The SEO Checklist for SaaS: 6 Steps to Improve Performance [A 2025 Guide]

Want to grow your SaaS business and dominate the search results?

SEO is your ticket to driving organic traffic, attracting the right audience, and turning visitors into customers.

This checklist walks you through seven steps to level up your SaaS SEO game - from keyword research and on-page SEO to building strong SaaS backlinks.

1. Prepare a List of Keywords

SEO starts with understanding what your audience is searching for. Keyword research helps you uncover your future customers' queries at every stage of their buyer journey.

Use tools like Ahrefs, SEMrush, or Google’s Keyword Planner to identify relevant keywords. Pro tip: target long-tail keywords — they’re less competitive and often show higher intent. Aleyda Solis compiled an impressive keywords mapping checklist for many industries, including SaaS - you can find it on her website.

Ideally, your keywords will be:

• Meaningful for your business
• Relatively easy to rank for (based on the keyword difficulty)
• Have an adequate monthly search volume in your target market(s)
• Transactional or commercial. Transactional keywords are search terms people use when they’re ready to take action, like signing up or buying something (e.g., “buy email marketing software” or “CRM free trial”). Commercial keywords are used when people are researching their options and comparing solutions (e.g., “best project management tools” or “email marketing software comparison”).

2. Optimize On-Page SEO

On-page SEO is your chance to tell Google, “This page has everything the user needs!”.

But it's also your chance to get potential customers to love your site and crave to learn more about your product.

Good on-page SEO improves user engagement, raises time spent on page, and lowers the bounce rate. All of this helps you rank higher on Google, because Google thinks your site meets user needs.

And of course, it helps convert your site visitors to leads and users.

On-page SEO helps users engage more with your website

Here’s how you can achieve it:

• Craft compelling meta titles and descriptions that include your target keywords
• Structure your content with clear headers (H1, H2, H3) to improve readability and hierarchy
• Use SEO-friendly URLs that indicate what the page is about
• Include your target keywords naturally within the first 100 words of your content
• Reduce images size and add descriptive alt text
• Set up proper internal linking to help users and search engines navigate your site
• Use bullet points or numbered lists to make your content more scannable
• Add a clear call-to-action (CTA) to guide users toward the next step (e.g. signing up or downloading a file)

3. Enhance Technical SEO and UX

Technical SEO ensures your site is easy to crawl and index, while user-friendly design helps your potential customers engage.

A few essentials:

• Improve your site’s loading speed. 40% of mobile site visitors leave a page that takes more than 3 seconds to load - so it’s worth checking your speed on Google’s PageSpeed Insights
• Make your website mobile-friendly and accessible (for example, for users with visual impairments)
• Implement HTTPS for a secure connection
• Use schema markup to enhance your SERP visibility
• Use intuitive navigation
• Reduce pop-ups and intrusive ads - they distract and annoy many users and cause them to leave

Technical SEO and user-friendly design make you more visible on search engines

4. Develop High-Quality Content

In SaaS, content is the gateway to solving your buyer’s problems. Focus on creating blog posts, guides, and case studies that provide real value.

If you’re in the B2B SaaS space, your user and buyer personas will likely be different - and will care for different problems.

Say, if you sell a development platform, your end users will be developers, but your ultimate purchasers can be the Technology Lead, Chief Product Officer, and Head of Finance. All of them will have their own concerns, goals, and doubts - and your content should convince all of them to buy your product.

SaaS companies need content for different personas and different stages of the funnel

Normally, SaaS sites include these types of content:

• Product pages (with product demos)
• Comparison pages
• Partner/Reseller/Distributor directory
• Case studies
• Thought leadership articles
• Company news
• Gated content (guides, checklists, whitepapers, eBooks)
• Industry/market reports
• Podcasts

5. Build a Strong Backlink Profile (This One’s Big!)

Link-building is the backbone of your SaaS SEO strategy. Backlinks from reputable websites signal to Google that your content is valuable and trustworthy.

Some tips to nail link-building to your SaaS site:

• If you’re just starting, build links to your bottom-of-the-funnel content first (conversion pages where users are more likely to sign up or make a purchase). It will be easier to justify the value of backlink building internally after you see some tangible results like an increase in leads.
• Create link-worthy content, like data-driven studies or free online tools (calculators, quizzes, maps).
• Build relationships with influencers and thought leaders in your niche. It takes time to establish a genuine rapport, but it will pay for itself multiple times in the future.
• Submit expert quotes to other SaaS blogs in your niche. It’s a low-hanging fruit that can bring many backlinks for little effort.
• Speak on podcasts. Sharing your story as a podcast guest is a great way to promote your product, boost your personal brand, and gain a valuable backlink — all at no cost.

Read more: 5 SaaS Sites That Got Link-Building Right

But how do you find good backlink partners for your SaaS site in the first place? Let’s face it — prospecting and cold emailing are exhausting.

Try Ranking Raccoon, the spam-free link-building networking platform where SaaS marketers build links faster and easier than ever. Here’s why you’ll love it:

• No cold emails: Forget the endless tedious prospecting and cold outreach. Ranking Raccoon is the community where you can message genuine site admins directly - without the unnecessary guesswork.
• Safe link-building environment: All sites on Ranking Raccoon are manually checked for quality. We filter out sites with shady or malicious practices, so you build backlinks with relevant, trustworthy websites.
• Much higher ROI on your link-building efforts: 71% of link requests on Ranking Raccoon get a reply within a week, and 35% of all requests turn into published links. That's an almost 11x higher success rate than when you build links with cold emails.

Sounds too good to be true? Try it for yourself, for free!

6. Monitor and Analyze Performance

Finally, keep an eye on your progress.

Regularly track key metrics like organic traffic, bounce rates, and conversions. Use tools like Google Analytics, Search Console, Ahrefs, Semrush, or others, to identify areas for improvement.

If you're building backlinks to your site, monitor metrics like Domain Authority, Page Authority, and Referral Traffic from your backlink partners. For more in-depth analysis, you might like our guide on measuring link-building ROI in Google Analytics.

As Kevin Indigo put it for Search Engine Journal,

“SEOs need to continue tracking, experimenting with, and adapting to changes in Google’s search landscape. Pressure on Google extends to SEOs. This is not a time of stability, as we have had more or less over the last two decades, but a time of agility, flexibility, and adaptation.”

Conclusion

And there you have it — the ultimate SaaS SEO checklist to take your SaaS site to the next level! From mastering keyword research and nailing your on-page SEO to building high-quality backlinks with ease, each step plays a crucial role in boosting your online visibility and driving organic traffic.

Ready to supercharge your backlink game? Ranking Raccoon has your back! With our platform, building strong, spam-free backlinks has never been easier.

Let’s make your SaaS business shine!