Your SEO content plan always has a gap
Even if you don’t add any new products to your website.
This statement is a +1 axiom for my library of rules on how to do SEO for SaaS brands.
You have to keep this axiom in mind to remain open to new keyword ideas.
I'm sure that even 10-year-old SaaS brands have such gaps.
There are 3 main reasons for that:
Your product solves more problems than you think.
People search for the same thing in dozens of ways.
New keywords appear and old keywords rise in the search volume.
This creates a huge set of keyword opportunities. Let me share examples of my wins and mistakes.
1/ Your product solves more problems than you think
Below is an example of a product use case I found for Favikon recently.
Favikon has much data about the influencers, frequency of posting, growth rate by followers, etc. They are leaders in LinkedIn influencers analysis, but they didn’t have a separate landing page about that.
I suggested creating 2 separate pages for narrow use cases: LinkedIn profile analyzer and LinkedIn competitor analysis tool.
These topics look too small in search volume and too narrow. Favikon at first is an influencer marketing platform, and then everything else.
However, such keywords have a good CPC rate and are closely related to the core value Favikon provides for brands and influencers.
At the end, the conversion rate of these pages confirmed my assumptions.
Another example. 9 months ago, I realized that we have too little traffic at Sitechecker for keywords containing the words monitoring and alert.
Considering our core offer and the features that our customers value most, this was a crime. Doing keyword research, we saw that the search volume of such keywords is small, but we decided to create 8 specialized pages for the experiment.
Here are the results.
We received 70 clicks for the last 3 months and 247 visits for all time.
Search Console does not show the keywords by which we received them, as always.
We received 18 trials and 2 subscriptions from this landing page.
These are small results, but a big signal about what is important to do.
You need more product pages. Every product has dozens of small features that users are looking for.
The closer the keyword is to your ICP, the less important its volume is.
GSC is not enough, it will never be enough to evaluate the impact on revenue.
For big and old brands, such opportunities are especially low-hanging fruit.
Their new pages related to the core topic of the website are usually indexed and ranked by Google in the top 10 in 24-48 hours!
Sometimes we even see such topics during keyword research, but leave them because of too low search volume. It’s a big mistake.
2/ People search for the same thing in dozens of ways
For example, Sitechecker ranks well for such keywords:
website checker
website crawler
seo checker
site audit tool
seo audit tool
These topics are too broad. Sometimes people who look for seo checker and seo audit tool mean the same thing, sometimes not. So, Google often has different SERP for such keywords.
That’s why we had to create different landing pages for them:
website checker — https://sitechecker.pro/website-safety/
website crawler — https://sitechecker.pro/website-crawler/
seo checker — https://sitechecker.pro/on-page-seo-checker/
site audit tool — https://sitechecker.pro/
seo audit tool — no separate landing page yet
Ahrefs did the same, creating two pages https://ahrefs.com/site-audit/ and https://ahrefs.com/seo-audit-tool, about the same product.
We are used to thinking that if we use clustering by SERP, we can rely on Google. As if Google always understands the user's search intent well, and will always show the same page for different keywords with the same intent.
As we can see, this often does not work. Sometimes it is worth creating a page about the same product, but in a slightly different form, and using different words.
3/ New keywords appear and old keywords rise
1. AI technology becomes more popular = more and more people look for tools that use this technology.
So, if you add AI to your product, you may need to create a new landing page or update the old ones to rank well for such keywords.
2. Some of your competitors that were small grew a lot, and people look for their alternatives more and more.
I am ashamed that for 7 years we lived without [competitor] alternative pages on Sitechecker. What stopped us from creating these pages for so long?
Stupidity;
Poor understanding of who we compete with and how we are better.
I am sure that such pages should be created as early as possible, even if part of your strengths are just your yet unrealized plans. Such keywords also have a low search volume often, but high conversion potential.
In our case, our clients started asking so often how we are better than Semrush that it became obvious—such a page is needed not only for SEO but also for the sales process.
Once I realized how valuable such keywords are, I started to run tests with parasite SEO on Medium.
Targeting keywords related to growing competitors is something that most SEOs won’t do, because they decide that such keywords have too small a search volume.
However, if the competitor acquires investments or invests a lot into media ads, it usually means that in the next 3-6-12 months, there will be more search related to this brand:
[competitor] pricing,
[competitor] alternative,
how to cancel [competitor] subscription.
Why are all these chances left on the table?
Product managers rarely dive deep into keyword research.
SEOs dive deeper but often don't know the product and its all use cases well enough.
SEOs aren’t incentivized for revenue and conversions, but only traffic.
Teams don’t have a system for updating their SEO content plan every month.
That's another reason why the SEO product manager role is key to organic growth for SaaS.
Only the person who:
understand both sides, SEO and product management,
is ready to invest a lot of time into learning the product and audience,
always keep in mind that there are keyword opportunities we missed,
will do keyword research constantly and find the gems in the ocean of potential product use cases.
That’s why keyword research is the most interesting thing for me in SEO.
You never know what you will dig up, but you know for sure that there is gold there.
P.S. If you run a B2B or SaaS website and leave a comment under this post, I will find one interesting keyword idea that you missed :)