📂 Learnings from Google search behavior for SaaS keywords

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When you're in scale-up mode and you have KPIs to hit... the pressure is on to deliver demos and signups. And it's a lot to handle: multi-channel strategy, remarketing, landing pages, email sequences, revenue ops, conversion rate optimization.

42/Agency, founded by my friend Kamil Rextin, has worked with companies like Sprout Social, Klue, Qwilr, Uptick, Onfleet, and many more to help them with all things demand generation. They're always my top agency recommendation for specializing in SaaS demand gen. Go read some spicy takes on freemium, "inbound marketing", and category creation and then schedule a free consultation.

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A generous marketer by the name of Mike Sonders did a study of ten well-known SaaS companies and then identified the ~16K branded searches (e.g., “hubspot pricing”, “servicenow login”, “zendesk support”, etc.) that people enter into Google to search for information on these brands.

Among those ~16K branded search terms, he analyzed their modifiers to find the ones common to most of the ten SaaS brands. Of those common modifiers, he identified the ones that searchers use when considering a potential SaaS purchase.

E.g., “hubspot pricing” is a search that a potential buyer would use when considering a purchase; “hubspot investor relations” and “hubspot login” are not.

Using median search volumes, he indexed the relative demand for the information implied by each “consideration” modifier.

These are the top five learnings:

1. The most sought-after (and often 1st) piece of info sought by SaaS buyers is pricing – by a large margin.

Have a pricing page! If you can’t share exact pricing for some reason, try one of these alternative approaches.

2. ‘[brand] alternatives’ is the 2nd most-frequent search pattern.

The inverse of competitor comparison pages... create a ‘[your_brand] alternatives] that positions your offering against your competitors.

Only 2 of the 50 biggest SaaS companies do this!

Ex: https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/comparison

3. SaaS buyers literally search for ‘why [brand]’.

This is another under-leveraged opportunity.

Buyers want someone to spell out for them why they should spend money on your solution.

Make it easy for them!

Ex: https://www.hubspot.com/why-go-hubspot

4. Security is a big concern for SaaS buyers. They want to know how you’re going to protect them from loss and litigation.

They’re checking out your privacy policy and GDPR terms, as well as SOC2 and HIPAA and other industry specific certifications.

5. Your ‘About Us’ page matters.

Does your company have meaningful funding? Well-known investors? Is it profitable and self-sustaining? Does it have experienced leadership?

In your company’s About Us page, make sure you convey anything that can reassure buyers that the company is robust and set up to thrive.

—Corey

p.s. did you see that I launched my new course, Marketing Like A Media Company? Would love for you to check it out →​

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3. ​The Juice: “Spotify for marketing & sales content” to discover blogs, podcasts, and videos to help you grow your business.
4. ​42/Agency: My #1 recommended demand generation agency for SaaS to help you drive demos and signups.
5. ​Supermetrics: Get all your marketing data into your reporting tool of choice. Push data from 70+ integrations into Google Data Studio, Sheets, and more.

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