How to Stay At Number 1 SEO Ranking After You Beat Your SaaS Competitors

Congratulations! You rank for relevant keywords already, and you reached quite a few number 1 positions. But if you think you’re done with SEO once you reach a number 1 SEO ranking, you’re completely wrong. And we’re sorry to break this to you, but search engine optimization is an ongoing work because if you stop it, the first position will easily become a past for you. 

Also, SaaS is indeed a competitive area, which means there will always be someone who will figure the easiest way out and push you lower on SERPs. From targeting highly relevant keywords and queries to fixing all technical SEO issues and balancing the content types on your website – being number 1 is a dream that may come true, but staying there is an ongoing effort.

So, how to prevent SEO regression for your SaaS company? How do you leverage the right SEO tools and resources and stay at the number 1 SEO ranking? 

Let’s take small steps and explain their importance once at a time. 

Understand That SEO is an Ongoing Effort

This is probably the hardest thing to explain to people with high expectations working on ambitious projects. But the sooner you understand that you can’t really rank at number 1 overnight, the easier it will be for you to embrace SEO as a main SaaS organic traffic source. 

Even if you somehow reach number 1 in less than a month, you must work really hard to stay there, which requires:

• Always stay alert on what your competitors are doing
• Don’t stop looking for specific long-tail keywords to target
• Stay focused on the target audience and their needs, expectations, and pain points
• Never give up on fixing the technical issues that may ruin the seamless user experience
• Track the relevant metrics and KPIs
• Embrace the different content formats that work best for your service
• Keep up with the SEO trends and updates
• Don’t give up on SEO as a SaaS strategy

How to Improve SEO Ranking after Beating Competitors?

Beating a competitor is a huge thing, even when you moved to position 20 and left them behind you at position 22. This is important to know because you can’t immediately beat the number 1 SEO ranking competitors. As we said, small steps at a time make a huge difference.

Imagine being in position 45 right now, and you have about 50 competitors to beat. Surely, you can’t fight against them all, but you need to overcome the lowest-ranking one first. 

By being consistent with the SEO strategy, you can move a few positions up in two or three months. That means, once you reach position 41, you have other competitors to beat – but also don’t let the beaten ones win the race. 

So, when we say SEO takes time, we think about the described example. Surely, it all depends on the starting position, as some SaaS companies have only two or three competitors to beat, while others may have fifty or even a hundred of them. 

Still, there are quite a few tactics that work, like:

Continuous Content Quality

Producing content just to have it won’t work in such a competitive landscape. You must offer quality over quantity. Keep your content informative and engaging. Listen to your audience, incorporate user-generated content, find the formats that work best, and address the users’ needs appropriately. 

Find New Keywords to Target

Once you start ranking, no matter the position, you’ll be able to spot many new and even more relevant keywords to optimize your website. Use tools like Ahrefs or SemRush to find more great keywords. Connect the website with Google Search Console so you can track the best-performing pages, as well as what keywords bring the most traffic to your website. 

Keep a Track on Technical SaaS SEO Issues

Resolve every technical issue related to SEO, like website speed, broken links, redirects, and bad image optimization. While many consider targeting keywords and publishing content as the main SEO activity, resolving the technical SEO issues will surely help your SaaS company stay at the number 1 SEO ranking for longer. 

Embrace the Importance of User Experience

User experience or UX is also an integral part of website optimization, especially for SaaS. Since the potential clients will use cloud-based web access to your product, you must let them know you care about their experience on the page. So, focus on fast loading, clear navigation, and attractive CTAs because it indeed makes a difference.

What are the Biggest SaaS SEO Challenges that Prevent You from Being Number 1?

While SaaS SEO strategies seem easy to implement, many businesses already suffer because of the fierce competition in the market. 

Let’s take a look at the common SaaS SEO challenges and potential solutions:

Relevant Keywords that Don’t Match the Intent and Purpose

Some SaaS companies face limited search queries with low or zero search volume. So, they try to combine more competitive keywords, thinking they’ll boost the online presence that way. However, that approach can be misleading for both search engines and real users who are looking for a specific solution online. 

For example, if you offer incident management software, the first thing that comes to your mind is optimizing for those specific queries. But don’t immediately jump to optimizing. You first need to check on what ranks for that keyword. In this case, those are product lists, which means Google considers it an informative keyword that works best with incident management software lists. Surely, you can find some product pages in the SERPs, but do you really think you can beat those product lists easily?

SERP analysis and keyword research tools will help you spot better keywords for this purpose, like “ai incident management software” or “incident management software vendor,” to target better. 

Optimizing the Pages Properly

Another challenge can be the different pages. While SaaS follows some standards when it comes to websites’ designs and functionalities, many companies don’t know how to optimize them effectively. 

That means every page has a purpose, and you need to map the SaaS keywords properly to make the number 1 SEO ranking possible. The goal is also to stop the wrong page ranking for your target keyword since proper optimization is crucial.

So, the homepage is a combination of navigational and commercial keywords, while the product pages are more about transactional keywords. The informational ones are best for blog posts and knowledge base but can be used on feature pages, too. 

Surely, you track, measure, and re-optimize when needed. 

Focusing on Only One Content Format

The classic content writing may work for SaaS SEO, but for a limited time only, without uncovering the whole potential. That’s why SaaS companies must leverage various content formats to match them with the buyer journey stages. 

As you know, blogs and knowledge resources mostly belong to the awareness stage, even though you can write blogs that help the decision-making process. Tailored emails work best for the leads who need to make a decision. Case studies and testimonials can be great to encourage those in the consideration stage to move to the decision stage. 

Demo videos are a great way to showcase how easy your tool is to use and what features it provides. Pricing-related content can encourage easy decisions, too. 

Pages copies navigate the website visitor through the whole buyer journey, making the whole experience easy and exciting for them. 

So, SaaS optimization requires more than exceptional blog posts with great keywords to know how to rank for SaaS on Google’s first page.

How to Identify and Address SEO Issues for My SaaS Company?

If your SaaS website seems perfect, but it doesn’t rank better than before, you need to run a few analyses and check what prevents it from performing its best. 

First, run a complete SEO SaaS website audit to see if there are some technical issues to resolve or maybe on-page optimization conflicts. The next step is a keyword analysis because sometimes, the chosen keywords may not align best with the target audience’s search habits. 

Another thing to check is if the website is mobile-friendly, as search engines really prefer mobile-responsive websites. You can additionally check if the brand mentions and backlinks come from authoritative resources. If you spot some spammy link to your website, consider removing it. 

Also, make sure you promote your content because the lead generation and conversion mostly depend on what value you offer to the page visitors. Spot the best-performing pages, blogs, and resources, and repurpose them into social media posts, emails, or even video scripts to improve your brand’s overall online presence.

How to Monitor SEO Performance for SaaS?

Staying at the number 1 SEO ranking for SaaS is much easier when you track and monitor the website’s performance. Knowing that, you can use, for example, Google Analytics to measure the easiest organic traffic for SaaS, track user behavior, and keep an eye on conversion rates.

Google Search Console is the easiest SEO tool for SaaS since it gives you a great insight into how your website performs on Google specifically. You can add more tools to your SEO toolset – as we mentioned Ahrefs and SemRush already – and check on the ranks, backlinks, brand mentions, and organic competitors. 

Also, you can measure plenty of SaaS-relevant metrics, as well as properly chosen performance indicators, to learn more about what users do on your website. That way, you get an additional idea of what to improve the SEO strategy and stay on the first page or even first position for longer. Measuring SaaS SEO results is a necessity since it’s the best way to monitor your success.

Questions to Ask Before Scaling Your SEO Game

Once you’re on the first page in search results, the hardest thing happens – staying there and not letting the competitors overtake you. 

That means you need to work all the time to improve the current SEO strategy for your SaaS company. To make things easier, you must ask some questions loud and clear. 

Here are some of them:

• Do I appear for the specific software categories I want?
• Who are my direct competitors?
• Who are my organic SEO competitors?
• How do I help my ideal client?
• Do I answer all the questions my target audience has?
• Can I identify even more SEO opportunities right now?
• What keyword gaps can I fill up?
• Can I build topic clusters around my SaaS product?
• Do I have keywords mapped for every SaaS buyer journey stage?
• Do I miss something that may improve my overall brand image?
• Am I aware of search engine algorithm updates and trends?
• Am I ready to follow all the strategy stages and adapt when needed?

All these answers can give you a nice direction to the number 1 SEO ranking position. You only need to never give up on the strategy, improve it, and set realistic expectations. 

Final Thoughts on SERP Number 1 Ranks for SaaS

Being number 1 on Google, Bing, or any other preferred search engine is possible. You only have to implement the SEO strategies that work for your SaaS product but also accept the fact they are prone to changes all the time. 

The SaaS competition can be harsh, and even though being number 1 is not always possible, you can surely stay on search engines’ first pages for longer.