If you plan to sell your SaaS company, you must perform your SEO due diligence. Having a solid SEO foundation in place for your SaaS website can help you fetch top dollar for your business. In this post, Ane Wiese, SEO Lead at saas.group offers advice on how you can do SEO diligence for your SaaS business. But first, it’s important to understand exactly why SEO is important for your SaaS website. There’s much more to it than generating traffic…
Why is SEO important for selling a SaaS company?
In addition to the more widely known benefits of SEO, such as increased traffic, heightened brand awareness, and increased visibility among your target audience in search engines, SEO also offers the following advantages for SaaS companies:
- Raise interest and sales. Search engines can be helpful tools for potential buyers who are on the lookout for SaaS businesses to acquire. If your website ranks well for business- and product-related keywords, you will be more likely to show up in their search results and get their attention. If someone searches for a main keyword related to your business and you come up in the results, it means that your SEO is working.
- Help you raise the price you are asking.SaaS businesses with a solid SEO foundation can command a premium price from willing buyers. This is because optimizing it further will cost them less. When you have to save a domain that has used a lot of "black-hat" SEO techniques, things are very different. Or to rewrite every page of the website because the current content has nothing to do with the product (it brings investors, but they are not the right people to sell to).
- Simply put, increased traffic and sales are the results of diligent website optimization.
- It might contribute to fostering trust and assurance. When potential customers see that your website has been properly optimized, it will increase their faith in your company and make them more likely to move forward with the transaction. The opposite will occur if theydiscover that you have used SEO tactics to make your website appear successful.It will appear that you did this to inflate your numbers in order to sell. Yourpotential buyers might think you are trying to trick them.
So, what exactly is SEO due diligence?
- SEO due diligence is the process of measuring a website's “SEO health”, share of voice in search, and ranking potential.
- It involves inspecting the website for technical errors, evaluating content quality, and reviewing off-page factors.
- The ultimate goal is to detect any potential problems that could be hindering the website's reach and share of voice in search engines.
- It’s to determine the quality of the website traffic, if it's reaching the desired target audiences, and how much work it will take to grow the brand further in search results.
How do you do SEO due diligence?
Hereare some checks that you can do to measure your SEO due diligence:
- Do a SEO website audit to determine if there are any performance issues that will affect how users will interact with your web pages. For example, test how mobile friendly your website is and what the page load time is across all of the locations that you are targeting.
- Review your content and keyword performance to understand if the content published on your website is truly driving value to your business, or is it just there to generate traffic with no thought of whether relevant or irrelevant audiences are visiting your website?
- Audit your website's backlink profile. Link building is a common service to outsource to PR, SEO and link building agencies. Not all of them offer the same quality. Even if you entrust an agency with this type of service, it’s your responsibility to ensure that you are getting good quality, industry-relevant backlinks for your website.
- Check for technical SEO issues. TechnicalSEO issues can prevent your website from ranking well in SERPs. For example, crawling and indexation issues that keep search engines from interacting withyour website. You can use a tool like Seobility to check for technical SEO issues on your website.
- Get a professional SEO audit. If you're not sure how to do your SEO due diligence, you can hire a professional SEO company to do it for you.
Investing time and energy into SEO is a crucial part of getting ready to sell your SaaS business. Follow the above tips to keep your website in good shape and maximize your SEO efforts.
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