SaaS
CommandBar
Head of Content and SEO at a YC-backed developer tooling company, building a content portfolio from almost nothing before the acquisition.
+415%
Organic traffic
Semrush Sept 2023 to Aug 2024
Service
B2B SaaS SEO
Organic growth for software companies whose category is either too new to have search demand or too crowded to win on volume. The work is deciding what the product is for, then making the site the best answer to that.
Who it is for
Seed to Series B software companies with a marketing lead who owns the number and no senior SEO to point them at the right work. Usually there is a large docs surface, a thin marketing surface, and no clear relationship between them.
Before you call
- How is the work measured?
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In leads and pipeline, with the data source named every time. Positions are a means, not the number.
CommandBar Organic traffic, +415%. Semrush.
Scope
What is included
- Category and demand mapping, so the site targets the job buyers search for rather than the name you gave the product
- Documentation and marketing separation, which is the single most common structural problem in SaaS SEO
- Programmatic and template page strategy where the data supports it, and an honest answer where it does not
- Competitor analysis against the sites actually taking the clicks, which is often a review aggregator rather than another vendor
- Technical direction for your engineers, written as tickets
- Monthly reporting against sessions, qualified traffic, and pipeline, with the data source named every time
What is not included
Written down here so it is not a conversation you have to have later.
- Content writing. I decide what should exist and your team or your writer makes it
- Link building, outreach, or digital PR
- Development work. I write the tickets, your engineers ship them
- Paid search and paid social
- A guaranteed ranking for any term, which nobody can honestly offer
In detail
Software companies tend to arrive at SEO with one of two problems, and they look similar from the inside.
The first is that nobody is searching for what you built yet. The category is new, the demand is not there, and every keyword tool returns nothing. The usual response is to write about adjacent topics with volume, which produces traffic that never converts and a blog that gradually stops being about the product.
The second is that plenty of people are searching, and every result is a competitor with ten years of content and a domain nobody is going to out-rank on effort. Writing more of the same is not a plan.
Both problems have the same root. The site has never made a clear claim about what category it belongs to and what job it does, so search engines have no reason to associate it with anything a buyer would type.
Docs and marketing
The specific failure I see most is a documentation surface that has quietly become the whole site. Docs rank well for the product’s own name and for API terms, which looks like traffic and converts nobody, because the people reading them already bought.
Meanwhile the pages that could convert a stranger are thin, few, and outranked by the docs for their own terms. The two surfaces compete, and the docs usually win, because there are more of them and they are better linked.
Separating them properly is structural work: internal linking, indexation rules, and a decision about what each surface is allowed to target. It is unglamorous and it is usually where the largest available gain is.
What the first ninety days look like
Month one is a full audit. Not a list of crawler warnings, but a diagnosis: what the site currently claims to be about, what buyers actually search, and the two or three things standing between those.
Months two and three are the structural fixes, which your engineers ship from tickets I write. Content direction starts once the structure can support it, because publishing into a broken structure wastes the content.
Results are legible somewhere around month four to six. Anyone promising faster than that in this category is describing a different kind of engagement.
How it starts
A complimentary audit call, then usually a full audit in month one that sets the agenda for everything after it.
Related work