Blogging to promote a SaaS business is one of the best ways to get more signups and sell more subscriptions.
SaaS blogging can become a sustainable, long-term promotion strategy with the right blog strategy.
About 15% of all of our customers run SaaS businesses and we’ve helped turn their blogs from liabilities into assets.
Here’s a set of best SaaS blog strategy best practices that will make your SaaS blog finally work.
Do not compete with service pages
You need to be covering all the “money” keywords with your service pages, and there is no point in dedicating blog posts to the same “commercial” topics like
- top X systems
- best services for X
- how to buy X software
The blog needs to be about 70% focused on the needs and pains of your customer persona, and you need to use the blog as a chance to educate your target audience about your services.
Keyword cannibalization is a thing, and if your service page is optimized for “time tracking software for remote teams” and you publish 5 more blog posts with the same keyword in the title, you’ll only confuse Google and all of your pages will underperform as a result.
In other words, your service pages need to focus on people who know that services like yours exist and who are looking to subscribe.
Your blogs posts, on the other hand, need to address a wide variety of their needs AND explain that your service will them out.
Focus on your audience
This is the #1 blogging strategy rule for any business, but it’s especially true for SaaS blogging.
Your blog articles don’t need to directly revolve around the features of your SaaS – rather, they need to go beyond them, and explain how your audience can reach larger goals. That is, your blog can cover everything related to scaling and managing their business, cutting costs, optimization hacks, promotion methods, hiring, marketing, and so on.
Here’s an example of how it works in practice. One of our long-term SaaS blogging clients offers a project management software platform for architects. We’ve researched and produced a post on top iPad apps for architects and kept it updated with relevant search queries by running frequent content audits. The article ended up getting thousands of clicks and dozens of SaaS sign-ups.
Naturally the client’s SaaS works on an iPad since it’s browser-based, and that is mentioned on the features pages. However, their SaaS blog strategy really lacked a piece 100% centered around architectural iPad apps semantics, so we produced it for them.
The article did so well because it hits a very relevant need of their audience – architects looking for handy tools. A lot of the readers who landed on the blog post from Google signed up for the app trial and ended up being users.
If you look at some of the most successful SaaS companies and their blogs, you will find that they are getting most of their traffic from large, practical blog posts that help their audience solve their needs.
Let’s take a look at some of the best SaaS blogs and their top content by traffic (there are many great ones, these are just the ones we come across most often):
Ahrefs
Ahrefs publish a fair share of blog posts that deal with their SaaS features, like SEO research, but the highest-traffic ones are still general info articles on affiliate marketing and traffic acquisition.
Those are exactly the things that most of Ahrefs customers would be interested in, as affiliate marketers make up a large chunk of their target audience.
Semrush
Semrush is a competitor of Ahrefs and it’s kind of cute how they publish absolutely identical blog posts (“what is https”, “most searched on youtube”, etc.) several months after Ahrefs do it.
Semrush blog is a bit more focused on the direct features of the tool, but it looks like they are shifting to a more sustainable, long-term SaaS blog strategy that Ahrefs use in their blogging.
Zapier
Zapier’s main service is creating automation scenarios that make work and life easier.
In their blog they are definitely showcasing their scenarios and integrations – they need to do that in order to pick up maximum amount of search queries. Those are the specific and short scenario-based articles like “turn slack messages into documents”.
However, a large portion of their traffic comes from general productivity-related topics, like “pdf creation”, “to-do lists”, “screenshots”, and so on.
Optimyzr
This SaaS offers PPC ad spend optimization tools, and their SaaS blog post strategy is revolving around related topics – shopping ads, keyword search volumes, bids, A/B testing, etc.
Instapage
Instapage offers a way to design and build conversion-ready pages, test and advertise them.
Their blog does an amazing job of catering to a very wide audience – pretty much any online entrepreneur will find value on their blog.
They cover diverse topics related to advertising, conversions, development, and anything else that is on the mind of someone who wants to build converting pages and send traffic to them.
Please note the blog post URLs that Instapage uses – that’s a great example of scalable, future-proof URLs.
Thinkific
Thinkific is a SaaS for online course creators, and the company does an amazing job with their blog.
It’s full of rich and diverse topics that are tangential to online courses but still approach their audience from different angles. Topics like
- hiring a virtual assistant
- setting up home video studio
- how to create a personal brand
- how to get on a podcast
- how to get coaching clients
- text to speech/voiceover
– all of that is at some point of time relevant for people selling courses online.
Supermetrics
This SaaS integrates marketing data and the highest-traffic blog posts are centered around marketers’ interests. Namely, affiliate marketers.
It’s interesting though, that even though in-house marketers in companies also benefit from Supermetrics, affiliate marketers are the “cash cow” judging by the blog topic selection.
Most likely their blogging got the focus based on their older posts and first-hand data (get a blog strategy audit to find the same “money” topics to focus your blog on).
Go easy on the company news
B2B SaaS companies may need to publish company news and developments to cater to their investors’ interests and/or demonstrate certain culture and values.
However, company news never get you real traffic from Google – if you check back with the examples above, none of these blogs harvest much traffic for branded queries or news articles.
Unless your business model depends on good publicity, you can run a successful SaaS blog without publishing a single piece of company news.
Use blog posts as service page prototypes
The only way to get true search volume of any keyword pool is to start ranking for it. That’s what the broad to narrow blogging strategy is based on.
If you are considering feature expansion and wonder if there’s enough demand – create a blog post about it first.
If your Google Search Console stats show that the blog post starts getting decent impressions – great, you can turn it into a more conversion-ready service page and possibly redirect the initial blog post to the new page.
Use your blog to cover industry-specific expertise
Your blog is a chance to have industry-specific guides and case studies that will explain how your SaaS can be useful to businesses in certain industries.
Create articles built along the following patters –
- USING_TECHNIQUE in INDUSTRY
- PROCESS in INDUSTRY
- SERVICE TYPE for INDUSTRY
- ACTIVITY for NICHE
- etc.
To give you an example – “social media management for dog shelters”, “web scraping in finance”, or, finally, “blogging for SaaS” – yeah this very article is an example of this technique.
These articles will serve two purposes:
- Help your sales people convert decision-makers in companies from these industries to invest into your subscription that your sales people contact cold
- Rank for keywords like YOUR_SAAS for INDUSTRY
Industry-related articles are your chance to showcase expertise and get organic traffic at the same time.
Use blog posts to “hijack” some of your competitors’ brand traffic
This works amazingly well if both you and your competitors are still relatively small.
Short posts like
- COMPETING SERVICE reviews
- services like COMPETING SERVICE
- COMPETING SERVICE alternatives
- COMPETING SERVICE pros and cons
- working with COMPETING SERVICE
can hijack a lot of their brand traffic. You don’t have to bash their services or go in-depth, just use some of their publicly available features and build concise and focused blog posts around them, obviously suggesting your SaaS as an alternative.
Don’t stagnate!
You need to find more and more new angles to approach your customer audience from.
Build out your customer persona and list their needs. Expand their needs to other services your customers are using. See what those other services blog about. Find online communities where your customers spend time – see what gets posted there.
If you feel you’re out of blog topics – we can assure you there are plenty of untapped content opportunities no matter how much content you’ve published.
Get in touch with us if you want to get your SaaS blog to work:
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