The Role of Technical SEO in SaaS Websites: Enhancing Your Website’s Performance
Websites play a significant role nowadays. Be it sales, dissemination of information, or a service offered for whatever reason, a website should function properly to retain visitor traffic. Any SaaS company should ensure its websites loading speed is good and friendliness with mobiles for whatever information customers are seeking.
That is where the role of Technical SEO in SaaS websites comes in.
Technical SEO makes it easy for search crawlers, such as Google, to crawl and see your site. This will make your website pop up higher in relevant searches and, in turn, drive more people to it. We will dive deeper into how SaaS companies can improve their websites’ performance, speed, and overall usability by leveraging technical SEO.
What is Technical SEO?
Before discussing Technical SEO in SaaS websites websites, let’s understand what it is. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It is the practice of improving a website so that search engines can easily find it. Technical SEO is part of SEO and focuses on the behind-the-scenes elements of your website, such as how fast it loads, whether it works on mobile phones, and how the website’s data is structured.
In SaaS, there is only one alternative to technical SEO. A visitor who feels a website is slow, cumbersome, or set up wrong will leave and choose a competitor’s website, ultimately impacting your potential to grow.
Why Technical SEO in SaaS websites is Important
A SaaS company sells its software over the internet, and for most users, the first point of contact will be your website. If your website is too slow or hard to use, then people may never try to use your software. It’s like trying to sell a product where the store is hard to find or looks messy.
Better technical SEO means the crawlers can find and understand your site. This, in turn, means people can find your SaaS product when these individuals are looking for something similar to your service. A well-optimized website ushers in better experiences whereby people can stay on your website using your software and refer others to the same.
Key Areas of Technical SEO in SaaS websites
There are a set of areas on which the SaaS companies can create their focus to improve the performance of their website. These include loading speeds, mobile responsiveness, structured data, and more. Let’s break them down.
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Fast Loading Speeds
The most important aspect of every website is its loading time. When a website takes a long time to load, visitors will become irritated and will go without looking at your SaaS product. A survey indicates that the majority want a website to load within a minimum time frame of less than 3 seconds. Your site could be killing your business with its long loading times.
How to Improve Loading Speed:
- Optimize Images: Big images are heavy for your website. Make sure every image on your website is the right size and compressed.
- Minimize Code: Websites have a lot of code behind the scenes, including HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Make this code smaller and cleaner to help the website load faster.
- Enable Caching: This helps save portions of the website and prevents reloading each time an individual visits it. It has been used to quicken loading times when visitors visit your site.
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Mobile Responsiveness
These days, people do a lot of browsing through their phones. If they are inconvenienced by using a mobile website, they will leave it somewhere else. A SaaS company must be aware that its website works on every device, particularly on a mobile phone.
How to Improve Mobile Responsiveness:
- Responsive Design: Your website must have a responsive design that automatically changes its layout, adjusting to the device in use. It should look equally impressive on a computer as it does on a mobile phone.
- Making things touch-friendly means making them large enough for good tapping to click the buttons or links easily on a mobile device.
- Do Test Your Website: Periodically test your website on every mobile model to ensure that it works properly with each one.
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Structured Data
Structured data will help search engines understand the context of your website. It uses a unique code called schema markup to tell the search engines what your website’s content is about. This helps the search engines show your website in search results for people looking for your SaaS product.
How to Use Structured Data:
- Use Schema Markup: Schema markup on web pages will provide context relevance to the search engines by letting them know what your webpage represents, bets reviews, ratings, or even your company’s contact details
- Get Rich Snippets: Structured data can also be used to make your website appear as a rich snippet in search results. That means your website will be able to appear with extra information, such as reviews or ratings, which will help it gain more visitors.
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Secure Your Website with HTTPS
Of all things, security is one of the most paramount things a website needs in today’s era. People would not believe in a website if it isn’t secure. A secured website would have HTTPS instead of only HTTP in the web address. Besides, websites with https encrypt all information users send and receive. This is important because SaaS websites may require customers to put in sensitive information.
How to Make Your Website Secure:
- Avail SSL Certificate: An SSL certificate encrypts data between a user’s browser and your website, keeping all information secure.
- Switch to HTTPS: If your website is on HTTP, switch to HTTPS. This will help in keeping your visitors’ data safe.
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Fix Broken Links and Errors
Broken links are links to nowhere, non-existing pages. They are problematic to the user, and they also affect your professionalism. Search engines also prefer to avoid broken links as they impede proper crawling.
How to Fix Broken Links:
- Broken Links Detection: Occasionally, find broken links on your website and fix or remove them accordingly.
- Error page fixation: When a user tries to enter a page that does exist, it needs to be forwarded to the custom 404 error page, which can take them elsewhere on your site.
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Improve Crawlability
Crawling means the extent and how the search engines crawl your website. The more complex your website is for crawling, the more the chances that a search engine will not crawl the main pages. And this impacts your ranking directly.
Improvement in Crawlability:
- Creation of Sitemap: A sitemap is a map of search engines. It will list a website’s main pages so search engines can easily find them.
- Utilize Robots.txt: It tells search engines which pages to crawl and which not to crawl. Ensure your robot.txt has been set right so search engines will note all important pages.
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Optimize Your URL Structure
Your website’s URLs should be uncomplicated and easy to comprehend. A clean URL structure helps both search engines and visitors understand what the page is about.
How to Optimize Your URL Structure:
- Keep URLs Short: Avoid using long, complicated URLs. Instead, keep them short and include relevant keywords.
- Use Hyphens Instead of Underscores: When separating words in the URL, use a hyphen (-) instead of an underscore (_). This will help search engines understand your words better.
Conclusion:
Technical SEO in SaaS websites allows your SaaS website to perform and increase in performance. This could be achieved by ensuring mobile-responsive page speed, providing security, Crawlability, structured data, and clean URLs for users, making the SaaS website friendly regarding search engines, and making it more likable for users to view.
A well-functioning, easily findable website attracts more visitors, nurtures conversions, and influences the overall success of your SaaS business. For all that to happen, investing time and effort in technical SEO will pay long-term dividends, making sure that your SaaS website will stand out in the competitive market.
The following tips will ensure your website is ready to deliver the best experience for your users and help your SaaS Company grow and thrive online.