the original source of the content 
4. rel next/prev - if you have pagination, this helps the search engines determine the 
first page to rank (also allows you to have SEO-friendly infinite scroll) 
5. <meta name="robots"> to control indexation (default is index,follow) 
6. Open graph (Twitter/Facebook) tags. 
 
To properly optimize your pages for SEO, these are the basics that you must have along 
with proper HTML formatting of H1s/H2s/etc described above. 

Title tag best practices 

Your title tag is useful for two things for SEO. First, it is one of the strongest signals to the 
search engines what your page is about. Second, if you write good titles then you can (in 
partnership with the meta description) entice clicks to your site even if you are not ranked 
in the first position. 
 
To be optimal for SEO, your title tags must be: 
 
● Under 600 pixels wide (used to be characters, but a multi-device world changed 
this); 
● Descriptive of your page, otherwise the search engines may rewrite it; 
● Have your target keywords near the front of the title tag (less important than it used 
to be, but still correlates well). 
 
Here is an example for [proposal template]: 

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Which one would you click? It depends on if you are searching for proposal template ideas, 
a ready-to-use template, and which software you are using to create them. 
 
Reality is that a lot of businesses still use Word for creating their templates, but there is an 
opportunity here for Proposable to make a better title tag that will entice more clicks and 
help them move people away from Microsoft Word. 

Meta description best practices 

The meta description is the that appears below the blue link in the SERPs. Historically the 
meta description would be truncated around 160 characters, though in late 2017 Google 
announced that they were expanding this across their search results to around 300 
characters. 
 
The meta description is not used in rankings​, but it does play a key role in enticing clicks 
through to your website. It is important to understand if the query for which the page is 
ranking is transactional or informational, and that informs your meta description strategy. 
 
Using the [proposal templates] example from above, you can see that the search engines 
bold the searched term when it appears in the meta description. Historically, this has 
correlated to increased click throughs, though these days when rich features like review 

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stars are present this helps less. It is still worthwhile to consider if your meta description is 
accurately describing what is on your page, especially for transactional queries: 
 

Canonical best practices 

The canonical tag is a meta tag provided by the search engines to help website owners 
control potential duplicate content on their website. The canonical tag is a suggestion to 
the search engines that tells them the original source of the content. 
 
In almost every case, a canonical tag is self-referential to the page. So getcredo.com/blog/ 
canonicals to itself with this: 
 
<link rel="canonical" href="https://www.getcredo.com/blog/"> 
 
Canonicals can also be used cross-domain. When you publish content on your website and 
then on another, such as Medium, then to avoid duplicate content issues (where the 
non-original source may outrank the original) a rel-canonical tag should be used. Medium 
does this by default, though many other publishers do not. 
 
Many marketing site platforms do canonicals by default, such as WordPress using​ ​Yoast 
SEO​. 
If you're just starting off, don't worry about advanced canonicals. What you need to do is 
make sure that you have a consistent URL schema set and that your canonical points to 
that page from other URLs that serve the same content. 
 
For example, maybe you use a technology that makes it impossible to redirect all 
UPPERCASE and Sentence-Case URLs to the main /this-is-our-url URL.  

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While ideally you would redirect all other permutations (www/non-www, trailing 
slash/non-trailing slash, UPPERCASE/Sentence-Case) into your one canonical URL of 
/this-is-our-url, if your technology does not allow it right now then you need to implement 
the canonicals. 
 
Best practice is also to ​self-canonical ​URLs to themselves with the absolute path. Your URL 
/this-is-our-url would then have this (assuming you use HTTPS, www, and a trailing slash): 
<link rel="canonical" href="https://www.site.com/this-is-our-url"> 

Meta robots best practices 

The meta robots tag is used to control indexation on an individual page level. It looks like 
this: 
<meta name="robots" content="index, follow"> 
 
The default is "index, follow", meaning the search engines should a) index the page and b) 
follow the links from the page to other pages on the site, passing them link equity to help 
them rank. 
 
If you do not want a page to be indexed, then you can set the meta robots tag to the 
following: 
 
<meta name="robots" content="noindex, follow"> 
 
This means that the page may still be crawled by the search engines, but it will not be 
included in their index nor findable in the search results. This is by design. If you want the 
page to be indexed, then set meta robots to index. 
 
The types of pages you may not want indexed are: 
 
● Landing pages for paid acquisition campaigns; 
● URLs that are meant for logged in users only (may be better handled via robots.txt); 
● Internal search pages (may be better handled via robots.txt); 
● Thank you pages for email signups or checkout confirmations. 

Controlling indexation 
One of the most important parts of technical SEO is controlling indexation of your pages so 
that the search engines are able to rank the right page for the right search query.  
 
This coupled with keyword research and proactively developing content to attract top, 
middle, and bottom of funnel users is singlehandedly the best thing you can do for SEO 
once you have your page templates properly formatted, URLs settled, and canonicals 
implemented correctly. 

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Robots.txt 
If you're a web developer, then you should know about the robots.txt file. This file is used 
to control indexation on a broader level than meta robots. When a page or subfolder is 
blocked in robots.txt, that page is no longer crawled by the search engines. When a 
subfolder is blocked, then no page within that subfolder is crawled by the search engines 
unless a specific page is specified to be allowed. 
 
The robots.txt is a sledgehammer to control indexation. For SaaS apps, it should most 
commonly be used for your logged-in application in case someone should link to a logged 
in page externally. You do not want the search engines to be wasting their crawl time on 
your pages that are only available logged in. If your app uses subdomains for users to 
display content publicly (such as https://site.yourservice.com), then you should not block 
those subdomains in robots.txt! 
 
This file is included in the root of your site and can be found here: 
 
https://www.domain.com/robots.txt 
 
It has two main purposes: 
 
1. Disallow content that you do not want crawled or indexed (there is also an Allow 
directive that we will explain); 
2. Link to your XML sitemap (which is also submitted to the search engines), as search 
engine crawlers review your robots.txt file frequently to 
 
The robots.txt file by default looks something like this (this from a WordPress installation): 
 
User-agent: * 
Disallow: /wp-admin/ 
Allow: /wp-admin/admin-ajax.php 
Sitemap: https://www.domain.com/sitemap_index.xml 
 
If you already have pages in the search engine index that you do not want indexed or 
crawled, then the fix is not as simple as blocking the page in robots.txt. This will stop the 
search engines from crawling the page, but will not remove the page from the index. To 
remove a section of your site from the search engines and stop them from crawling, first 
implement a meta robots noindex and then block in robots.txt once the pages have 
dropped from the index. 

Parameter handling 
Most sites use parameters to handle filtering or sometimes to build your URLs. While I do 
not ever recommend using parameters for your indexable URLs that you would like to rank 

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(instead of using site.com/type?param=keyword, use clean URLs like 
site.com/folder/slug-url), filtering is often completely unavoidable on your website. 
 
Therefore, you need to control how the search engines access these pages so that you are 
not inadvertently serving multiple (sometimes many as 4-6) exact or near-exact duplicates 
of the same content. When this happens, the search engines often do not understand 
which version to rank, and thus you risk them ranking the wrong URL worse than they'd 
rank the correct URL should you send the right signals. 
 
You can control parameters two ways (and I recommend using both) 
 
● Via​ ​Google Search Console​ and​ ​Bing Webmaster Tools​; 
● Via canonical tags. 
 
Like anything in SEO, the "right" answer to solving specific problems is "it depends". 
Depending on the parameter, you will deal with it in different ways. 
 
Here is how to think about when to use which solution. 
 
Controlling parameters via Search Console/Webmaster Tools i​ s a no-brainer that 
should always be taken advantage of. Each search engine will tell you the parameters they 
have discovered, which you can then directly tell them what to do with that specific 
parameter. 
 

 
 
For each parameter discovered, you can specify if the parameter: 
 
1. Tracks usage (eg a UTM tracking parameter); 
2. Changes the content on the page (sorts, narrows, etc) 
 

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If the parameter tracks usage, then the search engines will pick one representative URL 
which should be your URL that is most often linked on your site. If you find that they are 
indexing the wrong URL then you can also apply a canonical tag to direct them to the URL 
you would like them to rank, though you should also change your internal linking to link to 
that URL and not a parameter version. 
 
If the parameter changes page content, then you should choose what the parameter does 
(Sorts, Narrows, Specifies, Translates, Paginates, Other) and then what the search engines 
should do. I normally leave the directive as "Let Googlebot decide", but if it a logged in URL 
for example and they are discovering/crawling it then I will tell them to crawl No URLs. 
 
Use canonical tags with parameters w ​ hen you have filtering options on the front end of 
the site that you do not want indexed. For example, 
site.com/slug-url?sort=ascending&date=today would canonical back to site.com/slug-url 
because your two parameters are not new content that you want the search engines to 
index. These URLs are not showing new content, but rather sorting and specifying a specific 
date.  
 
If you want the specific date indexed, then the correct solution is to create a specific URL 
path (eg site.com/slug-url/date) instead of using a parameter. 

Redirects 
There are two main types of redirects that are used in SEO, and knowing the difference is 
important to your SEO success. 
 
The two are: 
 
● 301 - a permanent redirect from one URL to another URL 
● 302 - a temporary redirect from one URL to another URL. 
 
There is always debate within the SEO world about redirects. It is one of those arguments 
that never dies, similar to "which technology should I use for my web app" conversations 
within the SaaS world. 
 
While people will debate it, the answer to "which redirect should I use and when?" is 
answered in the definitions of the two redirects. 
 
If your URL is moving permanently, then you should use a 301 redirect. This has been 
proven time and time again to pass link equity to the new URL so that any links pointing to 
the old URL now count towards the new URL ranking. A 301 redirect will also remove the 
old URL from the index and the new URL will begin ranking. 
 

25
If your URL is moving temporarily (such as for maintenance) and you expect it to come back 
in short order, then use a 302 redirect.  
 
An example of when to use a 302 redirect on a SaaS marketing site would be if you were 
removing a feature, and thus its dedicated landing page, for a while but plan to bring it 
back. You could 302 redirect the feature URL to your /features (or equivalent) page and 
remove the individual feature page from XML sitemaps and internal linking. The URL will 
not drop from the search index, but it also will not rank as well as before. When you bring 
back the page, undo the 302 redirect. 
 
Takeaway: do not debate if a 301 or 302 redirect will pass link equity or not. While your 
tech stack may default to one, it is always possible to fix it to be able to apply the correct 
redirect. If you are current redirecting via 302 instead of 301 for permanent redirects, get 
an understanding of the links pointing to those pages to understand how many links (and 
thus potential rankings) you are leaving on the table. 

XML sitemaps 
XML sitemaps are your direct way to tell the search engines about your pages and gain an 
understanding of how well the search engines are indexing the content on your site. In 
Google Search Console this is found under Crawl > Sitemaps, and in Bing Webmaster Tools 
it is found under Dashboard > Configure my site > Sitemaps. 
 

 
The XML sitemap structure can be found​ ​on Sitemaps.org​. You should take the time to 
review that site because there are different XML sitemap options depending on the types 
of content you have on your site, such as video. 
 
The default/base XML sitemap structure is this: 
 
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> 

26
 <urlset xmlns="​http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9​"> 
<url> 
<loc>​http://www.example.com/​</loc> 
<lastmod>2005-01-01</lastmod> 
<changefreq>monthly</changefreq> 
<priority>0.8</priority> 
</url> 
</urlset> 
 
Your XML sitemaps should be dynamically generated, meaning that every time a new 
page/post is published or removed from your site, the sitemap should update as well.  
 
Sitemaps should also only serve URLs that return a 200 status code and are the canonical 
URL. If a URL redirects, is blocked in robots.txt, or canonicals to another page then it should 
not be included. Too many non-200 URLs can cause the search engines to not trust your 
sitemaps, which results in worse indexation. 
 
Most SaaS companies can get away with basic XML sitemaps because you realistically have 
50-100 URLs available logged out. We do recommend dividing up your sitemaps by type of 
page so that you can view indexation for these buckets, such as features pages or blog 
posts. This can help you diagnose issues with ranking and driving traffic. 
 
You can find a deeper dive into XML sitemaps on Credo​ ​here​. 

Tools 
If you are looking to get basic SEO tracking in place for technical SEO purposes, we advice 
you to get a subscription to a few SEO tools that can monitor your SEO basics and alert you 
when you have issues. 
 
● SEMrush​ or​ ​Moz​ (view our comparison​ ​here​) 
● Sanity Check​ (pull in Search Console data and receive reports) 
● Screaming Frog​ (CPU-based site crawler, $149 for annual license) 
● Google Search Console​ (free data from Google) 
● Google Analytics 
 
These are the basic tools to have in your toolbelt to help you with identifying major SEO 
issues and measuring traffic/conversions/health of your marketing. 
 
Check out all of Credo's recommended tools for SEO, lead generation, and more​. 
 
Check out SEO companies on Credo 

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Keyword research 
On your SaaS website, how many pages do you have? I can probably name most of them: 
 
● Homepage 
● Pricing 
● Features 
● About 
● Blog (and blog posts) 
 
Am I right? You might have a few other pages and if you're doing any content marketing 
then maybe you have some landing pages, but usually SaaS companies have very few 
pages on their site that can actually rank. 
 
On the one hand, this means that all of your links are consolidated to a few pages and thus 
you can probably rank well for those specific terms. But you are also limiting yourself 
because you do not have pages that target terms that your customers are searching for. 
You're doing both yourself and them a disservice by not having these pages. 
 
Every keyword for which you want to rank should have its own dedicated page (unless it is 
a permutation, in which case pick the highest volume version). 
 
But how do you do keyword research for SaaS? 
 
That's what I'm going to teach you here. 

Topics not keywords 

Let's talk briefly about targeting users in the search engines. When you (or ideally, your 
team) is writing copy for your site, are you thinking about a specific keyword that they 
might find you through or are you more concerned about the full topic for which your 
content should be relevant? 

Informational vs transactional keywords 

How you optimize for informational queries such as "how do I write a great cover letter" is 
very different from optimizing for a transactional query like "proposal software". 
 
Transactional keywords​ are the keywords someone types in directly before they buy. This 
may be things like [proposal software for lawyers] or [seo software]. These pages require a 
tight focus on your main keyword in your main page elements (title, URL, H1, H2, content) 
as well as more links to rank. These pages are about relevant information that leads the 
visitor to click your call to action and sign up (either to pay or for a free trial). 

29
 
Informational keywords, such as terms beginning with "how to" or "what is" tend to be 
content-based. Search engines are increasingly valuing long form content, which becomes 
the canonical piece of information about that topic, over shorter form blog posts and 
resource pages. 

Topics not keywords 

Over the last few years, the search engines have moved away from specific keywords and 
began rewarding content that is in-depth and covers the topic at hand fully. 
 
Google's​ ​Hummingbird algorithm​ rolled out in 2013 without much fanfare. It has been 
explained as providing better results through looking at intent instead of just keywords. As 
Moz says on their resource page linked above: 
 
While it’s believed that many preexisting components of the core algorithm remained intact, 
Hummingbird signaled Google’s commitment to an increasingly sophisticated understanding of 
the intent of searchers’ queries with the goal of matching them to more relevant results. 
 
While search engines still use keywords to determine what a page is about, they also now 
have a deeper understanding of what that specific keyword or keyword term is about and 
the other terms that it relates to.  
From this they build topics. 
 
Rand Fishkin, former CEO of Moz, explained it in t​ his video​. 
 

30
 
With this understanding, how do you do keyword research? Has it really changed over the 
years? 
 
Let's talk about doing keyword research for your SaaS site. 

Brainstorming 
Before you start jumping into the data, you need to take a step back and think about the 
broader topics for which your website and company should be found. 
 
Ask yourself (and write down the answers to) these questions: 
 
● What does your product do? 
● Who is your product for? 
● What features does your product offer? 
 
These give you the start of your seed keywords. It is important here to avoid industry 
jargon and to describe your product in as plain of language as possible. 
 
For example, "our product helps contractors manage their workers through calendar 
management, hourly billing, and scheduling through a web application and its 
accompanying mobile app". 
 
You can start to define your potential main keywords now, though remember these are 
preliminary. For the above example you have: 
 
● Contractor scheduling app 
● Contractor payroll app 
● Contractor management application 
 
Now we can use a simple hack (learned from​ ​Wil Reynolds​ of SEER Interactive) to getting 
ideas from Google. 

Using Google Suggest 

Now that you've brainstormed some of your main keywords, go to Google.com (yes, the 
Google homepage) and type them in. Then press space, n​ ot ​Enter, and see what comes up. 
The search volume you see beside the keywords is courtesy of Chrome extension 
Keywords Everywhere​. 

31
  
 
Click the ​Add All Keywords​ button in the lower right then keep going down the rabbit hole. 
This is a fantastic way of getting a great set of seed keywords to begin with. This is often the 
highest return on your time to identifying your main conversion-oriented keywords as well. 

Competitive analysis 
The next step I always take is to gather a list of competitors and run their site through 
SEMrush​ (other tools like Moz also allow for this) to understand the keywords that they are 
ranking for.  
 
Some competitors will be more useful than others, but what we are looking to do is expand 
the keyword set you are working with based on what your competitors are themselves 
targeting. 
Note that this used to be a lot harder.  
 
Circa 2008-2011 we were scraping competitor websites using tools like Screaming Frog or 
custom scripts to understand their meta keywords tags (a now-defunct meta tag that was 
not worth covering in the meta tags section of this guide) and thus what they were 
targeting. 
 
Let's look at how to use competitive analysis for keyword research. 
 
Take the term [contractor scheduling software] and put it into Google. You'll find the site 
GetJobber.com (I have zero affiliation with them, just using them as an example). When I 
put them into​ ​SEMrush​, I see that they are doing pretty well with SEO: 

32
  
Their keyword report is a goldmine of potential keywords, both informational ("how to" 
types) and transactional ("lawn mowin scheduling app"): 
 

 
 
From here, download the keyword report, then rinse and repeat this strategy for your 
other competitors.  
 
You will end up with a spreadsheet with all of your competitors keywords which you can 
then de-duplicate and arrive at a set of keywords with search volume for which your 
competitors are ranking. 

Similar keywords 
Now that you have a large list of your competitor's keywords, it is time to further expand 
your keyword set. Depending on your competitors, they may or may not be doing a great 

33
job with SEO and thus just doing competitor analysis will leave other potential profitable 
and traffic-driving keywords out of the list. 
 
To do this, use​ ​SEMrush's​ Phrase Match tool by entering your main keyword and then 
seeing the keywords that they suggest as being related to your main keyword.  
 
Here is an example for "contractor scheduling": 

 
 
Rinse and repeat this with your major keywords to make sure you are grabbing as many 
potentially relevant keywords as possible. 

Evaluating a keyword 
Once you have a list of keywords, ideally in Excel, with search volume and CPC (cost per 
click from AdWords), you can start to evaluate if a keyword will be both worthwhile and 
profitable to pursue based on potential traffic it can bring and how much money it can 
make you. 
 
The "how much money it can make you" is a metric that depends on your business, 
specifically your pricing and your conversion rates to paying customers as well as your 
retention/churn. If you already have data on specific keywords from AdWords bidding then 
you can use this data, but otherwise it is something you can benchmark for ideal 
conversion percentage and then adjust over time to determine profitability. 
 
Here is an example of a set of keywords from Keywords Everywhere: 

34
  
 
The ideal keywords to target are: 
 
● High search volume; 
● High CPC means they are profitable and people are willing to pay a lot to rank well 
for them; 
● Low competition. 
 
It is often impossible to find low competition and high volume/CPC keywords, so often you 
will settle on highly relevant to your business and high volume while also knowing that 
these keywords will be challenging to rank for and thus will require perfect on-page SEO as 
well as a fast website and links into the specific page. 
 
That's just SEO for you. 

Keyword intent 
As mentioned at the beginning of this section, Google's Hummingbird algorithm update in 
2013 began moving us away from solely focusing on keywords to needing to understand 
the deeper intent behind the keyword. 
 
There are two types of keywords that you need to understand: 
 
● Transactional - keywords meant for conversions because the person searching it is 
likely ready to buy (for example "employee scheduling software") 
● Information - keywords higher in the conversion funnel that meet the needs of 
potential future customers who are doing research and trying to learn more before 
making a decision (for example "how to hire employees for a cleaning business") 
 
Breaking your keywords into these two buckets is the next step to understand what kind of 
content and what kind of page you should build to effectively target it. 
 
The best way to do this is to go through your list and determine if the keyword is a core 
feature or descriptor on your main keyword. For example "employee scheduling software" 
and "employee scheduling software for restaurants" are transactional, whereas any "how 

35
to" is informational. These pages should have dedicated landing pages created because 
they are not only targeting specific keywords and thus need a dedicated page to rank, but 
they could convert for you and thus should be conversion-oriented, whatever that means 
for your app (free trial or direct sign up). 
 
If the keyword phrase is not the above, then it is informational. These can be targeted with 
blog posts or larger resources, depending on the potential volume and where they fall 
within the funnel (top of funnel for awareness, mid-funnel for more specific questions if the 
searcher is familiar with the industry). This also applies to keywords such as "template", 
"guide", or "what is". 
 
We will talk about using informational keywords for SEO more in the Content Marketing 
section of this guide. 

Mapping keywords to pages 

Now you've done all the heavy lifting. You have your keywords identified, both your main 
conversion-oriented keywords of which there are likely 15-20 and your informational 
keywords of which there are likely many more. 
 
Now take those keywords and map them to the specific URLs on which they will live. 
You'll come away with something like this to guide you in creating your pages: 
 

Structuring your website so pages rank 

We've now talked about technical SEO, including getting your pages indexed and 
discovered through technical platforms that can be crawled and letting the search engines 
know about your pages, and we're talked about keyword research. 
 
After you build these pages, how do you link to them so that they have the best chance of 
ranking? 
 
Since we're talking about SaaS websites, let's presume that your main keywords will be 
targeted by either features pages or pages targeted at specific personas. I'm going to show 
you an example of structuring your information architecture feature pages, but this can 
also be adapted for personas. 
 

36
As a general rule, your more important pages should be accessible from your homepage 
and your other main entry pages within 2-3 clicks.  
 
Here is a mockup of how that structure might look: 

 
 
In this example, you link from your homepage to your features page, when then links down 
to each feature. If your keywords are high volume and it works with your design, then you 
can also consider a dropdown in your top navigation to make these just one click from your 
homepage. 
 
Either way, your feature page should be close to your homepage within 2-3 clicks. What 
really gets them to rank is external links, which we will talk about over the next two 
chapters. 

Keyword Research Tools 

The keyword research tools we've mentioned are: 
 
● SEMrush 
● Ahrefs 
● Moz Keyword Explorer 
● Keywords Everywhere 
 

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Check out keyword research providers on Credo 
Content marketing 
Let's now talk for a while about content marketing. Content marketing is not SEO, but it can 
be a part and when done well content marketing can turbo charge your ongoing SEO work 
of technical, keyword research, and link acquisition. 
 
We'll talk about links in the next chapter, but first let's understand what content marketing 
can do for your business and how to think of it as a SaaS marketer/owner. 

What is content marketing for SaaS 

Content marketing is simply that - marketing your company through valuable content you 
are creating. 
 
For most companies, this often looks like blogging. Unfortunately, many SaaS founders are 
not marketers but rather developers or product people who know how to build a great 
product. Because of this, a SaaS company's blog is often neglected. 
 
There are examples of SaaS companies who have experienced a lot of success from 
content marketing. These are: 
 
● Groove - with their​ ​Startup Journey blog​ (no longer actively maintained) run by their 
founder Alex; 
● Buffer - with their​ ​Open Blog​ which was originally run by their cofounder Leo; 
● BareMetrics - with their​ ​Open Startups​ initiative. 
 
Content marketing does not have to be creating consistent blog posts week in and week 
out. In fact, I usually recommend that startups don't do this unless one of their founders or 
early employees is very good at getting eyeballs onto content that they produce 
consistently. 
 
Instead, I recommend that most SaaS companies focus on larger resources that have the 
chance to reach a larger audience and catapult them from just another startup to being a 
leader in their space. 
 
Creating a large resourcewith the intent/goal of getting the attention of a lot of people 
because of its sheer size as well as capturing their email addresses for future marketing 
opportunities is usually a much better use of your time and limited resources. 
 
Some examples are this guide you are reading, Moz's​ ​Beginner's Guide to SEO​, or Zapier's 
ebooks.​ I follow my own advice here (even though Credo is not a SaaS company) with our 
Resources​: 

38
  

What type content should you create? 

The content you create is fully up to your time, your skills, and your goals. As I said above, if 
you love to create content then go all out and invest deep into consistent and in-depth 
content. 
 
If you want to get the most bang for your investment at the beginning, then I recommend 
that you invest in less but bigger content that will essentially market itself when you get it in 
front of the right audiences. This can be big guides, videos, and the like. They'll spread 
more easily and gain more links than shorter blog-type content. 

Setting content goals 

Your content should always have goals. Beyond just pageviews and unique visitors, your 
content should also map to something much higher - ​revenue​. 
 
The best metric for content success for a technology company is email subscribers. In fact, 
a lot of SaaS companies have used their email list to grow a great software company. Some 
examples of this are AppSumo (that now makes Sumo, the popular WordPress sharing 
plugin), Groove (mentioned before for their Startup Journey blog), and email providers like 
Drip and ConvertKit. 
 
I've been guilty of the "create content to drive audience" mindset without having a clear 
picture in mind of what to do with those visitors once they arrive. Once I started using 
content upgrades and directing visitors into different content funnels designed to take 
them to the conversion they are ready for (signing up to a tool, submitting a lead, etc) that's 
when my business really started to grow. 

39
 
If you're focusing on producing content, then set yourself a specific goal (10,000 email 
subscribers, let's say) and focus down on that one metric. You'll find that to get to that goal, 
you have to do things that are also good for SEO such as content creation and promotion. 

Producing content - 10x vs 5x vs 2x 

Producing content is a time intensive and challenging undertaking. I fully understand why 
many startups that are trying to get traction would rather spend money on advertising on 
Facebook than creating in-depth content. Content takes a long time to produce, and once 
you've created it then you still have all of the promotion work to do. 
 
If you're committed to content as a marketing channel, then here's how I'd do it. 

10x content 
As I've said, if you want to get the most bang for your buck then invest in creating big 
content. 10x content, a term​ ​coined by​ Rand Fishkin, is something you create that is the 
industry leader.  
 
It usually takes a lot of time to create and has very high production value, but it stands out 
above everything else in the industry and can make your company a though leader in the 
space. 
 
Examples of this are: 
 
● Point Blank SEO's link building strategies 
● Brian Dean's SEO in 2018​ (and really everything on his site) 
● MakerBook​, a free resource for makers 
● Moz's​ ​Beginner's Guide to SEO 
 
All of these helped set the company apart from the rest of their industry. 

5x content 
I think most resources and guides that people and companies create falls somewhere 
below 10x content, but is still much more impactful than "blog posts for SEO". 
 
I would classify most well-produced ebooks and guides that are produced as 5x content 
because they take time to produce, but you can also do multiple of them per year and build 
a massive email list and follower base. 
 
I like to think that any 10x content is really 5x content that happened to push on a specific 
nerve and ending up spreading further than expected. 
 

40
5x content examples are​ Z
​ apier's ebooks​, ​Proposify's template gallery​, and​ ​Stripe's Atlas 
guides​. 

2x content 
2x content is less than an ebook, but more than a 500 word keyword-targeted blog post. 
These pieces of content, which are usually just long blog posts that go in-depth on a topic, 
tend to drive an outsized portion of traffic to the site and rank for many keywords. 
 
One example of this is ProfitWell's​ g
​ uide to subscription billing systems​: 

 
 

41
While the look is not amazing and it's not an "Ultimate Guide", it does have varied content 
types (such as a video with founder Patrick) and goes into 21 different billing systems to 
compare them and help you make the right choice. 
 
If you look at the SEMrush keywords report for this page, it ranks pretty well for a lot of 
valuable terms for ProfitWell: 
 

 
 
That is solid 2x content right there. This kind of content can be created consistently, ranks 
well, and drives an outsized portion of traffic. They could also take this and rework it to be 
5x content with a quiz and a download to drive even more business value. 

Where should your content live? 

Finally, let's talk about where your content lives on your website. 
 
There are a few main places where SaaS companies tend to put their content: 
 
● Within a resources section; 
● On their blog. 
 
The right location for your content depends on what role it plays in your conversion funnel, 
how you are driving traffic and audience to it, and your technical capabilities. 
 
Most 10x content, assuming you have produced 1 or 2 major pieces that almost all of your 
visitors are going to want to read, there is an argument to put it in the top navigation or in 

42
a dropdown. Sometimes, this content can even be on your homepage in its own dedicated 
section. 
 
Most 5x content lives within a Learning or Resource section. This is a manually curated 
group of fantastic content that visitors can browse, though the reality is that this content is 
usually best served in targeted drip email campaigns. It may be discovered via search as 
well, which can then feed your email subscriptions if you offer it as a downloadable (which I 
highly recommend). 
 
Most 2x content lives on your blog. The challenge here is to help your user navigate 
through your blog to find your best content early on in their experience of your site. You 
can do this via a Best Content page/link in the top navigation or a Best Content widget in 
the sidebar. These pages can be both top of funnel awareness content as well as 
consideration stage content to send to people who you determine are thinking about using 
your product. 

A word about blog locations 

Many startups start off with their blog on a subdomain, such as blog.startup.com. I 
encourage you not to do this. Many case studies have been published showing that moving 
from a subdomain to a subfolder has had a dramatic effect on traffic from search engines. 
This is hotly debated in the SEO world, but I firmly believe that if you want to give your 
content the best chance to rank well and be discovered then you should have it within a 
subfolder like startup.com/blog instead of blog.startup.com. 
 
I fully recognize the challenges to putting a WordPress (or similar platform) blog on a 
subfolder, involving reverse proxies and more often, but it is worth it to rank better and to 
minimize the upkeep required of another set of sitemaps, another Search Console profile, 
and needing to build links to that subdomain as well. 
 
Put your blog within a subfolder if you can. 
 
Check out content marketing companies on Credo 

   

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Building links 
So far we've talked a lot about the technical aspects of SEO and setting up your website for 
success. We've also talked about content marketing and building content that ranks and 
drives new visitors who can become customers of your product. 
 
Now let's talk about the elephant in the room for SEO, which is link building. 
 
We're going to talk about what link building actually is, how it has changed over the years, 
and how your startup should think about link acquisition to get those initial links that help 
you rank. 

What is link building actually? 

If you want to rank, you need links into your website from other websites. When Google 
launched in 1998, what set them apart from the other search engines of the day was that 
they used links to determine rankings. Links, in their view, counted as votes of popularity 
and thus how well the site/page should rank. 
 
Link building is the act of proactively getting other websites to link back to your site. These 
count as votes to your site and your content, and thus your website is seen as more 
valuable and relevant. 
 
Every site has a score. Did you know that?  
 
Google historically called this PageRank (though we do not have access to that score), 
which was on a 1-10 basis. The industry-accepted number today is Domain Authority, a 
metric from the folks at Moz. Our friends at Proposify, for example, have a DA of 45: 
 

 
 

44
You shouldn't focus on what your Domain Authority is as a KPI (more on that in the metrics 
section), but you should understand that your website can become stronger and be able to 
rank for a larger quantity of and more competitive terms as you acquire more links to your 
website from more authoritative websites. If you are trying to outrank your competitors, 
one place to start is by seeing if their site is stronger than yours. This is just one of many 
factors, but it's important. 
 
Within a Moz Pro campaign you can see this: 

 
 
The more and better links you have, the stronger your website and the better you rank. 
Building links is about improving your website's strength to rank better. And when you 
build links, that also means that you can earn referral traffic from supposedly very qualified 
sources. 
 
These are the links that search engines want to reward. 

Follow vs nofollow links 

Briefly, let's talk about how links work. 
 
There are two kinds of links: 
 
● Followed 
● Nofollowed 
 
Followed links are the links that pass link equity and are guaranteed to help you rank 
better. If a link is followed and from a strong relevant website, then this is the best link you 
can get to help your rankings. By default, links are followed on the internet. Search engines 
since Google have historically relied on them to help rank sites. 
 

45
Nofollowed links are links that are tagged so that they do not pass link equity. There are 
many reasons that a link should not pass link equity, such as if it's purchased or not 
editorially controlled by the site administrators. Google announced in 2005 that they would 
integrate the nofollow tag, and over the years we have seen an increase in the number of 
nofollowed links around the web as "link building tactics" like comment spam on blogs 
became commonplace. Now you can expect that all links from blog post comments 
sections are nofollowed. 
 
Finally, let me be clear that ​every natural link profile has nofollowed links in it.​ In fact, a 
link profile is suspect and more risky to a search penalty if there are not nofollowed links! 
As we've already said, nofollow links are a natural part of the web and links. 
 
SEMrush gives you a view into every domain's links and the breakdown of followed vs 
nofollowed. I have done very little active link acquisition on Credo, yet 9% of our links are 
nofollowed. This is a completely natural link profile: 
 

How has link building changed over the years? 

Over the years, link building has changed a lot. As search engines have matured and the 
online ecosystem has grown up, strategies and tactics necessarily change. This is no 
different in SEO and link building. 
 
Tactics that worked 10 years ago do not work now, nor should we expect them to work. 
Unfortunately, a lot of the content about link building online focused for a long time on 
quick tricks and hacks to get a few links and game the search engines. 
 
Fortunately (in my view), a lot of these tactics have stopped working as the search engines 
have become better at identifying link spam at scale. With a combination of​ ​their Penguin 
algorithms​ and a direct focus on and public outing of websites who went against their 
guidelines (two that come to mind are​ ​Genius​ and​ ​Thumbtack​) as well as publicly taking 
down services meant to influence search engines (such as Private Blog Networks, which 
you should know about but not use), the search engines have begun to clean up the web 
and therefore SEOs and those looking to rank better have been forced to focus on great 
content that meets user needs, and then to engage in great promotion of that content. 

46
 
Gone are the days of spamming thousands of comments on blog posts, buying mass 
directory links because they give you the​ ​anchor text​ you care about, and buying links on 
other sites.  
 
And I say, good riddance. We get to do real marketing now. 
In 2018, startup link building looks very different from 10 years ago where you'd hire 
someone in their mom's basement to build you 1,000 links for $100. Now, it focuses on 
high quality links that are earned, not bought. 
 
Let's talk about those, as those are the links that the search engines want to reward long 
term. 

What kinds of links matter for SaaS companies and startups? 

When you're thinking about building links to your site, instead of asking "What sites can I 
email about linking to mine?" you should ask yourself "What would make those sites want 
to link to mine without me having to ask?" 
 
While reality is that in order to get links (for the most part) you will have to ask for it at 
some point, approaching link acquisition from the direction of adding outsized value to 
them and their audience is far superior to trying to trick someone into linking back to you. 
 
As a SaaS company, what kind of links should you pursue? 
 
This depends slightly based on your niche and your competition, because that determines 
how competitive the terms are for which you are trying to rank. SEMrush, Moz, and Ahrefs 
all have their own version of a keyword's difficulty, so decide on the metric you want and 
determine from there the authority and number of links you need to rank. 
 
SaaS companies should pursue the following links to build a base of rankings: 
 
1. Content based by producing content that leads the industry and gives new insight; 
2. PR-based around the founding story and story of the problem you are solving; 
3. Partnerships. 
 
Let's talk about each. 

Content-based 
The best links are earned through doing things that are worth of being talked about. If you 
have a marketing team or are a founder with a writing addiction (like myself), then creating 
content can be an awesome way to establish yourself as an authority in your space which 

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then lends itself to other marketing (and link) opportunities like speaking opportunities if 
that is your desire. 
We talked at length about content marketing in the previous chapter, so let's talk about 
ways that you can use content to build links. 

Guest posting 
First, leverage yourself as a writer to begin guest posting on websites where your audience 
hangs out. If you're focused on small businesses, for example, and run a proposal software 
company then you have a vast audience to reach. 
 
One example of a SaaS startup that used content/guest posting to build their initial 
audience was Buffer, where cofounder Leo​ ​wrote over 150 guest blog posts in under 9 
months and acquired over 10,000 users that way​. 
 
That is a lot of writing and a lot of links that translated into a lot of positive press and 
customers. 
 
You will not be accepted to write guest posts if you haven't been writing content on your 
own site previously. Thus this strategy requires upfront work of being a subject-matter 
expert and proving that you can also write well. If that is not you and you do not have the 
time to write guests posts, then skip this strategy. 

Surveys, studies, guides, and tools 

One of the most effective ways to build great links and get the attention of an industry is 
through providing unique data and insights into the industry. While these topics can be 
difficult to identify, when done well they can shift your industry in your favor. 
 
There are a few ways to do this, including conducting surveys and releasing the results and 
outreaching to publications and influencers who may be surprised by them. This is a 
fantastic way to build relationships and can also open up other opportunities for 
collaboration in the future. 
 
If you look at Moz, 4 of their top 10 most linked pages are resources: 
 

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Same with Proposify: 

 
 
And Buffer's is a combination of homepage, features, tools, and content: 
 

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When I ran marketing at HotPads.com, an apartment and house rentals website, we used 
this to great effect as have larger companies like Zillow. By investing in data-driven studies 
that showed unique data, we were able to get links from Today.com, the Washington Post, 
Yahoo.com, and every single relevant website in our space. 
 
Big data pieces coupled with PR-based outreach works. 

PR and founder based 

Next, if you're in the early stages of your company then one of the best ways to get 
coverage is to have your founder as the public face. If your founder is willing to do it, then 
avenues like podcast appearances and stories of why you're doing what you're doing are 
PR gold 
 
Podcasts are one of my favorite ways to scale good press and attention. Compared to a 
blog post that can take many hours of time to create a piece of content that you are proud 
of and that deserves to earn links, a podcast appearance can be done in under an hour and 
still rank well for the terms you are targeting if the host also provides a full transcript. 
Podcasts are a win. 
 
The PR strategies here vary. 
 
Some startups will hire a PR professional to help them scale outreach (and therefore 
placements and links). This can work quite well especially if they have good contacts or are 
able to find the right contacts to get in front of. They can be worth their weight in gold to 

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help you put together your strategy and understand where you should have placements 
and coverage in order to drive your business forward. 
 
Sometimes though, having a PR person doing outreach on your behalf can seem strange to 
the press. VCs may like that you are extremely busy and don't have time to do outreach, 
but press may wonder why you are not doing the outreach yourself. 
 
I have found that a combination usually works best. If you are genuinely doing something 
noteworthy, then introductions from well connected mutual friends are usually the best 
way to get great coverage on podcasts and in major publications when others are writing. 
Becoming known as a source is the best way to get these links, and getting personal 
introductions to the people with writing access is hands down the best way to build these 
relationships. 
 
If you are working with a PR agency or considering it, I recommend that you get their help 
with the strategy and writing the specific emails and asks. But then have them, if they agree 
to it, do the outreach a
​ s you s​ o that you can also reply directly and be involved in the 
process. 
 
Speak with your PR person about this, as there are likely times when they should own the 
relationship and other times when you should. 
 
Overall, as PR relates to links, your PR person should understand that you're both looking 
for coverage (which can be leveraged into other coverage as well) and ideally to get links. 
While the links from most publications now are nofollowed (meaning they pass no link 
equity), they can send sizeable referral traffic and my SEO intuition tells me that search 
engines may value those differently that nofollowed comment links or similar. 

Partnerships 
Finally, partnerships with companies with customers who need what you offer as well as 
what they offer can be a great way to build links. 
 
For example, Credo helps businesses find the right marketing agency to work with. If they 
need marketing help and are used to work with agencies, then they likely also use web 
development and design agencies or products. Therefore, I have reached out to and build 
partnerships with complementary companies so that we can refer work to each other. 
 
These links stay around for as long as you have the partnership and can also send you very 
qualified traffic and customers.  
 
These are gold for your business overall a
​ nd f​ or your SEO rankings! 

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How link building succeeds 
Link building lives and dies by consistent outreach. When thinking about content marketing 
for SEO, the "marketing" side of that equation is promotion, which is how you get the links 
that matter and help you rank. 
 
Link building succeeds when you consistently look to provide value to the internet. 
Whether this is big pieces of content that are novel and get new attention or being a source 
for writers who need a quote, link building requires consistent attention from someone. 
 
Within a SaaS company with good MRR, this is usually the content manager or an SEO 
manager or agency. The person responsible for content/organic traffic should also be the 
one owning these strategies and efforts, with full support from the executive suite that 
understands the value and long term thinking required. 
 
Check out link builders on Credo 

   

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Tracking SaaS SEO success 
You can't fix what you can't measure, and if you can't fix things then you can't succeed. We 
who work on the internet are fortunate that we have an incredible amount of data with 
which to work. The challenge, of course, is knowing what to measure as direct metrics and 
what to measure as actions that get you to the direct metrics that drive your business. 

The problem with most SEO metrics 

You probably know a bit about SEO, or you at least know that it's important to your 
business. If you've read this far in the guide, then you know a lot more than a lot of people 
out there. 
If you know a bit about SEO, then you know that SEO is driven off of technical bits and 
pieces, content, and links. 
 
The problem is that most people want to measure SEO based on these things. 
 
"What do our title tags say?" 
"How well do we rank for [really red widgets] this week?" 
"Did we get that Answer box in Google for that keyword yet?" 
"Hey agency, how many links did we build this week?" 
 
And worst of all, ​"What's our Domain Authority?" 
 
None of these are the right questions to ask. Title tags should be set at the beginning and 
then links built to help you rank. Individual rankings focus you on small wins instead of 
larger wins to drive exponentially more traffic (though, you should have rank tracking in 
place to see larger movements). Answer Boxes are great and drive great traffic, but they're 
not available everywhere and usually only for information queries. Link numbers don't tell 
you if they're quality. And finally,​ ​Domain Authority​ changes with the rest of the web. 
 
The other problem here is that all of these are ​directional metrics a ​ nd don't map back to 
your business. 
 
Who cares how many links you or your agency built if you're not making any more money 
from SEO than last month? And if you hang your hat on Domain Authority, you'll be 
optimizing for a number that you can't control and that will never pay your payroll. 
 
So let's talk about the metrics that d ​ o ​matter to SaaS SEO success. 

Main SEO metrics for SaaS businesses 

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There are three main metrics that I believe SaaS team should track to know overall how 
well you are performing. 

Visibility/share of voice 
First, as talked about in the keyword research and tracking chapter you have identified the 
broad buckets of keywords to go after. Within those broader buckets you have your 
individual keywords which you are tracking as well. 
 
Many businesses are guilty of tracking what I call ​vanity keywords​, which are specific 
keywords that you search constantly to see if your ranking changed. This could be 
something like [proposal software] or even something broader that you'd like to rank for. 
 
I won't tell you to stop caring about these keywords. Hopefully they're high volume and 
matter to your business, and I have no problem with you continuing to search them. 
 
But if you want to track how your SEO is actually doing, then you need to care about the 
percentage of clicks you are receiving for those keywords across the full set. This allows 
you to think about big changes that will move the full set of keywords up and ranking, 
instead of focusing your business on one keyword that could make or break your business. 
 
Here is an example from a Moz campaign that I have set up: 
 

 
 

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This is something that I recommend all my clients track weekly and monthly to see how you 
are improving. It provides more insights than average ranking, at least as reported by 
Google Search Console, and allows you to see your share of the traffic in your space. 
 
Once you have this insight, you can use a tool like​ ​SimilarWeb​ or​ ​SEMrush​ to identify who 
has a bigger share and from there put together a strategy to improve yours should it make 
strategic sense for your business. 

YoY traffic and users 

This is a pure growth-focused metric. If you're at the beginning of your journey, then you 
may only have month on month tracking to pay attention to, but once you've been around 
for more than 12 months I recommend that you start tracking these numbers year on year 
so you can have a view into the long term health of your business. 
 
Year on year numbers matter as well because many businesses are seasonal as well. If you 
are a B2C SaaS business then you might see steady growth with a few lockstep changes at 
different points in the year (think of a finance app, which likely spikes around tax time and 
New Years), but most B2B SaaS apps are seasonal because budgets are approved at certain 
times during the year and there is a natural ebb-and-flow over the year. 
 

Revenue/signups from organic 

Finally, you need to tie SEO performance back to your business metrics. This is truly where 
the rubber hits the road and where you can justify spending a legitimate amount on SEO 
because you know exactly what it will get you. 
 

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You have the start from nothing and over time learn how well a specific channel converts 
for you, and then make decisions about where to invest budget based on opportunity. 
Sometimes SEO won't be the right thing to invest in right now, but sometimes it will be 
depending on everything else you have invested in. 
Here is a high level within Google Analytics with conversion goals set up. To take this 
further, with a SaaS business that directly takes payments where you can more easily 
calculate LTV and ACV, you can actually get the amount of money you are making from 
each channel in this graph. Now that's sexy. 
 
And those are the metrics that help you build your business. 
 

Directional SEO metrics for SaaS businesses 

SEO is about building your business, not just traffic. We have already established that, but it 
is worth repeating. 
 
Of course, more qualified traffic will often lead to more business. The quality of the traffic 
determines if that business is lasting and your new customers stay or churn, but a good 
rule of thumb is that customers follow audience. 
 
While these are not metrics on which to base your SEO success (revenue from search is the 
ultimate metric), you/your SEO should keep an eye on: 
 
● Rankings for buckets of keywords (especially transactional keywords that can 
convert well); 
● Traffic to your important conversion-related keywords; 
● Indexation of URLs submitted into sitemaps; 
● Website errors (big spikes in errors can lead to reduced traffic/rankings). 

56
 
These are not metrics for your SEO/agency to report on, but they are important to know so 
that they can let you know when something has changed for better or worse and how that 
affects your strategy moving forward. 

What to expect from SEO 

There are three main things to expect from SEO for your company: 
 
● SEO takes time; 
● SEO builds your base of traffic and will (almost) never spike; 
● SEO should map to your conversion funnel; 

SEO takes time 

SaaS founders and teams are usually impatient. You're probably inundated with offers to 
quickly hack your SEO, to quickly increase your Facebook ads ROI by 213.7%, and those 
sorts of offers. 
 
In our instantaneous world, we need to fight the desire to see results overnight. Very rarely 
will you see instantaneous results with SEO, and I have stopped even looking for that. 
 
Good SEO means your traffic and conversions from the channel will improve over time as 
you create new landing pages, develop new content focused on ranking and conversion, 
build new links to your site, and improve your site from a user experience and speed 
perspective. 

SEO builds your base of traffic but is not "free" 

Sometimes you will hear people talk about SEO as "free traffic". While in one way it is 
because you are not actively buying it, I believe this is a misnomer because it insinuates 
that there is no investment. 
 
Conversely, SEO requires an investment up front in order to later reap the benefits. You 
invest up front in research, content development, link building, PR, and more in order to 
over time rank better. 
 
SEO differs from paid acquisition in that you do not have to keep paying as much in order 
to keep getting that traffic once you've earned it. 
 
It is true that SEO always requires ongoing maintenance and you can always rank better by 
building more and better links, developing content, and maintaining your website well. But 
you will never lose all of your rankings/traffic if you shift budget or 
people/engineering/design time somewhere else for a while to get new channels off the 
ground. 

57
 
But do not be fooled that SEO is "free" or does not require an investment upfront. 

SEO maps to your funnel as a channel 

Contrary to most of what you read, SEO should map back to your customer's journey to 
conversion to your tool. 
 
The tough thing about a funnel of any kind is that the numbers become increasingly 
smaller the further you go down the funnel. You may target large volume keywords for 
extreme top of funnel awareness, but you should also recognize that a lot of this traffic will 
not convert to paying customers. 
 
You need to build out: 
 
● Content that attracts a larger audience, even if they are just beginning their search; 
● Content that gets people in the research phase who may be starting to consider 
your product; 
● Content that helps people at the decision stage decide that your product is right for 
them. 
 
SEO is also by no means the only channel that you should use to get new customers. It can 
be a very powerful channel, but it must be coupled with content marketing, email 
marketing, and even some paid acquisition (especially retargeting) to truly take your 
business to the next level. 
 
Many SaaS founders forget to use the full extent of marketing channels. SEO is but one 
channel. 

Analytics and Search Console 

If you're investing in SEO, then you need an understanding of where traffic is coming to 
your site and how well that traffic converts to customers. 
 
To do this you need to have both an Analytics solution (usually Google Analytics) and 
Search Console installed on your website. 

Installing Google Analytics 

Google Analytics is quite easy to install. You have probably done it before, but if not here's 
a quick tutorial on it. 
 
First go to​ ​Google Analytics​ and sign in with your email. I recommend using a generic email 
(such as hello@startup.com) so that administration is easier and you can add/remove 

58
people as they come into/leave your company. This is much easier than one person setting 
up and then leaving the company, yet you have no access to the profile once they leave. 
 
If you have not used the email to administrate a Google Analytics profile before, then you 
will see this screen. Click Sign Up on the right side: 

 
 
From here you insert all of your site information: 
 

59
 
Once this is all done, you can navigate to Admin > Tracking Info > Tracking Code where you 
can find your tracking code. It will look something like UA-12345678-1. Put this code in your 
<head> so that it tracks all visits/pageviews even if the page has not fully loaded. 
 
You can also use Google Tag Manager to load it asynchronously with all of your other tags, 
such as Facebook tracking pixels.  
 
The reality is that any tag you add to your site will slow it down a few milliseconds, but this 
is necessary tracking and its asynchronous nature minimizes its impact on your site 
loading. If you're concerned about it slowing down your site, you should probably be 
working to optimize other jobs and processes rather than avoiding an Analytics tag! 
 

 
 
Verify that setup was successful by navigating to your GA dashboard and verifying that 
traffic is coming through (visit your site in Incognito in Chrome to make sure). If you do not 
see data coming through, you may need to flush your cache before it will work. 

60
  

Installing Search Console 

We have already mentioned Search Console numerous times throughout the guide, so you 
need to make sure that you have it installed on your site so that you can gain important 
insights into your site as well as control parameters and submit sitemaps. 
 
Google Search Console can be found​ ​here​. 
 
Once logged in, you'll be asked to create a New Property (click the big red button in the top 
right if not): 
 

 
 

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Then you're asked to verify that you own the domain. I recommend using either the 
domain registrar or Google Analytics option. I remember back in the day when it was much 
harder to verify Search Console than today, so feel fortunate that it only takes a few 
seconds now: 
 

 
 
Your site should now be verified and data coming through! 

Configuring Analytics for SEO growth 

Now you get to configure Analytics to show your organic growth. There are a few key things 
to remember. 
 
First, you can find organic traffic under Acquisition > All Traffic > Source/Medium. Because I 
mostly watch Google organic, I'll navigate directly there. 
 

62
  
 
Alternatively, you can use an Advanced Filter to filter to Medium = organic. 
 
My preferred way of tracking organic and performance is through a Dashboard with 
multiple widgets including: 
 
● Overall organic sessions and users; 
● Google organic sessions and users; 
● Conversions from organic; 
● Top organic traffic pages. 
 
Depending on the site, I also like to get granular top level views into organic traffic to 
specific sections of the site like so: 

63
  
 
Depending on your marketing campaigns and goals, you can also track: 
 
● Downloads and email conversions from organic; 
● Subscriptions and revenue; 
● Free trials and converted free trials to customers. 
 
Analytics is an incredibly complex skillset in its own right and I have barely scratched the 
surface here. Your first goal should be a solid look into your numbers and watching them 
grow over time as you invest in marketing and growing your content and link profiles to 
capture more users. 
 
Check out​ A​ nalytics consultants​ and​ ​agencies​ on Credo 

   

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Supporting SEO at your company 
SEO is a full-company effort, as we established at the beginning. Whether you choose to 
hire an agency or have staff internally who can be tasked with leading the SEO charge, 
every company that wants to succeed with SEO has to dedicate significant resources 
(people and budget) over a period of time to really see huge results. 
 
As such, I have seen that it can be very hard for venture backed businesses to ever justify 
an investment in SEO because they are simply under so much pressure to perform and 
that is quite simply not how SEO works. There are a few VCs who value SEO highly, but 
those are very much the exception to the rule. 

How to staff an SEO investment 

When you're ready to invest in SEO, you're probably wondering who all needs to be 
involved within the company. We'll talk in the next chapter about whether you should hire 
inhouse or an agency, but right now let's talk about what parts of your company need to be 
involved in SEO efforts. 

Finance/analytics 
The finance and analytics teams have to be involved in SEO because they control the 
budget and can also help the whole company understand how SEO efforts are impacting 
the bottom line. It's all well and good to say that traffic is going up, but it is much more 
impactful to tell others in the company that the SEO efforts they are working on "drove 
XX,XXX new visitors which resulted in $X,XXX new MRR this month alone." 
 
That is what gets people excited. If you're not measuring the business impact of SEO as well 
as traffic, then you're not doing everything you can to be successful. 

Product/Design 
Product is one of the two main bottlenecks that can sink an SEO campaign, with the other 
being engineering. Product teams want to build new software features, which who can 
blame them? Getting a product team to prioritize work on the front end is never easy in the 
best of times, and when you have a long features and bugs backlog it can be near 
impossible. 
 
Because the logged-in application for most SaaS companies has very little to do with SEO 
and your marketing site is probably WordPress or similar, I often counsel SaaS companies 
to have either a dedicated front end or full stack engineer to work on front end things like a 
new blog or new page templates or even things like meta tag fixes.  
 
If you don't have the budget for a full time engineer to work on this, then use a service like 
CodeMentorX​ to find a freelance developer that you can work with to make these changes. 

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Engineering 
Engineering is the single most likely place within a SaaS company for SEO initiatives to die. 
Without a strong engineering leader who sees the value of SEO within your company, SEO 
will not happen at your company.  
 
Period. 
 
Engineers hold the keys at a software company. They determine the tech stack used and 
what gets built and when. If they do not want to prioritize something, then they will not and 
it will not get done. 
 
This is an area where your company culture really matters. Many SaaS companies I've seen 
have an engineering-driven culture, but if you want to really succeed with customer 
acquisition then the playing field needs to be leveled between the different teams 
internally. 

Marketing 
The marketing team (specifically thinking about content and brand marketing) often 
contains writers such as content writers and strategists. If you're a smaller SaaS company 
then you might not have dedicated strategists and writers, but if you're at the scale of a 
company like Buffer or Zapier (in the 10s of millions ARR) then you do have a dedicated 
team. 
 
The marketing team can support SEO initiatives by creating copy and new resources that 
help customers and target keywords that your potential customers are searching for. The 
marketing team should begin by understanding​ ​keyword research​ and​ ​how to do content 
marketing​ properly. 

The growth team 

If you are at the scale of $5m+ a year in revenue, then I recommend that you consider 
having a growth team. At minimum, this would be a growth expert who understands SEO 
as well as other parts of the funnel to drive growth, a writer, and at least one engineer and 
one designer that they have dedicated time from each week. 
 
This growth team is essentially another product team. They are responsible for driving 
growth across the organization, from top level traffic and audience through scaleable 
means through to conversion. They will work across marketing channels and be able to 
implement new technologies that are needed. 
 
Because they are essentially a product team, they work very closely with the engineering 
team and have to understand the technical tradeoffs that are made. This has, in many 

66
instances, been the way to move around engineers thinking that marketers are stupid and 
allows growth to happen because things get done. 
 
If you can't afford a full growth team​, then at least have someone spearheading growth 
efforts and give them dedicated design, engineering, and copywriting time. Or, give them a 
budget to work with to find contractors for some of these roles. 
 
If you want growth to happen at your company, you need someone tasked with it 
specifically. 

How execs can best support SEO efforts at a SaaS company 

I have never seen a business succeed with SEO where the executive was not a huge 
champion of it. This is because SEO needs support across the organization from business 
(for budget) to product (for prioritization) to engineering (for actually building the things) 
and finally marketing (especially for needed copy). 
 
Executives can best support SEO efforts at their company in a few ways. 
 
First, demand that SEO be data driven. Have the SEO show you hard data and case studies 
from others in the industry for the changes they want to make. Do this for the first few 
months and require great reporting. If you do this, then you can trust that you have 
implemented a culture of justifying recommendations and requiring that they map back to 
the business's goals of users and revenue. 
 
Second, give your SEO/agency support to get things done. Because SEO requires something 
from so many different parts of the company, a breakdown in support from one team can 
sink the entire undertaking. I have too many times seen an engineering team tank SEO 
efforts simply because they wanted to build something else. You as the executive are the 
one who can break this down and keep things moving when you need to. 
 
Third, you as the executive are the best spokesperson at the company for championing 
SEO. I've worked at larger companies where the CEO would literally praise the SEO team in 
front of thousands of their peers. Talk about SEO mattering and guess what? This company 
dominates SEO in their space. 

Resources that everyone on the team should read 

There are a few SEO resources that everyone at your company should read to get a basic 
understanding of SEO and to be able to speak intelligently about it. 

Moz Beginner's Guide to SEO 

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This guide, which is now about a decade old and being rewritten as of February 2018, is still 
the go-to resource for learning the basics of SEO that you can then go deeper. It's available 
in PDF format, and I recommend that you print off copies and read it cover to cover. 

Backlinko 
Backlinko is an SEO training company, but their blog is a wealth of knowledge. Brian Dean 
(our interview with him​ ​here​) is living proof that high quality beats quantity every time. It is 
a true wealth of SEO knowledge, including things like​ h ​ is link building resource​. 

Web Developer's Cheat Sheet 

Another awesome resource that has been around for years, this is a great cheat sheet for 
all developers to print out and reference often. This can become a source of truth internally 
for questions like "What does a canonical tag do?" or "Should I use a 301 or 302 redirect in 
this instance?" 

Keyword Research for SEO 

Another resource from Backlinko that should be read by everyone on your team who is 
responsible for increasing traffic. This guide gets to the bottom of how to do keyword 
research to identify the high value keywords that you should build specific pages for and 
then build links to rank. 

   

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What to do next 
Now that you've learned all about SEO, what it involves, and how to measure it and set 
yourself up for success you may be asking: 
 
Where do we go from here? 
 
This depends on your company and your available budget. If you already have a team in 
place and are not yet ready to hire a full time SEO, then you might be ready to work with a 
consultant to direct your team or an agency to both set the strategy and get some of the 
work done for you. 
If your business is doing great revenue and you've worked with a consultant or agency to 
see the bigger opportunity and how to get there, then it might be time to hire. 
 
Either way, I'd be happy to consult with you on your strategy through Credo's Porter 
Service.  
 
We'll spend an hour talking about your business and your goals, and I can give you my 
recommendations from a decade of doing SEO and running marketing teams, as well as 
seeing over 1300 businesses through Credo looking to hire or move their company in the 
right direction. 
 
Check out the Porter Service 

Should you hire an agency or a consultant 

The next question you may have is whether you should hire a solo consultant or an agency 
to help you with your SEO. 
 
This depends on your business and the team you have in place as well as if you are going 
to hire someone full time. 
 
Consultants are fantastic for strategy and for audits. Depending on the consultant, they 
may be able to offer a set of services such as link building though you should recognize 
that they will likely use some outside contractors for that. This is a necessity of the solo 
consultant world in order to make such a setup profitable for the consultant. 
 
If you need a broader set of services, such as both SEO and PPC or Facebook Ads, then you 
should work with an agency. If you need SEO ​services a ​ s well as SEO strategy, then you will 
be better served the vast majority of the time to work with an agency over a consultant. 
You might be scared of the thought of working with an agency because they have more 
overhead than a solo consultant, but I encourage you to be open minded about an agency.  
 

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The agency model can work well when you need multiple services and an account manager 
to wrangle internal teams. Think about that account manager like a product manager - they 
are being paid to wrangle the troops and keep things moving forward. 
 
Don't be afraid to pay for that if you don't have someone internally that can manage all the 
external providers you have. A great account manager is worth their weight in gold. 

How to know who to hire 

Besides using Credo's Porter Service, we have also created a guide to hiring for you. Hiring 
is hard, and whether you are trying to build a team internally or figure out how to hire the 
right agency/provider to work with, you need guidance. 
 
I recommend that you download our G ​ uide to Hiring​, which is a 23 page ebook that takes 
you through exercises to determine the right approach for you. 
 
You can either do that here, or if you signed up to receive this SaaS SEO guide by 
download then you will receive it with that as well in a couple of days. 

   

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About Credo 
Credo started in 2013 because our founder, John Doherty, was tired of seeing his friends 
and business owners he knew hire bad agencies who at best didn't do move their traffic 
and business forward, and at worst cost them time and money and business. 
 
We're a small but mighty team. We have a collective 15 years of digital marketing 
experience at some of the largest websites/companies and coolest startups. We've worked 
with companies like Zillow, IHG, Grovo, The North Face, Dribbble, Vevo, and more. 
 
We've also seen 1,300+ businesses with a collective $10M+ in marketing spend come 
through Credo since late 2015. We've helped them connect with great agencies and 
ultimately many have hired an agency to help them go to the next level. 
 
Whether an agency is right for you or a consultant can get you there, we'd love to help you 
out. 
So get in touch with us if you know what you need, and we will get you connected with the 
right providers and support you through to finding the right answer for your business. 
 
Get in touch 

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