There is a common misconception that blogging is the best content strategy for any SaaS company.
As much as I love blogs, they’re only one piece of the puzzle – and one part of it isn’t a comprehensive strategy.
After working with many SaaS companies over the years, I’ve found that creating a content repository is often a better fit for the uniqueness of the SaaS user journey.
In this article, you’ll learn how comparative, educational, and supportive content engages users at important touchpoints on the conversion path.
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Compare content repositories
Consumers in the SaaS space will also use “contrast” and “alternative” queries when searching with solution lead queries to find service providers that may not necessarily rank highly for key product phrases.
This expands the competitive landscape beyond just who ranks on the first page for typical target phrases.
These are worth using “business intelligence” combined with metrics like search volume to prioritize which comparison pages should be generated.
The point here is not to generate a lot of traffic, because anyone searching for Brand X and Brand Y will have some level of market education and probably be close to converting.
Comparison library for Gitlab
Gitlab has a large comparison repository with rankings for 123 pages and 3,024 keywords at the time of writing, generating an estimated 11,000 sessions per month (Semrush US).
This is a powerful content hub because Gitlab offers a lot of overlap with many other providers.
These comparison pages enable users researching specific product features to put Gitlab on their radar when, on the surface, a DevOps platform might not seem relevant (depending on the consumer’s market knowledge).
This can also be used as a tool to move users to the next stage of the funnel through Gitlab, and the links to these pages are prominently linked from the home page.
[Find Out:] How to Develop (and Perfect) a SaaS Content Funnel →
Comparison page for Notions
Notion takes a different approach to comparing content, and it singled out its two main competitors — Evernote and Confluence — for linking specific comparison pages to the site footer.
These pages leverage market knowledge generated through general marketing and reputation, with the Evernote comparison page ranking for 208 keywords and the Confluence page ranking for 82 keywords.
Educational Content Repository
Offering a single “value proposition” or looking at a keyword’s search intent in a linear fashion can be difficult.
As-A-Service organizations tend to have diverse customer bases with varying levels of product demand, purchasing power, and technical ability (and knowledge), as well as a narrow approach to optimizing for organic users.
This is why the content-centric/SEO moat approach is so powerful in this niche.
As far as the traditional SEO view goes, it creates a lot of good content, including many targeted keywords and their variations.
From a broader perspective, generate strong non-commercial content covering a large number of topics (and search queries) within well-structured (and internally linked) areas of the site, creating a content repository with a vast array of different user value propositions , catering to users at different stages of the journey.
It also helps to increase topic relevance across the field.
When the SaaS client released the first part of what has become a large comprehensive “learning center” in mid-2017, Google started crawling and seeing value in this content area.
The site also started improving the ranking of some of the business-value phrases on more commercially-valued landing pages.
This learning center, four years later, now has an estimated 151,247 keywords (31,000 of which are on the first page). It generates 1,378,281 organic sessions per month—about 25% of the domain’s estimated total organic traffic.
Screenshot from Semrush, October 2021
When building such an educational repository, it must be as business agnostic as possible. The goal of this content is to increase domain topic relevance and bring users to the site.
Including heavy commercial CTAs and sales language in these pages can weaken their value proposition and limit ranking potential.
Google examples of these content hubs include:
- Imperva’s Learning Center.
- Atlas University.
- Asana Academy.
- Adobe Learning Center.
- StackPath Edge Academy.
The Education Knowledge Base also creates a very natural place in the site architecture to contain a large glossary of terms that can be linked internally to pages within the Learning Center and business pages.
Support for content repositories
When I started working with a SaaS (or tech) company, the support part was an area that often “quick wins” in terms of increasing relevant traffic and content production.
The reason I say “fast” in terms of content production is because all the content needs to do is satisfy user queries.
For large numbers of supporting articles and entries, these can be two or three short sentences, links to documentation or other articles/pages.
To find the questions you need answered in the supporting documentation, you should leverage and combine many resources:
- Google’s PAA (People Also Asked) feature.
- Reddit, Quora, StackOverflow – anywhere users may post questions related to your brand/product.
- Third-party SEO tools that allow issue filtering.
Along the way, you may also find elements to include in other repositories, but you want to focus more on your brand/product here.
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By focusing on the support center, you can greatly increase the overall value it brings to your website.
For example, in the image below, optimization, pruning, and consolidation began in mid-2016. Creating relevant support articles becomes a feature of the new product GTM (Go-to-Market Strategy) to continually add content to this area of the site.
Screenshot from Semrush, October 2021
in conclusion
While SaaS companies will have different content needs to achieve their marketing goals, the goal is always the same: getting users into your business.
Therefore, any successful content strategy needs to be tailored to match the points of different types of users in their journey.
As you can see in the three examples above, different strategies work well together.
*All data used is publicly accessible through 3rd party tools.
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Featured image: ArtemisDiana/Shutterstock