SaaS SEO Case Study: Promoting a SaaS Service Internationally

In this case study we walk through our experience working with an international SaaS service and lay out the results we managed to achieve.

In the spring of 2022, we took on a SaaS service focused on security documentation. The product targets international markets and was rolling out first in Norway, the US, and the UK.

What was working:

• the site was built on WordPress;

• solid design and usability;

• page load speed was already in decent shape.

What needed work:

• a small page count;

• technical errors across the site;

• poorly optimized blog posts.

After talks with the client and a detailed discussion of SEO and promotion goals, our team put together a strategy to grow the service across several markets at the same time.

The core points of the SEO strategy:

• technical SEO improvements on the site;

• on-page optimization of the landing pages;

• internal linking inside the existing blog posts;

• building up the backlink profile.

At this stage we ran a full technical audit of the site, where we surfaced the critical SEO issues and wrote out instructions for the developers on how to fix them.

The main technical issue on the site was an incorrect hreflang setup, which was keeping the site from ranking properly in the target regions.

On our side, we provided full support during the implementation of the audit points and, at the end of the rollout, double-checked each point for correctness.

As a result of the technical audit, the site got:

• markup errors cleaned up;

• improved page load speed;

• a properly configured hreflang tag;

• a correctly set up sitemap.xml accounting for multi-region targeting;

• a fixed robots.txt file.

We built out a detailed semantic core fully geared toward bringing in the target audience.

We carried out the internal on-page optimization:

• briefs for the copywriters;

• title and description metadata;

• heading and image optimization.

The site had no backlink profile to speak of, so we built a link strategy based on gradual link acquisition. The main criterion of that profile was natural-looking backlinks. For the first six months we planned to acquire only crowd links from topical forums and posts.

Over six months of work together, we delivered great results: