“The first 20 years of the web were won by those that built the best infrastructure. Now it’s won by those that build the best experiences.”
-Aaron Levie
As a B2B SaaS company, you have an abundance of marketing channels. You’ve probably made your marketing checklist – a website blog, a community platform, all social media channels, a newsletter, etc. You can’t wait to start a SaaS blog, create content, and draw up publishing schedules. You have a notebook full of ideas for your design team. Isn’t this exciting?
Amidst all this excitement, don’t let your blog’s setup become an afterthought.
By setup, we mean the less-talked aspect of blogging within content marketing circles. For example,
- How does your content look when published?
- Are search engines taking note of your content?
- Is the site structure SEO-friendly?
- How easy is it for the user to find relevant content?
- Does the content load fast enough?
To answer these questions, you need technical SEO – the nerdy cousin of keyword research and link building.
Even though the core focus of your blogging strategy may be your content plan and content calendar, you cannot deny that having a well-structured blog that search engines love goes a long way.
And no, you don’t need to be a web designer or an SEO pro to do so. All you need to do is to follow these tips when you start your SaaS blog.
Tip 1: Make your blog search engine accessible
Your blog may be a goldmine of knowledge for your readers. But, if the posts on your blog are not accessible by search engines, they will not show up in the search results.
So, the first step in optimizing your site for technical SEO is making sure search engines can effectively crawl it. Crawling is how any search engine discovers what exists on the vast, vast internet.
The easiest way to help crawlers understand where your content lies are to organise pages in a way that helps crawlers find your website content quickly and easily. When structuring your site, ensure all the pages are just a few clicks away from your homepage.
Suppose your SaaS blog contains a lot of interconnected content (which it eventually will), submit your sitemap to Google. A sitemap is an XML file containing a list of all pages on your site in an organized manner. It lets search engines easily figure out which pages you have and where to find them.
Tip 2: Ensure high site speed
Not only does a fast-loading page delight your audience, but it also delights the search engines’ algorithms, as confirmed by Google Search Central. That’s right – page speed is a ranking factor.
Here are six tips for creating a fast-loading SaaS blog:
#1 Optimize your images
Your SaaS blog will likely include images, charts, and infographics. While they make your blog posts more engaging, too many images are often the biggest contributors to slow loading times. So, optimize your images by reducing their file size without sacrificing quality. Use lighter web formats like WebP instead of heavy jpegs, and you’re done.
#2 Remove unused CSS and JavaScript
More code = more requests from the web page = slower loading time. Removing unused CSS and JavaScript code can cut down your loading time a lot!
#3 Use a content delivery network (CDN)
A CDN is a cloud-based network of servers that deliver static content (such as images and CSS files) to users from servers that are closest to them. If a user is located far from your website’s server, CDNs help to improve loading times for them.
#4 Avoid using too many plugins
If you’ve built a blog with WordPress, you know that plugins are great. But, they can add a lot of weight to your website, which can slow down loading times. So, if you’re not using a plugin, it’s best to disable it.
#5 Keep your website up to date
Make sure to keep your website’s software up to date with the latest security patches. Outdated software can lead to security issues, which can slow down your website.
#6 Keep testing your website’s loading speed
Tools like PageSpeedInsights help you test your website’s loading speed and identify areas where you can improve loading times.
Tip 3: Optimize for mobile
If your website is not optimized for mobile, you’re losing out on a lot of potential traffic.
In the first quarter of 2023, mobile devices generated 58.33 per cent of global website traffic. This number is only going to grow in the future, so it’s important to make sure that your website is optimized for mobile users. Mobile users are also more likely to get annoyed and bounce from your site if it’s not optimized. A Google study found that 53% of mobile users will abandon a website if it takes more than three seconds to load!
And if that isn’t enough, Google now factors mobile usability into its search ranking algorithm. This means that if your website is not optimized for mobile, you’re less likely to rank high in search results.
To optimize your SaaS blog for mobile usability, you should:
- Use a responsive theme so that your blog looks good on all devices.
- Use the ‘above the fold’ approach, i.e., make sure that the gist of your content is included right at the top.
- Remove any intrusive ads and popups. Nobody wants their mobile screen roadblocked!
- Optimize site speed
- Reduce the overall page size.
Tip 4: Improve ‘findability’ with blog taxonomy
When you use a taxonomy to organize your blog posts, you make it easier for users to find the content they’re looking for. This can help to increase traffic to your blog and improve your SEO.
For our blog, we have used categories and tags to organize related content so that it is easier to navigate. This has helped our users navigate our blog easily and stay longer. Here is how we did it:
- Identified the main topics of our blog. We listed down the key areas that we wrote about and started to create categories and tags for our blog posts.
- We made sure our taxonomy was consistent with the topics we talked about. This can be a little challenging if you work in a niche where all topics are somehow interrelated, and you’re tempted to box an article in all categories.
- We keep our taxonomy up to date. And as we add new blog posts, we update them accordingly.
Remember, it is not just blogging…
But it is blogging for B2B SaaS.
You aren’t talking to a broad audience. You are providing a limited amount of products and services for a niche audience. The keywords you target are highly specific and have low search volumes. And so, you need to make sure that your content and your site’s performance are always complementing each other.
Go ahead and use these tips to start a SaaS blog that is successful. Happy blogging!