Step 1 of 5: Optimize Traffic Growth For Your SaaS Product

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Step 1 of 5 on how to double your SaaS revenue using the rule of 72.

Overview: Getting Started with the Rule of 72 for Doubling your SaaS Revenue
Step 1: Visits – From Stranger to Visitor
Step 2: Creates Account – From Visitor to Sign-up
Step 3: Get Onboarded – From Sign-up to Onboarded User
Step 4: First Week Retention After Onboarded – From Onboarded User to Returning to the Product within 1 Week
Step 5: Upgrade to a Paid Account – From First Week Retention After Onboarded to Paying Customer

We understand how difficult it can be to find the next growth opportunity or key insight that will help you reach the growth targets you’ve set for your SaaS product, especially when you need to collect the accurate data.

That’s why we created a framework that will help you discover growth opportunities at every step of your customers’ journey, as well as this post that focuses on traffic growth opportunities.

In our last post, we discussed how to use the rule of 72 and behavioral analytics to help your company double its revenue. In this post, we’re sharing the first piece of the puzzle – achieving an improvement of 15% on turning strangers into traffic growth.

The 4 Sources of Traffic Growth 

The first step in the buyer’s journey is getting them to your website/product landing page. Whether it’s paid traffic, referral traffic, organic traffic, or social media traffic, the more qualified visitors you can get to your website, the better. This is true for both B2B SaaS and B2C SaaS companies.

Working with our rule of 72, the goal is to improve traffic by a mere 15%. To keep the math simple, this means if you normally get 10,000 visitors to your website each month, you only need 1,440 additional new visitors to complete the first step in doubling revenue for your business.

The question then becomes – how can you drive those 1440 extra people to your website? It depends on how you’re currently driving traffic to your website, so in this post we’ll break down 4 sources of traffic growth – organic, paid, referral and social media traffic – so you can find your way into improving traffic by 15%.

Organic Traffic Growth

Organic traffic encompasses all the people who end up on your website from a search engine without you having to pay for ads. We know that 30% of all traffic in a search engine goes to the first result in the search engine result pages or SERPs. We also know that 75% of all search traffic goes to the websites that rank on page one. Hence the old joke that page two of Google is the best place to hide a dead body – because no one sees it.

The fastest way to improve your organic traffic, therefore, is to improve your search engine ranking. How do you do this? It all boils down to the proper search engine optimization of your content. If the blog posts, articles, web copy, etc… on your website don’t feature the keywords that people are searching for online, you won’t garner any page views from search engines.

Unfortunately, even if you do use the keywords people are typing into Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc… you still could end up on the second page or worse of the SERPs. The cause? Other people are trying to use SEO to their advantage as well. You need more than a single keyword on your post to outrank another company.

The best thing to do is to find opportunities to grow your own traffic that are either better than or completely different from your competitors. It is important to understand domain rating, URL rating, what backlinking is and the importance of them.

Here are three things you could do to improve your rankings and increase your traffic starting today:

  1. Content Gap Analysis
  2. Optimize Current Content
  3. Backlink Building 

Content Gap Analysis

The best way to gain insights into what will help you grow is to effectively spy on the people outranking you and understand where there are gaps within their content strategy.

One way to do this is with a content gap analysis, where you take all the keywords your competitor ranks for and subtract the keywords that your own website ranks for. What you get is a list of keywords that you should be targeting.

Ahrefs’ Content Gap tool allows to do that with a bunch of competitors at the same time, giving you a massive list of keywords that you should be targeting.

Here is a detailed breakdown on exactly how to perform this.

Optimize Your Current Content

If you already have a nice library of content but it is not fully optimized, you probably have a great opportunity to increase traffic by simply using the Googe Search Console.

Here is what you want to look for:

 

  1. Your site for keywords that are ranking between #10-#15 (top half of page 2 ) with a decent number of impressions you can capitalize on
  2. Has a relevant page associated with the keywords that are showing as being searched but not leveraged on the page currently
  3. Ideally some of these keywords or similar ones have a lower KD rank of under 20 ( Can look this up for free here https://ahrefs.com/keyword-difficulty)

 

Google Search Console

 

Once these are identified you can simply optimize the page to include these relevant keywords to capitalize on more ranking opportunities to increase your traffic. You should only have to do this for 1-3 pages to reach your goals in general. However, this only works for sites that have content already. Otherwise they will have to look at paid traffic or referral traffic options.

Link building is third on the list because this takes quite a bit of work but is extremely powerful. There are many backlinking strategies out there, just be careful to not build bad or spammy backlinks or it can actually hurt your rankings in the long run.  Here is a basic guide and list of resources to begin.

 

1. Do your Backlinks Research

Here are a couple resources

2. Pick Link Building Strategy

Reverse-Engineer Your Competitors – If you have better content: this means that it’s likely that people who linked to competing content will want to link to your content too (or instead)

Resources Page Link-Building

“Guestographic” Link Building (Infographic)

Guest-Blogging Link-Building

Broken Link Building

3. List out “Likely Linkers” / Good Fit Opportunities for Link Building Partners

4. Gather Link Building Partner Email addresses

5. Draft Email Campaign

6. Send Email Campaign

7. Execute Strategy with Link Building Partners

If you can get these three organic growth strategies right you will reach your 15% increase goals and more than likely far surpass them.

Working towards this goal of being on page one of the SERPs may require beefing up your current content or writing completely new content for your website to target the right customers. On top of that, be strategic based on your business,  you should consider where your SEO efforts should stop for a certain page or keyword. You don’t want to spend a ton of time on ranking for a keyword above certain high profile sites as you simply aren’t going to outrank them. The good news is, if you create evergreen content, you can reap the benefits for weeks, months, or even years to come!

Paid Traffic Growth

Another option to get your additional 15% of new visitors is with paid traffic. Some businesses are already using paid ads to garner page views. If you want more views, you can optimize your ads to be more effective, but most likely you’ll need to increase ad spend. This is often a difficult choice for bootstrapped startups because let’s face it, ads on Google can get pretty expensive.

Another way to improve your paid traffic efforts is to look at less expensive options that will yield a better ROI. These days thanks to Facebook ads, Twitter ads, even Capterra and Linkedin Ads there are many paid traffic options that might be less costly than Google ads.

These networks can allow you to stay within budget while generating the required 15% improvement in paid traffic visitors.

Just be careful as it is very easy to blow money in paid advertising if you are not strategic about it. Make sure to test the channels first before going full force with them and you’ll find the right channel for your business.

Referral Traffic Growth

This is one of the sweetest types of traffic you can get because it’s built on trust.

Your referral traffic will organically grow over time if you are truly putting out valuable content and not just keyword stuffing. However, our favorite type of referral traffic is derived from strategic guest blog opportunities. Essentially, when you guest blog, you take advantage of an established website’s audience. You write something of value for another company’s website and then invite them back to your website to get to know you a little better.

As a bonus, referral traffic can actually help your organic traffic reach and backlinking goals as well. This is because Google favors websites that are being linked back to/mentioned in other places online. That’s why referral traffic and organic traffic are often talked about in tandem – they go together like peanut butter and jelly. It’s a sweet combination!

Social Media Traffic Growth

While social media traffic still is relevant, we’ve found that there is no direct relation between the number of shares and the number of pageviews an article gets. In other words, just because something is shared on social media, doesn’t mean the end-user will click through to read the post in its entirety to learn more.

So what’s the best way to derive page views from a social media share?

Deliver maximum value to your audience instead of pushing for the sale. 

The more informative and helpful your content is, the more likely someone is to pay attention to what you post and in turn click through to your website more often.

What do you do with your traffic once you drive new visitors to your website? Get them to create an account with your product! Improving this conversion is the second step in doubling the revenue of your business.

Get the Complete eBook on How To Double Your Software Revenue

While we’ve covered a lot in this post, believe it or not, we’ve barely scratched the surface of things you can do to double revenue in your SaaS company. We invite you to download the complete eBook to get insights on the rest of the steps for doubling the revenue of your business.

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