Steal This SEO Strategy From HubSpot

Most SaaS founders think that SEO is about writing blog posts alone. 

But guess what?

It isn’t.

Truth is…

You can use SEO to drive traffic and signups for your SaaS startup without writing articles on your website.

Yes, you read that right!

HubSpot serves as a compelling example of how this SEO strategy can be successfully implemented. 

And in today’s post, I’ll share with you the HubSpot’s SEO strategy you can steal for your startup. 

Plus, four key things you should consider before implementing this SEO strategy as an underdog in any niche.

So, let’s get started.

How Free Tools Fuel HubSpot’s Organic Traffic Growth

In 2006, HubSpot launched the website grader tool.

With a simple goal in mind…

To give marketers advice on how to improve different aspects of their websites for free.

According to HubSpot, the tool analyzed about 2 million websites in 2010 (about four years after its launch).

That is around 500,000 websites analyzed every single year.

Based on this calculation, I believe that 10 Million+ business owners would have used this free tool to analyze and gain insights into improving their websites.

What does this show?

Today, HubSpot has taken it further and launched several free tools to support its marketing efforts.

Now you may be wondering…

Does this SEO strategy work?

Well, let’s look at the statistics for one of these tools.

According to Semrush, the “Email Signature Generator” tool is one of the biggest drivers of traffic to Hubspot's website.

As you can see, it drives about 44,000 organic traffic visitors to the website every single month.

By that calculation, this tool alone has led about 500,000 people to discover HubSpot in the last year.

While I can’t discuss the conversions (leads, demos, and signups) from these tools, I believe that they would work well for them.

The reason is simple…

The core of the HubSpot CRM is to help business owners with Sales, Marketing, and Customer Service.

If you take a deep look at these tools, you’ll see that they help business owners achieve at least one of these goals.

Take the “Blog Ideas Generator” tool as an example.

It’s useful for any small business owner who wants to generate blog ideas for their websites.

Once you’re ready to use the free tool, HubSpot subtly encourages you to create a free account.

That way, only people who have signed up to try HubSpot for free will be able to get results from the free tool.

While this is a great way to get signups from free tools, I don’t recommend this approach.

Here is why… 

It seems like you’re forcing the reader to sign up as a user to get the value from your free tool.

In most cases, the user will bounce to look for another tool on Google that provides total value upfront.

If they eventually sign up, they’ll most likely do it just to get value from your free tool and nothing more.

Aside from HubSpot, another company that excels at using the “Free tools” SEO strategy is Ahrefs.

According to Semrush, the free tools are the top pages driving the most traffic to the Ahrefs websites.

These free tools drive over 200,000 organic traffic visitors to the Ahrefs website every month.

Ahrefs has a different approach to providing value with its free tools.

Unlike HubSpot, it doesn’t push you to sign up for its tool before getting value from it.

Using the “backlink checker” tool as an example.

After inputting the website “ahrefs.com” on the tool, here is what we got.

As you can see, it provides the key information you need about the Ahrefs backlink profile.

At a glance, you can know the Domain Rating (DR), Total Number of Backlinks, and Referring Websites.

However, it limits the information about the Referring Pages, plus Anchor and Target URLs.

So, if you want to learn more, you can get started with its Starter Plan.

In this case, anyone who decides to sign up is most likely sold on Ahrefs's value and knows exactly what they’ll get from it.

4 Things To Consider Before Building a Free Tool as a SaaS Startup

Now, let’s talk about the key things that’ll help you drive results from your free tool.

1) Don’t build a free tool because your competitors are doing the same. 

Make sure it is an extension of your paid tool. 

2) Optimize the free tool to target specific keywords as you usually do to a blog post. 

That way, you can rank high on Google for keywords your target audience is actively searching for.

3) Most users will judge your paid software based on their experience using the free tool.

So, make it easy and fast for them to use, understand, and get an aha moment. 

4) The fact that you’ve built a free tool doesn’t mean that users will automatically upgrade. 

Instead, strategically use relevant CTAs to tell them precisely what to do next and how.

To recap…

Writing Blog Posts Isn’t the Only SEO Strategy for SaaS Startups

SEO isn’t about writing blog posts alone.

As a SaaS startup, you should also build free tools for problem-aware visitors in your niche.

This is an effective SaaS SEO strategy for:

• Generating qualified traffic.

• Driving user signups and

• Getting paying customers.

Hope you found this helpful and valuable.

Before you go, kindly share your honest feedback on today’s email below.

To your startup success,

Shehu AbdulGaniy 

Founder, Your Content Mart

P.S: I'm launching a Program/Community to help Startup founders unlock growth with SEO. It's a Done With You program where I personally guide you to implement the Underdog SEO Blueprint to drive qualified traffic and signups from organic search. Reply with "Underdog SEO" for an early invite.

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