SaaS SEO: a strategy guide for B2B software companies.

The pages below are options, not a template every SaaS company must build. Build the ones your buyers actually ask about, and skip the rest.

How to write comparison and alternatives pages that hold up

Comparison pages are reviews, whether you call them that or not. Google's guidance on writing reviews is a useful standard: explain what sets each option apart, cover which one might suit which buyer, and provide evidence from your own experience. A comparison page that admits where a competitor is the better choice for some teams is more believable than one that says you win on every line.

Be careful with pages at scale

Integration and use case pages invite templates: one page per integration, per industry, per city. That can be useful when each page has something real to say. When it does not, it drifts into what Google's spam policies call scaled content abuse: many pages generated mainly to rank rather than to help, however they are made.

The questions come from the people who talk to buyers. Collect them from demos, sales calls, lost-deal notes, support tickets and onboarding, then sort each one:

• Is it a decision question? (Which tool, which plan, does it integrate.) It goes to a decision-stage page.
• Is it a problem question? (How do I fix this, why does this keep happening.) It goes to educational content that leads to the product.
• Is it a product question? (How do I do X in the app.) It belongs in the help center or documentation, which can rank too.

For each page, write down the question it answers, the evidence you have and who will build it. That is the difference between a plan and a list of blog titles.

Many SaaS marketing sites are built with the same JavaScript frameworks as the product. Google documents that it processes JavaScript sites in three phases: crawling, rendering and indexing, and that server-side rendering or pre-rendering is still a good idea because it makes a site faster and not all bots can run JavaScript.

• Render important content on the server, or pre-render it, for the marketing site at least.
• Keep the app and the marketing site separate so logged-in pages do not compete with public ones.
• Treat documentation as an asset: make it crawlable, link it to the marketing pages, and give duplicate versions a canonical.
• Check what Google sees with the URL Inspection tool in Search Console, not what your browser shows.

Once the decision pages exist, educational content has somewhere to send people. Write for the problems buyers have before they know your category exists, in their words, and link each piece to the decision page it naturally leads to. Google's helpful content guidance is the standard to hold it to: original insight, first-hand expertise and a clear reason for the page to exist. Our guide to B2B SEO covers this layer in more depth.

Timelines depend on the site, the category and the competition, so treat this as an order of work, not a schedule:

• Foundation: crawlable marketing site, analytics and Search Console, conversion tracking for trials and demo requests.
• Decision pages: the comparisons, alternatives, integrations and pricing buyers ask about most.
• Expansion: more integrations and use cases, where you have something real to say about each.
• Problem-aware content: the educational layer, linked to the decision pages.
• Upkeep: competitor and pricing pages go stale fast; review them on a schedule.

Traffic is the wrong headline number for SaaS. Group pages by type in the Search Console Performance report and in analytics, then look at what each group produces: trials, demo requests, qualified pipeline and, eventually, revenue. A comparison page with a few hundred visits a month that produces demos is worth more than a glossary page with thousands that produces none.

If you want help deciding where to start, our SEO service and our work with technology companies both begin with that sequence.