The rise of AI chatbots like ChatGPT and Google Bard is creating new search experiences for SaaS buyers. While it can be incredibly challenging for SaaS brands to rank for competitive keywords in traditional search, optimising your overall brand entity can help your business stand out in AI-driven searches.
By taking the time to enhance your brand’s digital presence, you make it much more easily recognisable, understandable, and ultimately preferable to the latest AI models. This can lead to better visibility, engagement, and conversions from AI-powered searches.
Annika, our SEO Director, recently made a guest appearance on the In Search SEO Podcast to discuss strategies for optimising SaaS brands for AI search. You can watch the full interview below:
On the show, Annika outlined 6 key steps SaaS brands should take to enhance their visibility and prominence for the new world of generative AI search.
In this complete guide, we’ll recap Annika’s insights from the podcast and expand upon them to create an actionable checklist for SaaS brands.
The Growing Importance of Optimising for AI Search
It’s clear that conversational AI is going mainstream in a massive way. Yet many brands aren’t evolving their strategies fast enough to optimise for this new search paradigm.
Here are a few reasons why making your SaaS brand “AI-ready” needs to be a top priority:
- AI chatbots open up a whole new search experience for SaaS buyers. Questions can be asked conversationally, and the AI will synthesise the most relevant information from various sources into easily digestible answers.
- In traditional Google search, it’s extremely difficult for most SaaS brands to rank for competitive high-value keywords like “best social media management platform”. Instead, generic listicles and blog posts tend to dominate the results.
- With an optimised brand entity, your actual SaaS product has a better chance of prominently appearing in AI-powered searches related to your market. You become part of the conversation.
- Generative AI models like GPT-4 are trained on massive datasets of online content and leverage capabilities like natural language processing (NLP) to better understand queries and content context.
- By optimising your brand information and messaging in a way that resonates with AI algorithms, you can capture visibility and engagement in this new realm of search.
- The goal is to enhance your SaaS brand’s digital presence so that it’s easily recognisable, understandable, and preferable to AI chatbots. This will allow your business to stay ahead of the curve and build authority in the age of generative search.
If you want to learn more about leveraging AI SEO for online growth, check out our latest blog!
Now let’s explore the key steps brands should take to make this happen…
Step 1: Craft Compelling Brand Pages
Your homepage, About Us page, and other primary brand pages serve as critical hubs of information for AI chatbots. That’s why you need to take the time to optimise them for search bots and customers alike.
Here are some tips for crafting brand pages that resonate:
- Feature your mission statement prominently. This conveys your underlying motivations and contributes to shaping your brand identity. Make sure it clearly communicates your values, culture, and unique value proposition.
- Include overview content that defines who you really are as a business. Help readers understand your origins, purpose, and what makes you different from competitors.
- Share any impressive facts or stats about your company’s growth, customer base, market leadership, awards, etc. AI models consume factual data signals to assess relevance and authority.
- Use conversational, easy-to-understand language. Avoid overly complex sentences and industry jargon. You want your pages to be accessible.
- Implement structured data for improved visibility in search engines like schema markup for your mission statement, founding date, CEO, etc.
- Remember to keep these pages fully up-to-date. If you rebrand, reposition your business, or overhaul your messaging, refresh the content accordingly. Outdated brand pages could hinder your AI search visibility.
Step 2: Create Comprehensive Product Overviews & Pricing Pages
In addition to your brand pages, you need dedicated product pages that educate potential customers about your SaaS offering’s capabilities, benefits, and value.
Your product overview content should:
- Highlight your product’s key features and benefits in an easy-to-digest way. Use bullets, headings, and bolding for scannability.
- Explain how your product solves pain points your target customers experience. Use real-world examples and customer stories.
- Directly compare your capabilities versus competitors. Show how you outperform other options.
- Describe the types of businesses that use your product successfully and why. Social proof builds credibility.
- Provide pricing details like free trial options, various plan tiers, and cost per user. Transparency is key.
- Use conversational long-tail keywords and avoid excessive jargon. Generative AI excels at natural language processing.
- Emphasise your unique value proposition. Why should customers choose your SaaS over alternatives?
Remember, AI models digest facts very well. Anywhere you can organically showcase impressive metrics like number of customers, user base size, years in business, satisfaction rate, etc. will make your product content more compelling.
Step 3: Curate Influential Customer Testimonials
Collecting customer testimonials might seem tedious, but they serve an important purpose beyond social proof and trust-building. AI chatbots consume real-life examples of how customers use and benefit from your SaaS solution.
When curating customer testimonials:
- Seek detailed examples of how clients use your product successfully in their business. These specific use cases bring your product to life.
- Ask for testimonials from larger, well-known customers. Mentions of recognisable brand names may resonate more with AI.
- Encourage reviews of your product’s usability, functionality and overall experience. Go beyond vague satisfaction.
- Get permission to re-use excerpts from favourable customer reviews on sites like G2 as social proof.
- Aim for customer testimonials that showcase diverse use cases.
Customer testimonials humanise your brand and help conversational AI understand real-world applications of your SaaS. Develop a customer review content strategy to consistently generate new examples over time.
Step 4: Amplify Mentions in Reputable News Outlets
Media coverage from reputable news outlets further enhances your brand’s authority and visibility for AI search. But you can’t just hope mentions come to you. You need to proactively pitch news sources to earn high-quality placements.
Here are some tips for securing news media coverage:
- Actively connect with reporters who cover SaaS, tech, and vertical topics related to your market. Send relevant story pitches.
- Promote new product launches, feature updates, major funding announcements, expansion into new markets, etc. via press releases.
- Hire a PR agency to expand your outreach and coordinate branding campaigns that integrate earned media.
- Measure success not just by social shares or traffic referrals, but also by monitoring rankings of your news mentions. Higher visibility means more influence on AI algorithms.
- Pay attention to which news sites tend to rank highest on Google when searching for your SaaS brand. Prioritise building relationships with those influential domains.
Earning media placements on digitally-savvy news platforms like TechCrunch, Mashable, VentureBeat, etc. lends enormous credibility. But even mentions on niche sites can accumulate to strengthen your brand entity through repeated exposure.
Step 5: Foster Mentions in Relevant Industry Publications
In addition to general news coverage, prioritise getting your SaaS brand featured in roundups, listicles, and product review publications prominent in your industry. These are go-to resources for many AI chatbots when researching brands and solutions.
Relevant sites allow you to establish domain expertise and share insights that AI chatbots will consume. Types of publications to connect with include:
- Industry blogs, news sites, and magazines like MarTech – Look to be included in relevant listicles like “Top 10 Social Media Automation Tools”
- Leading review platforms like G2, Capterra, and Software Advice – These sites are heavily referenced by AI. Make sure your product is listed and focus on improving its ranking.
- Relevant directories like Clutch.co or The UK Tech List – Getting featured helps establish domain authority while improving local SEO.
- Vertical market media sites – Become a contributor to build relationships and get included in industry-specific roundups.
The backlinks and brand exposure gained on these sites is tremendously valuable. But more importantly, being prominently featured in listicles and product comparisons directly influences how AI chatbots evaluate and recommend solutions in your space.
Step 6: Encourage and Manage Customer Reviews
User-generated content in the form of customer reviews represents a valuable asset to optimise for generative AI. But you can’t just create profiles and hope the reviews pour in. To harness reviews, you need to proactively request, collect, and manage them across platforms.
Here are some best practices for customer review generation:
- Make review requests part of your onboarding and account management processes. Don’t just ask once.
- Incentivise reviews through contests, discounts, or giveaways. Offer an eBook download in exchange for verified review.
- Monitor review sites regularly. Look for opportunities to request reviews from active users.
- Respond professionally to negative reviews. Offer to resolve issues before they spiral.
- Track review volume and rating benchmarks by site. Set goals to improve over time.
- Analyse competitor reviews for strategies to replicate their success.
With enough reviews, you can break into the coveted “Top 50” and “Best Of” lists with many AI models reference. The social proof can make your solution stand out. But it takes work to continually generate reviews, so build out a process.
Conclusion
As we look to the future, Google’s Search Generative Experience provides a glimpse of what’s to come. Rather than simply retrieving relevant pages, SGE uses AI to synthesise its own listicles, product comparisons, and recommendations by pulling data from multiple sources.
This demonstrates the importance of SaaS brands focusing on being prominently featured in roundups and reviews across the web – not just on their own site. The more a brand surfaces in authoritative industry publications, directories, and review platforms, the better chance it has of ranking highly in AI-generated content like SGE.
In closing, optimising for organic visibility in listicles and product recommendations should now be central to every SaaS brand’s AI strategy. Combined with crafting compelling brand pages, showcasing authentic customer stories, earning media placements and customer reviews, your SaaS business can thrive in the age of generative search.
Don’t navigate AI-powered search alone. At Seeker, we can help your SaaS business leverage machine learning to construct efficient and cost-effective AI SEO strategies. Get in touch with our experts today.
To learn more about embracing AI, check out or latest post on Why Embracing AI Doesn’t Mean Selling Your Soul!
