The Art of SaaS Content Writing: An Actionable Guide

SaaS content writing is like a puzzle – each piece has to fit perfectly for the big picture to make sense. The challenge? Creating content that not only informs but also engages your target audience.

This article will share insights that will help you streamline and scale your SaaS content production. Whether you’re a seasoned pro or just starting out, you’ll learn some tips and tricks to help you elevate your game. So buckle up, and let’s get ready to make some magic!

What is SaaS Content Writing?

SaaS content writing refers to the creation of written content for software as a service (SaaS) companies. Content can take many forms, including blog posts, product descriptions, case studies, and email campaigns. Content is used to inform, educate, and engage potential and existing customers. 

SaaS content writing aims to promote the benefits and unique features of the company’s products or services and establish the company as a thought leader in the industry.

Ultimately, you’re creating content to drive sales and customer engagement.

Effective SaaS content writing requires a deep understanding of the target audience and the ability to communicate complex information clearly and compellingly. Of course, you know all of this.

How is SaaS Content Writing Different from Other Niches

There are several differences between SaaS content writing and content produced in other niches. First is content length. 

The average SaaS blog post is more than 1,500 words. We rarely write articles that are shorter than this length for clients.

Many posts are significantly more than that.

Secondly, the best SaaS content writing is focused on the uses of the product and the pain points of customers. You’re creating content that aligns with the interests of your target audience and nudges them toward trying your product.

Let me give you an example.

In this article, we created timesheet templates for Quidlo. This is something lots of employers with hourly employees look for. That’s also the target market for Quidlo.

The goal is to give away these templates for free. However, within that article, we also share alternatives to excel templates. The alternative is Quidlo Timesheets. And we explain why using an automated timesheet software is superior to manual excel templates.

Finally, SaaS content is factual. You refer to case studies and data when writing content. You’ll rarely use stock photos. Rather, you’ll illustrate your points by sharing graphs or similar graphics. 

Screenshots are also commonplace with SaaS content. These are super helpful when you’re trying to demonstrate a point or guide the reader.

Why You Need to Invest in SaaS Content Writing

Search engine optimization is critical to establishing an online presence and driving traffic to a SaaS company’s website. Successful SEO is underpinned by great content. By creating valuable and relevant content, a SaaS company can establish itself as a thought leader in its industry, build trust with its target audience, and ultimately drive more leads and sales.

A well-optimized website with high-quality content will rank higher on search engines, increasing visibility and attracting more organic traffic. 

According to a study by Brightedge, 53% of site traffic comes from organic search. That traffic can be responsible for as much as 40% of revenue generation.

Here’s an example from Surfer SEO, a client of ours, that illustrates my point.

They get almost 29,000 visitors a month to their site. They’re ranking for some relevant terms, like the “article outline generator tool.” As a result of ranking in first place for the tool, they’re getting close to 500 visitors a month. 

That’s a tidy result for a middle-of-the-funnel search term.

Another of our clients, Aura, has a content strategy focused on top-of-the-funnel search terms. They’re getting close to 600,000 visitors per month to their site.

Again, a huge result that drives qualified leads to their site.

These types of SEO results are invaluable with funding rounds too. They show your company is on that upward trajectory.

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

The SaaS Content Marketing Funnel

Content marketing will take a large chunk of your SaaS marketing budget. You need to understand the content marketing funnel to get the best results from your investment.

Here’s a quick snapshot of the funnel:

• Top of the Funnel = Informational search terms and statistics posts
• Middle of the Funnel = How-to articles & tools
• Bottom of the Funnel = Comparison and product review posts. Plus case studies
• Buying Funnel = Your sales pages
• Retention = Product tutorials

The further you are down the funnel, the lower the search volume, but the higher the conversion potential. Informational search terms, for example, get a lot of traffic but won’t generate sales.

Transactional terms, on the other hand, get lower search volume but higher conversion rates.

You can start from the bottom or top of the funnel. There’s no right answer to the approach. Generally speaking, it’s easier to rank for top-of-the-funnel search terms.

You need to be consistent and take a long-term view of things to generate results. If you decide to focus on bottom-of-the-funnel search terms, do all the comparison articles you can. Don’t do two or three articles and then jump to a different focus. You’ll be disappointed by the results.

This guide to SaaS keyword research provides some handy insights on the best approach.

9 Types of SaaS Content You Should 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.

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 organically 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 original 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. 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 send a questionnaire to 2,000+ people. They then analyze the data to pull out trends for the year.

The 2022 report generated 996 links from referring domains. 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 got 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 get lots of traffic coming to your site and generate awareness about your offer.

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. Obviously, 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. These posts 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 

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. Here are the hoops you need to jump through to create a team that can produce quality content at scale:

• Hire a 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 that we use. This way, the reader comes away from the posts with insights they can apply to their business.

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

6. Templates 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. The other 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’s suited to template posts. There are several relevant template keywords to target. We happen to be ranking for two important ones.

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 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.

That ranking article generates around 2,000 visitors a month to the Sendinblue blog, according to Ahrefs. 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.

8. Comparison & Review Articles

Comparison articles 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 create 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, users are always trying to find 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. That doesn’t mean you can get some of that traffic. 

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.

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 creating. They require quite a bit of investment too. But the best part is they can skyrocket your conversions.

Case studies show how a certain user found a solution to their pain point using a particular product. That’s the kinda 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.

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

5 Powerful 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 any meaningful results if you’re not keen on how you create the content. So, let me share some of the guidelines we follow to create valuable content for our clients and blog.

A. Keep it simple

It’s tempting to show your expertise with technical jargon while writing content. That’s the last thing you want to do. Your readers want to feel your expertise through the insights you’ll share. Not the powerful words you’ll include in your content.

So keep your writing simple, stupid. If you won’t say a word or a sentence in a real-life conversation with a friend, don’t bother including it in your content.

We train our writing team to aim for a grade 7-8 score.

B. Focus on the 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 knowledge. This allows us to pick the right topics, use the right examples, and generally curate our content to meet their unique needs.

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. This is one of the best ways to write content that encourages engagement.

C. Thorough keyword research

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. They can unearth more keyword ideas to pursue.

D. Show product in action

Earlier in the article, we pointed out that one of the unique differences between SaaS content and other types of content is the use of original graphics and screenshots. 

The point of all this is to make the content look and feel more actionable. You’re trying to give readers insights and tips they can go and implement right away.

So, whenever you’re describing a product or feature, show it in action. Use arrows and other shapes to draw attention to the specific elements you’re describing.

E. Consistent tone and presence

Create a style guide and make sure your writing team follows it when producing content. Make sure your style guide includes all critical elements like your brand voice, tone, etc. That helps in creating consistency, which is helpful for branding.

Structuring Your SaaS Content

Let’s look at how you can structure your content to make it more inviting for the readers.

A. Writing Headlines That Grab Attention

Headlines can determine whether someone proceeds to read an article or not. Essentially, the fate of an article that took hours to write could depend on a single line of probably less than 60 characters.

Now, your headline should include the target keyword. This confirms to the reader that they’re about to engage with the right thing. Plus, it’s good for your SEO.

From there, it all comes down to creativity and lots of testing. You can include numbers, for example. And add some power words. 

But with that said, you don’t want to overdo it. Neither should you sensationalize your headlines. 

Recently, we’ve been playing around with ChatGPT to come up with headline ideas. You should do the same. Simply prompt the AI to “give me several headline ideas for a topic about [insert your target keyword].” 

You can also give the tool your working title and mention the keyword that must be included in the headlines.

ChatGPT will deliver several headlines. Rarely will the tool produce a perfect headline right out of the box. So the trick is to pick little bits of the best suggestions and compile them to produce your title.

B. Creating a Compelling Introduction

Your introduction needs to be brief and catchy. Our best practice is to write a 150-word introduction.

For the catchy bit, use the Problem-Agitate-Solution guideline. Start by introducing the topic and pointing out why it’s a problem. You can agitate this further by dropping a relevant stat when possible.

Then transition to explain how the article is going to resolve that problem.

C. Formatting Your Content for Maximum Readability

Break your text into smaller digestible paragraphs to enhance readability. I’d say never write a paragraph longer than 4 lines.

Also, make sure your article doesn’t have huge chunks of text. So include an image, bullet point, or subheading every 4-5 paragraphs. 

D. Using Images, Videos, and Interactive Content

Use visuals to make your content more engaging. But remember, no stock images. Original graphics and screenshots only. You want visuals that add value to the content. 

Optimizing Your SaaS Content for SEO

You’ve seen how you can structure your content to make it interesting to readers. Now here’s how to get it to rank on search engines.

A. Keyword Optimization

Make sure to include your target keyword at strategic places throughout the article. The keyword should be in the title, meta descriptions, URL, and other areas within the article body. 

Avoid overoptimization, though. I’ll mention the tools we use to ensure every piece of content has the right keyword density in the next section.

B. Meta Descriptions and Titles

Every article must have a meta description and title tag. The meta description will be displayed on the search results, so make sure it’s something that’ll provoke users to click on your result. 

The meta description should be 150 characters long.

Meanwhile, try to keep your title tag similar to the article title. Titles should be less than 60 characters long.

C. Header Optimization (H1, H2, H3)

Break your article into H1, H2s, and H3s. Every article should have only one H1. That should be the article headline. Then use H2s and H3s from there. 

We try to avoid using H4s because we also don’t want to overcomplicate the article structure.

D. Anchor Text Optimization

Internal linking is an essential part of onsite SEO. It helps search bots crawl through your site. Make sure every new article has at least four internal links. Use contextual anchor texts when adding internal links.

At Crunch Marketing, we usually use exact anchor text only 20% of the time. For the rest, we’ll use variations of the target keyword. This is useful in preventing overoptimization issues.

E. Content-Length Optimization

For content length, we normally look at the length of the top-ranking content (the top 5 results). Then add up the total and come up with an average. That’s the word count we’ll aim for

You can do this manually by using a free tool like Word Counter to count the number of words in each article. Alternatively, you can rely on on-page SEO tools like Surfer SEO that aggregate the number for you.

Tools for Ideation and Content Creation

Here are the tools we use for content ideation and creation:

A. Keyword Research Tools

Ahrefs

Ahrefs is an all-in-one SEO tool with lots of features including a keyword research functionality. You can use this tool to find keyword ideas. The tool shows the search volume, difficulty level, and potential traffic for each keyword. 

This data can guide your content marketing efforts to improve website visibility and ranking. For example, if you’re a new site, you may start writing content for keywords with lower difficulty levels to improve your chances of ranking higher on the SERPs.

Google Autocomplete and People Also Ask

Google Autocomplete kicks in when you start typing something on the search bar. It suggests various popular queries based on the words you’ve already entered.

Meanwhile, the People Also Ask section shows you additional queries or topics related to your search query.

Use these free features to identify popular topics people are searching for.

Answer The Public

Answer the Public is great, especially when you want to create an FAQ section for your content. The tool will give you popular questions people are searching for based on a particular keyword.

The tool is free too. Though you only get to do 3 searches per day. 

B. Content Planning Tools

Chat GPT

ChatGPT can help with creating article outlines. Prompt the tool to give you an outline around a particular topic or keyword.

For example, here is an outline for an article on “how to boost employee productivity.”

I recommend checking the ranking content before you start writing your article. Look out for any essential subheadings that ChatGPT may have missed.

Detailed Chrome Extension

This tool is helpful when you want to extract the outline of ranking content. Install the extension, go to the article you’re interested in, and click the extension gear. You’ll get a report like this.

Besides providing the article outline, this tool will also give you details like the links and images used in the article. 

C. Editing and Proofreading Tools

1. SurferSEO

SurferSEO is pretty much the industry standard in content optimization. The platform helps you optimize your article against the ranking content by suggesting key phrases to include and the word count to aim for. It also suggests the ideal number of paragraphs and headings. 

I’ll recommend making sure every article you publish hits a score of at least 85. The higher the better. But don’t just fix the phrases for the sake of it. Everything needs to feel natural. Otherwise, you’ll trade user experience for search engine optimization.

2. Frase

Frase works just like SurferSEO. I’d say you don’t need both. 

You can also use Frase to generate article outlines. It has an AI content writer too.

3. Grammarly

We use Grammarly for proofreading. The platform will help you catch grammar mistakes and enhance your sentences for better readability. 

I’ll say aim for an overall score of 90+ and a readability score of above 60%. Plagiarism should be less than 3%.

4. Writer AI Content Detector

AI content writing tools are everywhere today. Unfortunately, they’re still not that good at creating quality content. Even more worrying, Google says AI-generated content is against its webmaster guidelines.

So we use the Writer AI Content Detector tools to detect AI-generated content. Make sure your content scores at least 90% on this tool.

And this tool is free, by the way.

D. Collaboration Tools for Teams

1. Trello

We use Trello for collaboration. To streamline your SaaS content writing process, I’ll recommend creating several columns for each key step. So you’ll probably have a “To Do,” “Writing or Doing,” “First Review,” “Writer Revising,” “Second Review,” and “Approved.” 

We have one of these for every major department. This one is for managing onsite content for clients.

2. Slack

Slack is great for instant messaging. Trello has an @mention feature, but it’s so easy to miss these notifications. So you should set up a Slack channel to prevent this.

SaaS Content Writing FAQ

Summing Up

When you think about it, the goal of SaaS content writing 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 if you need assistance with all this.