Watch this video for the next 10 seconds and you will learn one the most basic yet effective
SaaS SEO strategies.
In fact, veed.io, a video editing software company uses this SEO strategy to attract
around 1.6 million monthly organic visits from Google search.
Now, what's most impressive to me is their pace of acceleration.
They've 10x'd their traffic in around a year.
I mean, just look at their organic metrics.
They're literally vertical.
Now, if you didn't quite follow the animation, that's ok because I'm going to walk you through
a SaaS SEO case study of how Veed uses this SEO strategy and how you can use it too.
So veed.io has two main parts to their site – their free tools and their blog.
And according to Ahrefs' Site Explorer, their tools account for around 80% of their total
monthly organic traffic and their blog gets around 11% of their total organic traffic.
Let's talk about their free tools first.
From a user-facing standpoint, it's clear that Veed considers their free tools to be
important as it's literally their first menu item.
Let's click on their Video Editor tool and break it down.
They have breadcrumbs which are helpful for navigation and tell us a bit about how they've
structured their tools.
More on this later.
Then you have the primary keyword target as the H1, a keyword focused description
and then their CTA.
Now, when you click on their CTA, it takes you right to their free tool where you can
give it a spin without any kind of opt-in.
And I'm just speculating here, but I think this would improve user experience signals
which can help improve rankings.
Now, let's skip over the social proof and company blurb because it's focused more
around conversion than SEO.
And this leads us nicely into some of the on-page optimizations they've done
with their copy.
Based on the headings, it looks like they're trying to serve informational
intent with a fairly commercial page.
So they have "How to edit a video" in their H2 here and then below that they
have steps about how you can do it with their video editor.
And I think this works in their favor, at least for this page, because the SERP
for "video editor" is slightly fractured and their page serves both intents.
I won't expand on this further because we have a full video on how you can handle and take
advantage of SERPs with mixed or fractured intents, so I'll link that up in the description.
Alright, so if we scroll down a bit further you'll see a video with a heading that seems
borderline keyword stuffing which I don't think is necessary, and that section has
some H3s where they expand on related topics to video editors like collaborating
on video projects, and their free online video editing software.
Scrolling down to the next section, you'll see an FAQ that seems to be a mix of
search-driven and product-related questions which I'm personally a big fan of.
Now, if you want to find relevant questions to add to your landing page, you can use
the People Also aAsk box for your target query and/or use the Questions report in Ahrefs'
Keywords Explorer to find bigger lists that prospective customers may be searching for.
Now, in the next section, they've made a prominent block using a super basic internal linking strategy
that many SEOs tend to neglect.
If you look at the URLs for each of these links, you'll see that they all
live in the /video-editor subfolder.
And if you visit one of these pages, and scroll down, you'll see a nearly identical section
where they link to all of the same sub-tools.
So what they've essentially done is created a ‘tool hub' using internal links.
And this part is actually pretty important because a) free tools are quite easy to get
links to because they're inherently valuable;
and b) they're distributing PageRank within their tool hub.
And I'll circle back to this in a minute because I want to quickly talk about the next section
with the subheading, "More from Veed."
All they've done here is link to a few blog posts which were clearly created with search
engine optimization in mind.
It's not something that's exactly revolutionary, but like the internal links section above, they're
able to pass PageRank to relevant blog posts through internal links.
And that should help rank these blog posts higher in Google search to reach
larger audiences in the top or middle of the funnel and convert some readers into
customers because these posts recommend their product as a solution.
Alright, so let's go back to this whole concept of a "tool hub" because it's
important you understand why this is an important part of their SEO strategy.
When I say "tool hub," I'm referring to the architecture that's typically used
in content hubs where there's a pillar page, cluster content or sub pages, and hyperlinks
which connect the pages together.
By creating a structure like this, you're allowing PR to cycle throughout the hub.
So if and when any of these pages earn links, all pages within the hub benefit.
So unlike the blog example where there might just be a one-way internal link,
there's a reciprocal relationship between these pages.
Now, if we revisit that YouTube video editor sub page, you'll see that it's nearly identical
including the destination URL for their CTA.
The things that have changed are the breadcrumbs for navigation and
obviously the main copy because each page is targeting a different query.
In this case, they're targeting "youtube video editor," which gets 46,000 monthly global
searches in Google.
They've also updated the FAQ to have more relevant questions to their query, and their
internal links to their blog are pointing to posts that are more relevant to YouTubers.
Now, to check "tightness" of this hub, I crawled their entire website with Ahrefs' Site Audit
and checked these URLs in Link Explorer.
As you can see, their hub page links to 13 other pages that include the video-editor subfolder.
Now, if we switch the source URL to the YouTube video editor URL, you'll
see that there are exactly 13 internal links there too.
And the same applies for all pages in this "tool hub."
Now, to give you an idea of the scale that Veed has done this at, check out the Site
structure report in Site Explorer.
As you can see, they have 250 pages in their tools subfolder which generates over a million
monthly organic visits.
Their create subfolder is actually a whole new set of free tools and they have around
100 of them that generate over 50,000 monthly organics.
Then they have others like video converters with 271 pages.
And once these pages start ranking well, I wouldn't be surprised to see their traffic
spike again.
If you want to learn more about how to create content hubs, I highly recommend watching
our full tutorial and just as Veed has done, you can apply them to your tool pages too.
Now, content and structure are only half the picture.
The part we haven't talked about yet are backlinks.
Now, because they're a relatively new company with lots of competitors, it's unlikely that
they're earning all of these links organically.
Link building is absolutely essential to get results like this.
Over the past two years, you'll see that their links and traffic are moving in tandem.
And they're moving fast.
To further support my case of manual link building, their LinkedIn employee page shows
11 people with outreach in their title.
And not everyone has a LinkedIn profile or keeps it up to date.
So I'd imagine they have way more than 11 people sending outreach emails every day.
Now, if you still aren't buying it, I've gotten two outreach emails from them.
One that pitches their tool.
And another that pitches a blog post.
We'll get to the blog soon.
Now, based on these outreach emails, I'm pretty sure they're doing things with a high-volume,
low-conversion approach.
The reason I believe this is because of the shotgun styled emails and the fact
that they're using a subdomain to send emails.
And people often use different domains or subdomains to prevent potential damage to
their main domain's sender reputation.
Now, even though I'm not a fan of this outreach approach, it doesn't mean that it doesn't work.
To get a bit more granular, I exported their monthly referring domains count in Ahrefs'
Site Explorer and put together these graphs from the data.
It doesn't look like they weren't doing any link building in 2018 and 2019.
But around May 2020, it's clear that they started building backlinks.
And as their traffic continued to rocket because of their link building efforts,
they doubled down again in late 2021.
Now, looking at their link velocity on an annual basis you'll see they got around
2,700 referring domains in 2021.
And for 2022, they're more than half way there at the time of recording this video
and we're only four months into the year.
It seems Veed understands the compound effect of SEO and whoever's in charge has
given the green light for more.
I could talk another 30 minutes about their tools section, but I want to briefly
talk about their blog which lives in the /learn subfolder.
As you can see, they've replicated their content and links strategy to their blog
which only looks like it started in May 2021, exactly a year from when I'm recording this video.
And within that year, they've grown their blog to around 178,000 monthly organic visits.
Now, just like I did with the referring domains data, I exported the number of organic pages
they've published.
And these are pages that rank in the top 100.
And it's clear that they're still in the early stages of scaling.
Now, let's review one of their blog posts.
Without having read it, it looks pretty standard with a table of contents, some clear SEO content
writing, images, external links, and internal links.
Nothing fancy, which proves that you don't need to get fancy to rank.
The only thing I want to point out is that they have a related posts section at the end
of all their posts, which helps to keep link equity flowing through their internal pages.
And at the very bottom, you'll see that they're pushing related tools as well.
So I think it's safe to assume that those free tools are helping drive new users to
their platform.
And if that's the case, then it's smart because they're maximizing the dynamic duo of content
marketing and SEO.
Now, I won't expand further on their blog because during this whole scaling stage
it tends to be more about volume of production to see what sticks more
than anything else.
But now that we've gone through this SaaS SEO case study, I want to make sure that you
walk away from this tutorial understanding how you can implement this strategy to your
software company.
So let's look back at that first animation I showed you.
At the top of your website, you have your homepage.
And to keep things basic, let's say that it links to the two most important sections
of your site: free tools, and your blog.
Now, anytime the homepage gets links, the tools and blog page will also get some
value from them, increasing their authority.
And because these pages are linking to other deeper pages, they can gain value too, but
to a lesser degree.
Let's zoom in on the tools section.
You might have three different types of tools.
Let's say a video compressor, a video editor, and a subtitle generator.
They're three different topics, hence the three different colors, but they're all connected to
the main tools page.
So anytime the main tools page gets links, it passes value to these three different tools.
And because it's a two-way link, if these three tool sub-pages get a link, then it passes
value back to the tools page which is still connected to all tools.
Now, with the video editor, there might be 3 different sub editors – a YouTube editor,
a TikTok editor, and a Twitter video editor.
Now, anytime these pages get links, they pass value to the pages they link to.
And some of these tool pages are also directly connected to relevant blog posts.
So they'll also get value and build the page's link authority.
Basically, PageRank is getting cycled throughout the site so when any page
on your site gets links, the whole team is benefiting, which is why I think this
SaaS SEO strategy is so simple, yet effective.
Now, strategy is going to give you the blueprint for what you need to do but in order for it to be
effective, you need to be able to execute on all 3 components of structure, content,
and links.
And we have tutorials and free courses that'll teach you and your team how to write content
for search and how you can build links to your site so I'll link some of these resources
up in the description.
Give this SaaS SEO strategy a try and I'll see you in the next tutorial.