Nick Brown is the Founder and CEO of accelerate agency, a SaaS SEO & content agency. Working with enterprise and scale-up brands.
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If you ever get the chance to delve into the details of how SEO works, it quickly becomes apparent that it’s not just one thing. A good SEO plan is made up of several remarkably different components, and each requires skills and abilities that really aren’t related to each other at all.
Understanding how the different parts of SEO work together is useful for anyone selling a product online. When I’m explaining this to people, I often compare the whole system to a race car. Let me share that with you now.
Technical SEO Is the Engine
Search engines look at a lot more than just the content of a page when they are deciding which pages to rank at the top of search results. One of the most important things they look at is a series of standardized metrics known as Core Web Vitals. This includes:
• Page loading performance.
• Ease of interaction.
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• Visual stability of a page from a user’s perspective.
Understanding a website’s Core Web Vitals isn’t possible just by eyeballing it. You need to understand what specifications Google is looking for, how to evaluate them and how to get them up to scratch. A key example is page speed—a page might load in a way that seems fine to the casual user but falls far short of Google’s expectations.
You also need to pay attention to the web crawlers that search engines send out to check your site over. How often do they visit? Do they have trouble with any pages?
There’s also your website’s architecture to consider, and whether or not a site is geotargeted for the country you are trying to rank in searches for.
This type of SEO work is (unsurprisingly) known as technical SEO. I compare it to a race car’s engine for two main reasons:
• Like a high-performance engine, technical SEO needs to be tuned by an expert before you can expect to be ready for competition.
• But also like an engine, technical SEO on its own isn’t enough. An engine can’t operate without “fuel.”
High-Authority Inbound Links Are the Fuel
It doesn’t matter how well your engine is tuned if the gas tank is dry. In just the same way, a website with excellent technical SEO won’t be ranking at the top of competitive searches without plenty of high-authority links.
Inbound links are links to your website from someone else’s website. For example, if your company sells an HR SaaS product, a link from one of the top HR news websites to your website would be very useful for improving your SEO.
Here’s why this matters: Despite the constant change that SEO has undergone in the past two decades, links remain a determining factor for how well any website ranks in searches. A link from a high-authority domain tells Google your website is important.
“High authority” is a key term, as not all links are equal. Every website domain on the internet has a grading to indicate how authoritative it is. Several different companies provide competing versions of this metric, but most operate on a 100-point scale with the vast majority of websites scoring well under 50.
In a competitive niche like SaaS, you need lots of links from websites above 50 (ideally well above 50—I personally aim for the 80s or 90s). Links should also come from highly relevant websites (so, for our HR SaaS example, links should come from high-authority domains that primarily feature content about HR). With a few hundred of these links, which I would compare to high-performance fuel, you can get your race car’s engine fueled up and purring along.
This process can be really difficult, but with the right guidance on how to get high-authority links for your SaaS website, you’ll be able to get the ball rolling.
Just having a finely tuned engine running on top-grade fuel isn’t enough to win a race. You still need something to take you to the finish line: content!
High-Quality Content Is the Tires
If you want SEO to become a productive sales channel for your business, content is where the “rubber meets the road.”
What I mean by this is that no one will visit your website just because it has great technical SEO or because it has links from all the top domains in your sector. People will only visit your website if it has content they want to consume.
Just as with links, however, not any old content will do. SEO content needs to balance two difficult objectives at once:
• Capture the reader’s attention and draw them deeper into your sales funnel.
• Demonstrate to search engines that your content should be ranked in searches.
This second task is surprisingly technical. The content needs to be the right length, have just the right number of primary and secondary keywords in just the right places, and ideally be written by a demonstrably authoritative and trustworthy author.
If you can create content that is compellingly written and answers the right questions, then (just like tires on a car) your website will soon be getting traction.
Put it all together—technical SEO, high-authority links and high-quality content—and you’ll find you’ve got yourself a website that is ready to take you places.
Of course, there’s a lot more to a race car than the engine, fuel and tires. There are also the shocks, the spoiler, the monocoque (yes, this is a real word) and much more.
But most important of all, of course, is an experienced driver and a support crew. Maintaining this depth of SEO expertise in-house is possible, but not necessarily the most practical option in the competitive world of SaaS SEO, so getting agency support is something I would recommend.
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Author: Nick Brown, Forbes Councils Member
