Launching your brand new Saas product or startup is both exciting and filled with doubt. You've put in countless hours of work developing it and you're ready to stand up and say "hello world, this is what I've made". But then it hits you - you need to market it. You try some product launch sites, you maybe underprice your product and try and sell on cheap saas offers sites. But did you know that SEO is still the most cost effective way to market your product? It may not seem so looking at the cost of professional services or SEO tools (The Crawl Tool excepted!). Let's talk about it.

One of the primary benefits of organic search traffic is that it is, by its nature, targeted traffic. The people coming to your site are actively interested in the topic. Unlike paid-ads, the benefit of SEO work to improve your rankings is that this traffic tends to compound itself over time. You could start your startup without it, but you'd be missing an amazing and important piece of the marketing process.

Having a high search engine ranking also helps to build trust and credibility in your product or brand. Think about it - you're starting from zero. With SEO and ranking your site highly, the search engines are giving you the trust and credibility you need. Arguably that credibility is much higher with organic results than paid options and other forms of advertising.

Think about it from a user's perspective - they've asked Google or Bing where is the best place to find X, and they say your site! For a new product or startup, this can be a game changer!

You might read that SEO is all about backlinks. That's part of the puzzle, for sure. But it's not the whole story. At The Crawl Tool we like to talk about improving your user experience and on-site SEO - at the same time. What we mean by this is that often when you improve your SEO, you're simultaneously improving your site's user experience for your audience. And happy visitors are buying visitors!

There's a cool little three way synergy where search engines want to return the sites highest that provide the best user experience, you want your site to rank higher, and visitor's want a great user experience.

SEO is not an instant win. It takes time to have an effect. But over time, it's by far the most cost effective form of marketing for a startup saas or product. Great SEO tends to compound itself. For example, a page that has a good user experience and ranks highly in search engines is likely to get more links, helping it rank higher. Starting SEO earlier in your saas marketing means compounding those benefits quicker.

SEO is within the capabilities of most startup founders, particularly developers launching a saas. But that doesn't mean it's without its challenges. This is where having the right tools becomes crucial. It's not uncommon to hear people saying they'd have to sell their first born child to afford the prices of some tools. That's where The Crawl Tool comes in. We make SEO tooling accessible for free or at low cost to those starting out on their journey or with a new project. We can help you with the saas essential areas listed below and more.

Technical SEO is about the foundations of how your website works. It's not always visible, but it's still important. Identifying and fixing technical issues that might be affecting your website's performance or visibility in search engines is a priority. Fixing these issues often pays off well and relatively quickly.

It's not what you build - it's the way you build it. Having a good structure to your site not only allows search engines to navigate it better, but it allows your users to navigate it better too! Take a look at the linking on your site (perhaps with The Crawl Tool) and see if important pages are easy to find, and if topics are interlinked.

Once you've made improvements, you'll want to monitor their effect. As websites are ever changing entities (even if sometimes it's just the sites they link to that change) you'll also want to keep an eye on things to check no new issues pop up. Like 404s, for example. 404s are particularly important because there's no worse user experience than a page not found message! Tools like The Crawl Tool can schedule re-running of the report/audit on a regular basis for you.

It's not our primary focus at The Crawl Tool, but you can still put in a competitor's website to see how good their SEO is. We like to put in competing SEO audit tools so we can see if they use their own tools on their own sites (spoiler - they nearly universally don't). This is useful information for us, it's why we focused on building functionality we want to use. By understanding areas where your competitors are weak, you can compete better.

If you're launching a saas product or startup then I hope we've convinced you that SEO should be an important part of your marketing strategy. With the right tools it's nowhere near as complicated or expensive as it might seem, and very likely will be the most cost effective element of your marketing strategy in the long run. Incorporating it from day one helps you compound benefits that your sleeping competitors won't.