Building a SaaS SEO Strategy with Call Data

Any business with a call center can benefit from real-time agent-assist software. It can ease the load on the representatives, help them understand each customer better, and improve quality control. 

Agent-assisted software can also serve as an important source of internal data on the customers. For a B2B SaaS company with a long sales cycle, call data can inform your understanding of the ideal customer profile and customer journey. This can help you run a better sales funnel and convert more leads.

A deeper understanding of your customers and their needs translates to other areas of business. One of the most important ones is search engine optimization.

This guide will walk you through how SEO can be helped by customer insights, and how to improve SEO for SaaS companies with knowledge about your clients.

Why SaaS SEO Needs Real Customer Insights

SEO is the practice of optimizing your website to be in line with Google’s standards in terms of website speed and crawlability, as well as optimizing pages for keywords that correspond to them. The end goal is to have more pages appear in the top ten of relevant search results, attract more traffic, and ultimately, bring in more leads.

As Google’s algorithms change, though, and become smarter and better at understanding what is behind user requests, simple optimization techniques don’t cut it anymore. Adding the right keywords to a page is still essential, but it’s not enough to outcompete hundreds of other websites.

Especially for SaaS companies, since a lot of SEO for them is centered around educational content.

An ecommerce website typically does SEO for thousands of product pages, trying to optimize each in multiple areas.

SaaS companies typically don’t have many service pages apart from a couple of landing pages for different things they do. So the best way to do SEO for SaaS is to produce educational content focused on helping people in your industry. This content helps them discover your company and build trust with you before they’re even in the market for the product you sell.

For the type of SEO that relies heavily on content, it’s not enough to produce generic blogs and put in a few keywords. You need to understand what types of content your target audience is interested in, what their current level of understanding is, and what exact information they need.

This information can’t be based on an assumption on your part. It has to be backed with data.

Some of the data that’s going to be useful for content SEO efforts can be taken from Google Analytics. It gives you a better understanding of how people browse your site and how they convert.

Some can be found through SERP analysis. Looking through the articles that rank high on Google for your target keywords might give you a clue as to what users want to see in content.

But the real treasure trove of insights useful for SaaS SEO is call data analytics. Agent-assist software aims to have as complete a picture of your clients as possible. Its goal is to have the information on each individual client that can help an agent have a productive conversation with them.

When you extrapolate that data and find trends in it, you can have a better understanding of different customer profiles as a whole. This includes:

• Lead demographic data.
• Career stage data.
• The biggest challenges related to the industry.
• Current goals.
• Questions they have about the industry or the product.
• Objections to making a purchase.

A lot of this data is qualitative and needs interpretation, but taking your time to understand the conversations your leads are having with the agents will grant you a deeper understanding of the people you serve.

This will help you produce better SEO content for SaaS topics and attract more potential buyers.

What are the Main Challenges of SEO for SaaS Companies?

SEO can be very different for some industries, but no industry is devoid of its specific challenges in doing search engine optimisation. Here is how that manifests for SaaS businesses.

Longer Sales Cycles

SaaS software isn’t an impulse buy; it’s an investment, and a pricy one at times. This means the leads will take much longer to research the market and make the decision on what they want to invest in.

As a result, the average SaaS sales cycle in 2023 was around 50 days, with some reports putting the figure as high as 80. The higher the price and the more difficult the industry, the longer the cycle typically is.

What this means for SEO efforts is that more often than not, you won’t have many people looking to make a purchase right away, like with the beauty or clothing industry. 

Your main goals with SaaS SEO are going to be exposing your brand to new people and building trust with the leads by providing helpful information. Improving user trust can lead to shortening of the sales cycle by up to 33%, so it’s a positive feedback loop.

High-Intent but Low-Volume Keywords.

The majority of keyword research for SaaS will focus on informational keywords and will have a very small conversion rate. This means that, for the most part, you’ll deal with longer keywords, sometimes phrased as questions, and will have to find ways to combine multiple user requests into larger pieces of content.

On the side of transactional keywords, you’ll typically see a lot of long keywords with high user intent but very low volume. Most of the traffic will come from a few high-volume keywords that describe your services briefly, like “call center software.”

But not everybody knows the exact name for what they’re looking for, so you’ll see a lot of different long phrases that describe what you do. For instance, “software that helps call center agents,” or “an app that improves sales agents' performance.”

Finding those natural language phrases about the product you sell with conversational AI analytics is part of SaaS SEO.

Full-Funnel Content

Content that you produce for SEO doesn’t just serve to bring new people to your website and show that your company has expertise in the field. Your ultimate goal is conversion, so your SaaS SEO content strategy should help you retain the visitors and nudge them further down the sales funnel.

This doesn’t stop at a newsletter subscription form.

You should arrange your existing content by the stage of the sales funnel it fits best, and produce content with a specific sales funnel stage in mind. Mention how your product helps with solving the issues covered in content pieces and link between content strategically to move leads down the funnel.

The Growing Importance of Solution-Driven Content

As competition in SaaS SEO is quite high, the content has to adhere to a higher quality bar. Even though there’s a place for general overviews, it shouldn’t be the only type of content you produce.

The pieces that you expect to make an impact should be deep and solution-driven. This means, instead of presenting basic information on the topic, you go into the finer details of why and how something is done.

This puts more pressure on the marketing team to perform.

How to Conduct SaaS SEO Strategy Using Call Data Insights

The general idea of using call data to inform SEO strategy for SaaS is straightforward. Analyze it to understand your customers better, then form an SEO strategy around that newfound understanding.

Let’s look at some techniques and SaaS SEO tips to see how that template can play out in real-life scenarios.

Define Your SaaS Buyer Personas Using Call Conversations

Creating a buyer persona helps in every area of business, SEO included. Analyzing call conversations with machine learning analytics can help you create a more complete picture of who your potential customers are and what their needs are.

Specifically, you’ll be looking for knowledge gaps and typical problems they face. Analyze customer interactions with agents for common questions about the workflow your tool helps with. Find out whether there are areas that your leads aren’t skilled in. Find out whether there’s a common problem they face.

This information will help you build more detailed personas based on documented conversations, not just demographic data leads provide in a form. Use it to improve your content SEO strategy.

Map the Full Customer Journey Using Support Data

When you’re analyzing customer interactions, you can also supplement your existing data on the customer journey. You can track a lot of the journey with Google Analytics by finding patterns in user sessions, especially those that lead to a conversion.

Call data can show you what’s happening with the leads internally. If you can sort leads by their stage in the sales funnel, analyze their conversations separately to understand what’s on their mind at different stages.

Analyzing the most popular questions on each stage helps you to align content topics with the correct stage, both in terms of style and the depth of information that you need to provide.

Identify High-Intent, Low-Volume Keywords from Call Language

Finding short, high-volume keywords is relatively easy. Most SEO tools would show them to you right away. The challenge is finding the low-volume, high-intent keywords that can be easier to rank for and provide a good conversion rate.

A lot of them are phrased as questions. The best way to find those is to data mine call transcripts. The questions your leads are putting into search engines to find information that’s important to them are often the same questions they ask your agents.

Once you find enough phrases that might be potential keywords, vet them with a free keyword research tool. With the limited free credits, you can find long keywords that are similar to the phrase you’ve found in the call transcript and confirm that it has some search volume.

Finding keywords like these can give you an edge over the competition as you’ll be targeting high-intent search terms they overlook.

Cluster Topics Around Customer Pain Points

A deeper understanding of customer pain points can help you group helpful content together.

For instance, if a typical problem your leads have is scaling lead generation efforts, you can create a large guide that covers the topic in general and provides an overview of different methods. Then, create 5-10 articles that cover each method in detail.

When you do that and interlink those articles, you’re not only helping your leads. You’re building topical authority. Now that you’ve covered the most prominent points on scaling lead generation, Google will consider your company an expert in the topic and might boost all articles written on it.

Typically, you’ll find multiple large topics like these, and they require a lot of work to cover. Prioritize topics based on how frequently leads mention them in conversations. Those are probably the most important ones to them and will attract more traffic.

Include Helpful Content in SaaS SEO Content Strategy

Call data insights don’t just inform the clustering of topics. You can use them to create content ideas and understand what exactly users want to see in each content piece.

Come up with content that addresses real issues revealed in calls. These can be top-of-the-funnel issues that involve a lack of knowledge in strategies or techniques used. It can also be a bottom-of-the-funnel issue that involves the practical use of your software.

Tailor the guides you create to the leads’ level of understanding and specific concerns they have.

Frequent questions you receive from customers are also useful for improving landing and FAQ pages. Address concerns you often see in call transcripts to improve landing page conversion.

Optimize for Voice and Conversational Search

The share of voice searches remains high and grows steadily. The best way to optimize your website for voice searches is by including natural language phrases, and call data analytics is one of the best ways to find phrases like these.

Look for questions related to the topic, and include them in the text to improve the odds of the page appearing for voice searches.

Improve On-Page, Off-Page, and Technical SEO Based on FAQs

Technical optimization mostly involves simply following a SaaS SEO checklist. Questions and topics that are frequently brought up in interactions with agents can inform areas of SEO other than keyword optimization and content creation, including technical SEO.

Based on common misunderstandings and objections, you can create better meta tags—information about your website page that is displayed on search engine results pages (SERPs). This can help improve click-through rate.

You can create internal linking patterns based on the association between topics, both thematically and by being on the same stage of the sales funnel. This improves the time users spend on your site and its crawlability.

The most pressing and complex questions your leads and customers have can be turned into hands-on content that attracts backlinks. Templates, checklists, eBooks, case studies, and statistics can build a positive brand image and earn dozens of links from other sites.

Distribute and Promote SEO Content via Customer Support Channels

Producing high-quality content is the hardest part. But it’s not the only one. To get the initial surge of users on the page and earn social shares and backlinks in the process, you need to distribute and promote your content.

Sharing it on social media and in relevant online discussions is important, but you can reap even more results if you use support channels to distribute it.

Asking the agents to talk about your most recent article to every caller is a stretch, but you absolutely suggest high-quality educational content when the context calls for it. For instance, if a lead is unsure about handling a specific process, you can suggest a knowledge base entry, a detailed guide, a checklist, or a webinar of yours that covers it.

You can also share content pieces in the newsletter and link to relevant content in the knowledge base.

Continuously Analyze New Call Data for SEO Updates

As with most things in marketing, once you have improved your SEO strategy based on the insights from call data, you don’t stop there. The next step is monitoring call transcripts monthly or quarterly and looking for new trends and patterns in the data.

You’re looking for new topics that customers are interested in, new additions to the topics you’ve already covered, and new issues they might be having. When you find one, go ahead and update your existing content based on new information.

This allows you to stay ahead competition as you cover new trends as soon as your target audience picks them up.

Potential Pitfalls and How to Avoid Them

Large-scale data analytics comes with its issues. These three are the most common ones in call data analytics.

Data Privacy and Consent Issues

As the world moves towards more responsible data collection and usage practices, you need to approach data governance more carefully. Both from ethical considerations and to comply with legislation.

Thankfully, it’s not a new territory, and there are common best practices for data collection and analytics.

• Always get explicit consent for recording calls.
• Do not record or store sensitive information in call transcripts.
• Provide a way for clients to access their data.
• Delete the data upon request.
• Store call data in an encrypted format.
• Provide security training for employees.

These practices, as well as following GDPR, HIPAA, CCPA, and other legislation related to data privacy, ensure that your customers’ data is safe.

Noise vs Signal

Another common problem in data analytics is confusing random data for something worthwhile. It’s easy to discover something interesting, believe in it, and follow the lead that ends up being completely wrong.

Remember that you’re looking for trends and patterns, not standalone instances of using a phrase or a question.

Scaling Analytics

Unlike quantitative data, numbers that can be easily manipulated in a spreadsheet, qualitative data, like call transcripts, needs a lot of effort to analyze. In the past couple of years, scaling analytics has become affordable thanks to AI-based natural language processing tools.

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Now, instead of searching for keywords in text with an algorithm, you can instruct the AI to analyze the transcripts, look for specific patterns in them, and summarize the findings. 

Summary

Agent-assist software can greatly improve the productivity of agents and lead to more conversions. The data you can gather from the calls can give you a more detailed understanding of your ideal customer profile and their customer journey.

Use this understanding to improve all areas of SEO for SaaS companies, and above all else, the content you produce for it, and you’ll bring more leads to your sales funnel.