Top SEO title tips for start-up SaaS brands 

Business

If you belong to a new SaaS brand, we don’t need to tell you that online real estate is more important than ever. When it comes to your company’s website, this means you need to get it front and centre when potential clients search for your services. A great start is to consider how you are currently tackling SEO titles.

These small snippets of text that appear along with your page URLs have great potential for welcoming new traffic to your site, and it doesn’t take long to implement the right techniques.

It’s also worth noting that anyone can optimise them – you don’t need to be a webmaster with extensive experience – although, if you do find that it’s a bit too much effort on your part, there are plenty of SEO professionals out there to bear the load.

12 SEO title tag tips to take on board

Without further ado, here are 12 essential SEO title tips to help get your start-up off the ground. Each of these best practices is geared towards improving impressions, your CTR and where your site ranks in search engines, so let’s get down to business.

1. Quality SEO Titles Begin With Quality Research

A fundamental truth of SEO is that it’s data-driven, and this has been the case since the early days of Google. This includes investigating which queries your target audience is using, and you can do this via keyword research – i.e., looking at the metrics behind the search terms people enter into search engines.

2. Ensure the Meta Title Intent Matches Your Page

This one is so important. All of your meta titles should accurately reflect the content of your page, and while they don’t need to be identical to your H1 or on-page title tags, they need to be concise and descriptive. Is it a comparative guide? What about a service page? This should be clear at a glance.

3. Incorporate Keywords Properly

You’ve conducted your keyword research and have created content that matches the intent behind the query, satisfying the user – but how do you seed the keyword into the title tag?

Best practice is including one primary keyword or a long-tailed variation, with the geographical context if relevant. It’s also recommended to frontload the keyword, rather than incorporating it at the end. If you have space, a great tactic is to merge your primary keyword and secondary into one. Crafting the title with this balance not only boosts visibility but also ensures that your SEO content aligns closely with both search engine algorithms and user expectations.”

For example, the keywords “best accounting software” and “best business accounting software for small business” could become: “The Best Accounting Software for Small Business | SaaS Brand Name”

4. Stick to Best Practice Character Limits

Among recent important SEO statistics, it has been found that title tags that fall between 40 and 60 characters have the highest CTR. This means you should absolutely follow this limit.

If you’re stuck for space, there are plenty of hacks out there. For example, have you thought about saving pixel space by opting for a pipe (“|”) instead of a dash? What about using ampersands instead of “and”, or using numerals rather than spelling out numbers? Each of these ideas has been proven to increase CTR too.

5. Incorporate Your SaaS Brand Name 

As well as sticking to a 40-60-character limit, you should always aim to include your SaaS brand name at the end of the tag, usually following a dash or pipe. Not every company does this, but those that do benefit from increasing their name recognition and, therefore, brand awareness.

6. Remember to Prioritise People Over Search Engines

One of the most common mistakes newbie SEOs make is forgetting that content ought to be written with humans in mind, not just search engine bots. You shouldn’t be shoehorning in exact match keywords if they don’t make sense or are grammatically incorrect, and the tag should be designed to win over users into clicking with enticing language.

Favicons – the little icon next to your site in the address bar – also fall under this area. They appear next to your page in the SERPs, so make sure it’s visually appealing, unique and recognisable.

7. Know that Google May Rewrite Your SEO Titles

Do note that Google won’t always use your title tags. This is because it draws from other places (H1 and other heading tags, anchor text of links and any prominent content highlighted via style treatments) and evaluates what is best. As a result, don’t spend too long crafting your titles – be considered and thoughtful – but definitely avoid poring over them for hours.

8. Keep Each Page’s Title Tag Unique

Search engines will actively penalise your website if you reuse the same title tag for multiple pages. This is because their crawlers will view this as duplicate content, and duplicate content is unhelpful to the search ecosystem. For this reason, always be careful to fill out your meta titles individually.

9. Use the Tools at Your Disposal

There are thousands of SEO tools designed to improve website visibility out there, but it’s up to you whether you want to use them. Many webmasters swear by them as their efficacy outweighs the cost. Here are some free examples worth checking out:

10. Continual Learning & Testing

As with any marketing strategy, A/B testing can help get your brand leaps and bounds ahead. However, with title tags, you have to get a little creative. Annoyingly you can’t compare different versions of the same element, owing to the fact that you can’t display more than one iteration of a meta title.

To get around this, instead, you’ll have to run each variation of the SEO title for the same length of time (usually, a few weeks), and monitor any changes in your KPIs like impressions, clicks and ranking position. See any positive trends? Do more of that in your next go-round. Just make sure to be very specific in the data you track.

Unsure where to start? Typical techniques involve comparing versions of meta titles with and without power words, different numbers, specific CTAs and keyword variations. Keep going and you might find the optimal combination for your pages.

11. Implement Meta Title Tag Best Practices as Part of a Wider SEO Strategy

Like any other element of search engine optimisation, implementing SEO title best practices should form only a tiny aspect of a wider, overarching SaaS SEO strategy. To give you an analogy, think of meta titles as a single brick within a wall. Below this brick is a layer comprising the following foundational practices: optimised website UX, mobile-friendly pages, a proper link structure, a solid content marketing plan and more.

Without high-quality content or a decent website set-up, users may click on your pages and then swiftly leave them without seeing your software offering. This undesirably high ‘bounce rate’ can negatively impact your rankings in the long run as the data is effectively signalling to search engines that users aren’t finding your content valuable. Suffice it to say, for your optimisation efforts to pay off, they need to sit alongside other best practices – otherwise, your hard work is going to waste!

12. Reach Out to the Professionals If You Need More Hands On Deck

As we’ve just implied via the previous tip, search engine optimisation is hard graft. You can’t simply pop some keywords into your SEO titles and see your pages fly to number one – no, there are lots of techniques to employ, the majority of them being long-term efforts with no immediate pay-off. 

So it’s understandable why many SaaS start-ups decide to outsource the work to agencies who can offer bespoke SEO services that serve them well. On top of the immediate access to the experts in the field and their knowledge, they often include the cost of the various SEO tools they use within their fees. This means that it’s a lot more cost-effective than handling it yourself, particularly if you have other important tasks to attend to such as onboarding clients or handling internal issues with your software.

SEO titles are an essential tool in your SaaS marketing arsenal 

By now, we hope you’re convinced of the importance of SEO title best practice to your SaaS brand. Not only will you make your meta titles more readable for those searching for your product, but you’ll see an uptake in your site’s visibility in search engines and more traffic driven to your website as a result.

To ensure your website is favoured by the search engine giants like Google, Safari and Bing, you need to build a tailored content strategy around the needs of your audience and work to optimise each element of your site from the metadata that shows up in the SERPs to the very fabric of your website. The idea is to make everything both appeal to your ideal readers and search engines.

Although a more niche and technical industry, start-ups in the SaaS industry can square up to the more established players by implementing SEO from the get-go. Remember the basics and all the tips we’ve shared, and you’ll incrementally move towards your goals. Now, all that’s left is for your company to get started!