The global Software as a Service (SaaS) market is projected to reach $1.23 trillion by 2032. It is a highly competitive industry, with emerging startups competing against the likes of Microsoft, Salesforce, and Oracle.
Strong growth is driven by increased cloud adoption, the rise of AI and machine learning, and the accompanying demand for scalable, cost-effective software solutions across various industries.
While competition is fierce, the industry offers abundant opportunities for innovation and differentiation. Emerging companies that successfully leverage AI and adapt to the evolving market landscape will thrive in this rapidly expanding sector.
We sat down with Julia Araujo who heads SEO at V2 Cloud, a virtual desktop provider that provides cloud-based desktop solutions.
Their virtual desktops help businesses of various sizes access their applications and data securely from any location without needing to manage complex IT infrastructure.
SEO goals
As a relatively young website in the industry, Julia’s primary objective was two fold.
- She was required to recover from a traffic loss caused by technical issues and core algorithm updates earlier in the year.
- An additional goal was to improve conversion rates from organic search.
Since V2 Cloud had only recently begun to invest in SEO, they wanted to be sure it was a viable customer acquisition channel for them before allocating more resources.
Challenges
Julia’s main challenge was the size of her team relative to her responsibilities. Although V2 Cloud has been in the market for a few years, it was only recently that the company began to grow and hire non-product-related teams to expand the company.
Thus, most of the content on their website, while technically sound and insightful, was written by technical experts until last year, so it lacked the necessary refinement to appeal to search engines.
Since search engines like Google rely on on-page clues via keywords and entities, V2 Cloud’s website was underutilizing its potential to bring in organic visitors.
We are a small marketing team, with only one person focusing on content creation and optimization. So we needed to find a way to make content optimization faster and more efficient, reducing the time spent researching how to optimize each content piece.
– Julia Araujo, SEO Manager at V2 Cloud
In addition, Julia’s limited budget didn’t allow her to outsource a lot of work or pay for several tools.
1. Updating existing articles
Her first step was to focus on optimizing the website’s legacy content to invite search engine attention.
We know that Google likes to see updated content regularly, so Julia’s strategy of targeting existing content was sound and yielded quicker results.
Since V2’s website had close to 200 blog posts, this wasn’t going to be an easy task.
Julia’s team also recognized the need to optimize content across all categories of the website, including landing pages, tutorials and the glossary.
Combine that with the fact that only one person is responsible for content, updating and optimizing 200 articles was quite the challenge.
At a minimum, a 1500-word article will require between 2-3 hours to update and optimize. Add an hour or more for additional steps like SERP intent research, writing research and editing.
Julia and her small team were looking at a minimum of 400 hours to optimize existing articles. That’s ten 40-hour work weeks, assuming they discarded all other responsibilities.
With Surfer, Julia and her team were able to streamline the content optimization process in a simpler manner. Since the editor allowed them to retrieve articles directly into Surfer, they were able to start working from there.
Surfer’s Content Editor is a game changer. It is a lot easier for me to visualize what can be enhanced in each content piece, what new sections can be added, and complimentary topics that weren’t considered previously.
– Julia Araujo, SEO Manager at V2 Cloud
Since Surfer evaluates a URL's on-page keyword optimization with a Content Score and specifies keywords and headings that need improvement, you can optimize your web pages quickly.
However, updating articles is a time consuming task.
Since search engine results evolve all the time, Julia and her writing team needed to analyze the SERPs and competitor pages to ensure 2 things.
- Ensure that the page still meets the search intent
- identify missing content gaps on their pages.
A lapse in either meant that their content would underperform in the search results.
They used Surfer’s Auto-Optimize feature that analyzed their pages for missing information and NLP terms to then generate the omitted content without changing the article’s original meaning.
The Auto-Optimize option is especially great for blog posts, and it gives that extra boost that can take the articles up the SERP rankings.
– Julia Araujo, SEO Manager at V2 Cloud
2. Create new related content
The second pillar in Julia’s SEO strategy was to create new pieces of content to deliver useful information that their users sought while contributing to their sales.
Writing new articles could help them expand their audience reach while proving their relevance to search engines in the cloud computing industry.
New content will attract a higher volume of visitors and build V2 Cloud’s credibility with them, thus contributing to the sales team's lead pipelines.
Julia has recently started using Surfer to find new keywords that are important in her niche and that she has a realistic chance of ranking for in the short-medium term.
I’ve recently started experimenting with the Topic Explorer as well, and it has shown some interesting results for industry-focused content ideas. – Julia Araujo, SEO Manager at V2 Cloud
Here’s an example of a cluster for “cloud-based healthcare” that has almost 1400 monthly searches but hasn’t been covered by V2’s website at the time of writing this.
Results
Julia shared that since V2 Cloud’s SEO efforts are relatively recent, the website is yet to realize its high potential.
However, using Surfer has enabled her to observe steady traffic growth every week, despite seasonality and technical challenges.
But more than just traffic, V2 Cloud has seen an increase in lead profiles from inbound marketing.
We have also observed an improvement in lead quality from organic sources, as the opportunity and customer percentage rates have increased .
– Julia Araujo, SEO Manager at V2 Cloud
Takeaways
Even though V2 Cloud operates in a competitive industry, organic search can grow its business. Targeting realistic keywords within your niche can get the ball rolling and attract users who may not have heard about your product.
Julia had all the challenges we see with companies evaluating if SEO is right for them.
She had only one operator, a small budget and existing pages that needed to be fixed. As Julia discovered, you don’t have to sign up for a bunch of SEO tools.
We needed a tool that would fit within our current budget while boosting our operational processes.– Julia Araujo, SEO Manager at V2 Cloud
She was able to overcome these obstacles with high quality content and a sound SEO strategy that today contributes to V2’s bottomline.
An SEO platform like Surfer can meet all your content research, writing and optimization needs at a price that doesn’t drag your ROI down.
