7 Best Ways to Grow your SaaS Startup Using PPC and SEO

Intro

Growing a SaaS startup is no easy task, yet using effective online marketing strategies such as PPC and SEO can give your business a huge boost.

With well-planned PPC and SEO advertising campaigns, you can target your ideal customers with ease, draw attention to your products or services and entice people to become paying customers.

In this blog post, we will cover the essential elements of both PPC and SEO, from understanding what works best for your business goals to implementing tactics that draw in viewers to improving outcomes.

By the end of this blog post, you'll better understand how these two powerful tools can help you successfully grow your SaaS startup.

What is PPC?

PPC stands for Pay-Per-Click, an internet-based advertising model where a business or individual pays a certain amount each time their ad is clicked – it’s why some businesses’ ads appear at the very top of a search page result.

Brands use PPC to appear as a top result for specific search terms like this example when you look for ‘salesforce alternatives’. Note that Google clearly indicates them with the word ‘Ad’.

PPC is a powerful way to get noticed by potential customers and increase exposure on various marketing channels.

This matters in SaaS marketing because it adds to the traction of your project and creates awareness around your brand and product.

Using PPC helps bring qualified leads, which makes the process of identifying warm prospects easier. It's critical for helping grow your SaaS over time.

However, depending on your industry, niche, and goals, using PPC can be expensive. And you need to perfect every stage of your campaigns so you don't waste your budget. Meaning that your ad copy, landing page, and payment process need to be perfect.

As this report by UberSuggest shows, the PPC (or CPC -cost per click here) for popular terms is expensive. If you have a marketing budget, you can get a top spot in search results but you can spend thousands of dollars or more in days.

If PPC advertising sounds intimidating, it's essential to learn how SEO can help you offset the challenges that come with paid advertising.

What is SEO?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, an online marketing technique used to help websites rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPs).

It involves optimizing webpages and content to ensure they appear higher up in the SERPs, which can be incredibly beneficial for a SaaS startup.

This is because SEO enables you to bring in more of your target audience without having to spend money on PPC campaigns.

Moreover, SEO helps to build trust and credibility with your audience since customers often believe that websites that come up higher in SERPs are more reliable.

SEO is also important for boosting your website traffic and conversions. When a potential customer lands on your site during their search for a product or service, you stand a much higher chance of converting these visitors to paying customers.

One clever way to leverage information from a search results page is to see how you and your competition perform for a specific keyword.

Ranktracker has a powerful SERP Checker tool where you enter a term and you’ll see detailed reports on who ranks for that keyword. You’ll learn how easy or hard it is to compete for that search term and you can even get information on ‘local’ results for a specific area. Such information will help you earn traffic with one-time content creation.

It's important to note that SEO is an ongoing process that requires time and effort for businesses to reap the rewards. It's not something you can set up once and forget about; it takes consistent monitoring, testing, and tweaking if you want to get the most out of your campaigns.

And it may take weeks or months for you to see results. Which is why SEO isn't the only way to grow your SaaS, and PPC marketing has its place too.

Now, let's explore what you should choose and when?

PPC Vs. SEO for your SaaS Startup Growth

Both PPC and SEO are effective strategies for growing your SaaS startup.

PPC is great if you need quick results and want to start generating leads right away. A well-planned PPC campaign can help boost website traffic, engagement, and sales with relatively low costs.

However, it’s essential to understand your industry and audience before you start your PPC campaigns, as the cost and ROI (return on investment) of a campaign will depend on these factors.

SEO is a great long-term investment for SaaS startups. It takes time to see results with SEO, but once you’re ranking higher in the SERPs, it can be incredibly beneficial for your business.

You'll build your authority, get organic traffic, and see growth without the expense of advertising.

It's important to note that SEO and PPC can be used in tandem. You don’t need to choose one over the other; rather, you can use both strategies to ensure maximum visibility and successful growth of your SaaS startup.

You could use PPC at first to bring more eyeballs to a new product launch or to feature updates. Simultaneously, you could create blog posts, videos, and other search engine-optimized content to start driving organic traffic and increase your visibility in the SERPs.

We'll dive deeper in the next section and look at practical ways to use both PPC and SEO.

So, keep reading to find out how to use these two powerful strategies together for the most success.

7 Best Ways to Grow Your Startup with PPC

Once you've understood what you're trying to achieve with paid advertising, it's easier to take practical steps. Let's look at ten key ways you can drive more traffic and leads your SaaS with PPC:

1. Create Quality Ad Copy

Writing compelling and informative ad copy to grab the attention of potential customers. You can do this by working with a talented and experienced copywriter. You can also use AI copywriting tools and free ad templates online and craft such copy on your own.

And if you’re willing to learn, take up an ad copy course to make your ads drive more clicks by talking about benefits, creating urgency, and using relevant keywords.

2. Use Meaningful Keywords

It's essential to use the right words to target your potential customers with PPC. This means doing keyword research and understanding which terms are most used by your target audience. You should also focus on long-tail keywords that are more specific than the general ones.

3. Target the Right Audience

Reach out to the right people by targeting audience segments that show an interest in your product or service. You can do this by using the right keywords and by stating the benefit of your product or service upfront.

Also, speak to your target audience directly. For example, if you're selling marketing products, say 'The best marketing analysis tools for senior marketers' to attract the right people's attention.

4. Optimize Your Landing Pages

While an ad will get people to click on your site, it won't necessarily drive conversions.

It's your landing page that will convert visitors into leads.

To do this, make sure that the page is free of distractions, the content is concise and relevant, and there are clickable calls to action that guide people to purchase. Also, add testimonials and offers for discounts and highlight the benefits of buying from you. Such elements go a long way to getting a return on investment when using PPC.

5. Test and Refine Your Campaigns

It's essential to test your PPC campaigns and refine them based on the results. This is because different ads appeal to different segments, so you'll need to carry out A/B testing and tweak your ads accordingly. You can also try different ad formats, adjust the budget, and analyze competitor ads for inspiration.

6. Track Conversions

Every time you run a campaign, you need to monitor conversions from each campaign. Doing so lets you adjust tactics for better ROI optimization.

If you do this after every time you make changes to a campaign, you'll be able to hone in on what drives the best conversions, whether it's copy, images, or your offer.

7. Use Remarketing Ads

It's essential to leverage remarketing ads. These ads appear to target website visitors who have already shown an interest in your product or service – increasing brand awareness among potential leads who may have forgotten about you over time. And creating a sense of familiarity so potential customers will be more likely to convert.

7 Best Ways to Grow Your SaaS with SEO

Now that you've compared SEO and PPC marketing, you'll be able to leverage content better to achieve your business goals. Let's look at practical SEO tactics that will lead to organic and lasting growth for your SaaS.

1. Optimize Your Website Structure

This technical detail is important for both people and search engines. How you structure your site plays a critical role in how people experience your brand and content.

It's important to build websites in a way that makes it easy for search engines to crawl and index the content. This means you should use proper headings, include metadata, and create keyword-rich URLs.

Create a sitemap and submit it to Google's Search Console so that Google can easily find and index your content.

You should also pay attention to the speed of your website, as this is a signal of quality for search engines.

2. Publish Fresh Content Regularly

Create fresh content such as blogs, videos, or other forms of media to give users more reasons to visit your website.

You should also focus on the topics that are relevant to your target audience, as this will help your content rank higher in search engine results.

Include relevant keywords, as this is how search engines will be able to understand the context and purpose of your content.

By publishing quality, consistent content, you can build trust with potential leads and establish yourself as a thought leader in your industry.

3. Build Quality Backlinks

A challenging but necessary step you should take is to build good-quality backlinks to your blog content. This means reaching out to relevant websites and asking them to link to your content.

This is a hard task, as it requires you to build relationships with people in your industry. You can also post content on other websites or become a contributor to other popular sites.

Building backlinks is an effective but slow process that needs to be done regularly and strategically.

4. Target Long-Tail Keywords

The reality is that most internet-relevant short keywords are already taken. So you should optimize for long-tail keywords, which will help you to reach a more niche audience that has specific searches in mind.

You should also focus on niche keywords that overlap with your core business, as this will help you to capture a much more targeted audience. Find long-tail keywords by researching or utilizing a tool like Google Trends.

One clever tactic is to use Meet Glimpse together with Google Trends for detailed reports - you get 10 free reports that dive deep into a keyword. For example, here you see several related keywords for ‘salesforce’ giving you ideas for content.

5. Develop Quality Internal Links

Internal links are useful for both users and search engine rankings. By linking to other pages on your website, you can provide visitors with more resources or information about a topic.

For instance, if you have a product page, you can link to other related services or the blog post that introduced the product. This helps users to find more information on the topics they are interested in, and it also boosts your search engine rankings.

Google also uses internal links to find content on your site, so make sure that you interlink your pages effectively.

6. Use Schema Markup Language

This is an advanced setup where you add 'schema' or tags that tells search engines what content is about.

Every searched for a recipe for cookies and found results where the cooking time is mentioned right in the snippet? You don't even have to open the link to find out if the recipe is vegan, gluten-free, or if it's a holiday recipe. You get the whole brief at a glance on the results page. And this is thanks to schema markup.

Searching for ‘best vanilla cookie recipe’ brings up results with data like cooking time, ratings, and so on. Such details are possible with schema markup.

Implementing schema markup manually is hard.

But fortunately, all you have to do is use a reliable SEO plugin to help. A premium one will enable you to create schema markup for your content quickly and easily. And you won’t even need to know how to code.

You can add schema markup to products, food recipes, books, blog posts, and even things like health conditions, automobiles, and financial topics.

Schema.org provides you with standard markup you can apply to your content to help search engines understand what you’re writing about. This is a page on using correct markup language for recipes.

Adding schema can give your SEO efforts an edge over the competition, and it’s easy to do with the right plugin, so don’t neglect it.

7. Monitor Your Competitors' SEO Strategies

Tracking competitors’ SEO strategies means you can stay ahead of the game.

You can use Rank Tracker to track your competition’s performance and to gain insights on how they are optimizing their campaigns

Our keyword finder tool lets you learn what keywords your competitors are ranking for. And you can use this information to look for alternative keywords or to ramp up your own content creation.

Using competitor analysis is a great way to identify new opportunities in the market and try new things. You can also use these tools to compare your content to your competitors and see what’s working for them.

By following these steps, you can optimize your website for better search engine rankings and grow your SaaS startup with optimized content.

Conclusion

By proactively incorporating PPC and SEO marketing into your SaaS venture, you can create a dynamic and robust presence on the web.

PPC advertising has the potential to offer high ROI when structured correctly (and when you have the budget). And SEO is ideal for long-term visibility and brand building.

When you integrate both of these campaigns, you help your business stay at the top of search engine rankings and create awareness among your target audience.

With this combination, you can reap great rewards from your SaaS initiatives!