SaaS SEO Blog Tips
In the last few months, I've achieved great progress in sprucing up the T.LY blog! Through thoughtful and impactful posts, SEO tactics, and answering Google's related questions, I have seen some tremendous success that's worth celebrating - here are my main takeaways so far.
Moved from Subdomain to /blog
When I started T.LY, I took the easy route, created a WordPress blog, and used blog.t.ly as the domain. This was easy to set up and worked great. I even researched whether Google cares about subdomain vs. subdirectory, and it seemed it didn't matter. Check out this video from Google: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJGDyAN9g-g
Regarding SEO, some experts suggest that subdomains can't benefit from the link authority your root domain has already earned. Similarly, backlinks generated for a specific subdomain aren’t likely to be passed on to other web pages or sections within the same website. Knowing this can help you make informed decisions about how and where to build links for maximum benefit! I still do not know which is better, but having a unified experience for those reading my blog and using my app was a win-win.
Custom Blog
I decided to move the blog to /blog but didn't want a complicated setup that interfered with my app. The setup I went with is to use WordPress as a CMS with a custom blog front end that uses the WordPress API for post content. This allows me to cache all the posts and render them in HTML, which is excellent for SEO and speed. I can customize the look and feel of the blog without worrying about breaking WordPress.
Over 50 New Blog Posts
Over the past five months, I've added over 50 blog posts on related content around URL Shortener, marketing tools, social media, and more. Mostly, I've come up with the topics myself, but I've also used Google's "People also ask." section to come up with new topics. My goal is to answer these questions and increase my site ranking.
Google Featured Snippets
My goal in answering URL Shortener-related content was to be picked up by Google's Feature Snippets. So far, I've had great results from these posts and highly recommend you apply similar concepts with your content.
Added a Sections Sidebar
I recently added a Sections sidebar from a tip Justin Jackson shared on their blog for Transistor.fm. The goal is to improve the overall readability and navigation of the blog, which should help readers find the answer they are looking for. At the end of the day, Google cares about answering people's searches. The site that does this best will improve its search results.
What tips do you have about SaaS blogs and improving search engine results? Feel free to share any thoughts on improving my blog.
Thanks for great advice! Do you think we need to move from https://blog.getscreen.me/ to getscreen.me/blog?
Thanks! I would say yes if you can update it with little effort to be on your primary domain. Having the same look and feel for your blog and primary site is really beneficial. What is your current setup for your blog and primary site?
The blog was made on WP. It is exactly the same as the main site
Gotcha, so the blog an main site are WP. That makes it easy to configure. I'm always curious about how people embed a blog within their main web app.
This comment was deleted a year ago.
Great post, thank you for sharing your insights on SaaS SEO!
I found your tips to be really useful, especially the idea of creating a robust blog to increase visibility and attract more traffic to my website.
Your emphasis on focusing on topics that are relevant to my target audience and using long-tail keywords is also spot on. I also liked the idea of building backlinks and the importance of optimizing for voice search.
SEO can be overwhelming, but your post broke it down in a way that made it much more approachable. I'll definitely be implementing some of these strategies in my own SaaS business. Thanks again for sharing your knowledge on this topic.
Thanks! What tactics and tips are you using to improve SEO for your blog?
I think the sidebar is a really good idea. We're mostly technical founders and have been reading tons about how to approach blog SEO recently for https://arguflow.gg/blog . The biggest struggle we're having now is figuring out the optimal cross-posting strategy to build up some backlinks. Do you have any solid advice for that?
Thanks to @mijustin for sharing how and why he added a sidebar section to their blog. Take a look at what Transistor is doing. Their site looks great!
Regarding building backlinks, I've done a ton of manual outreach to blogs and sites over the years. I've had some luck, but it can be challenging and time-consuming. Adding an affiliate program can help with giving people a reason to add your link to their site. Fortunately for a site like T.LY, backlinks come naturally over time due to the nature of the product. Currently, T.LY has over 6.4 million backlinks and 30k linking websites.
My best advice is to add an affiliate program to your site, do manual backlink outreach, and write good content so backlinks come organically over time.
If someone built a legitimate, non-spammy site that helped users build genuine backlinks, that would be awesome.
Hey, thanks so much for that information. 🍻
You’re doing all the right things. Subdirectory was a good choice.
I would keep answering as many of the google “people also ask” questions because they are questions people actually search for on google. A lot probably have low search volume and therefore low competition.
One other thing after a quick glance is you have huge chunks of text in all your articles. Keep paragraphs to a few sentences max so people can read/skim easily.
Thanks, I will focus on making the posts more readable!
loved how you're creating relevant content clusters. You're doing a great job!
Thanks, @sm_salmaan! What tactics are working for you? Any insights you have to share?
This comment was deleted a year ago.