Building a SaaS product is itself a daunting task, and marketing it to the right audience is another challenge altogether. And if you’re bootstrapping your SaaS business, that can be an even bigger challenge. The SaaS industry is highly competitive, especially if you are in the crowd with no funding support. However, with a great product, a very calculated approach, and the right SEO and content marketing plan, you can easily bootstrap your SaaS.
How To Know Your SaaS Product Is Ready For Users?
The answer is simple – Use yourself before launching for users.
It is quite challenging to get user feedback when your SaaS development is just done. Therefore, the best way to analyze if your SaaS is good enough for users is to use it yourself, create different situations and a checklist, and see if your product is able to solve all problems in all situations.
Though this can’t be as helpful as real user feedback, still, it will help you discover and solve minor bugs.
Start With Content Marketing – Copywriting
It is always better to have a website ready before the launch of the product, so that, by the time you launch your SaaS, your website would already have some content, authority, and relevant traffic.
A good example of a bootstrapped SaaS that used this technique is: Respona
They didn’t just create blog pages, they were even open to providing early access to their beta version. It helped them get user feedback and ideas on how they can improve their product.
Also, in their beta launch, they offered a free onboarding session where they communicated with their customers to understand their use case.
Such an approach costs nothing to very less, if you yourself are an expert in copywriting then all you need to do is a good plan and time management.
However, if you still prefer to freelance or hire a copywriter, here is what the cost would be.
Charges by an expert for writing 1500 words (Fiverr, Upwork, etc.) article = $150 – $180.
Charges by an expert for writing 1500 words (Digital Gratified) article = $60 – $80.
Therefore, the cost for copywriting 20,000 words of quality content a month would be approximately $1,000.
Of course, hiring a full-time copywriter would be costly, as per the current market trend, a good US copywriter charges $5,000 – $10,000 a month for a full-time job, and believe me it’s super challenging to find a GOOD copywriter, that too for a full-time job.
Consult An SEO Expert – Technical & On-Page SEO
In the starting days of your SaaS, you don’t necessarily need to invest in regular technical audits and super serious on-page optimizations. An hourly consultation a week or even a month would be enough for you to do the necessary.
Also, if you don’t have knowledge about SEO, then hiring a freelancer or SaaS SEO agency for an SEO plan and suggestions should also be fine. In fact, there are many SEO agencies that charge absolutely nothing for a consultation.
For example, Digital Gratified charges $0 for SEO Consultation (and $150 / hour for SEO audit). Since you are in the initial days of launch, it’s safe to say that the website audit should not take more than 3 – 4 hours. Also, a monthly audit should be enough for you.
In an SEO Consultation, we will ask for your requirements and would be sharing what kind of approach you should have for your SaaS SEO, what kind of keywords you should target, what should be your long-term goals, etc.
And, in SEO Audit, we will give exact keywords that you should target and how should be targeting them, and technical SEO issues that need to be solved for a better user experience.
Highest that this will cost you would be $500 – $600 a month.
Power Up Your Content Marketing & SEO – Link Building
Link building is a process of acquiring hyperlinks from other websites to your website. The main aim behind link building is to improve the search engine ranking of your website so that it can get more organic traffic.
This is where you would need to invest the most, doesn’t matter how good your content is, and how perfect your SaaS website’s technical and on-page SEO is, without good backlinks, it is almost impossible to rank your content.
We at Digital Gratified have now worked with more than 100 SaaS businesses, and in our experience, there is no way that your SEO and Content Marketing efforts fail if your product is really great, you are targeting the right keywords, writing high-quality content, and has powerful link building strategy.
When I speak about link building, it not only includes getting backlinks from high-quality relevant domains but also product/business listings and PRs.
Product / Business Listings
This is just listing your product / business on domains like G2, ProductHunt, etc. Users use such platforms for reviewing a product or choosing the right SaaS as per their needs.
This costs nothing mostly but a few hours of effort. There might be some platforms asking for monthly subscription charges to get listed, however, the cost is still minimal.
We can assume the monthly expense to be $80 – $100.
Press Releases
A press release is publishing an article about your SaaS on domains like Forbes, this particularly helps in branding.
From an SEO perspective, links from such websites help in building website authority rather than directly helping in ranking a keyword.
Getting PR articles published costs a lot around $1000 – $1500 a PR, so it’s best to not plan more than two or four PRs a year.
Therefore, if you go with 4 PRs a year, your annual cost for PRs would be $4000 – $6000, which means, approximately $400 a month.
Links From High-Quality Domains
If you want to rank for your targeted keywords, then it is important that you get links from high-quality SaaS websites / Business websites.
For example, if you have a project management tool, then getting a link from a website like learn.g2.com or blog.hubspot.com would do wonders for your rankings.
But such links don’t come for free, you need to either pay the website or offer them something valuable in return. For example, you can write an article on their blog in return for a link, or maybe even more than that.
The cost of such links varies from $100 – $600+. So, the best approach is to plan your link building in a way that you can build at least 15 backlinks a month in the remaining budget of approximately $3000.
Here is a guide on link building pricing that can help you in the same.
Disclaimer: These Are Not The Only Expenses
There are other expenses like website hosting, email marketing, customer support, development, etc. However, when it comes to marketing a SaaS using SEO and content marketing, the mentioned budget and expenses are more than enough.
In fact, we have seen businesses doing great with a budget of less than $5000 as well.
Key Takeaways
SEO and content marketing are essential for any SaaS business that wants to generate organic traffic and leads.
The cost of SEO and content marketing varies depending on the size and scope of your project. However, you can expect to spend $500 – $600 a month on SEO, $80 – $100 a month on product listings, and $400 a month on press releases.
Link building is the most important part of SEO and can cost anywhere from $100 – $600+ per link. You should aim to build at least 15 links per month, which can cost you up to $3000 per month.
About Digital Gratified
Digital Gratified is a full-service digital marketing agency that specializes in SEO and content marketing for SaaS businesses. Our team has worked with over 100 SaaS businesses and we know what it takes to rank your content and get organic traffic. Contact us today to see how we can help you grow your business!
If you’re thinking about bootstrapping your own SaaS business, contact us today to see how we can help you grow your business!