How SEO affects CAC (Cost of Customer Acquisition) in SaaS

Last updated in May 2024

Why Do SaaS Companies Need an SEO Strategy?

SaaS (software as a service) companies are gaining more and more popularity. Research shows that there is huge growth in this type of service on the market.

However, strong competition makes it harder to find customers. Your SaaS company may simply get lost among others in this niche. In addition, SaaS marketing is more complex than product marketing and is different from traditional promotion methods. The reason for this is the lack of a physical product to sell. It’s a real quest: convincing people to integrate software is much harder than selling a pair of shoes!

Therefore, in order to achieve their goals and generate a lot of valuable leads, companies need an appropriate strategy. And SEO has proven to be the most efficient strategy out there.

Of course, in the old fashioned way, one can look towards conventional PR and advertising, which also contribute to promotion. Yet, at certain stages, under certain conditions, an SEO strategy can be more effective and bring more results. Let us take a look at why SaaS companies choose SEO to acquire customers.

5 Reasons Why SEO works for SaaS Companies

1) Helps spread the word about your SaaS business.

Creating an exceptional product does not guarantee success. The public needs to know about it so that it can benefit both users and you. An SEO strategy will help promote your business and capture your target audience’s attention. Everything is simple. Search results that are at the top of the list are more trustworthy and memorable. And SEO will help you get to the top.

2) Increases traffic to your website.

SEO is one of the most scalable and strategic approaches to SaaS growth. Most people, including business owners, who are looking for a SaaS product start their search by querying Google or another search engine. To get to the top of search results, you need SEO assistance. Since the top result in SERPs gets 31.7% of all clicks – this means attracting a huge chunk of traffic.

In fact, you can predict how much traffic you will get by ranking at the top of a search query. This will help you understand how much worth investing in SEO.

3) Gives you an edge over your competitors.

People trust a business that appears at the top of search results, and your competitors know this very well. Therefore, they are most likely already taking steps to improve their position.

To stay ahead of the competition and prevent them from capturing the majority of potential customers, resorting to SEO is essential.

4) More people will subscribe to your software.

As mentioned earlier, trust in your company increases when people see your brand name at the top of the SERP. And if they go to your site and see the solution to their problem artfully inscribed in quality content, it will be harder for them to leave without subscribing to your product.

5) Saves the budget.

Paid advertising has a good appetite and can eat up a big chunk of your budget. In addition, if it is effective at the initial stage of the development of your SaaS company, then you need to move on to more effective strategies.

Curiously, SEO continues to work by inertia, sending customers to your site even after you stop optimizing at full strength. Advertising is a different story. Ads for which you no longer have the budget are removed and no longer bring customers to you.

How the SEO Strategy is Mapped to the Marketing Funnel for SaaS

You may be familiar with the marketing funnel concept. Funnel model can vary from industry to industry, but for SaaS companies, they commonly look like this:

The purpose of all SaaS companies is to attract as many people as possible into their funnel and encourage them to move down to the very bottom, increasing their engagement and loyalty.

In general, SaaS companies and even startups are now taking a holistic approach to promotion and marketing. SEO as an organic traffic channel to the site helps to correctly respond to user requests and questions that they google.

For SaaS, the role of SEO is especially important at the initial stage, or top of the funnel, called “Acquisition”. However, the rest of the funnel should be analyzed as well.

Marketing goals and channels of user acquisition

A marketing funnel is a diagram of how a person moves toward a purchase. This is an ideal scenario, but in life, everything can go differently.

For example, a person can “fall out” of the funnel, and then immediately return to one of the lower stages. Or learn about a brand from a friend’s rave reviews and immediately place an order, bypassing the upper stages.

The marketing model involves studying the buyer’s journey and developing different offers and activities for each stage of the funnel.

Knowing your buyers and their journey

To better understand the customer journey, to know where and at what step of the funnel to start communicating with them, build a CJM (Customer journey map). The map marks the user’s steps from learning about your SaaS company to buying on your website. CJM is suitable for any business, and it helps to speed up the user’s movement through the funnel.

Based on the collected map, identify the weak points in your funnel: the stages at which most of the visitors leave. These places in the funnel need to be worked on first.

Pre-Funnel SEO

This stage includes creating content aimed at attracting an audience that does not yet need your product. For example, some SaaS companies post useful informative articles on their blog that are not always related to their industry. They create a variety of content covering finance, marketing, and other topics, and generate more traffic to their site. Why is this needed?

First, it will increase brand awareness. If your company is known among those who are not yet on the path to buying your product, this will positively affect the formation of your brand and its reputation.

Secondly, it leads to an expansion of the audience. Fans of your brand who, while not in need of buying your product, may recommend it to others.

Top of the SEO Funnel

The top of the funnel represents those who have just set out on a journey. These people are aware of the challenge or problem they have, and they refer to the search engine to look for possible solutions to it. Your initial task is to understand what the potential client will write in their request. Then you adjust your content accordingly, using the necessary keywords.

This is the most appropriate stage for applying SEO in order to attract customers to your site. In this part of the funnel, the marketing goal would be to interest the visitor in order to move further to the mid-funnel part: to encourage them to leave their contact information or subscribe to the newsletter. Creating SEO-friendly content will assist you in this.

Give seekers what they want: detailed yet specific and understandable answers to their questions, containing issue solutions. Make sure that the data is up-to-date and really matches potential customers’ queries. Optimize content for keywords that are used by information search engines.

To find the right keywords, identify the difficulties your leads may need to tackle and brainstorm phrases related to them. Also, outline the specific solutions you suggest. All this can be placed in a table of three sections: problem, solution, and key phrases.

Middle of the SEO Funnel

Your mid-funnel inhabitants are not only aware of their problem but also aware of the existing options for solving it. However, they are in the process of thinking, as they have not yet decided which solution or product to choose. Perhaps they are doing a more rough study, analyzing each product individually and correlating its properties with the needs of their business.

This means that at this point of your SEO strategy, you need to ensure your prospective clients see the solutions they are looking for in your products. Tell them more about the products and tools you offer: their features, integration options, and use cases. Remember that superficial description is not enough, because this time you are creating content for those who already have a certain understanding of what you offer, but want to dig deeper into their research. Provide them with sufficient informative material and research tools. These could be tables comparing your products and their features, guides on how to use them, and so on.

Your mid-funnel SEO efforts should focus on generating leads who are one step away from buying. This means that there is one step left for them to move to the bottom of the funnel and become your customers.

Creating the deeply informative content we wrote about earlier also requires using the right keywords. This time, try to imagine niches from which visitors can come to you. Show how different types of software, as well as the specific features they provide, will improve their performance in their industry.

Bottom of the SEO Funnel

Those who reached the bottom of the funnel or entered it, skipping the upper parts, are not like those who are still in the previous phases of their journey. They already know more about what they need and are closest than ever to their destination – the purchase.

Most likely, such people hesitate between the software of several brands. And your task is to convince them that your product best suits their needs. Therefore, at this stage, the SEO strategy should be aimed not only at increasing traffic but also conversion.

What can be done? Since your visitor is likely looking at multiple brands, why not create comparison content? Let your product stand out from what your competitors offer. When creating this kind of content, you need to remain objective, but at the same time be able to emphasize your product advantages by providing strong evidence and facts. Such work involves collecting information and analyzing competitors, as well as brainstorming appropriate keywords.

Articles with market analysis and an overview of industry trends also work well. Let the reader see how naturally your brand fits into modern realities.

Success stories that feature your software, as well as testimonials from your clients, can also motivate someone to decide in favor of your company.

SEO techniques that affect CAC for SaaS Businesses

Сompetitors analysis and keywords research for SaaS

When developing an SEO strategy for SaaS, it’s also worth focusing on how brands compete in the marketplace and what strategy they use. Without it, you will not achieve your goals, because you will always be one step behind the market leaders.

Own experience is good. But if there is an opportunity to study someone else’s experience, draw the right conclusions, and use ready-made and successfully working solutions, then why not take advantage of this?

Knowing what other companies’ content works best in your industry will help you polish yours. You have to figure out what keywords your competitors are ranking for, what promotion channels they use, how much money they are investing, etc.

Thus, you will not be left behind by your industry opponents, on the contrary: you will be able to gain an advantage over them and eventually even become a leader in your market.

Working with the semantic core is one of the most important stages of SEO promotion. It is necessary to collect a pool of relevant keywords, structure them, and not make a mistake. If you use only high-frequency keywords and phrases, it will be difficult to oust your competitors. The situation is reversed for low frequencies. It is much easier to reach the top, but such requests lead to very few clients, and sometimes they do not lead at all. It is necessary to look for a golden mean in order to systematically move forward in search engines and increase traffic volumes with adequate investments.

Content strategy for SaaS companies 2022

According to some data, content creation generates three times more leads than traditional marketing and costs 62% less. Content strategy is a collective concept that includes business analysis, market research, and assessment of competitor activity. What to focus on, how to attract visitors, what channels to use – all this is important to think over and structure before starting work on content.

In 2022, your SaaS company will be able to win the race against its competitors only by resorting to a holistic B2B strategy. It includes the following steps:

Know Your Leads and Map Your Audience Needs

Your product is always within some value chain among others. Think about what other tasks your user solves before coming to you and after they have started using your product.

Make a List of Relevant Keywords

Consider what words and phrases your target audience will use when using Google Search. Make a list of the most important keywords that are directly related to your SaaS solution and that people might use when searching for a product or service. There are many paid and free tools that you can use to search for keywords by entering your topic or industry. The most popular are Ahrefs, Google Keyword Planner, Keyword Intelligence BiQ, and Moz.

Create High-Quality Niche Content

Focus not on promoting your product, but on creating first-class content that focuses on the needs of your potential customer. Make sure you use expert and in-depth content with the right keywords and links on all web pages. It should help in solving the client’s problem, show a specific way out of any situation, and introduce the product or service. Your website should be an attractive lead magnet for potential customers. Work on designing, creating catchy and informative pictures, videos, and infographics.

Simplify site navigation and the process of registering new users. Add a FAQ section and a page with real customer reviews.

Measure the level of user engagement

Track user behavior to understand how they interact with content, how long they stay on a particular page, where they click (what they are interested in), and on which pages they do not linger for a long time. There are free tools like Google Analytics, for example, which will provide you with extensive analytics to measure the success of your business. Analyze the received reports and act on improving your content accordingly.

Define your KPIs

It is very important to set specific goals and set a time frame for their implementation.

For example, you want to increase organic traffic by 20% per month or time your site is visited or sell a certain amount of your product.

Link Building for SaaS SEO

Link building is an extremely efficient and indispensable promotional tool. Not using it means losing some traffic and, therefore, profits. Link building allows you to increase brand awareness and establish yourself in the market as an authoritative expert.

In fact, this is an ideal and unobtrusive promotion of your website. When a respected resource places a link to your site, users are more likely to follow it. The thing is, it looks more like a recommendation than a paid advertisement. This means that people will trust you almost as much as they trust the site that links to your SaaS company.

The more such links and the longer they stay on the Internet, the stronger and more authoritative your link profile will be. This will automatically increase your ranking, and for Google, as well as ordinary users, your company will have value in the SaaS industry.

There are many link-building techniques. Therefore, in order to create a link architecture and site structure that will work for your company flawlessly, it is better to hire an SEO specialist. The cost of link building can vary greatly from $100 to $20,000 per month depending on quality and volume. If this is too costly for you, here is what you can do yourself:

Use your connections

Ask professionals from your contacts or business owners who already use your product to refer to your SaaS company. Those who know you will be more responsive to your request.

Benefit from integrations

If your SaaS product integrates with a third-party brand solution, ask them to link to your site.

Deal with relevant and respected donors

If a spammy and dubious resource links to your site, this will badly affect the reputation of your company. Links to sites that have nothing to do with your product, niche, or content will not organically fit in and will be considered spam. Allow only reputable sources that are relevant to the SaaS industry to link to your content.

Crowd marketing for SaaS businesses

B2B companies can spend 3 to 12% of their income on marketing. The good news is that there is a type of marketing that not only saves your SaaS company budget, but it is also super effective. Crowd marketing also has to do with link building, as you place links to your website in social networks, other sites, or thematic forums. In addition, this type of promotion involves working on the reputation of your company and opens up the opportunity to interact with the target audience.

Where and how to find ground for crowd marketing?

To find sites for crowd marketing, use all the semantics you have. In the first stage, you just need to enter queries into the search engine and note all the sites that will be in the top 10. To check a resource trust, use, for example, the CheckTrust tool. Do not use a site with a lot of spam comments.

How to write a comment?

The text of your comment should not be clearly advertising. The perfect comment skillfully complements the content and demonstrates that you have carefully read the article and the discussion section. On good sites, you can leave comments even without a link, just with the domain name. If the link is placed, it is important that the text looks as organic as possible. Then there are chances that it will not be removed by the moderator.

Where to post comments?

Forums are a great place to post, where you can disguise recommendations as your opinion, responding to requests from a real audience.

Review sites and business listings can be great platforms for promotional work. Besides, it’s always interesting to know what people think of you. The most valuable of the sites are g2.com, capterra.com, crosdesk.com, trustpilot.com, betalist.com.

Q&A sites are a good option for promoting your SaaS company. Millions of users search for information using sites like Quora. You have a great opportunity to reach out to a potential audience. Search for questions on the desired topic and tell about yourself. Many questions with answers from Quora are at the top of Google. Therefore, you can receive regular traffic from it, unlike most other external sites.

Social nets like Facebook have many valuable pages and groups with an active audience. To get started, join all thematic publics, regularly answer questions related to your product, do not skimp on words, and carefully study user problems. For SaaS companies a must have is to create a company profile on LinkedIn.

SERM for SaaS

The more successfully and better the image of your SaaS company is presented in the search results, the more trust and loyalty the user has to it. Conversely, a damaged and unformed reputation, due to the young age of the company and the lack of sufficient information on external resources, can become a problem for the company’s success.

A bad reputation can have several reasons: poor quality of goods/services, people like to leave negative reviews, and slander from competitors.

Whatever the reason, there is always a set of steps you can take to improve your brand’s reputation in SERPs, and this is called SERM.

SERM usually consists of three stages:

reputation analysis;
building an improvement strategy;
strategy implementation.

Initially, you can turn to Google to find out what people are saying about you. Then make a plan of action based on the information received. There is always room for improvement.

In general, SERM includes the above strategies. This includes working with various Internet sites in order to create a company’s presence on the network and creating high-quality content with the right keys and backlinks. The image of your SaaS company will be positively affected by video reviews of its products. You can also ask bloggers or experts in your niche to write a review.

Apart from creating a positive image of the company, it is also important to deal with negative reviews, ratings, and testimonials. They can not be ignored, but competently respond to unflattering statements that can affect a successful business.

You can hire professionals to look after your online reputation. The cost of online reputation management depends on how big the company is and how complex the reputation problems are. Therefore, pricing can range from $300 per month to over $50,000 per month.

Bottom Line

Promoting SaaS is not an easy task, but a good SEO strategy is quite capable of handling it. In reality, this is a whole complex of different strategies and methods that no target audience can resist. Naturally, SEO can have a significant impact on CAC, especially if you entrust the matter to competent professionals. However, everything that works for the success of your SaaS business costs money, because in the end, it will return many times over.

What does competitor analysis in terms of SEO?

For those just about to start work on their website, project, or client project, such an analysis will help determine the possible obstacles faced when entering a specific niche, the strengths and weaknesses of competitors, and what kind of content they have. As a result, it will be clear how difficult it is to break into the leaders of the chosen niche, or it is better to give up some ideas altogether.

Such a competent approach is not just a long shot, but a set of content solutions, common themes, and everything else that can be implemented on your website based on what is already working effectively for your competitors.

The process includes the collection of semantics, that is, individual keywords for which the content will be optimized. In addition, link building ideas are collected by looking at competitor profiles and determining where you can get links for your sites.

Benefits of competitor analysis that you can gain:

keywords and content ideas;
ideas where to get new links;
how you can deal with competition and become top in a long-distance run;
detailed analysis of direct competitors.

What you can learn about a competitor’s site:

if competitors use SEO, what is their strategy and how it works;
traffic amount (very approximate using third-party resources);
best content type and quality pages covered topics, keywords;
sources of links;
site structure + internal linking scheme.

How to find competitors for your project?

The most obvious way may look like this: go to Google, enter keywords, and get to know your competitors, but as it turns out, this is not the best way. Instead, you can use such tools:

Ahrefs Competing Domains
Google with Ahrefs Toolbar or Keywords Explorer enabled
Traffic share by domains in Keywords Explorer

Let’s define the roadmap for each tool.

Ahrefs Competing Domains

Since there is an amount of SEO-based competitor analysis guides written by marketers and SEO experts, they all use as an example SEO sites and related vocabulary.

In our article, we decided to use the site of a crypto exchange, for which we will single out the competitive ones using the above tools.

The first thing we should do is enter the site into Ahrefs Competing domains. This reveals to us the sites that overlap with the top 10 keywords from the perspective of maximum overlap percentage. And right away we see several dozen competitor domains that can be investigated further. This is the first place to find competitors.

Google with Ahrefs Toolbar or Keywords Explorer

The next place to find competitors is Keywords Explorer, where you should also type in keywords and look at the results. You can select a country on which the result with metrics will immediately be issued.

In some cases, it would be better to use Google Ahrefs Toolbar enabled. These queries are less expensive, and there will appear a table with combined metrics for the domain and page under each search result. But the most useful thing is that this issue can be exported and in one table you will get a matrix for numerous competitors.

Traffic share by domains in Keywords Explorer

Another method is to use Share traffic from Keyword Explorer.

This tool allows you to analyze a large number of requests at one time. When you are about to enter a niche, then you already have a number of keywords that can be used. You should collect them in a table and immediately enter them into Keyword Explorer and analyze them.

Step-by-step Competitor Websites Analysis

What competitors to check first?

In the competitor websites list pay attention to relatively new websites with good results.

When we observe such a picture, it is very interesting to find out how such results have been achieved.

Does domain age matter for search ranking?

Practice shows that older domains are ranked higher in search engines. As a rule, over the years of their existence, such resources accumulate a lot of information that is indexed by search engines.

Therefore, if competitors with older domains work in the thematic niche, and you have a fledgling resource, then you will have to make up for this by increasing the download speed, content variety, link promotion, etc.

However, just because a domain was registered many years ago doesn’t make it strong:

All this time, the website might not be indexed, not receive links, traffic and not exist at all.
The site could change its owner, SEO team, budget, and so on.
The graph of the growth of the link profile and traffic is much more indicative.

Step 1. General Ahrefs website overview

Step 2. Organic search tab

One of the most illustrative reports in terms of how serious they are about SEO is the tool shown below.

Step 3. Organic positions in Ahrefs – Organic search tab

It shows the number of keywords depending on the positions. We can see that most of the keywords are at the top. This is a good indicator.

You can see the number of pages by the result in Google, although this is not always accurate information. But just to look at and evaluate a competitor is enough.

Be sure to go to the site itself and check out their design (logo, fonts and color schemes, photos, cover text, widgets, etc.).

Step 4. Content and organic traffic analysis. Top pages report

Let us start with the Top pages report. This tool shows us the pages, top keywords, and the number of keywords that bring us the most traffic. You can add branded keywords directly to your filter so they don’t get in your way.

The top pages report is a filter for categories that can be used for Intent analysis. For example to check the most traffic pages from corporate blogs.

What to look at:

number of keywords, not just traffic (to assess the overall potential of the topic);
the number of backlinks (relative to traffic).

As a result, we receive ideas for content with good overall traffic potential (not just good single keyword frequency) that don’t need a lot of backlinks.

You can find additional keywords besides the ones that bring lots of traffic.

Step 5. Keywords count as an indicator of overall traffic potential

Step 6. Check websites

Look at the competitors’ pages and study their successful guides, UI and UX, design, and customer flow. Perhaps you can do something better for your site.

Step 7. Check the competitors’ Featured Snippets

Hint! Use these reports for different purposes:

Top pages report for analysis at the site/domain level;
Organic keywords report for the page or category analysis;
Top Subfolders/Subdomain for structure/section analysis.

The missing semantics

Step 8. Content Gap

You can look at organic keywords to see how they intersect several sites at once. You add your site to the filter so that it does not rank, and start to analyze the sites of competitors. We receive keywords for which three or two of your competitors rank. You’d better use a keyword filter right here.

Step 9. Content Gap Report at the pages or categories level

You can analyze not only websites but even categories and individual pages. To do this, there are a number of separate tools that suggest which keywords are used frequently. You can take your article on this topic and add 3-5-10 articles about your competitors to this report to analyze them. There will be keywords in the search results that can be added to your page since these keywords are already bringing traffic to your competitors.

Backlinks sources in business niche

Step 10. Niche link sources

Similar to the Content Gap Report, you can add 10 websites of your competitors to this report and find sites that link to several competitors at once. You can often find categories here where you can be added absolutely free.

When we turn to an individual analysis of backlinks, the first thing we pay attention to is the graphs of the Referring Domains growth, but this indicates more the amount of effort expended than the result.

Don’t start with Backlinks or Referring Domains, but rather go to the Best by Links report.

Step 11. Best by Links are the pages with the highest number of referring domains.

Although these pages may not always be high-traffic.

You can also look at the report called Best by Links’ Growth, where you will find the pages with the best link growth. This is either fresh content or pages that people have been referring to recently.

Advice:

Use Backlinks report at the page level
At the site or domain level: use reports Best by links, Best by links’ growth, Referring Domains

Technical analysis of competitor’s website

What should you check?

Page load time
How mobile-friendly the website is
Simple on-page SEO mistakes

First of all, any page of the site needs to be viewed by the load time, as this is one of the ranking factors for Google now.
Using the Mobile-Friendly Test tool, you can see how friendly the page is to mobile devices. This is necessary since a large percentage of traffic comes from mobile devices. You can add a competitor’s site to Ahrefs Site Audit to see if there are simple SEO mistakes.

So that the work done is not wasted, at the last stage, it is necessary to bring together all the data. That is why you need to enter the results in a special table (enter the site and its main metrics). The last stage will be to analyze the data obtained and draw conclusions about your place among the rest of your industry.

This type of SEO research allows you to discover all the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors, compare them with your own strategy, and understand what you are doing wrong and how to fix it.

In fact, such a strategy is a specific guide to action that will help you find the answer to the question: what to do to get ahead of the competition?

Ahrefs released several updates to their tools several months ago, some of which are freely available and incredibly useful. In this article, you will not only learn about them but also how to apply them in practice.

Updated Organic keywords

Ahrefs Organic Keywords

What distinguishes it from the old tool version is historical data by months with past dates. You can observe the changes since the beginning of this year: keywords that are bringing in more traffic and changes in rankings.

Next, you can see what keywords the site was ranked for in the past. For example, this is a crypto news website, and if you look back, at the beginning of 2019 it was a news site that was ranked for completely different keywords.

Ahrefs Organic Keywords

And there is a keyword filter. It identifies new and lost keywords, as well as keywords that have improved or declined in rankings.
For example, using the “new” filter, you can see only new keywords for which the site has begun to rank in the last three months.

Then there is a one-way feature that was not originally planned by the developers, but eventually, it was announced to become a separate button. This button provides the ability to find keyword cannibalization for the site.

Cannibalization is when several pages of a site rank at the top for the same keyword. Sometimes this is good, sometimes it is bad, depending on the specific case. If such pages distract attention from the ones you need, then you can rewrite them. But there are cases in which it plays into your hands.

For example, one such case is illustrated in the picture.

And right in the Organic keywords report there is a SERPs history. For any keyword, you can use this drop-down date picker to get an idea of what search results looked like in the past, see which sites were before, and where your site was in comparison to others. It is something like a time machine for a search result.

In addition, there is an abundance of filters that can be used immediately in Ahrefs. For example, here are five filters that you can see in the picture. And there is a cool list of ideas for creating awesome content and getting traffic.

Updated Top Pages 2.0 are the best organic website traffic pages

This report shows the best website pages for organic traffic.

Analyzing competitors, observing significant and important changes on their sites is good for promoting and working on your website. Therefore, it is important to watch its traffic history together with the history of new pages.

Next, similar to organic keywords, we can now compare the current period with a year, month, or several months ago and see how the traffic on the page has changed since that time.

For example, by choosing a range to compare with the beginning of the year and sorting the “Change” column in descending order, we get a list of pages that have started to bring the most traffic to the site since the beginning of the year. For the sites we work with, we can sort in reverse order the pages that worsened their traffic the most.

In the upper right corner, there is a switch that toggles the change column between percentage view, absolute value, and a graph that will show the traffic-to-traffic ratio in bars.

In addition, a filter by page status has been added. Page status is either a new page that Ahrefs has started to see in SERPs that it hadn’t seen before, or a lost page that has disappeared from SERPs, or one that hasn’t changed.

The coolest application is to monitor competitors and see what new articles they have published, new pages that start to grow, rank and appear in search results for keywords. For example, let’s compare January of this year, set the status “New” and see for the Lifehacker website pages that were published only in this half of the year and which have already started to increase traffic.

Link opportunities – Potential internal links

Internal links:
1. Ensure the user movement on your site.
2. Pass the PageRank to the pages.
3. Search engines use anchor texts and text next to them in algorithms “to understand the content on the page”.

The most obvious way to add internal links to a site, taking into account the keyword, is the command site: next comes the site name and the keyword.

This is a manual process, where you can enter only one keyword and you do not know if there is a link to the page you would like to pump up. Therefore, there is the Link opportunities tool.

What Link opportunities do:
Collects 10 best (by traffic) keywords for the pages of your site.
2. Looks for mentions of these keywords on other pages of the site.
3. Shows the possibilities for placing internal links (only if the link is no longer there).

This is what this report looks like.

Potential internal links - Ahrefs Guide

The same functionality is available for free in Ahrefs and is called Webmaster Tools.

Average Frequency vs Monthly Keywords Frequency

One of the latest updates in Ahrefs is Average Frequency or Monthly Frequency for keywords.

Where does the traffic come from?
It is calculated quite simply – knowing the frequency of the keyword, the frequency of the number of clicks on the search results, then the number of clicks is distributed between the search results from the first to the nth position by the percentage of clicks.
The curve is not constant, and there is a curve for each keyword. The data depends on the data that was collected from different services. Summarizing this data of all keywords, the traffic that the site receives is calculated. All tools calculate the traffic that sites have received to date based on the average frequency, average search demand over 12 months, and subtract the estimated traffic that the site receives.
A lot of keywords are influenced by seasonality, trends, peaks and valleys. Therefore, the Ahrefs team added a value not only for the average frequency but also for the monthly frequency. There is a toggle that allows you to calculate the historical traffic of the site according to the trend graph of that keyword.

This is the picture of studying traffic while considering a trend. There is a special tab that allows you to do this, which is very important and useful for certain sites.

The same toggle is in the Top pages, where the shape of the graph changes completely.

Updated Referring Domains Report

The new report combines three old reports. In the picture you can see the status of links from this domain, it is either live, or a lost link, or it is lost during this period of time.

There have been added many filters for user convenience.

Here is an example of using these filters:

Only Do-follow backlinks
DR more than 40
Traffic of the donor-website bigger than 100
Links to the target website less than 3
Only new ones
For last 6 months
Only from content

Update of the Backlinks Report

First of all, Ahrefs team updated the speed of report appearance. For example, instead of 6 seconds, blog loads in 2 seconds. For larger sites, this is even more of a difference. The loading of reports has been accelerated by 3-5 times.

There is no longer any division into indices: “Live”, “Recent”, “Historical”. Now the indexes are merged, you can see the indexes of all reports. Instead, the links have a state that can be:
Newly published. This is when a new page was found with a link to a site that analyzes the page.
New. This is when a link was added to an existing page.
New restored. This means that at some point in time the link disappeared for some reason, and then reappeared on the page.

There is also a filter by link type.

Filter by the type of the acceptor content is a very useful thing. There are two options: linking to the html page or to other files and resources. Most of them will be links to an image. If you want to look at links to files and resources that have a different format, then in two clicks you’ve got a Backlist report.

The whole set of filters is also present for the backlinks report. The metric to pay attention to is the number of links to other sites from the page. The following formula applies here: the more pages a page links to, the more PageRank is scattered and the less PageRank goes to each page from which the page links. It means that it is better to get links from pages that link to a small number of other sites, then your site will have more weight and bonus. This filter can be applied directly to the report.

Traffic Data from Google Search Console

In order for you to receive data, you need to confirm ownership of the site through the Google Search Console. Ahrefs will keep this data for longer than 16 months. On one page you can see all traffic graphs for all sites, projects that you run. More updates are planned related to backlinks and traffic.

Ahrefs Toolbar

This extension is not entirely new, just redesigned. There is a list of question that Toolbar can help to find the answer to.

For ex. the results in the USA are ranked from the German blog. Ahrefs Toolbar now has such a function as a search simulator from other countries. It will not replace searching from another country, but it will become a fairly accurate and useful simulation. The issue depends not only on the country, but also on the language of your system. And here is an example of a search simulation for Backlinks for the US but in German on the standard domain Google.com. You can find that the articles of the German blog are ranked in the top.

We described main changes added to Ahrefs tools and reports in several last months. Hope it help you to skyrocket your organic traffic and define SEO possibilities clearly in 2022.

By Natural Links

How do I become rich doing the job for free? Ask Matthew Woodward, one of the rising stars of the SEO market. Matthew runs his UK-based business online and shows fantastic results. The secret to his success is his valuable content. By publishing it for free, Matthew demonstrates his overwhelming expertise in SEO and digital marketing and, in this way, attracts prominent names. Let us investigate his bio and blog and find the value for ourselves.

Who Is Matthew Woodward?

Specialization: Author, Entrepreneur, Marketing, Blogger

Website: Matthew Woodward: Award Winning SEO Blog

Social: Twitter, Youtube

Matthew Woodward is a real rock star and a man of great abilities among the numerous SEO famous names. Just read the bio he provides on the site.

2006 – Matthew W starts working

2009 – starts his blog

2012 – wins the award The Best Of SearchEngineJournal.com

2013 – wins Pro Blogger One to Watch and three other rewards

2021 – Matthew is one of the “must-know” names on the digital marketing and search engine optimization market, and he is 26.

Speaking about his success, Matthew W says he always needs “something to chew“. Well, now he, with his team, chews on the big brands, providing consulting services on everything related to digital marketing. It seems there is no topic he can professionally discuss. However, he is better known for his tutorials and guides on digital marketing, – detailed, helpful, and available for free. Matthew follows the principle, “Do what you love best, and you’ll not work a single day more.”

He is a living example of making money with a blog. Besides, he shows how to create shareable content and get natural links from forums and blogs. So, Matthew is a person of interest to everybody who works in the digital marketing niche.

Matthew Woodward’s Website: A Brief

Matthew Woodward’s website’s home page looks a little bit overloaded with information, but at the same time, it can be a paradise for those who are looking for information. Matthew introduces himself in a video and provides the selected videos from his YouTube channel – case studies, educational videos, helpful tips, etc. You can also find testimonials from the clients, subscription buttons, and many internal links.

Of course, Woodward advertises the services of his SEO agency on the site:

Fully Managed SEO
E-Commerce SEO
Technical Audits
Penalty Removal
“Partner With US” (A referral program)

Besides, he offers training – paid and free – and promotes the partner products. As a professional in Natural Links building, I can put the highest mark on LinkThatRank service. They explain their methods of work and even provide the calculator for the link profile. The price is also impressive, though. However, the real jewels are hidden in the SEO section.

In one of his interviews, Matthew mentions the dozens of websites that copy information from each other and give outdated advice. Woodward provides only original, valuable, and well-written content.

Besides, he has accumulated his SEO experience over the years, and his reviews reveal the main evolution processes in digital marketing.

Speaking about the history of SEO, among the recent products, I am impressed with the article The 1 Million Domain Test – Ahrefs vs Majestic SEO [Huge Update].

In 2013, Matthew conducted the research of the best link checker – a useful tool for checking broken and malicious links. In 2021, he repeated this research. Spoiler: in both cases, Ahrefs won first place, but the study itself and findings are worth reading.

The last section I want to talk about is called Work. You will not find the open positions in Matthew’s team here. It is a real treasure for new freelancers.

It is a collection of guidelines and ideas, and not all of them are related to SEO. For example, Woodward provides instructions on work on Fivver, – popular UK freelance service. When somebody provides a lot of training and tutorials on a special skill, there is a risk of nurturing future competitors.

However, Matthew sincerely believes that the Internet is limitless and there is enough jobs for everyone. Besides, he knows that most of the skills require long periods of repetitive action, which is not for everyone. Many people would prefer hiring somebody instead of doing this, and Woodward is open to propositions.

Contribution to the SEO Community

Above, I mentioned three main channels Woodward addresses to his audience: his website, YouTube channel, and Twitter. Frankly, all three platforms are closely integrated, so we can consider them as a single product, educational and promotional. What else Matthew W offers to the SEO community, together with his brilliant articles and videos, is the learning courses. For now, there are a few courses available:

My Free Link Building Training Will Show You How – available as a webinar.

and How To Build A Successful Blog In 7 Days – email course.

Besides, you can subscribe to regular emails and get useful tips and advice via email. Of course, it cannot go without mentioning the site of Matthew’s agency SEO Logistics.

If you want to compete with SEO Logistics, investigate their website, especially case studies. At least, you can see the nice format.

Wrapping Up

Matthew Woodward has become a big name for all digital marketing professionals. Many newcomers entered this professional field via his blog, full of helpful guides and articles. In knowledge-sharing, he is probably ‘the best in the class.’ Hundreds of grateful followers can confirm this.

Woodward also offers some SEO-related services via his own agency, Search Logistics. According to his claims, Search Logistics is a team of SEO professionals ready to face any SEO challenge, from the general website development strategy to the removal of Google sanctions.

Some skeptics say Woodward’s agency has a little turnover – in the numbers of backlinks.

I just want to remind you that you may order high-quality Natural Links from us.

Disclaimer: this article is aimed at sharing one of the most famous SEO career stories. This is not intended to demonstrate any affiliation or relation of a described personality to NL Tech or any part of Natural Links and its affiliates. Glenn Gabe is a specialized author, marketer, entrepreneur, and blogger. His contributions to the SEO community directly reflect his extensive experience of more than 25 years in digital marketing. He has held leading positions in various reputable companies, developed strong SEO-related knowledge, and helped his customers boost their online visibility.

The following sections cover who Glenn Gabe is and his contribution to the SEO community.

Specialization: Author, Entrepreneur, Marketer, and Blogger
Website: Glenn Gabe
Social: Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn

Who Is Glenn Gabe?

Glenn Gabe has been working in digital marketing for more than 25 years. He has more recently been dedicating his time to helping various companies enhance their organic ranking on search engines.

Glenn is currently an SEO consultant at G-Squared Interactive, aiding his customers in a broad range of SEO-related areas, including audits, training, and many more. He has worked in numerous industries, including finance, e-commerce, publishing, real estate, and even the military. His passion for the web debuted at an early stage. After graduating from college, he was one of the few lucky participants in a presentation at the IBM conference center. It was conducted by a marketing professional regarding the best-performing retail companies in the US. Although many participants left the room, Glenn was attracted.

He knew back then that the Internet would turn into a decisive force for the marketing and advertising industries, so he wanted to be a part of the change as soon as possible.

Career

For almost a decade, Glenn worked for the Perrier Group of America, now known as Nestle Waters. He focused on creating and improving websites, and applications. He also worked more as new technologies appeared on the market, such as PHP, Flash, SQL, and others. He contributed to several Nestle Waters divisions’ well-being, especially those whose performance was staggering.

In 2001, Glenn Gabe established G-Squared Interactive LLC, a firm aimed at helping other businesses take advantage of state-of-the-art technologies for marketing and advertising purposes. He developed an e-marketing platform, known as Heighten Marketing Technology, focusing on teaching customers to use a flash video application to boost their revenues. It also tracked critical activities in a .NET back-end.

As a result, Heighten proved a success for different verticals. They included video production services, online auctions, health, fitness, etc. As his company’s list of customers continued to grow considerably due to the increasing popularity of the Internet, he was required to provide services beyond video-based marketing. The new demands turned his focus to areas such as SEO, Social Media Marketing, and others. In addition, he started to include web analytics packages in his work.

About Glenn Gabe’s Blogging Career

Glenn Gabe is a passionate blogger. He is the talented writer behind G-Squared Interactive’s blog, the Internet Marketing Driver, which discusses SEO strategy’s latest practices. He explores a broad array of relevant topics for website owners who want to increase their traffic. For instance, he discusses Google Search Console rankings, the SERP feature, image migrations, and the complexity of broad core algorithm updates, among others.

He is also working at Search Engine Land, where he explores various subjects regarding advanced SEO. Previously, Glenn worked as a columnist for Search Engine Watch and Search Engine Journal.

Contribution to the SEO Community

Glenn started his SEO-based work early in his career. He worked for Yellowbook, a website with almost 20 million web pages that was based in Philadelphia. He was in charge of all their SEO-related operations. He was the Vice President and Director of Search Strategy at McCann Relationship Marketing Worldwide, a global agency headquartered in New York City. In addition, he held several key leadership positions for the US Army and Lunesta, among others.

Moreover, he helped craft search capabilities at a global level, as McCann Relationship Marketing was working in more than 30 countries worldwide. Finally, Glenn offers SEO training via a course he developed. This covers a wide range of highly relevant topics, as it was designed to provide precious help to business owners, designers, marketing professionals, and developers.

The course helps various professionals develop a solid understanding of SEO, and enhance traffic. It also boosts the visibility of their products and services in search engine results. His “Last Year in Search” presentation covers the last 12 months of changes in the Search industry. It’s always updated with the hottest trends, helping site owners stay up to speed on the latest Google changes.

There is an abundance of information that tackles the latest changes, how these could impact companies, and how they affect the bottom line.

Other Useful Resources

Glenn has developed numerous resources for the SEO community. Some examples include:

The article helps to improve Web Story tracking and analyze user progress through the story; this leads to a better understanding of user engagement, finally leading to improved traffic
The case study discusses the problem caused by handling robots.txt files by both protocol and subdomain, which can result in conflicting crawling instructions
One more useful article that explains why mobile organic search traffic remained strong in comparison to desktop
The content piece that approaches the discrepancies between impressions and positions in Google Search Console
The article that approaches the differences in performance when comparing desktop to mobile
The article discusses how long site owners can wait until images lose signals after flawed URL migration; too much elapsed time results in the fact that the URLs have to build up rankings just like new ones for web search

Conclusion

Glenn Gabe has made a substantial contribution to the SEO community. Apart from his interest in the web, which debuted more than 25 years ago, he has employed a unique mindset to address his clients’ needs. He associates specialized skills with marketing and sales expertise to handle all of his projects with a professional attitude.

This article highlights and provides an in-depth look into the life and career of Dr. Marie Haynes, as she has made significant contributions to the world of SEO. Marie is a leader and entrepreneur in the SEO world who helps new websites engage to their utmost capacity and potential. Marie has played a vital role in establishing the idea that SEO can be a stable and relevant career path. Before we take a deeper look into Marie’s personality, let’s take a quick look at her profile.

Specialization: Author, Entrepreneur, Marketer, and Blogger
Website: Marie Haynes
Social: Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube

Who Is Dr. Marie Haynes?

Dr. Marie Haynes is an author, businesswoman, blogger, and accomplished Search Engine Optimization practitioner. Marie is the grandmaster of SEO and is recognized for tackling Google’s Penguin algorithm. She holds extensive knowledge in site traffic management and site engagement.

As an entrepreneur, she is the founder of Marie Haynes Consulting, helping businesses improve their online presence and ranking on search engines. Dr. Haynes also regularly updates her followers on Twitter with the latest information and general advice on SEO and digital marketing.

Dr. Marie Haynes’s Blogging Career

Before becoming a leader in the SEO industry, Marie earned a medical degree from the University of Guelph. Marie discovered the SEO community in 2008 while gearing up for the launch of her website. Marie soon became curious as to why her site was getting less traffic than its competitors.

Out of sheer interest, she figured out Google’s Penguin algorithm, becoming one of the very few to do so. Suddenly, Marie witnessed her website visitor count magnify from 100 to a massive 12,000 in less than a day, owing solely to her research surrounding algorithms.

Marie decided to apportion the information she had learned by providing advice, interviews, and articles to help other site owners rank on search engines, manage traffic, and break the algorithm. With time, the demand for her services and expertise grew as more and more people wanted Marie to help them rank on search engines and optimize their websites.

Eventually, Marie established her own company by the name of Marie Haynes Consulting, Inc. Marie hired and trained a team of experts to help her tackle the considerable demand for SEO services.

In addition to being an entrepreneur, she has written numerous articles for Search Engine Watch and Search Engine Land about Google algorithms. Dr. Haynes has been featured in Forbes, as well as other top business magazines.

Books and Podcasts

She authored an informative book, Unnatural Links: The Complete Guide to Recovery, which provides information on unnatural penalty links and link evaluation to improve site traffic.

Due to her significant list of achievements and broad mastery of SEO, Marie is a frequent honorable guest at conventions like Pubcon and SMX. She has used her established position in the SEO community to further her career. She expanded her reach on several platforms accessible to a wider range of people and not just those present in the SEO community.

In addition to her book, Dr. Haynes has also published case-study-backed SEO data in her Google’s Quality Raters’ Guidelines and Medical Consensus whitepaper. Her research is in-depth and highly informative, containing tips for establishing and improving Google’s trust in medical-based websites. In addition to her work as an author and consultant, Marie also hosts her very own podcast that provides updates on current affairs in the search engine community and offers personal input, opinions, and valuable information on improving website quality. She hosts this podcast alongside individuals who play essential roles in her field of work, such as John Mueller from Google.

What Is Her Contribution to the SEO Industry?

Dr. Marie Haynes has been a regular contributor to the SEO community by keeping it updated on any developments in search engine optimization. She has also created a list of changes that affect traffic to websites, which significantly helps both established and new websites keep track of and increase their audience engagement.

This list holds excellent value, as it engages websites to show up on search engines more frequently and puts sites on the internet “map.” Alongside these efforts, Marie has also created a full guide on E-A-T (Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness) and SEO.

This concept is explained in great depth with informative quotas in Google’s Quality Raters’ Guidelines. Dr. Marie Haynes frequently describes how the E-A-T concept holds critical importance in ensuring a site’s success, both locally and professionally, as it provides more visitor interaction, as well as a front for Google to intercept in terms of website quality.

Dr. Haynes places a fair amount of importance and trust in it.

Dr. Marie Haynes: Useful Articles, Interviews, Videos, and Podcasts

As Dr. Marie Haynes holds great value in the SEO community, she has a robust online presence that contributes to her beliefs and opinions, which can help a website turn successful within days.

A few particularly poignant articles and interviews are:

1. Her SNYCU podcast with John Mueller

2. The article on the June 2020 Google update that gave information on traffic and visitor interaction with government sites

3. The article on taking a deep dive into evaluating and analyzing user interaction and its reasons to increase engagement and traffic

4. Her interview with Search Engine Watch on the E-A-T concept

5. Her interview on YouTube by SEMrushLive called 60 Minutes with Marie Haynes

6. Her article providing tips and advice on how to manage and keep data up to par during the Covid-19 pandemic

Conclusion

Dr. Marie Haynes’s contribution to the SEO industry is laudable. She is an expert in her field and has managed to do what many others have failed to accomplish. Marie plays an important role in helping website owners overcome any SEO challenges.