SaaS Content Writing: How to Boost Conversions & Engagement

SaaS content writing is the art of crafting compelling written material that informs, educates, and engages your audience turning leads into customers for your software product. It’s something we know a thing or two about.

Over the last three years, our SaaS content marketing agency has written thousands of SEO-optimized articles for clients like Writer, Shift4Shop, and GetResponse. We have a team of 40+ writers alongside Junior and Senior Editors. During this time, we’ve built out a body of internal guides to help our team with SaaS content writing.

This guide to SaaS content writing covers the insights we’ve gained from this experience. Let’s start this off at the beginning.

Why You Need a Good SaaS Content Strategy

According to Exploding Topics, there are 30,000 SaaS companies globally. These companies compete for customers through various marketing channels.

The fastest-growing companies gain market share by dominating a marketing channel.

SEO, video, podcasts, and events are the primary organic marketing channels for SaaS businesses. These channels take up a large chunk of a SaaS marketing budget. Blog content is one of the easiest and cheapest marketing channels to scale.

Take Aura, one of our clients, which focuses heavily on content marketing.

They invested heavily in search, specifically targeting top-of-the-funnel search terms. In 24 months, site traffic grew from fewer than 20,000 monthly visitors to 600,000 visitors per month.

Search is now the primary customer acquisition channel for Aura.

This nicely highlights why a well-optimized website with high-quality content can generate outsized returns. That can make search a driver for additional growth.

Surfer SEO, another client of ours, is a good case study of a company investing in content. Surfer gets almost 15,000 visitors a month to its blog.

They’re ranking for terms like “competitor keywords” and “how to choose SEO keywords.” An SEO content optimization tool like Surfer will generate leads from ranking for relevant keywords like these.

How to Write Great SaaS Content

You haven’t been living in a cave for the last two decades. I’m sure you don’t need to be sold on the importance of SEO and content marketing to your business. So let’s focus on the specific steps that get you writing SaaS content that generates leads and customers in no time.

1. Create Content Outline & Use Editorial Guidelines

To get the best results from your SaaS writers, you need great editorial guidelines. I highly recommend you download this resource, which we provide to our writers. A friend of mine produced it years ago, and it’s great for setting expectations.

Outside of sharing this resource with our writers, we ask our writers to follow these rules:

• No Fluff: Every paragraph you write needs to provide value to the reader.
• Paragraph Length: Paragraphs can be between one to five lines. Vary the length to make your piece of content engaging. The median paragraph length is three lines.
• Vary Sentence Length: Vary the sentence length to make your content engaging. A mix between short sentences and longer sentences is ideal.
• No Run-On Sentences: Always break up long sentences. If you’re using more than two commas in a sentence you probably need to split it up.
• Images: Use one image every 300 words to break up text evenly—ideally, data sources (charts, etc.). Don’t use generic copyright-free photos like stock images.
• Keep it Simple: Imagine your reader is a college-educated person who speaks English as a second language. This is your target audience.
• Do a Final Check with Grammarly: We’ve used many grammar tools over the years. My favorite is Grammarly. I strongly recommend it.

Our editorial guidelines are straightforward. We’ve used these guidelines for the guest post content we produce for sites like Hubspot, BigCommerce, Envato, and others.

The editorial guidelines need to be customized to your site and target audience.

You should also provide writers with a comprehensive article brief. The more comprehensive the brief, the fewer mistakes your content writer will make. Here is the article brief we use.

FREE: SaaS Content Brief Template

Here are some of the important things a good article brief covers:

• Keyword Focus: The target SEO keyword.
• Headings + Description: This section provides an overview of the HTML headings in the article. Each heading should have a short description.
• Internal Links: List of your preferred internal links and the anchor text to use.
• External Link Rules: List of sites the writer shouldn’t link to, e.g., competitors.
• Editorial Guidelines: Link to your editorial guidelines.
• Resources: List of SEO tools the writer can use alongside passwords and other info.

You can see it should be comprehensive. Here’s a link to the template.

2. Write Using an SEO Optimization Tool

If you want your content to rank in the SERPs you need to be using an SEO content optimization tool. Your competitors certainly are.

Various SEO optimization tools are available on the market. The most popular solutions are Clearscope, Surfer SEO, and Frase, but there are plenty of others.

I’ve had the chance to talk with the teams at Clearscope and Surfer about how its content optimization tools work. While the exact process is a business secret, the general way these tools work is as follows:

• Use an API pull from a solution like Google Language Natural Learning – the algorithm that underpins Google – to review the first 30 search results. Most tools use more than one AI solution.
• Conduct keyword extraction to get the NLP keywords from the text. These are the terms Google might expect to see in an article targeting a keyword based on the existing search results. That tells you what keywords to include in an article.
• Check the length of the ranking articles. That will give you an estimate of how long your content should be.
• Deliver all these insights through a central dashboard. Most tools use a traffic light system or score out of 100 to show you how well you’ve optimized your content.

Hears a video from Surfer that discusses how its content tool works.

You need to invest in an SEO optimization tool to compete in the search results.

3. Write a Great Headline to Hook Your Reader

Headlines can determine whether someone proceeds to read an article or not. According to Copyblogger, eight out of ten people will read a headline, but only two out of ten people read the rest of the copy. Given that you’ve only got a headline to hook you from the SERPs, you get a sense of how important your title is.

Basically, your headline really needs to be better than the top search results.

The good news is lots of headlines in the SERPs suck.

Recently, we’ve been playing around with ChatGPT to come up with headline ideas. Here is the general prompt we use to come up with great headlines: “Suggest five headlines on TOPIC using the TYPE OF HEADLINE formula.”

For example: suggest five headlines on SaaS marketing strategies using the curiosity gap headline formula.

Here are some headline formulas to try:

• Curiosity gap formula
• Credibility formula
• Objection headline formula
• Controversial headline formula

ChatGPT won’t always produce great headlines. However, formulas like these can help you create better headlines. Check out our short guide on how to use ChatGPT to write headlines.

4. Write a Compelling Introduction

Your introduction needs to be brief and catchy. Our best practice is to write introduces not longer than 170 words. And here are a few approaches we use to come up with introductions:

• Problem-Agitate-Solution: Introduce the topic and point out why it’s a problem. Use insights to agitate the reader and show how the article will solve this problem. You can use a shocking stat to demonstrate the magnitude of the problem, for example.
• Definition Approach: Directly define the keyword you’re targeting. Then get into the article.
• Story-Led Introduction: Use a story or case study to introduce the topic.

You can use the same introduction style for most of your content. For example, Aura frequently uses story-led introductions.

Find the approach that works for you and utilize it.

5. Make Your Content Skimmable

Break your text into smaller, digestible paragraphs to enhance readability.

I’d say never write a paragraph longer than five lines. Yoast recommends this approach. In its guide to recommended paragraph length, it states: “it should be more than two sentences long at the very least. If your paragraph is over 200 words, it’s almost certainly too long.”

Also, make sure your article doesn’t have huge chunks of text. So include an image, bullet point, or subheading every four to five paragraphs.

Take this post by Backlinko as an example.

You can see most paragraphs are no more than three lines. Many paragraphs are one or two sentences.

The content is skimmable and easy to read.

6. Use Images, Videos, and Interactive Content

Use visuals to make your content more engaging. We suggest adding a media resource at least once every 300 words. It breaks up the text and keeps the reader engaged.

But remember, no stock images. Original graphics and screenshots only. You want visuals that add value to the content. Just look at the kind of images I’ve used in this blog post, for example.

SaaS Content Writing Tips

You know what type of content you want to write for your SaaS brand—that’s awesome. Unfortunately, you won’t get meaningful results if you’re not keen on how you create the content. Here are the guidelines we follow to create valuable content for our clients and blog.

1. Write Long Form Content

The content that appears in the search results is getting longer. According to a study of 912 million blog posts conducted by Backlinko and research by SEMRush:

• Ideally, a blog post should range between 1,500 and 2,500 words in length.
• Articles with longer content tend to receive about 77.2% more links compared to shorter pieces.
• To optimize social sharing, content should ideally be between 1,000 and 2,000 words in length.

Article length obviously varies dramatically depending on what search term you’re targeting. However, a general theme, which is backed up by those two pieces of research, is longer is better.

If you’re serious about getting into the search results, then be prepared to invest in long-form content.

2. Write at a High School Grade Reading Level

It’s generally agreed that the reading grade of your content is not a ranking factor. This article on Search Engine Journal provides a nice grounding on the disconnect between readability and search rankings. You can use complex language to engage with a small audience.

With that said, you should use simple language to attract a large audience. There are many reasons for this. For example, people who speak English as a second language struggle to read difficult text.

In fact, most of us struggle with necessarily difficult content.

There’s a good chance the last time you started reading a heavy article, you pressed back on the browser and picked another resource from the search results. I know I’ve done that.

So keep your SaaS writing simple, stupid. Depending on the topic, our writing team aims for a readability score of grades seven to eight. Yale recommends this in its guide to web accessibility. It’s something that I agree with.

You can check your score using the Hemingway App. It’s a free tool.

3. Focus On Your Target Audience

Always remember who you’re writing content for. What kind of struggles do they deal with? What kind of brands do they look up to?

For example, at Crunch Marketing, we know that our target audience is people in the marketing department of SaaS companies with intermediate marketing knowledge. This allows us to pick the right topics, use the right examples, and generally curate our content to meet their unique needs.

We know what they already know, so we don’t bore them with the basics. Instead, we pour our resources into the specific insights they need to thrive.

You need to do the same thing.

Take a step back from writing your content and visualize who the ideal reader is. Put yourself in their shoes and imagine what they’d want to read. The content needs to resonate with your audience.

4. Optimize Your Content

To write an article that ranks well and addresses the search intent, you have to do thorough keyword research. There’s no way around that. The good thing is there are so many ways to do keyword research. 

Start by analyzing the Google autocomplete and people also ask features. These will give you interesting keywords and additional topics you can cover.

You can also look into free and paid keyword research tools and content optimization like Frase and Surfer. They can unearth more keyword ideas to pursue. Check out our SaaS keyword analysis guide here for more details.

5. Use Case Studies & Back-Up Points With Sources

Great SaaS content is actionable. Use screenshots to illustrate your points. For example, when you describe a product or feature, show it in action. Use arrows and other shapes to draw attention to the specific elements you’re describing.

You should also pull in case studies and back up your points with relevant sources. That’s crucial, especially when doing B2B SaaS content writing. You need reliable data to convince B2B audiences.

It’s also an important element of EEAT, a Google ranking factor. I recommend reading the Google Search Quality Evaluators Guidelines to better understand what Google looks for from quality content.

Also, I’d avoid including general stats and case studies just for the sake of it. The more relevant and closely related a study is to the topic in question, the more helpful it will be to your readers.

6. Get Insights From Customers

Your best content insights come from your customers. Listen to customer support calls and talk to the sales team. You will create better content if you understand customer pain points. You’ll also get to know the words and phrases they use.

Insights like these help you write compelling content that potential customers will find useful. If you’re working with a freelance writer or content marketing agency, it’s worth sharing some of these details.

For example, at Crunch Marketing, we schedule a separate call to interview the client and understand their product. We also request multiple product demos (recorded). This gives us an inside look into how the product works and who it’s being sold to.

7. Update Your Content Regularly

According to Search Engine Journal, the freshness of your content is widely seen as a Google ranking factor for many search terms. Regularly updating your content is one of the best ways to improve search rankings and overcome any downward traffic trends.

Check out this example from one of the sites I’m involved in.

We started doing content updates to older articles around where that arrow is. Within 30 days of the updates, site traffic almost doubled.

There are various strategies you can use to update content.

One option is to review which pages generate the most leads for your business. Then go to Google Search Console and compare page traffic year over year. If the page traffic for this year is lower than last year, you should do a content update.

Alternatively, check which pages have seen a year-over-year traffic drop

Create a list of posts to update. If you have a decent amount of site content, aim to update a minimum of eight posts a month. You should be doing this alongside publishing fresh site content.

The Role of AI in Content Writing for SaaS

Sophisticated AI tools now assist in everything from ideation to optimization. So how should you use them, and what are the risks?

Search engines seem to be okay with the use of AI in content creation. For example, here are the guidelines from Google. Here is the key part of the argument: “however content is produced, those seeking success in Google Search should be looking to produce original, high-quality, people-first content demonstrating qualities E-E-A-T.”

Essentially, Google says you can use AI to generate content. But there is a catch.

Are you producing AI content at scale, and is the content really helping the reader? In March 2024, Google released a major core update targeting spammy websites using AI content. The goal was to get rid of unhelpful content on the SERPs. Some sites were even deindexed.

With that in mind, here’s how we use AI tools for content generation (hint, we don’t use AI to create all our content).

We use AI tools to review outlines, come up with headlines, scan drafts, and suggest improvements. AI tools are great for this. Algorithmic recommendations must be weighed against maintaining your brand voice.

So, what’s the takeaway?

AI offers enormous potential for elevating your SaaS content writing. But it should complement, not replace, human expertise. By blending both, you can produce better content.

Metrics to Track the Effectiveness of Your SaaS Content

When it comes to gauging the success of your SaaS content, metrics are your best friend. While traffic is an obvious indicator, the real story often lies in more nuanced data points.

Here’s a rundown of key metrics you can track to view how your content is performing:

• Search ranking: The position your content occupies in search engine results is crucial. If you’re not on the first page, you’re missing out on a massive chunk of potential traffic. Google Search Console is the best data source for reviewing rankings.
• Page Metrics: On-page metrics like time-on-page and bounce rate. A high time-on-page suggests that visitors find your content valuable, while a high bounce rate could indicate the opposite. Use tools like Google Analytics to dive into these metrics.
• Conversion Data: Your content should drive actions. This could be anything from signing up for a newsletter to requesting a demo or making a purchase. Track conversions using custom events in Google Analytics or dedicated conversion tracking tools.

By monitoring these metrics, you’ll gain a comprehensive understanding of your content’s performance. This will help you refine your strategy, enabling you to produce content that not only ranks well but also resonates with your target audience.

9 Types of SaaS Content to Produce

The content you produce for your SaaS blog will generally fall into one of the following buckets. Read on to gain insights into the different content types you can produce and the role of each.

1. Statistics Posts

A statistics post is a list post. You gather all of the statistics relevant to your niche together in an article and hit publish. These posts are one of the best ways to get links back to your site.

Here’s why they’re so effective:

• Writers add statistics to content to validate an argument.
• Many writers are lazy. They go to Google and search for statistics about a niche.
• The writer links back to the roundup post rather than the source.

Take social media statistics as an example. Here’s the ranking content.

That article has links from 6,582 domains.

It’s nuts just how many links you can get organically from this type of content.

The lesson here; publish a post with statistics for your niche and make it rank. For example, we made a roundup post of the top SaaS statistics. It helps if you can have the latest stats.

Once you get a few links to get that article to rank, more will pour in, cementing its position. This is one of the easiest ways to improve your site’s domain authority and secure hard-to-get links.

2. Reports: Original Research

Every content team should invest some time in creating original research. The problem with this type of content is it’s a big investment. You also don’t know if these projects will generate results, which is why few companies do this type of research.

With that said, you can get great results from producing original content that aligns with your niche.

Take Buffer as an example.

A few years ago, they started releasing an annual report on the State of Remote Work. It’s a big investment. They sent a questionnaire to 2,000+ people. They then analyze the data to pull out trends for the year.

The 2023 report has generated 1.4k links from referring domains so far. That includes sites like Hubspot, Atlassian, the BBC, and others. At the time of writing, 1,112 domains reference the 2021 report. The report summary has links from authority sites like Inc., Techcrunch, and others.

A huge result.

I could go on.

They’ve been doing this report for a couple of years and knocking it out of the park each time.

You’d struggle to generate these types of links running a guest posting or link-building campaign. The editors at top sites like these just wouldn’t respond to your inquiries.

That’s the power of great original research.

3. Top of the Funnel Posts

Top-of-the-funnel blog posts target keywords your ideal buyer persona would find interesting. They’ve got a low conversion potential but have higher search volumes. These are the posts you write to attract lots of traffic to your site and generate awareness about your offer. They’re also very helpful when you want to build an email list since you can add popups and signup forms.

Here are a few examples from Quidlo, a time-tracking solution we create content for.

They’re ranking for terms like “team dynamics,” the “best virtual assistant companies in the Philippines,” and “4-10 work schedule.” Each of these topics falls into different content groups.

We’re creating content that covers the different types of work schedules with Quidlo.

That graph showing exponential growth is exactly what you want to see when you look at your search results. The goal is to take Quidlo from where they are now to 100k+ visitors a month, which is a realistic target given the content calendar.

4. Pain Point Posts

Pain point posts are a great way to showcase how your software addresses the pain points of your target audience. They are squarely in the middle of the SaaS marketing funnel and follow the Problem-Agitate-Solve copywriting arc.

You first lay out the problem.

Then you discuss how much of a pain in the ass the issue is. That generally means highlighting how much time it takes to deal with the issue or the costs associated with the problem. This step helps remind the reader that it’s an issue they want to address.

Finally, you showcase how to use your software to solve the issue.

Here are a couple of examples of posts that address customer pain points:

Quidlo, a timesheet tracking software solution, has an article on preventing employee timesheet fraud. This is a real pain point, especially in the workplace with hourly employees. 

In this article, Quidlo provides actionable solutions to the issue. And, of course, one of the tips is for employers to use time-tracking software like Quidlo.

Or what about HubSpot? They understand that one of the biggest pain points among business owners is the need to personalize customer experiences. So they create an insightful article around the topic.

Those blog posts should give you a nice idea of the kind of content to produce for your own audience.

5. Checklist Posts

Checklist posts provide the steps a reader should go through to accomplish a task. The idea here is to have an actionable layout. Our guide to SaaS content production is a nice example of a checklist-style post.

We show readers how to create a content team and scale content production based on the insights I’ve gained from running a 40-person team in our SaaS SEO agency. Here are the hoops you need to jump through to create a team that can produce quality content at scale:

• Hire a SaaS writing team
• Create a knowledge base
• Create a content workflow
• Conduct keyword research
• Create your content calendar
• Start producing content

To make the content actionable, we break each of those steps down, sharing the tools and workflows we use in-house. That ensures the reader comes away from the posts with insights they can apply to their business.

Checklists let you position your brand as a source of valuable content. A great checklist will also generate some branded searches.

6. Template Posts

There’s a good chance that people in your niche want templates for the tasks they’re doing. Templates are a great high-volume middle-of-the-funnel search term. Another thing I like about templates is that you can create a nice downloadable asset.

Finally, template posts are a pretty easy type of content to create.

That’s three good reasons for creating template posts.

Quidlo is a nice example of a company that uses template posts. We wrote several posts targeting template keywords. For example, “time tracking spreadsheet templates” and “Google Sheets time tracking templates.”

The project time-tracking spreadsheets blog post and the Google Sheets time-tracking templates post bring more than 2,300 visitors a month to the Quidlo blog. That’s a decent chunk of highly relevant search traffic.

Moreover, these are keywords with decent buying intent and conversion potential.

7. Best of & Alternatives to Articles

There are two types of bottom-of-the-funnel list posts you should be creating; alternatives to posts and best software in your niche posts.

The “best of” blog posts are just a listicle for the tools in your niche. For example, with Beaconstac, a QR code platform, we do a lot of list posts. This guide on Medium to the best QR code generators is one of their most important blog posts.

The article ranks in first place in the SERPs for the target keyword.

You’ll notice this post is not hosted on Beaconstac. You can artificially dominate the search results by making content for third-party sites and getting it to rank.

Alongside the best of lists, you can also create lists of alternatives to the market leader in your niche. You could make a list post about the “best alternatives to Mailchimp” if you have an email marketing platform, for example.

According to Ahrefs, that ranking article generates around 2,000 visitors a month to the Sendinblue blog. Generally speaking, the higher the search volume or value, the higher the competition. Start with the smaller competitors, then work your way up the food chain.

Being bottom-of-the-funnel content pieces, you’ll need the writer to have extensive product knowledge. Alternatively, they should work closely with the product dev and sales teams or the product marketer. This is essential in showing how exactly your product is different and why that’s a big factor.

Users doing these searches are in the consideration stage. Sharing specific details about your software can make all the difference as to whether they’ll go with your product or choose someone else’s.

8. Comparison & Review Articles

Comparison posts are just a variation of review articles. You compare one competitor against another. The twist is you can get creative with the article outline to introduce your software somewhere in there.

It’s very simple. Take ClickUp, for example. They’re quite a big deal in the project management industry. But not so much in the time-tracking niche, where Clockify and Toggl pretty much run that world. 

So how does ClickUp introduce its platform’s time-tracking capabilities? They created a comparison article on Clockify vs. Toggl. And they get it to rank at the top of the SERPs for the search term.

Let’s now go into the article. This is the last subheading in that article.

Pretty clever, right?

The truth is that there are lots of comparison searches across most software niches. Whether it’s a project management tool, time tracker, or email marketing solution, potential users are always trying to figure out what’s the best option.

The problem is that most of these searches are branded in some way. Therefore, unless you’re already a market leader in your niche, you’re unlikely to be in the search term. But here’s the thing- you don’t have to be.

Just create a comparison article discussing the market leaders in your industry. Then add your solution somewhere in the mix. I’d recommend doing this toward the end of the article. You don’t want readers coming in for a Product A vs. Product B article, and the first subheading is about a product they’re not very familiar with. This will cause bounces.

Let’s circle back a bit. Does all this mean market leaders cannot create comparison articles? No, it doesn’t. 

Let’s look at HubSpot. This is a household name in the world of inbound marketing and CRM. They could pretend that other products don’t exist, but that would be silly.

So what do they do?

They create comparison articles pitting their software against other solutions in the market.

Not only that, but they also compare other CRMs. For example, they rank third for the search term Zoho vs. Salesforce.

I think you get the idea.

Once again, you want someone with a deep understanding of your product to write these articles. They must also pull the specific differences that make your product stand out.

9. Case Studies

Finally, we have case studies. Frankly speaking, case studies are one of those SaaS content types that’ll give you a headache to create. They require quite a bit of investment too. But the best part is they can skyrocket your conversion rate.

Case studies show how a user found a solution to their pain point using a particular product. That’s the stuff potential customers usually look for before making a purchase.

Does this product work? Has anyone ever used it successfully? Your case study will answer these questions bringing potential customers a step closer to converting.

Asana is a great example of a SaaS brand that does this so well. They partnered with HackReactor to create a case study showing how Asana was instrumental in helping the coding boot camp scale.

Asana has an entire page dedicated to case studies. They’re also keen to create a case study for their every customer persona. This is very useful because the case study must resonate with the user to be effective. So if you have multiple buyer personas, you must create customer success stories or case studies for each.

We also produce the same kind of content for our agency. We have multiple case studies showing how we’ve helped SaaS companies like Writer, Surfer, and Right Inbox win in the SERPs. And the content has proven to be very useful in generating leads for us.

Creating case studies is expensive and stressful. But case studies are a valuable bottom-of-the-funnel asset you cannot overlook.

SaaS Content Writing FAQ

Summing Up

When you think about it, the goal of content writing for SaaS is to communicate with your audience. You’re trying to help them with their issues and, hopefully, give them enough value for them to consider your software when they’re ready to invest in a solution. 

But that is not enough by itself. Your content must also rank to catch the eyeballs you need.

From this article, we showed you how exactly you can pull that off. Create different types of content ranging from statistics posts and original research to “best of” and “alternatives to” articles.

Then, follow the tips and tools we shared to make sure your content is engaging and ranks well. Does all this feel a bit too overwhelming for your team? Don’t worry. Content writing is a problem most SaaS brands struggle with, especially when they’re trying to scale. Get in touch with our SaaS content writing agency if you need assistance with all this.