SEO Segmentation: The Role of SEO in Enhancing SaaS Outbound Lead Quality

More engagement. Better engagement. More leads. Better leads. More conversions. Customer loyalty. These are the things every modern SaaS brand wants—but how to get them?

SEO segmentation is one answer. It can play an important part in a successful lead-generation strategy, improving the quality of your leads, making sure your content ends up in front of the right sets of eyes, boosting the user experience, raising your conversion rate, and more.

So, let’s look at what SEO segmentation is, how it works, and how your SaaS company can use it to your advantage.

What is SEO segmentation?

Considering your audience and how to target them is a crucial point on any SaaS SEO checklist and this is where segmentation comes in. 

Segmentation is a tried-and-tested marketing technique that involves dividing a brand’s audience into segments based on things like interests, demographic information, pain points, and so on. 

The idea is to be able to target different segments intensively based on these common data points rather than sending out more generalized marketing to your entire customer base.

SEO (search engine optimization) is all about using content techniques, including (but not limited to) keywords and backlinking.  

Any good SaaS content marketing agency will put segmentation at the heart of its SEO strategy. Search engine optimization is key for driving awareness of and interest in your company’s products, thereby creating leads. By using segmentation strategies, you’re more likely to attract high-quality leads that will convert, recommend, and come back again and again.

What are the benefits of segmenting for SEO?

Segmenting for SEO has many benefits. Here are just a few of them.

It improves targeting

Tailoring your SEO to specific segments allows you to hone your targeting. Rather than using more general keywords designed to appeal to a broad range of searchers, you can disseminate highly targeted content to generate specific leads with specific needs.

But what’s the benefit here? Surely, if more general search engine optimization brings in the same amount of searchers, it’s just as good as more segmented, targeted SEO? 

Well, it’s all about the quality of the leads generated.

Look at it from the point of view of the customer. If you run a search for something and get a load of fairly generic results, you’re likely to scroll and click around for a while until you find something that fits your needs. 

But if one of the results gives you exactly what you’re looking for, is precisely tailored to your needs, and speaks in language that appeals to you, the search is over. You’ll click straight onto that site and, if it fulfills the promise of the search snippet, you’re likely to convert there and then.

Segmented SEO delivers the latter kind of lead. It speaks directly to each of your audience segments, which ultimately brings greater engagement and a higher conversion rate.

It improves the user experience

Segmented SEO ultimately gives your users a better experience too. Search engine optimization is, in principle, about making your website and content more visible to potential leads and customers. In the process, however, you tend to end up personalizing your marketing in ways that both generate leads and improve the general user experience.

Say, for example, that you’re optimizing your pages for an older demographic. Your keyword research will likely reveal that they prefer more straightforward search terms, perhaps choose full sentences rather than individual keywords, and rarely use slang. They may also be more likely to use voice search or to require web content to be read out to them by a device.

These are useful insights that you can use to not only craft highly optimized content that brings in leads but also to make your website and content more accessible to your target users. In the above example, you could alter the language featured on your pages to be more comprehensible for an older audience, and make sure that all text can be read clearly by a device like Alexa or Google Home.

It boosts ROI

By bringing in high-quality leads to a website/page that’s perfectly optimized for their needs, you can vastly improve your conversion rate as well. 

Segmented SEO is a cost-effective way of improving both the quality and quantity of leads. It also ensures that they stay on your pages longer, bounce less, convert more, and stay loyal to your brand. All of this means a big boost for your profit margins.

Something as simple as rewriting a web page can make a huge difference to your conversion rates, making good SEO one of the biggest ROI wins out there.

How to do market segmentation and SaaS SEO

Here’s how to go about building a well-crafted, tightly-segmented SEO campaign for your SaaS business.

Create well-defined customer personas

It’s often helpful to build customer personas for segmentation and SEO. This is a facsimile of a customer that can be used for marketing, search engine optimization, and customer relations.

Here’s an example of a typical customer persona. ‘Naomi’ does not exist, but she has attributes that are similar to a sizable segment of your customers and potential customers.

Creating personas like Naomi helps you group consumers into identifiable segments based on characteristics they have in common. This is a huge help when it comes to crafting SEO content for different demographics.

When building customer personas, think about the following:

• Basic demographic information (age, gender, etc)
• Where the customer is based
• The customer’s job role, and what they need from SaaS that could make that job easier
• The customer’s skills, and how SaaS could augment/complement these
• Their interests
• The kind of language they use
• The kind of content that will appeal to them
• The problems they face in their work, and how your SaaS solution could solve these
• Anything else that’s particularly relevant for your product

Work out your segmentation criteria

The segments you use for your segmented SEO will vary from campaign to campaign. It all depends on who you’re trying to reach and what you’re trying to achieve.

For example, if you want to reach more young professionals, it may be a good idea to create segments targeting certain professions, such as social media managers, junior graphic designers, and so on. 

Go back to your strategic aims and goals if you’re not sure how to define your segments. If you have clear ambitions, you should be better able to determine who to target to achieve these.

Use your data to group customers into relevant segments

Ideally, you’ll already have collected and analyzed plenty of data to help you create customer personas and group them within these. Now, it’s time to go back to that data and use it to segment them.

Assign a relevant segment to each of the personas you’re targeting in your campaign. The segment each customer is in will determine the kind of SEO you’ll use for their targeted content marketing.

You don’t have to have one segment per persona. If appropriate, you can put several personas in each segment. 

For example, if you’re running a geo-targeted campaign to try and get more leads from Chicago, and more than one persona is based in Chicago, by all means, put all the Chicago personas into that geo-segment. The important thing is to ensure that your content and targeting remain relevant to all the personas within a segment. 

If you have several clashing personas within a segment, it might be a good idea to create sub-segments for closer targeting.

Remember, segments aren’t set in stone. They’re a tool to help you reach your customers and meet their needs. You can switch them around, alter your strategy, and do anything else that helps you get the formula right.

Pinpoint target keywords and SEO trends

It’s time to get down to the nuts and bolts of SEO. Pinpoint the kinds of keywords and SEO trends and tactics that will get the best results for each of your segments.

If you’ve studied and analyzed your customer data to build your personas, you’ll already have a good idea of why they might need your software, the problems it could solve for them, what they’re looking for in a solution, and so on. Now’s the time to figure out how they’d search for these things on the internet.
If you know the kinds of topics and issues your personas will look for, you can use a keyword tool to find commonly searched terms within those subject areas. There are plenty of these out there, many of which are free. There are also many AI SEO tools that use machine learning algorithms to analyze vast amounts of data, helping you refine your segmented SEO strategy for optimal results.

Create content optimized for each segment

By this point, you should have:

• A set of well-defined customer personas
• SEO segments targeting specific personas
• A list of relevant subject areas that your segments may be searching for and the keywords accompanying these

Now, it’s time to start creating content optimized for your segments. The targeted audience in various defined SEO segments would expect original and valuable content from you. However, due to the vast amount of content available in every single niche, there are chances of accidental plagiarism.  An effective solution to avoid this issue is to use a plagiarism checker with an advanced algorithm and an extensive database. Such a tool will easily help you check plagiarism in the underlying text.

However, if you still feel that content creation and optimization is skilled, time-consuming work, even if you’ve laid out all the research and groundwork meticulously. To save time and get the best results, you might want to consider employing one of the many B2B SEO agencies that are out there. They’ll have the skills and experience necessary to:

• Run an SEO audit of your pages, content, marketing channels, etc
• Undertake in-depth keyword and content analysis for your brand
• Optimize your pages for well-targeted SEO
• Create and place perfectly optimized, well-segmented SEO content
• Implement effective content marketing strategies that align with your segmented SEO efforts
• Track and report back on campaign progress on an ongoing basis

In addition to these step-by-step guide, it’s crucial to complement your segmented SEO strategy with effective outreach emails. These can help you establish connections, promote your tailored content, and engage with your target audience.

Use SEO segmentation to bring in the best leads

SEO segmentation is one of the many ways you can enhance your outbound lead generation.  It can bring in lots of high-quality new leads, encourages customer loyalty, and gives fantastic ROI. 

By optimizing your pages and content with particular personas and segments in mind, you can hone your targeting and make your content irresistible to potential customers. 

For the very best results, it can be a good idea to hire a professional agency. They won’t just write search-engine-optimized content for you; they’ll also audit your current SEO, dig deep into your data, analyze your target audience, and produce the perfect strategy for your brand.

Bio:

Nick Brown – accelerate agency

Nick Brown is the founder & CEO of accelerate agency, the SaaS SEO growth agency. Nick has launched several successful online businesses, writes for Forbes, published a book and has grown accelerate from a UK-based agency to a company that now operates across US, APAC and EMEA.