When marketing a SaaS product, there’s constant tension because you’re often trying to balance contrasting goals.
Should you focus on customer acquisition or customer education and retention? Do you take the targeted marketing approach to boost conversion rate or choose to broaden your market while settling for a slightly lower conversion? Immediate lead generation is tempting, but you know that long-term brand building is essential to making a mark in the market.
Due to these considerations, weighing the pros and cons and choosing between SEO and PPC can become a never-ending task. As a marketing agency, we can tell you that when you integrate both into your approach, real, tangible results follow.
A well-rounded PPC SaaS marketing strategy doesn’t just rely on quick wins. It leverages SEO to create a sustainable growth engine that keeps paying off over time. Let’s understand how to combine SEO and PPC to craft a dynamic SaaS marketing strategy that scales with your business.
Understanding SEO vs. PPC marketing for SaaS
Here are a few things to understand before you start crafting your SaaS marketing strategy:
What is SEO marketing for SaaS?
SEO marketing for SaaS involves using specialized techniques to gain more visibility on the Search Engine Results Page (SERPs). When your SaaS website shows up higher in the SERPs, you receive more website traffic and increase customer acquisition.
SEO involves multiple strategies like keyword optimization, on-page content optimization, technical SEO, or even link-building. If your Saas website is new, initiating your SEO efforts by fixing common technical SEO is a smart move.
For slightly more advanced websites that publish high-quality content regularly, content optimization becomes crucial. Finally, when you’ve put in place a well-thought-out SaaS content marketing strategy, you can look into backlinking to gain authority.
What is PPC marketing for SaaS?
Pay-per-click (PPC) marketing for SaaS involves creating paid advertising campaigns to direct traffic to your website. In a campaign, you bid on specific keywords that are highly relevant to your SaaS offering and pay when a user clicks on the ad.
Also, since these ads include high-buying intent keywords that can be further narrowed to target specific demographics, interests, and behaviors, they are quick to show results in the form of conversions.
By combining PPC with persuasive ad copy and landing page content while regularly adjusting bids, marketers can maximize ROI for SaaS companies while accelerating new customer acquisition.
Which is better for SaaS: PPC or SEO?
PPC and SEO are separate marketing approaches catering to different goals and objectives. PPC is ideal for generating fast results, making it perfect for launching new SaaS products, time-sensitive promotions, or entering highly competitive markets. Also, PPC campaigns are really effective at retargeting customers.
SEO is slower to take effect but supports long-term growth if done correctly. It’s often more cost-effective than PPC but requires patience and consistent effort.
For SaaS companies, viewing PPC and SEO as allies rather than competing strategies can unlock greater growth potential. Instead of isolating them in separate silos, integrate PPC and SEO to create a synergistic effect that amplifies your marketing efforts.
Below, we’ll show you how to do this, but before that, it’s critical to understand that SaaS marketing is unique, which is why it benefits from using both SEO and PPC.
Benefits of using both SEO and PPC in SaaS
You know the benefits of SEO and what PPC can do. What’s important to understand is that when used cohesively, these strategies can bring results that turn out to be more than the sum of their parts.
Here’s how: If you simply used PPC, you’d get immediate visibility and traffic. However, PPC campaigns reveal valuable data for testing keywords, refining messaging, and driving quick conversions.
This means that if you also have ongoing SEO campaigns, your PPC campaigns can inform your SEO campaigns, helping to target high-converting keywords faster.
Conversely, your SEO campaign can lay the groundwork for sustainable success by building brand authority and driving traffic over time. This organic traffic can lower your overall cost of PPC by improving quality scores in search engine algorithms, leading to better ad placements at lower bids.
In this way, by aligning PPC and SEO, you can leverage the strengths of both PPC for short-term wins and SEO for long-term gains. But how do you create a cohesive, collaborative strategy that capitalizes on the strengths of both PPC and SEO? Here’s how:
How to combine SEO and PPC for your SaaS marketing strategy
So, it’s clear that SEO and PPC together can get the best results for your SaaS company. However, you do have to be intentional about how you overlay them. We combine these strategies in three steps or stages to create mutually reinforcing marketing outcomes for our clients:
Step 1: Ensure your SEO health is solid
Imagine you have a store in a mall. Would you start an ad for your store if you’re not ready to sell your product? What happens if potential customers enter a store that’s still being finished? If the sales process is bumpy and rough around the edges, they leave with an unfavorable impression of your store.
Your website is your online store, so start by ensuring you’re ready to attract potential visitors. This means optimizing your website with technical SEO. In practical terms, this means optimizing your site’s structure, content, and user experience. Making it faster, if need be, and making it easier to browse and navigate.
So that when you start receiving traffic, which you will thanks to PPC, your website will be able to leverage it for conversion. What’s the point of pulling a customer with a PPC ad only to have them bounce because your website was 1 second slower to load or they were faced with a 404 error message?
All this means is that giving your SaaS website a good technical foundation is essential. You can start by auditing your website’s technical health. This can be done with the help of SEO auditing tools, or you can simply use our free SEO audit tool. The groundwork you do here will enhance the efficacy of your next step. That’s phase 1. Done.
Step 2: Use PPC for growth while SEO picks up
Once your foundational SEO is in place, it’s time to leverage PPC for immediate growth. Conduct keyword research to identify terms that your target audience is searching for. Set a budget that aligns with your goals and choose a bidding strategy that suits your objectives.
While all this is happening, you have to keep up your SEO efforts going. This means regularly publishing high-quality SEO-optimized content that informs, educates, and meets users at different stages of their buying journey.
This is because SaaS sales cycles are long, and the intangible nature of SaaS products demands that content fills the gaps in the target audience’s psyche. This is also why SEO content for SaaS is unique, it has to fulfill the dual purpose of education and persuasion. Enlisting the services of a good content marketing agency at this stage can help.
Working with experts at this stage is also important, as they can help you leverage PPC keyword data for the success of your SEO efforts. Experts can help you refine keyword selection for your content marketing, split test landing pages/ad copies, and even use PPC to promote your content.
Conversely, PPC can fill the gaps where SEO might be slow or where competition is fierce. A strong PPC campaign will keep your SaaS product visible and top of the customer’s mind. You can continue capturing market share while your organic rankings gradually improve and SEO gains traction over time.
That’s phase 2—dynamic, collaborative, and synchronized. Most companies make the mistake of running PPC and SEO campaigns in silos negating these unified effects and leaving money on the table.
Step 3: Reduce PPC efforts once SEO bears fruit
When your SEO strategy starts delivering consistent organic traffic, it’s time to reassess the role of PPC in your SaaS marketing strategy. Ads cost money, after all. So, now you can begin strategically reducing your PPC spending.
You’re not abandoning PPC altogether. Instead, you’re reallocating resources to areas where they can have the most impact and also targeting and narrowing your PPC campaigns to maximize ROIs.
For example, once you have steady organic traffic, you can focus your PPC efforts on more targeted campaigns, such as remarketing, promoting new features, or reaching highly specific audience segments.
You can reduce spending on keywords where you already rank well organically (through SEO) while still leveraging PPC for strategic opportunities like launching new features or time-bound promotions.
By this time, you should know your market segment so you don’t have to experiment. Instead, you can leverage your expertise from the previous stage for more significant results. This shift in focus allows you to maximize ROI.
The budget freed up from reduced PPC spend can be reinvested into further optimizing your SEO strategy, such as expanding content or improving site performance. That is if you want to maintain the same marketing budget.
If you want, you can also reallocate to product enhancement, UX development, post-sales support, management, or any other aspect of running a SaaS business. The possibilities are endless when you have the budget!
Need help improving your SaaS marketing strategy? Ranq knows how
So, that’s how you combine SEO and PPC to get maximum results out of your SaaS marketing campaign. It’s not the easiest operation to run if you’re also taking care of other business aspects. This is why we suggest that it’s best left to experts.
If you need a team of experts to capitalize on all that PPC data to generate fast results in SEO campaigns, Ranq is here for you. We have a deep understanding of the SaaS landscape and know what it takes to attract, convert, and retain customers in a competitive market. Whether you’re struggling with low organic traffic, high customer acquisition costs, or lackluster conversion rates, our tailored strategies combine the best of SEO and PPC to deliver measurable growth. Contact Ranq to get your customized SaaS marketing strategy!