SaaS Technical SEO: A Bull%^*!-Free Guide
What Is SaaS Technical SEO?
Technical SEO is one of four essential factors that make up search engine optimisation, alongside keyword research, content, and off-page optimisation.
The main objective of technical SEO for SaaS is to help Google find your pages. Technical SEO for SaaS encompasses all the practices involved in making sure that search engines can crawl, index, and understand page content effectively.
SEO isn’t a linear process, but if it were, it would be step number three, after keyword research and content.
Don’t let the word technical intimidate you. You can take Enterprise SaaS SEO into your own hands by using our helpful Technical SEO Checklist to audit your own site.
Read more about B2B enterprise SEO.
Keep scrolling to get started.
DIY SaaS Technical SEO Checklist for WordPress
We recommend doing a technical SEO audit if you notice some site-wide issues and not just problems on a particular page. If, on your journey, you come across settings that you think you need to change but just the very idea of it gives you the same heart palpitations as a Starfleet redshirt being asked to flip a dubious switch, then maybe it’s best to leave it.
Alternatively, if you’re the kinda person who follows the philosophy of f**k around and find out, why not change the setting and see what happens in the next few weeks?
Otherwise, carry on, brave soldier!
Content & Sitemap Checkup
- Review the SEO settings within the CMS platform and apply best practices.
- Check the meta title template.
- Confirm the existence of an XML sitemap:
- Using the backend of the CMS, collate a list of all content types, and whether they should be included or excluded from the sitemap.
- List the steps needed to amend the sitemap and action those steps.
- Make sure the sitemap has been submitted to Google Search Console and Bing Webmasters Tools.
- Review all noindexed pages to ensure that none are noindexed by mistake.
- Review the URLs (slugs) from the included content types to find any that look like they should be noindexed or deleted, e.g; thank you pages, test pages, etc.
- Review the actual pages from the included content types to see if there are any issues.
- Check for duplicated internal content to see if the number of indexed pages in the sitemap found by Google Search Console match the above number.
Technical Checkup
- Check the Settings > Reading to ensure “Discourage Search Engines from indexing this site” is unchecked (WordPress only).
- Check that all four versions of the URL redirect to the same site (also check the trailing slash…).
- Check /robots.txt to ensure nothing is being blocked accidentally and add the xml sitemap to the robots.txt file.
- Check any existing 301 redirects. Make sure all destinations (or a sample, if there are too many) are live pages.
- Check the permalink structure.
- Verify the charset UTF-8 tag is present.
- Verify the HTML lang attribute is present.
- If your website is multilingual, check bi-directional hreflang tags.
- Verify the relevant countries are being served the correct URLs.
- Verify your website’s valid SSL certificate.
- If there is a valid SSL certificate, check all top-level pages for the padlock symbol.
- Check the Open Graph settings to make sure the title, description and image on the homepage and a blog post are there.
- Ensure the blog/news/etc. feed of content uses pagination rather than javascript to load content.
Website Crawl
- Run a crawl (we use Screaming Frog).
- Fix website redirect chains.
- Fix any unnecessary redirects (including http links or incorrect trailing slash).
- Fix any unoptimised or duplicated meta titles.
- Fix any missing or duplicate H1 tags.
- Ensure all pages available to search engines have a self-referencing canonical tag.
- Check that pages have meta descriptions.
- List all pages with a noindex tag
- Check for all URLs returning a 404.
- List all pages more than 2 clicks away from the homepage.
- Check the URL for spaces, capital letters, or other inconsistencies.
- Identify any insecure content.
- Check the orphaned pages and add internal links to any important ones.
- Run a Site Audit using Ahrefs and review the results.
- Once the changes have been made in this section, re-run the crawl.
Legal, etc.
- Make sure the business address, email, and phone number (NAP) are in the copy of your pages.
- Check that the site displays a cookie opt-in notification.
- Ensure the site’s Privacy Policy is available on all pages on the site.
- If the site has e-commerce functionality, make sure the Terms & Conditions and/or Terms of Service pages are available from all pages on the site.
Schema
- Review the current schema on the site.
- Add Website and Organisation schema to all pages (Local Business if applicable).
- Check the site using the Schema Validator tool.
UX/Accessibility & CRO
- Check your website in several browsers for consistency.
- Make sure website navigation and menu are clear and user-friendly.
- Make the logo clickable to the homepage.
- Include a favicon.
- For businesses that welcome customers in-person, include a Google map on one of the pages, ideally the Contact Us page.
- Include contact details throughout the site (email and phone) and display them as clickable links.
- Add a user-friendly 404 page (include helpful links for the user)
- Display breadcrumb trail marks.
- Set the main font size to 16px or above.
- Make sure the headings and text are sufficiently visible against the website background.
- Make hyperlinks clearly contrasted with the main text.
- Make blog content shareable across social media channels.
- Ensure sitewide content is visually inviting with whitespace, short paragraphs, bullet points, and padding around headers.
- Check that content is error-free, well-written, helpful, and avoids keyword stuffing.
- Check that all pages feature sensible CTAs with contrasting colours and buttons.
- Remove any instances of inconsistent branding (e.g., logo, colour scheme, messaging).
- Ensure site design is visually appealing to first-time visitors.
Google Search Console
- Check that XML sitemaps submitted for Google Search Console are for the correct property.
- In Google Search Console, take a look at the available Indexing reports and Enhancements.
- Check for any Manual Penalties and Security Issues.
- Check the Links section and make sure everything looks natural.
Traffic (Google Search Console)
- List any pages with 0 Clicks in the last 6 months—ignore this step if the site has migrated recently.
- Review the URLs and consider deletion/repurposing or adding content to improve.
Page Speed & Performance
- Check the uptime of the website.
- Check the DNS, SSL and TTFB.
- Check the homepage speed in Google PageSpeed Insights, Pingdom, or https://app.sitespeedbot.com/
Homepage On-Page SEO Checkup
- Review the home page meta title and description.
- Review the home page H tag profile.
Benefits of Technical SEO for SaaS Companies
A Better User Experience
User experience isn’t just about winning a beauty contest. It’s also about functionality and trust. If you want potential clients to take your SaaS seriously, you’re going to need to make sure your site offers users a seamless and intuitive experience that doesn’t leave them suspecting you of being slow on the technological uptake.
Competitive Edge
B2B software is the industrial farming industry of the 20th century; the quest for innovation has led to cutthroat competition and nothing but buying power for the end user.
Your competitors will take every opportunity to outrank you, so don’t expect to rest on the strength of your product alone. A technically optimised site brings you that much closer to dominating search engines.
Better Rankings
What are we all here for? Everything boils down to making your website more visible to your target audience. Moving up on search engine result pages and fine-tuning your content to ensure that the right people are finding you is why we do this.
Other SEO Factors Software Companies Need to Think About
The Importance of Accurate Analytics
Why go through all this effort to improve your results if you don’t have a reliable way of monitoring your progress? This checklist assumes that your analytics and tracking tools are set up correctly.
When was the last time you aligned your web pages with customer searches?
Technical SEO is merely one of the three pillars holding up your SEO efforts. On-page optimisation can’t really begin until you have a solid strategy for the SaaS keywords you want to rank for and the content to support it.
Be honest: have you skipped this important step? Keyword strategy is the key (sorry) to exposing your brands to B2B SaaS customers, so we highly recommend giving this an honest go.
How Effective Is Your Content?
Your technical SEO is only as good as the words on the page. If you think of each page as a theatre production, content is everything you see on stage while technical SEO is everything that goes on behind the curtain. You really need to master both if you want to engage your audience.
Content creation has changed since generative AI, like Chat GPT, became widely available, but it still involves human participation (and if you’re curious to know why, start listening to our podcast).
No matter who or what is writing your content, on-page SEO best practices and keyword research should still be influencing what you write and how you display it on the page.
How Are You Demonstrating Your Credibility?
Is your SaaS site or product getting high praise from technology sites or other high-profile brands? Off-page SEO is the last pillar of SEO, and it’s all about demonstrating your authority and boosting your credibility through backlinks and mentions.
When other important websites link to your SaaS product pages, it tells Google that your site is useful, relevant, and trusted. These positive signals can make your site show up higher in search results, so more people can find you.
As with all things SEO-related, off-page SEO serves Google by serving users. When other sites recommend or link to your SaaS products, people trust them more.
Do You Need to Optimise for International SEO?
You want your SaaS products to sell all over the world, so don’t rely on a person’s browser to do the translating for you. Sure, there’s nothing wrong with using Chrome’s built-in page translator, but your competitors have fully functional international sites, so why not you? (Psst…if your competitors have an international site, that kinda means you need to build one too and make it even better.)
Add these international SEO checks to your list:
- Check that the translations are accurate, relevant, and sensitive to the local audience.
- As previously mentioned, implement hreflang tags to signal to search engines which language and regional content to display for specific users.
- Ensure the regional office’s Google My Business account is correct.
- Use a CDN to serve content from servers located in the target regions to improve page speed.
Get Started Now With Optimising Technical SEO Elements
Technical SEO ensures that search engines can efficiently crawl and index your website. Key components of technical SEO are optimising URL structures, implementing proper redirects, utilising XML sitemaps, enhancing website speed and mobile-friendliness, and addressing issues like duplicate content and canonicalisation.
By optimising these technical aspects, you can improve your site’s overall SEO health.
Frequently Asked Questions
Definitely. While this guide focuses on helping SaaS websites, the steps for technical optimisation are the same for other types of businesses/sites.
Schema markup is code that’s added to a site to give Google more information about what it is and the type of content it has. The purpose of Schema is to give search engines more context and to help them “understand” a site better.
Aside from giving your site a competitive advantage, Schema markup enhances your site’s SEO in the following ways:
Improved Search Engine Understanding
Schema markup has basically standardised the language used to describe the content of your pages. Using this structured data is like giving Google, Bing, and Yahoo! a phrasebook. Improved understanding can lead to better search engine rankings.
Rich Results
When you add schema markup to your web pages, search engines can use this data to generate visual changes to the SERP listing, including review stars, FAQs, etc. which makes it more eye-catching for the user.
Voice Search Optimisation
Voice assistants like Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant use structured data to give detailed and accurate answers to voice queries.
Local SEO
Schema markup can provide essential information about brick-and-mortar businesses, like NAP (name, address, phone number), opening hours, and even customer reviews. This data is pretty important for businesses trying to show up on local searches and Google maps.
Knowledge Graph Integration
Marking up your content increases the chances of your information appearing in Knowledge Graph panels (those boxes of information that sometimes appear on the right-hand side of a SERP).
Duplicate Content
You might wonder what content has to do with technical issues.
When identical or very similar content exists on multiple pages of a website, Google gets confused.
If you have two or more pages serving the same search term, search engines may struggle to decide which page deserves the higher ranking. This state of confusion can actually lower the rankings for both pages, which is why we use the term keyword cannibalisation.
Poor URL Structure
A URL, or web address, is like the digital roadmap to a webpage.
Besides the obvious hit to UX (a ranking factor that falls under technical SEO’s domain), a poor URL structure makes it difficult for search engines to understand the hierarchy of your content, which is pretty important when it comes to indexing and ranking your pages.
Best practices for naming your URLs:
- Keep them as concise as possible. If your page title is ‘A Tax
- Accountant’s Guide to Quicker & Better Filing’, your URL should look more like this: /tax-filing-guide not this: /a-tax-accountants-guide-to-quicker-and-better-filing
- Use all lowercase letters.
- Use dashes instead of underscores.
- Do not use special characters, and scrap small connector words like “and”, “with”, “that”, “but”, etc.
- Lastly, make sure your URLs are sitting in the correct folders, i.e. all your blog posts should be in your blog folder.
Thin or Poorly Written Content
The term thin content refers to pages with very little substance or value—that is, low word count, fluffy filler, and/or insubstantial information. Pointless pages, if you will.
Thin content is bad for SEO for the simple fact that Google prioritises helpful, people-first content. As a result, thin pages will be deprioritised for pages on other sites that offer readers real value.
From a technical standpoint, thin content might not even give search engines enough to work with. That is to say, without enough substance, Google won’t understand what it’s looking at, which, as you can probably guess, isn’t ideal for ranking purposes.
Poor Accessibility
Poor accessibility can seriously hurt your SaaS site’s technical SEO for a few reasons. First, and most obvious, if people with disabilities find it hard to navigate, access content, or do things on your site, they’re just going to leave (and so should they). A low engagement rate, as I’m sure you know, isn’t that great for your rankings.
Secondly, poor accessibility means bad user experience. When your site has problems like images without descriptions, content that’s all over the place, or issues with navigation, it makes users unhappy, or at least annoyed. Google only wants to show sites that provide a good user experience, so keep that in mind. Plus, if your site isn’t accessible, users may think your SaaS product is just as bad. The site is a reflection of your business and/or product.
Your site’s social sharing and backlinks could also take a hit. Low accessibility means that your pages are less likely to get shared on social media or linked to by other sites. These social signals and backlinks are super important for off-page SEO.
There could be a few reasons your site’s traffic hasn’t changed one way or another. If you’ve just implemented the changes, you may need to wait a few weeks to see the difference.
Perhaps, the site was ok to begin with? Well done you. It’s not a waste of time if you’ve learnt something.
If it has been a few weeks and there’s still no change to your page rankings, there may be another factor not listed on this checklist that’s affecting your rankings.
At that point, we encourage you to get in touch with our experts to learn more.
It depends on how competitive your keyword is. If it’s a high-volume search term, you’ll have to keep an eye on your page’s performance and check your rankings frequently.
Other than keeping tabs on your competitors, you’ll probably also need to make slight adjustments as Google’s algorithms change. The beauty of search engine optimisation is that once a page is written and optimised, it requires very little maintenance.
While a B2B SaaS SEO agency might describe technical SEO and keyword research/strategy/implementation as two distinct steps, they go hand-in-hand.
A technical SEO agency won’t optimise a page that doesn’t have a keyword focus, and doing keyword research for a page that isn’t going to be optimised is a wasted opportunity to achieve better results.
