Technical SEO For SaaS: A Guide to Increasing Organic Traffic on Your SaaS Website

When it comes to improving organic traffic for SaaS websites, the first thing you need to do is improve the technical SEO to ensure all other SEO efforts are not wasted because of poor technical SEO. 

If you are running a SaaS website and struggling with its poor technical performance, then this guide will be helpful for you. 

Here, we will discuss technical SEO and its importance for SaaS websites. We will also showcase how to improve technical SEO for your SaaS website with the help of DIY methods.

Finally, we will explore how installing RabbitLoader can increase organic traffic by improving technical SEO for your SaaS websites without writing a single line of code or hiring an expert.

What Is Technical SEO?

Technical SEO indicates the process of improving a website so that Google and other search engines can easily find, index, and crawl its content, improving its visibility in organic searches. Even though Technical SEO focuses on various aspects, from the website’s PageSpeed performance, architecture, to the URL structure, there are 3 major impactful aspects in the Technical SEO mentioned below,  

• Crawling

Crawling refers to the process that search engines like Google use to explore for and index new or updated content on your website, index it and then rank it for related search terms and intense. The context for crawling can be an image, PDF, web page, texts among others.

• Rendering 

Rendering is a process through which a browser converts the code into displayable content on the user screen. Think of it as converting (rendering) the CSS code to show you the beautiful layout. 

• Indexing

Indexing is a process where search engine crawlers also known as bots or spiders  explore the pages of your website and categorize the pages & content to match with search queries & search intent.

The Importance Of Technical SEO For SaaS Website

Technical SEO is considered the backbone of a SaaS website’s performance. Without technical SEO for your SaaS website, all on-page and off-page SEO efforts can go to waste. Here, we will explore the benefits of technical SEO for SaaS websites, which include:

• Increase The Organic Traffic 
• Improve User Experience
• Boost Conversion Rate  

Increase The Organic Traffic 

Technical SEO mainly focuses on improving search engine optimization rankings. According to statistical research, 45.1% of the total search clicks came from organic clicks. This research clearly shows that users are more likely to trust organic results than paid resources.   

So, by improving your technical SEO for your SaaS website, you can significantly increase organic traffic and page views, which in turn will improve your website’s conversion rate. 

Improve User Experience

When running a SaaS company, your first priority should be providing a seamless experience to your users. By improving your technical SEO, you can significantly improve this experience.

Assume your website’s loading performance is very poor. When a visitor opens your website, and it takes a long time to load its content, the user will be more likely to leave the website. According to a report, the bounce rate is only 9% when the loading time of a website is between 1 and 2 seconds. However, it increases to 38% when the loading time is increased to 5 seconds. 

Therefore, by technical SEO you can improve your user experience as well. 

Boost Conversion Rate

The conversion rate of a SaaS website depends on many factors, such as the website’s design, content, PageSpeed performance and more. Optimizing the technical SEO for your SaaS website can help you achieve a desirable conversion rate by improving its technical health. 

How To Improve Technical SEO For Saas Website

When it comes to SEO optimization, many website owners focus on the basic strategy, on-page SEO and overlook the technical SEO due to its difficulties. Here, we will discuss the most straightforward strategies and also mention the helpful tools for implementing the strategies.  

You can quickly improve technical SEO and increase organic traffic without any technical expertise by following our technical SEO guide, which includes:

• Improve Website’s Loading Time 
• Optimize Core Web Vitals Metrics Performance
• Improve Your Website’s URL Structure
• Improve The Website’s Mobile Responsiveness
• Implement Encryption To Increase The Website’s Security 
• Add An Organisation Schema For Making Structured Data
• Improve the website’s architecture
• Remove the website’s duplicate content
• Review robots.txt file
• Use XML sitemap
• Implement pagination 
• Check the deadlinks and fix them 

Let’s see how to implement these strategies in detail. 

Improve Website’s Loading Time 

The loading time can be the user’s first impression of a website. So, prioritizing user expectations, Google always considers loading time a vital ranking factor. Let’s explore the best practices for improving loading time. 

1. Image Optimization

Though adding high-resolution images is part of on-page SEO, it can harm a website’s loading time. Optimizing images can significantly improve a website’s loading time. Converting them into next-gen format can reduce the image size without compromising the picture quality. 

RabbitLoader can optimize images with its built-in bulk image optimization feature. It converts all your images into WebP and AVIF format and reduces their size.  

2. Reduce the Resource File Size.

HTML, CSS and JavaScript files are considered a website’s core resource files. Their large size can also cause a website to be slow. There are two effective ways to reduce the file size: minification and compression. For more details, read our blog Minify resources. 

RabbitLoader removes the unnecessary characters from your HTML, CSS and JavaScript files and makes the files smaller. Not only minification, but it also compresses the files and reduces the code redundancy in your files, reducing the file size. 

3. CSS Optimization

With optimizing the CSS file, achieving a good loading performance can be easy. Optimization of CSS files can be possible by generating a separate file for critical CSS and removing the unused CSS rules from the stylesheets. 

Where most of the optimization tools avoid this strategy for its difficulties, however, RabbitLoader can successfully reduce the page size by generating critical CSS and removing unused CSS. 

4. JavaScript Optimization

JavaScript optimization is one of the effective PageSpeed optimization techniques to improve the initial loading time and page’s responsiveness. To do it manually requires expertise in JavaScript. 

However, by installing RabbitLoader, you can typically improve the initial loading time and page responsiveness. RabbitLoader defers the JavaScript functions that are not needed for the initial loading, improving the initial loading speed. 

5. Fonts Optimization 

Using different customizable fonts is the reason for using FOUT in your SaaS website. Using them can harm your user experience and Search engine rankings. To prevent this, you can use web-safe fonts which are already installed in any modern browser.   

6. Implement Web Caching

Implementing web caching can significantly improve a website’s page speed performance. However, manually implementing this web caching can be daunting, especially when you are not interested in the technical aspect.  

RabbitLoader implements the most effective two web caching mechanisms: browser caching and CDN caching. 

Optimize Core Web Vitals Metrics Performance

According to John Mueller’s clarification, along with the other ranking factors, Google also considers care web vitals metrics in its ranking algorithm. Google developed a set of performance metrics to determine the website’s performance based on three factors: loading time, visual stability and page interactivity. 

Now, consider measuring and optimizing Core Web Vitals. Several online PageSpeed analyzing tools are available, such as Google PageSpeed Insights, GTmetrix, and RabbitLoader, which can analyze the performance of Core Web Vitals. 

By following the strategies we mentioned for optimizing the website’s loading time, you can easily optimize Core Web Vitals metrics such as Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS), Interaction to Next Paint (INP) and other performance metrics. 

Note: RabbitLoader is the most helpful tool to optimize the Core Web Vitals metrics and improve the PageSpeed performance of a website.   

Improve Your Website’s URL Structure

A URL indicates the address of a website. It includes protocol, path and domain name. A URL is a mediator between the user and the web page. Optimizing a website’s URL is not as difficult as PageSpeed optimization. Let’s explore the best technical SEO practices to improve a website’s URL structure:

• Keep the URL short and simple
• Try to include meaningful keywords in your URL
• Try to separate two words by hyphens (-) instead of using underscore (_).
• Use lowercase in your URL
• If you want to customize your URL, then you can use permalink. 

Here are some helpful tools for optimizing a website’s URL: TinyURL, Sniply, URL Shortener, and many more.  

Improve The Website’s Mobile Responsiveness

After the update of the ranking algorithm in 2015, Google used a mobile-first-indexing policy to determine the ranking of the web page. So, to rank better in any search engine, you need to make your SaaS website more mobile-friendly. 

Here, we will discuss how to increase the website’s mobile responsiveness and make it more mobile-friendly. 

• Use Responsive Image 

Using a responsive or adaptive image can significantly increase the mobile responsiveness of your website. Responsive images generally adjust their size attributes, such as height and width, according to screen size. Therefore, it would improve the website’s visual stability. 

Here, RabbitLoader again shows it’s magic. When you are already using RabbitLoader to improve loading time and optimize core web vitals metrics, you don’t need to take any headaches for adaptive images. RabbitLoader automatically changes the height and width according to the screen size and makes your device more friendly. 

• Improving the Loading Speed 

When analyzing PageSpeed on mobile devices, Google always tests the website’s PageSpeed on a 3G network speed. Therefore, to increase your Google rankings, you need to improve the loading time of your website. 

As you can see, manually improving a website’s loading time involves many technical aspects. Using RabbitLoader can improve it within just a few clicks. 

Increase The Website’s Security 

After an update in 2014, Google added website security to its ranking algorithm. So, improving your website’s security can help you to increase the rankings in any search engine. 

Using HTTPS instead of HTTP makes the website more secure. HTTP stands for Hypertext Transfer Protocol, where ‘S’ stands for Secure in HTTPS. Hiding a user’s sensitive information, such as credit card details, passwords, and others, can increase the website’s security. Here, we will discuss how to improve the website’s security in detail. 

• Implementing SSL 

Adding an encryption-based security protocol like SSL (Secure Socket Layers) can increase your website’s security by adding an extra protection layer between the server and the browser of the end users. 

To improve the security of your website, you can use Cloudflare which offers a free SSL certificate on your website and secure your web traffic, which leads to increasing your website’s Google rankings. 

You can easily check whether your website is secure or not. If your website is secure, the domain will show HTTPS instead of HTTP.  

Add An Organisation Schema For Making Structured Data 

Adding structured data or an organization schema markup helps a search bot to understand the content of your website in a better way. Adding properly structured data can help a search engine answer the user’s question on the search engine result page. 

Let’s understand this structured data with an example. Assume you are running an e-commerce store. By implementing a proper organization schema markup, you can tell “what the product is about”, “ what the price of the product is,” “the discount amount,” and every detail of your content. 

Several SEO plugins, such as Yoast, Schema Pro, RankMath, WP Review, SEOPress and others, are available in WordPress to implement structure data or schema markup in your SaaS website. 

Improve Your Website Architecture 

The ultimate goal of improving your website architecture is to make it easy for users to navigate your website. Not only users, improving website architecture can also help a search engine to crawl a web page. Website architecture has four key components such as navigator, internal links and URL structure. 

• Navigation 

Navigation is essential for a Google bot to determine the importance of a certain page on your website. This can increase the website’s ranking in any search engine. Let’s discuss the best practices to make an SEO-friendly navigator. 

1. Ensure that your important web pages are linked as “level 1”. The best practice is to add a maximum of three levels.
2. Always try to add local info, social media pages, privacy policies and support pages in the footer navigation of your website. 

• Internal Links

When a search engine crawls your web page’s content, it examines both your internal and external links. By creating internal links, you can guide a search bot to your important pages. 

The best way to use an automation tool like dofollo. When you are adding new content to your website, this automation tool helps you by suggesting the relevant internal links for the new content.   

• URL Structure 

By improving the URL structure, you can also improve the search engine rankings. We already discussed how to improve a website’s URL structure. 

Remove The Website’s Duplicate Content  

Having duplicate content (the same content on two or more than two web pages of a website) can negatively affect your website’s search engine rankings. Several tools like Siteliner are available to check whether your website has duplicate content. 

The best way to avoid duplicate content on your website is to use canonical URLs. By adding a canonical URL, you instruct Google to consider the URL as the primary or main content. Let’s understand how canonical URLs work. 

Assume you are running a b2b SaaS website with duplicate content. In this case, you need to add a canonical URL for the main page.  

Canonical URL: https://rabbitoader.com/blog/

Alternative URL: https://rabbitoader.com/blog/?page=1

When you are adding a canonical URL to the main page, Google considers this web page for indexing and rankings. 

Review robots.txt File 

A robots.txt file instructs the bot which page they can access and which page they cannot. You can check your website’s robots.txt file by adding “/robots.txt” at the end of your homepage’s URL like this: https://rabbitloader.com/robots.txt.  

You need to check to ensure that you are not blocking access to essential web pages that Google needs to crawl to rank your website. 

For example, in RabbitLoader.com, the home page and the blog page should not be blocked because if they are accidentally blocked, they will be hidden from the search bot. 

Use XML Sitemap 

While every piece of content on the website needs to be crawled, sometimes, due to some inconsistency, the content takes more time or never gets crawled, decreasing your website’s Google crawl rate. 

An XML sitemap consists of a list of the website’s important content with their priority. A search bot like Google can easily crawl the critical links and index them faster than the less important links. 

Several plugins, such as Yoast SEO, Streaming Frog, Validate XML sitemap, and many more, can be used to create an XML sitemap. After making the XML sitemap, you can submit it to Google through the Google Search Console. 

Implement Pagination 

Pagination is a technical SEO strategy for dividing long content into multiple web pages. This makes it easier for Google and other search engines to index and crawl the content efficiently. Implementing pagination also enhances the user experience. Let’s understand this with an example. 

Assume you are running an e-commerce website. Your user is looking for a dress, and your e-commerce site has many results for the query. If all products are on the same page, it requires a lot of scrolling to reach the last product on the page, which can be frustrating for a user. Also, Google can’t index all content properly. 

If you want to add pagination to your website manually, you need expertise in JavaScript and CSS coding. However, if you are not interested in technical aspects, you can easily use automation tools like Page Break to implement pagination. 

Check the Deadlinks and Fix Them  

Having a lot of deadlinks can negatively affect a website’s SEO rankings. A deadlink causes a 404 error, which frustrates the user experience. These deadlinks confused google bots to find and crawl the website’s page. 

Summary 

At this point, you might understand doing technical SEO is a challenging process. However, as a website owner or SEO expert, you can’t avoid this process if you want to increase the organic traffic on your website. By doing this, you can typically increase the search engine ranking. 

Let’s quickly recap the technical aspects involved in technical SEO:

• Improve Website’s Loading Time 
• Optimize Core Web Vitals Metrics Performance
• Improve Your Website’s URL Structure
• Improve The Website’s Mobile Responsiveness
• Implement Encryption To Increase The Website’s Security 
• Add An Organisation Schema For Making Structured Data
• Improve the website’s architecture
• Remove the website’s duplicate content
• Review robots.txt file
• Use XML sitemap
• Implement pagination 

Implementing these technical aspects manually can be daunting, especially when you are trying to improve the loading speed. Improving loading time manually is a time-consuming process that requires technical expertise. So, many website owners invest in many plugins, which sometimes negatively affect the website’s loading performance.  

Here, RabbitLoader comes in!

RabbitLoader implements all PageSpeed optimization strategies that are required for improving the website’s loading performance and optimizing the core web vital metrics performance. Not only that, but it also improves the website’s mobile responsiveness and makes your website mobile-friendly. 

Therefore, if you also want to increase the organic traffic in your SaaS platform and increase the conversion rate (the percentage of converting users to potential customers) of your SaaS product, you must install RabbitLoader to improve the search engine ranking.