For many SaaS companies, technical SEO takes the backseat. Most organizations focus on hands-on SEO activities, such as content creation and backlinking. 

However, your SEO efforts won’t pay off unless your technical SEO is on point.

It’s like buying a lottery ticket: you can only win if you buy the ticket in the first place. 

Technical SEO should be a priority at the start of SEO projects.

It’s the foundation of everything - if it’s off, no one will be able to find your amazing content. 

The problem is that many SaaS companies take a reactive approach to technical SEO. This means they only start worrying about it when they migrate or when their traffic tanks (or never goes up in the first place).

Most of the time, their traffic analytics show them that something has gone wrong - and only then do they realize it needs to be fixed. 

Moreover, once they perform a detailed SEO audit, they focus on fixing the things that have low to no impact on their rankings. With technical SEO, 20% of the work yields 80% of the results.

So, in this article, we’ll uncover the truth about SaaS technical SEO that few people talk about.

We’ll share why SaaS companies should focus on technical SEO from the very beginning and what technical SEO aspects have a real impact on their rankings. 

What is Technical SEO & Why Is It So Important? 

Before we jump into the technicalities, let’s first explain what technical SEO is and why you should care about it from the beginning, whether you’re a B2B or a B2C SaaS business. 

Technical SEO is the process of ensuring that your website is properly structured, configured, and optimized for search engines so that they can successfully crawl and index your site’s pages.

The goal here is to ensure search engines can read and understand your site’s content so that it ranks for relevant keywords in SERPs.

For SaaS companies, this means making sure your website is easy for users to find and use on desktop, mobile, and tablet devices.

‍It also means you need to make sure Google understands the structure of your site, so it can display the right results when someone searches for your product or service.

Technical SEO can be a complex and intimidating topic, but the good news is that it’s not rocket science.

In fact, with a bit of basic knowledge of how search engines work, you can make some crucial improvements to your site that will help it perform in search.

Truth: Few Technical SEO Actions Have a Real Impact

Technical SEO is a big topic.

And it’s, well… technical. 

There are many moving pieces and different ways to approach it. 

But there are really a few core impact items and actions that can actually move the needle. I see many companies spending thousands of dollars on technical SEO and getting no results from it.

In fact, I've seen this happen more often than not.

The reason is that over 90% of the technical SEO items that companies often focus on have a low to no impact on their ranking results. 

I'm not saying this is true for every technical SEO consultant, but most of them focus on implementing tactics that have no real impact on your business.

These things are just unnecessary fluff.

Think of it this way: the job of technical SEO is to make sure Google can find, understand, and ultimately index and rank your website.

One big thing here is consistency: we want to be as consistent as possible, and fix as many small things as possible.

Most websites don't suffer from big tech SEO issues (that happens, but it's not the usual thing).

What most websites have is a large number of small issues.

None of them are problematic by themselves.

But they all add up.

If you to a restaurant and the bread is bad, that's fine.

If the bread is bad AND the waiter/waitress is a pain, that's even worse.

If the bread is bad, the waiter/watress is a pain, AND the place if filthy, it's starting to get annoying.

If the bread is bad, the waiter/watress is a pain, the place is filthy, AND the food makes you puke the next day ... that's an effin bad restaurant.

The same goes for websites

Core Technical SEO Items for SaaS Businesses

Most modern CMS are pretty good at tech SEO out of the box.

If your website runs on a popular CMS, such as WordPress or Webflow, you’ll only need to focus on a few core technical SEO items to improve your search results. 

Here are some core technical items that every SaaS business should address.

Site speed

Site speed is of the technical SEO aspects that matter the most, as it can affect a website’s bounce rate, conversion rate, and ranking in Google search results. 

A one-second delay in page load time can result in a 4.42% decrease in conversions. And according to Google Consumer Insights, if a website takes more than 3 seconds to load on a mobile device, 53% of visitors will abandon it. 

So, one of the main things to focus on when fixing your technical SEO issues is to make sure your site loads quickly. If it takes too long for your website to load, users will leave and go elsewhere — especially since they're likely on a mobile device, where speeds are even more critical. 

While many variables affect site speed, such as server load time, network latency, and image size, it’s important to keep your site fast by optimizing images and reducing HTTP requests. 

Site speed is more of a tiebreaker, but the business impacts can be huge, which is why it's at the top of the list.

Crawlability & indexability

Another equally important technical SEO factor you should get right before you even worry about content or backlinks is your site’s crawlability and indexability. 

Having a crawlable and indexable site is one of the most important things you can do as an SEO. 

A poorly crawlable website will not rank well because Google can’t see it or understand it properly. The same is true for indexability — if your pages are not indexable, they won't rank. Period.

In other words, if Google's crawler can't access your site, then it won't be able to index it — and if it's not indexed, then no one will be able to find it!

Mobile optimization

As surprising as it may seem, your site’s mobile optimization plays a huge role in your SEO efforts. Google has been steadily increasing its focus on mobile-friendly sites and pages. That’s because over 50% of Google’s traffic comes from mobile devices. 

Google has moved to mobile-first indexing, meaning it primarily looks at the mobile version of pages (not desktop ones).

Nowadays it's better to have a very good mobile version than a very good desktop one.

Of course, you can have both.

HTTPS

The use of HTTPS is a must for any website that collects any type of user data. HTTPS (Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure) is a secure version of HTTP, the protocol over which data is sent between your website and users' browsers.

When it comes to SEO, HTTPS has two significant advantages. First, it provides a secure connection between your website and visitors' browsers. Second, Google has confirmed that HTTPS is now a ranking signal that they use in their algorithm to determine the quality of a site.

This is not such a big issue nowadays as most hosting companies allow their users to enable HTTPS in just a few clicks. 

Canonical URLs

Another crucial technical SEO aspect to focus on is canonical URLs.

Canonical tags allow us to signal to search engines which page is ... well ... "canonical".

I.e. which page is the "true and trusted" version of itself.

This is very useful when several pages have the same content by design, but you only want to show one of them in search.

The main scenario for this is eCommerce product pages, but canonical tags can also be used for partner pages (if you use a URL structure like /page/partner-name/ to create a branded partner version of a page), and each page should be "self-referencing".

International SEO

International SEO is a very important aspect of the larger picture — especially if you sell to clients or customers outside your home country. 

It’s not just about translating your content into other languages so people can read it. It’s about ensuring that your website has a proper structure to rank for keywords in multiple languages and locations.

This may be complex, but it boils down to one of three things: 

• Creating a separate website targeting each country with its own domain name and hosting. 
• Creating subdomains for multiple languages and locations and optimizing the content and metadata of subdomains to target each country separately.
• Letting all languages exist under one domain, each separated into its own subfolder. 

International SEO also has implications for companies with content in the same language but for different locations - such as /uk/ and /us/ subfolders.

Title tags and meta descriptions

Meta titles and descriptions are one of many important technical SEO items that you need to take care of. These two fields will be used by search engines when they display your website in SERPs.

These are the core aspects of on-page SEO that should be addressed for each page separately. 

Meta titles and meta descriptions can have an impact on whether or not your site ranks in the SERPs, so you need to pay extra attention to optimizing them properly for every single page on your website.

The reason I'm mentioning them in the tech SEO part is the "consistency" thing.

If only a third of your pages have metadata, it doesn't send a great signal.

Conclusion: Focus on technical SEO from day one!

You cannot build a house without foundation.

Similarly, you cannot expect your site to rank high in search engines if you haven’t set up a proper foundation. 

Technical SEO is the backbone of a strong SEO strategy for a multitude of reasons. To rank your site in search engines, you need to start with technical SEO before you worry about content creation or backlinking. 

The truth is that technical SEO is easy to overlook but vital to the long-term success of your business when it comes to ranking in search engines. So, make sure not to ignore it!