SEO for SaaS: A Content Marketing Guide for Austin Startups

Photo by Phil Desforges

Content marketing is a highly effective marketing strategy for many SaaS companies. Per dollar spent, content marketing garners 3x as many leads as traditional marketing.

So why don’t more tech companies jump in?

For many small SaaS startups and tech companies, content marketing can feel annoying and labor-intensive. It’s difficult to start from scratch.

Often, everybody in the company already wears too many hats. For teams that are mainly comprised of engineers, marketing can be a puzzle that is hard to crack because of time or money — or both.

We created this guide to help time-strapped startups build a fast and effective content marketing strategy. By the end of this article, you should have some actionable ideas for how to make the leap into SEO-friendly content marketing for your business.

Why does Content Marketing Work?

If you’re part of a tech startup or lifestyle business, chances are you’ve heard some talk about content marketing.

In the past, typical advertising methods centered around invasive messages that interrupted the life of readers and viewers. Today, people simply tune out the thousands of advertising messages they see every day. Flashy colors, overused hyperboles, and shallow messaging don’t work like they used to.

What does seem work in the digital space, however, is inbound marketing.

Contemporary inbound methods like content marketing seek to provide search engine users with helpful information and solutions to their problems. Through instruction, entertainment, and clarification, businesses can market their service simply by being helpful.

Google’s search algorithms are designed to prioritize authoritative articles over irrelevant (or lackluster) ones. When someone needs specific information, it’s Google’s stated intention to match the user with the best possible information.

Content marketing works because your business becomes the publisher of a given solution. You create things people actually care about and in return, Google sends searchers to you.

Jumpstart Your Content Marketing for SaaS

1. Choose Your Platform

Start with the most basic option: Set up a blog. As Kaleigh Moore says, “Small businesses with blogs get 126% more lead growth than small businesses without.”

You have two options: Use an existing blogging platform like Medium or integrate a blog into your current website.

In our opinion, this shouldn’t be a decision at all. If you’re putting in the time and energy to optimize for keywords, then you should build out your own blog platform.

Websites like Medium or blogging on LinkedIn are great for easy Likes and sharing, but at the end of the day you’re helping to perpetuate the reach of their platforms instead of your own website.

You want to own the canonical link for the original content. So be sure to publish on your own blog first, then consider secondary publishing options like LinkedIn.