There is a common misconception that a blog is the best content strategy for all SaaS businesses.
While I love blogging, it’s just one piece of the puzzle — and one piece that doesn’t make for a comprehensive strategy.
Having worked with a number of SaaS companies over the years, I’ve found that creating content repositories often makes more sense with how unique the SaaS user’s journeys are.
In this article, you’ll learn how comparison content, educational content, and support content can engage users at key touchpoints in the conversion path.
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Compare content repositories
Consumers in the SaaS space, while searching with potential customer queries, will also use “opposite” and “alternative” queries to find service providers that may not necessarily rank high on prominent product phrases.
This expands the competitive landscape beyond just who ranks the front page of typical target phrases.
These are worth using Business Intelligence along with metrics like search volume to prioritize which comparison pages to create.
The focus here is not on generating a lot of traffic, as anyone looking for Brand X versus Brand Y will have some level of education in the market and will likely be close to converting.
GitLab comparison repository
Gitlab has a large comparison repository of 123 pages at the time of writing and a ranking of 3,024 keywords, generating an estimated 11,000 sessions per month (Semrush US).
This is a content powerhouse, as Gitlab has a product offering that overlaps significantly with a number of other providers.
These comparison pages enable users looking for specific product features to put Gitlab on their radar when the DevOps platform doesn’t seem a good fit (depending on consumer knowledge of the market).
This also acts as a tool to take users to the next stage of the funnel using Gitlab, and links to these pages are prominently anchored from the homepage.
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Concept comparison pages
Notion has taken a different approach to content comparison by marking two of its main competitors – Evernote & Confluence – with specific comparison pages linked to the site’s footer.
These pages benefit from market knowledge, built through general marketing and reputation, with an Evernote Comparison Page Rank for 208 keywords and a Confluence Page Rank for 82 keywords.
Educational content repositories
It can be difficult to make a single “value proposition” or to look at your keyword research objective in a linear fashion.
As-A-Service organizations tend to have disparate customer bases with varying levels of need, purchasing power, technical capabilities (and knowledge) about the product, as well as a narrow vision approach to optimizing organic users.
This is why the content hub/SEO moat approach is so powerful in this niche.
In terms of the traditional SEO view, it generates a lot of good content including a number of target keywords and their variations.
Taking a broader view, producing robust, non-commercial content covering a large number of topics (and search queries) within a well-organized (and internally linked) area of a website creates a content repository with a large number of diverse user value propositions that cater to users at different stages. from their trip.
It also helps in improving the topical relevance of the domain as a whole.
When a SaaS customer deployed the first section of what became a large, comprehensive “learning center” in mid-2017, Google began to creep in and see the value in this content area.
The site has also begun to improve ranking across a number of commercially valuable terms on more commercially focused landing pages.
This learning hub, four years later, now ranks for an estimated 151,247 keywords (31,000 of which are on the first page). It generates 1,378,281 membership sessions per month – about 25% of the estimated total organic traffic for the domain.
Screenshot from Smash, October 2021When building educational repositories like these, it’s essential to be as commercially neutral as possible. The goal of this content is to improve relevance and drive users to the site.
Including heavy business CTAs and sales language across these pages can weaken their value proposition and reduce ranking potential.
Google examples of these content hubs in the wild include:
- Imperva Learning Centre.
- Atlassian University.
- Asana Academy.
- Adobe Learning Center.
- StackPath Edge Academy.
Learning repositories also create a truly natural location within the website structure to include large glossaries that can link internally to both pages within the learning center and trade pages.
Support for content repositories
When I start working with a SaaS (or technology) company, the support department is one area where there are often “quick wins” in terms of driving relevant traffic and producing content.
The reason I say “quick” in terms of producing content is because all the content needs to do is satisfy the user’s query.
For a large number of support articles and entries, these can be short fragments of two to three sentences that link to documentation or other articles/pages.
To find the questions you need answered in your support documentation, there are a number of sources you should use and combine:
- Google’s PAA (People Ask Too) feature.
- Reddit, Quora, StackOverflow – anywhere users might post questions related to your brand/product.
- Third party SEO tools that allow filtering of questions.
In the process, you may also find items to include in your other inventory, but you’ll want to focus more on your brand/product here.
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By focusing on the Support Center, you can greatly increase the amount of value it provides to your site as a whole.
For example, in the chart below, the optimization, pruning, and consolidation started in mid-2016. Creating related support articles became a feature of new product GTM (Go-to-market strategies) to continually add content to that area of the site.
Screenshot from Smash, October 2021conclusion
While SaaS companies have different content needs to achieve their marketing goals, the goal is always the same: to get a user into your business.
Any successful content strategy, then, must be customized to match the takeaways of different types of users throughout their journey.
And as you saw in the three examples above, different strategies can work very well in tandem.
* All data used is publicly available via third-party tools.
More resources:
- How to Optimize Your SaaS Homepage: Keywords, Linking, and More
- How to create SaaS content to increase acquisition and retention
- SaaS Content Marketing: A Complete Guide
Featured image: ArtemisDiana/Shutterstock
