How to do keyword research for SaaS and Tech companies?

Needless to say, getting to the top of Google is an essential step for tech and SaaS companies to attract large and sustainable amounts of organic traffic and leads. In this day and age, the key to growing on Google's rankings is to consistently produce engaging content with the right keywords that pertain to your target audience. Keyword research is a vital step to determine what exactly your target audience is searching for, the competitive landscape, and what types of topics you can write about to attract the most traffic and grow on Google in the shortest amount of time possible.

Here is a guide on how to do proper keyword research for your tech or SaaS company.

What keywords are you already ranking for?

To see what keywords are already ranking on Google for your website, just link the free Google Search Console to your website, have it crawl all your pages, and you will be able to see a full report. The report shows which keywords your website is ranking for in the top 100 results of Google, how many impressions Google gave (how many times your website has been shown for that search query), and how many times people actually clicked into your website via that search query. You can also use a tool like SEM Rush or Ahrefs to determine which position your website will show up on Google for a particular keyword.

When planning topics to write for your blog or other types of content, it's best to focus on keywords that you're ranking well for already. It's generally much easier to increase the ranks of high ranking keywords, and this tends to pull up your low ranking keywords as well.

The keyword triad

Choosing the best keywords or topics to write about consists of three main factors - relevance, volume, and competitiveness. It's best to have all three factors in order to have the most impact for SEO and growing on Google.

Relevance

It's important to choose keywords that are relevant to your product or service offering. This ensures that you are attracting the appropriate types of people to your site who are most likely to convert from readers to leads to customers. The goal of content marketing is to ultimately draw qualified visitors into your sales pipeline.

Volume

Here's a simple analogy: let's say you open a restaurant in a city, and another one in the middle of a desert. Obviously, with everything else being equal, the restaurant in the city will attract a lot more customers versus the one in the desert, simply because there's more people in the city.

In the world of Google, The number of people that frequent a location equates to the search volume of a particular keyword. In other words, volume is basically how many users search for that keyword in any given time. The higher the search volume, the more users you will get to your site if you rank well for that keyword. Most of the mainstream SEO tools such as SEM Rush or Ahrefs will have a keyword explorer option. This allows you to enter in a topic, and it will spit out all the relevant keyword variations with the respective search volume. You can also use the free Google Trends to inspect the search volume of a keyword over time.

When doing keyword research, it's important to focus on keywords with medium to high search volume. This ensures that, once you do rank for that keyword, you are attracting a healthy amount of traffic to your site. On the flip side, if you focus on keywords with little to no search volume, that's similar to opening a restaurant in the middle of a desert - you're hardly going to get any traffic to your site from that keyword.

Competitiveness

We've talked about search volume which is analogous to the number of people frequenting a location at any given time. This is the maximum number of visitors you can capture to your website. However, there are of course other competitors also competing for a share of that volume. Competitiveness is basically a measure of how much competition there is in that space. A proxy for this can be the number of results for that keyword, or some SEO platforms may also provide a competitive density metric.

It's important to focus on keywords that have little to no competition. This ensures that once you publish your page with that keyword, you'll have a high chance of showing up on Google from the start and attracting visitors, because there aren't many other competitors in that space. On the flip side, if you target very competitive keywords, that's the same as opening a restaurant on a street with already a dozen existing restaurants. All of these restaurants are already diluting the amount of visitors on that street - you'll have a hard time attracting a fair share of those visitors.

Keyword insertion

Back in the early days, inserting lots of low difficulty keywords into your content may improve your SEO. However, nowadays Google will penalize you if you do "keyword stuffing". Instead of inserting keywords wherever possible, or creating content just for the sake of inserting more keywords, it's important to focus on writing high quality content and insert keywords sparingly. Make sure the content is valuable, informative, and engaging for users, and only insert keywords where it flows naturally with the content. Additionally, try to write the content as if someone is speaking to the user - this is called conversational text and can help improve your Google rankings via voice SEO. Learn more about voice SEO here.

Conclusion

SEO and getting to the top of Google is undoubtedly and essential part of any marketing strategy, as it can huge amounts of users per month to your business. Although focusing on technical SEO and off-page SEO can help, the factor that moves the needle the most is definitely your keyword rankings and content. Making sure you do proper keyword research, and consistently create content around these low difficulty keywords, would be the quickest way to grow your Google rankings.

At ASATA, we offer a full, done-for-you organic growth package where we audit and optimize your SEO, do keyword tracking and research to identify the best keywords to target for your business, and write out the entire content with these keywords for you. This is the fastest approach for your website to move up the Google rankings. Book a discovery call today to learn more!