There are over 22,600 software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies in the world right now, according to Crunchbase. On Capterra, there are more than 800 software categories. Research by Statista indicates that the market size of the SaaS industry has grown from $5.56 billion in 2008 to over $156 billion in 2020. What do these figures show? It’s simple. The SaaS industry landscape is becoming more competitive by the day. To stay on top of your game as a SaaS business, you must identify the companies you’re competing with from an SEO standpoint. That way, you’ll know the content strategies to focus on, the keywords to target, and the type of backlinks to acquire. In this post, you’ll learn three effective ways to do this quickly. Why care about your SEO competitors as a SaaS brand? If you don’t know your SEO competitors, you’re leaving so much on the table, while they occupy the top spots on the SERPs. 1. You can identify the top keywords they’re targeting and how they’re acquiring backlinks to help your own strategies. By identifying the companies competing against your SaaS brand, you’ll know the top keywords they’re targeting. That way, you can focus on those keywords that can generate qualified traffic and drive user signups for your SaaS. This streamlines your keyword research process. Knowing your top SEO competitors is also a great way to perform a link gap analysis. That way, you can know the type of backlinks they’re acquiring and where they’re getting them from. This helps you to identify relevant websites that are more likely to link to you. 2. You can figure out the competitive edge you have over them If you don’t know who your top competitors are, you won’t be able to find the SEO opportunities to focus on to drive growth for your business. Take, for instance, if they focus more on high-volume, top-of-the-funnel keywords. If you then go after middle- and bottom-funnel keywords, it could give you a competitive edge. 3. You can understand their biggest drivers of growth and conversion. Most SaaS companies optimize their blog posts, landing pages, and product pages for conversions. This is because they measure growth by the number of signups and paying customers that they have. By identifying your SEO competitors, you can know the kind of CTAs and buttons that work well in your niche. That way, you’ll have a better understanding of the conversion strategies that can drive growth for your SaaS business. Three ways to identify the SEO competitors of your SaaS brand Here are three tactics you can try today to identify your SaaS brand’s top SEO competitors. 1. Use SEO tools SEO tools have access to large amounts of data for different websites and niches — and they’ve analyzed and categorized this information for your own use. For example, SEMrush has the Market Explorer tool, which helps you to find potential competitors for your business. Ahrefs also has a competing domains report in the Site Explorer tool. This helps you to identify the websites competing with your SaaS, based on the kind of keywords you’re ranking for. You can also use the Moz Pro True Competitor tool to identify the top SEO competitors for your SaaS brand. Here’s how it works: Let’s say you want to identify the top SEO competitors of Moz. With this tool, you can find that information within a few seconds. The first thing you need to do is enter the following details in the tool: Preferred market: The specific location you’re targetingDomain type: The type of domainDomain name: Your website URLOnce you enter this information and hit the “Find Competitors” button, you’ll get a list of top 25 competitors: As you can see, websites competing with Moz on the SERPs aren’t limited to software brands alone. They include others such as: GoogleSearch Engine JournalHubspotSearch Engine LandWordstreamBacklinko.This tool also has the Overlap and Rivalry metrics, to filter your top competitors. The Overlap metric filters your top competitors based on the shared keywords you both rank for on the first page of Google. The Rivalry metric uses factors like CTR, DA score, the volume of shared keywords, etc. to identify the most relevant competitors for your SaaS. After identifying your top SEO competitors, you can perform an in-depth analysis of at most 2 of them, to know the keywords they’re targeting. 2. Survey or interview your new and existing customers If someone signs up for your SaaS product, chances are that they’ve demoed or tried out other options before deciding to go with yours. It’s also possible that they’ve just churned from one of your competitors to become a customer. This shows that they have an idea of who your direct and indirect competitors are. To get this information, all you need to do is reach out and interview them one after the other. This could be by talking to them via a quick call, sending a short survey for them to fill out, or asking them during the onboarding process. Here are some questions you can ask customers to identify your top competitors: What tools were you using to [solve X problem] before trying out our product?If you’ve never used any tool before, how were you able to solve this problem before now?What made you interested in trying out our product?When did you realize that a tool​ like ours is what you need right now?How much research did you do to decide on our product? What are some other, similar tools you discovered during the research process?3. Perform a Google search targeting your SaaS use cases and features Performing a Google search for the use cases, features, and problems your software solves is a great way to identify your top SEO competitors. This is effective because most companies ranking high on Google are investing in SEO. Use the “related:website” advanced search feature This search operator shows you other websites related to the one you search for on Google. Let’s say you want to find websites like salesforce.com. You can search for “related:salesforce.com” on Google. The results on page one are some of SalesForce’s top SERP competitors: Search for the use cases of your software If your software helps SaaS companies onboard and activate new users, one of your core use cases is “user onboarding”. If you search “user onboarding software” on Google, you’ll unlock competitors who are either bidding for or ranking organically for the keyword. Some of the websites targeting this use case on Google include: AppcuesUserpilotAptyUserflowAside from that, there are SaaS brands paying to rank on the first page of Google for this keyword. Search for your SaaS features One of the core features of the Moz tool is the “rank tracking” feature. To identify the websites that have a similar feature, you can input that keyword on the Google search bar. Here’s the result it returns: As you can see, aside from Moz, other competing websites for this feature include: Link-AssistantAhrefsRank TrackerSpyfuSEMrushSearch for your SaaS jobs-to-be-done (JTBD) Let’s say you run an online video editing software, one of the problems that your audience most likely have is “how to add an image to video”. By performing a Google search for this query, you’ll see a result that looks like this: This shows that some of the top SEO competitors in the online video editing space include: KapwingVeedOnline Video CutterFlixierMovaviConclusion If you don’t know the SaaS companies you’re competing with, they’ll leave you behind and dominate your niche. In this post, you’ve learned three effective ways to identify your top SEO competitors as a SaaS brand: You can use an SEO software such as the Moz True Competitor tool to find your competitors and know the keywords they’re targeting.You can reach out to new and existing customers, to find out the solutions they’re comparing you with.You can search Google for your SaaS product’s features and use cases. This shows you the companies likely competing with your brand on the SERPs.Ever tried any of these tactics before? Kindly share which of them worked really well for your SaaS brand in the Q&A.

More brands than ever are investing and producing quality journalism to drive their earned media strategy. They recognize that it’s a valuable channel for simultaneously building authority while finding and connecting with customers where they consume news. But producing and distributing great content is no easy feat. At Stacker and our brand-partnership model Stacker Studio, our team has mastered how to create newsworthy, data-driven stories for our newswire. Since 2017, we’ve placed thousands of stories across the most authoritative news outlets in the country, including MSN, Newsweek, SFGate, and Chicago Tribune. Certain approaches have yielded a high hit rate (i.e., pick up), and one of our most successful tactics is helping add context to what’s going on in the world. (I mentioned this as a tactic in my Whiteboard Friday, How to Make Newsworthy Content: Part 2.) Contextualizing topics, statistics, and events serves as a core part of our content ideation process. Today, I’m going to share our strategy so you can create content that has real news value, and that can resonate with newsroom editors. Make a list of facts and insights You likely have a list of general topics relevant to your brand, but these subject areas are often too general as a launching point for productive brainstorming. Starting with “personal finance,” for example, leaves almost too much white space to truly explore and refine story ideas. Instead, it’s better to hone in on an upcoming event, data set, or particular news cycle. What is newsworthy and specifically happening that’s aligned with your general audience? At the time of writing this, Jack Dorsey recently stepped down as CEO of Twitter. That was breaking news and hardly something a brand would expect to cover. But take the event and try contextualizing it. In general, what’s the average tenure of founders before stepping down? What’s the difference in public market success for founder-led companies? In regard to Parag Agrawal stepping into the CEO role, what is the percentage of non-white CEOs in American companies? As you can see, when you contextualize, it unlocks promising avenues for creative storyboarding. Here are some questions to guide this process. Question 1: How does this compare to similar events/statistics? Comparison is one of the most effective ways to contextualize. It’s hard to know the true impact of a fact when it exists stand alone or in a vacuum. Let’s consider hurricane season as an example. There’s a ton of stories around current hurricane seasons, whether it’s highlighting the worst hurricanes of all time or getting a sense of a particular hurricane’s scope of destruction or impact on a community. But we decided to compare it another way. What if we asked readers to consider what hurricane seasons were like the year they were born? This approach prompts a personal experience for the readers to compare what hurricane seasons are like now compared to a more specific “then” — one that feels particularly relevant and relatable. I’ll talk more about time-based comparisons in the next section, but you can also compare: Across industries/topics (How much damage do hurricanes do compared to tidal waves?)Across geographic areas (Which part of the ocean is responsible for the most destructive hurricanes? Where has the most damage been done around the world?)Across demographics (Which generation is most frightened of hurricanes?)There are dozens of possibilities, so allow yourself to freely explore all potential angles. Question 2: What are the implications on a local level? In some cases, events or topics are discussed online without the details of how they’re impacting individual people or communities. We might know what something means for a general audience, but is there a deeper impact or implication that’s not being explored? One of the best ways to do this is through localization, which involves taking a national trend and evaluating how it’s reflected and/or impacts specific areas. Newspapers do this constantly, but brands can do it, too. For example, there are countless stories about climate change, but taking a localized approach can help make the phenomenon feel “closer to home.” We put together a piece that illustrated significant ways climate change has affected each state (increased flooding in Arkansas, the Colorado River drying up, sea levels rising off South Carolina, etc.). You could take this a step further and look at a particular city or community if you had supporting data or research. If you serve particular markets, it’s easy to implement this strategy. Orchard, for example, does a great job publishing real estate market trend reports in the areas they serve. But if you’re a national or international brand that doesn’t cater to specific regions, try using data sets that have information for all countries, states, cities, ZIP codes, etc., and present all of it, allowing readers to identify data points that matter to them. When readers can filter data or interact with your content, it allows them to have a more personalized reading experience. Question 3: What sides of the conversation have we not fully heard yet? The best way to tap into the missing pieces of a story is to consider how other topics/subject areas interact with that story. I’ll stick with our climate change theme. We did the story above on how climate change has impacted every state, which feels comprehensive about the topic, but there’s more to dive into. Outside of just thinking how climate change is impacting geographic areas, we asked ourselves: How is it affecting different industries? Now we have a look at a more specific angle that’s fascinating — how climate change has impacted the wine industry. When you have a topic and want to uncover less-explored angles, ask yourself a set of questions that’s similar to the compare/contrast model: How does this topic impact different regions? (E.g. What is wine’s cultural role in various countries?)How does this topic impact different demographics of people? (E.g. Who profits most from wine making?)How does this topic impact different industries? (E.g. How have wineries/vineyards impacted tourism?)How is this topic impacted by these various things? (E.g. How is the flavor of wine impacted by region? Who buys the most wine, and where do they live?)This should create a good brainstorming foundation to identify interesting hooks that aren’t often explored about a really common topic. Conclusion Not only will taking the approach of contextualizing differentiate your story from everything else out there, it will also allow you to re-promote it when a similar event occurs or the topic trends again in the future. Contextualized content is often this perfect blend of timeliness and evergreen that’s really difficult to achieve otherwise.
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