SaaS blogs are full of top-of-funnel posts that rank beautifully and sign up nobody. The searches that convert are unglamorous: your competitor's name plus 'alternatives', your category plus 'for accountants', your product plus an integration. That's where we start, and it's usually uncontested.
Three patterns account for most of the SaaS SEO work we take on. If one of them is yours, the audit will confirm it in a fortnight.
Great traffic, no signups.
You've covered the questions people ask years before they buy. The buying-stage queries — comparisons, alternatives, pricing, integrations — are still unclaimed.
BOFU buildCompetitors own their own comparison pages.
'X vs Y' searches are decided by whoever publishes the fairest, most complete comparison. Ceding that page to a competitor means they frame the choice.
Comparison ownershipOur category is too new to have search volume.
Then rank for the problem, not the category. People search their pain long before they know your product name exists, and that traffic converts at a surprising rate.
Problem-first targetingSequenced deliberately, because each phase depends on the one before it. Numbering here means order, not decoration.
Benchmarks, not promises. Your starting point decides how far and how fast, and the audit gives you both numbers before you commit to anything.
Lower volume, far higher conversion, and usually completely uncontested.
Organic sessions matter only as far as they become signups.
Each connector is its own query with its own buyer.
Benchmarks reflect the standards we work to, not guaranteed outcomes. For an early-stage SaaS with little domain authority, expect meaningful organic volume around month six to nine — and don't make SEO your only channel in year one.
It starts at the bottom of the funnel rather than the top. Alternatives pages, comparison pages, integration pages and segment pages carry lower volume but far higher intent, and they're usually uncontested. A generalist agency will hand you a blog calendar. The buying-stage queries are what produce trials.
The mechanics are the same but the target set and the measurement are not. SaaS has no transactional product pages, so the money pages are comparisons, integrations and pricing. Conversion is a trial rather than a purchase, so attribution has to survive a long multi-touch journey — which last-click reporting cannot do.
Ask what they'd check on a JavaScript-rendered app: whether marketing pages are server-rendered, how the app subdomain is separated from the marketing site, and how programmatic pages are kept out of thin-content territory. An agency answering with a generic crawl checklist hasn't worked on SaaS architecture. Ours is covered under technical SEO.
Yes, and they should be genuinely fair. Pages that claim you win on every axis get dismissed by buyers and increasingly by AI engines too. Naming where a competitor is the better fit builds the credibility that makes the rest believable.
Viable but slow, and it shouldn't be your only channel in year one. Start with long-tail BOFU terms where the top ten is weak, plus integration and alternatives pages that are naturally low-competition. Expect meaningful volume in month six to nine, not month two.
GA4 with proper channel grouping, plus a first-touch field passed into your CRM at signup. Last-click will systematically undercount SEO because organic tends to open the journey and something else closes it. If you're judging SEO on last-click, you're judging it wrong.
Powerful when each page has genuinely unique data or utility — per-integration, per-template, per-location pages backed by real content. Thin programmatic pages spun from a template are a helpful-content liability. The dividing line is whether a human would find each page useful on its own.
Ask what they report on. An agency leading with sessions and keyword counts is measuring the wrong thing for SaaS. Ask to see how they'd map your funnel, whether they'd write comparison pages that concede a competitor advantage, and how they'd handle attribution into your CRM. The free audit shows you our answers before you commit to anything.
SaaS SEO rarely runs alone. These are the three we most often run alongside it.
Topic clusters, content audits and E-E-A-T writing built to rank and to convert.
Explore →GrowthCompetitor gaps, intent mapping and SERP feature analysis, scored on winnability rather than volume.
Explore →ScaleGetting cited in AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini, measured rather than guessed.
Explore →No obligation, no sales sequence. We'll show you which buying-stage queries your category leaves unclaimed and what it would take to own them.