SaaS content marketing services: How we consistently create expert-level content for our clients

Our content writing process takes place after we've conducted The SaaSpirin Audit and run keyword gap analysis. The SaaSpirin Audit identifies existing pieces of content on your website that need improvement. Our keyword gap analysis targets high-buying intent keywords that your competition is ranking for and you aren't. With these topics in a content workbook, we'll begin writing.

When we founded SaaSpirin, we wanted to take responsibility for our clients’ conversions instead of reporting on vanity metrics like traffic and social shares.

We do this using The Pain Point Writing Framework, a seven-step process for consistently creating expert-level content that converts readers.

In a nutshell, The Pain Point Writing Framework involves understanding your customer’s pain points and what makes your product better than the competition and using this knowledge to target high-buying intent keywords.

These articles bring in conversions because:

  1. They nail the key reasons why customers buy instead of trying to guess what they are
  2. They show readers why your product is better than the competition; it doesn’t just summarize the features on your product page
  3. They target keywords readers search for when they are ready to buy

Note: If you’re looking for an SEO agency that takes responsibility for conversions by understanding your customer’s pain points and your product’s key differentiators, instead of regurgitating the information on your product page, consider booking a quick call.

Step 1: Jumping on a content call with you + surveying your customers

In our experience, nailing customer pain points is the number one factor determining whether a reader will convert or not.

This is a major problem we’re seeing in the SaaS content industry. Most of the articles we read online sound like they’ve been outsourced. They’ll just provide a surface-level summary of a product’s features without strategically targeting customer pain points and product differentiators.

To avoid this, we’ll hop on a call with you, gain an understanding of your product, and survey your customers by asking questions like:

  • How did you discover (product name)?
  • What made you choose (product name) over the competition?
  • What major pain points are (product name) solving?
  • What would you likely use as an alternative to (product) if it were no longer available?

The reason we directly survey your customers is because we find that most of our clients don’t understand their customers as well as they think they do. By gaining a different perspective and seeing how your customers are talking about your product, we uncover pain points and differentiators you might not know about.

With this knowledge, we can create content that speaks to real customer pain points and shows customers the key differentiators between your product and the competition.

Step 2: Updating existing content

We now have a good understanding of your product and why your customers buy. From here, we’ll update existing content that we recognized needed improvement during The SaaSpirin Audit.

We like to call these existing articles “low-hanging fruit” because they offer the fastest turnaround in traffic and conversions.

This is because these articles are already indexed, and you're ranking for these keywords, even though we identified you're making crucial SEO mistakes; maybe you're missing metadata, or the content is slightly outdated. 

So once we've fixed these mistakes, it's easier to jump up Google's search results than if we targeted a brand new keyword and started from scratch.

In some cases, we've jumped up Google's search rankings within a few days of updating a post.

Step 3: Categorizing high-buying intent keywords

In the keyword gap analysis phase, we identified high-buying intent keywords that you aren’t ranking for. In this step, we’ll categorize these keywords further into four buckets:

1. “Best product” keywords: These keywords have the highest buying intent since readers are literally searching for your product. For example, if you're selling budgeting software to couples, these keywords might be "best budgeting app for couples" or "buy budgeting software for couples."

2. Versus keywords: Versus keywords directly compare your product to your competitors. These are typically one of the last searches customers make before buying, so it's essential that you rank for this type of keyword and show customers why your product is better than the competition.

3. Alternative keywords: These keywords also show high-buying intent because customers are looking for alternatives to your competitors. Maybe a customer had a bad experience with a competitor and wants to buy something else. For example, if you're selling GPS software, these alternative keywords might be "Google Maps alternatives" or "Apple Maps alternatives."

4. High-buying intent how-to keywords: These keywords are middle-of-the-funnel because customers aren't really searching for your product, but they are looking to achieve something your product can help with. Using the example above, if you sell budgeting software to couples, high-buying intent, how-to keywords would be: "how to budget as a couple" or "mistakes to avoid when budgeting as a couple."

Step 4: Conducting SERP analysis

Now, it's time to conduct SERP (Search Engine Results Page) analysis and understand the intent of the searcher so that we can fulfill this intent inside our article.

Side note: If you don’t know what SERP analysis is, it’s essentially typing the primary keyword that we’re targeting into Google and seeing what the top-ranking pages are talking about. This gives us a good understanding of what the searcher is looking for because Google’s algorithms will reward or punish websites depending on whether searchers read through the entire article or bounce within seconds. Naturally, the articles ranking on top of Google would have fulfilled searchers’ intent.

However, we won't regurgitate the information we find on the first page of Google. Instead, we're trying to find any "gaps" on Google's first page, i.e. what topics are these websites not discussing.

For example, if we're writing a piece on backlinks and we find everyone on the first page of Google is talking about why you should focus on building backlinks, we’ll take a contrarian view.

We'll maybe talk about why we believe there are better ways to generate traffic and build authority, and present some data that we collected to back this up.

Step 5: Creating an outline

Once we know what other websites are discussing and have identified a unique direction to take our article in, we'll create a more detailed outline.

We’ll optimize this outline inside an SEO tool like Clearscope, so our writers can just come in and populate it using their SaaS expertise and the information gathered from you via the content call.

Step 6: Using our SaaS experience to write unique and truly valuable content

We have real-life experience running a software development agency. We've developed and launched SaaS applications for companies like PwC, ArcelorMittal, and Bombardier. 

This experience building software applications and putting it on the market has given us a foundation of SaaS expertise to write articles around.

Alongside the knowledge we gained from jumping on a video call with you and learning about your product, this real-life experience allows us to write genuinely unique and valuable articles and avoid the trap of writing regurgitated content.

Step 7: Interlinking and other SEO best practices

The last step involves basic SEO best practices such as linking newly published posts to older posts so they aren't orphaned, pasting the final draft into an SEO tool like Clearscope, and writing SEO-optimized meta descriptions.

Next steps

If you’re looking for an SEO agency with a proven track record of creating expert-level content, you can contact us here.

Once we've started publishing unique articles targeting high-buying intent keywords, it's time to build backlinks to these pieces.

Backlinks are like votes in the eyes of Google. With all things being equal, the more votes you can build to authoritative websites, the higher you'll rank.

If you want to learn more about our backlink building process, feel free to visit our SaaS backlink building services page.