Key takeaways
- If your category has no search volume, the demand exists under the name of the problem or the tool people currently use instead.
- Comparison and alternative queries convert better than anything else a young SaaS can rank for, and they are usually available.
- Rankings are the wrong headline metric here. Report signups and activation from non-branded organic, or the channel gets judged against paid acquisition and loses.
- Beware of building an SEO strategy around a category that only exists in your pitch deck.
A founder in Lisbon once showed us a keyword plan built entirely around the name of their product category. It had beautiful structure and almost no search volume, because the category was three years old and known to about four hundred people worldwide. The plan was not wrong about the product. It was wrong about the population of people typing things into a search box.
This article covers SEO for SaaS and early-stage products using the Semalt platform: how to find demand when your category has none, which query types actually convert for software, and how to report a channel whose contribution is measured in signups rather than sessions.
When the category has no volume
The instinct is to conclude there is no SEO opportunity. Usually there is; it is simply filed under a different name. Demand for a new solution exists in three recognisable places, none of them the category name.
- The problem, described in the user's words
Before people know a solution category exists, they search for the symptom: "how to stop X", "why does Y keep happening", "manage Z without a spreadsheet". These queries are unglamorous, underserved, and they attract exactly the person with the problem you solve.
- The tool they use instead today
Almost every new product replaces something — a spreadsheet, a manual process, an older tool. The queries around that incumbent are where your future customers already are, and comparison content there is legitimate rather than opportunistic.
- The adjacent established category
Your product may be new, but it sits next to something with volume. Ranking for the adjacent category and explaining the distinction on the page captures people who are searching the closest thing they know.
Framing used throughout this article rather than measured benchmarks.
The trap worth naming. Building a content plan around the category you hope to create is the most common way early-stage SEO budgets disappear. Category creation is a marketing project measured in years and usually driven by other channels. Search rewards you for serving demand that already exists, and the demand that exists is for the problem, not for your vocabulary.
There is a full walkthrough in Is It Worth Competing? Reading the Results Page Before Investing in a Topic.
Comparison and alternative queries
For software, the two highest-converting query patterns are consistently the same: "X vs Y" and "X alternatives". Someone searching either is in the market, is evaluating, and is close to a decision. Nothing else a young SaaS can realistically rank for converts comparably.
They are also frequently available, because the incumbents rarely write them well. A market leader has little incentive to publish an honest comparison against a smaller rival, which leaves the space to review sites, affiliate content and whoever is willing to be straightforward.
Comparison pages that work
- Say plainly where the competitor is the better choice
- Compare on the dimensions buyers actually weigh, including price
- Stay current — an outdated comparison damages trust immediately
- Cover migration: what moving actually involves
Comparison pages that backfire
- Feature tables where you win every row
- Vague criticism with no specifics
- Comparisons against products you have never used
- Pages that are obviously written for the algorithm, not the reader
The first item on the left is not a rhetorical concession — it is the mechanism. A comparison that names the cases where the competitor fits better is read as credible, and credibility is what makes the rest of the page persuasive. Every buyer has read a dozen comparisons where one product wins every row, and none of them believed it.
When the product is the funnel
Product-led companies have an advantage in search that most do not use: parts of the product itself can be public and indexable.
Free tools, calculators and public templates rank for queries that describe the job to be done, and they demonstrate competence rather than asserting it. A visitor who used your free calculator has experienced a small version of your product, which is a considerably better introduction than a landing page.
Public documentation is the second underused asset. Well-structured docs rank for specific technical queries, they attract people already trying to solve the problem, and they are frequently the reason a developer recommends a product internally. Gating documentation behind a login removes all of that in exchange for very little.
The test for a public tool. It should solve one real problem completely, without a signup, and without being crippled to force an upgrade. A deliberately limited tool reads as a lead form in disguise and gets treated as one. A genuinely useful one earns links for years, which is the part that compounds.
The technical problems specific to product sites
SaaS marketing sites break in ways that brochure sites do not, and three of them recur often enough to check on any new engagement.
The app and the site share a domain badly. Application routes, invite links, shared-record URLs and preview states frequently end up crawlable, generating thousands of near-identical or access-denied pages. The pattern that works is a clear separation — marketing on the root, application on a subdomain or a clearly excluded path — decided deliberately rather than inherited from whatever the first developer set up.
We cover this in detail in Generating Pages at Scale Without Producing Junk.
Client-side rendering hides the content. A marketing site built in the same framework as the product often renders its copy in the browser. It looks perfect to a visitor and can be substantially invisible to a crawler. This is the single most common reason a well-written startup site ranks for nothing, and it is invisible to everyone reviewing the site visually. Check the rendered source of one page per template before anything else.
Changelogs and status pages compete with the product pages. Release notes are useful and they are also thin, frequent and heavily templated. Left fully indexable, they can outnumber your commercial pages several times over and dilute the picture of what the site is about. Keep them public but keep them contained.
None of these is difficult to fix. All of them are much cheaper to fix before the site has a year of accumulated URLs, which is an argument for having the conversation with the engineering team early rather than after the first disappointing quarter.
Measuring a channel that produces signups, not sessions
SaaS reporting fails in a specific way: SEO is measured in sessions and compared against paid channels measured in customers. Sessions lose that comparison every time, regardless of quality.
The chain that works has four links, and the first two are usually missing from agency reports.
| Metric | Why it belongs |
|---|---|
| Non-branded organic signups | The actual output; branded signups were created by other channels |
| Activation rate by source | Reveals whether organic signups are better or worse than paid ones |
| Visibility on the commercial cluster | The leading indicator that moves first |
| Assisted influence on closed deals | For anything with a sales motion attached |
The second row is the one that changes conversations. Organic signups frequently activate at a higher rate than paid ones, because someone who arrived by searching for their problem has already framed the need. If that is true for your product, it is the single most useful number you can put in front of a founder, and almost nobody measures it.
A realistic first year
Sequencing matters more for a startup than for an established site, because runway is finite and the wrong order can consume two quarters with nothing to show.
Start with the pages that serve people already looking for you: brand, product, pricing, integrations, documentation. These are cheap, they are entirely within your control, and they capture demand other channels are creating.
See also: Your Own Results Page.
Then move to comparisons and alternatives, which is where non-branded conversion begins. Then the problem-level content that attracts people before they know the category exists — this is the slowest-paying layer and the one most often started first, which is why so many startup blogs have forty posts and no pipeline.
Only after those does category-level content make sense, and by then you will know from your own data whether the category has begun to acquire search volume, rather than assuming it will.
A note on the Lisbon market
Two things are specific to running this from here. The first is that the addressable market is almost never Portugal, which changes the tracking setup: measure demand in the countries where you sell, from those locations, not from Lisbon. Portuguese-language content for a product sold across Europe is usually a small part of the plan rather than the foundation, and building the site the other way round is a common early mistake.
The second is a genuine local advantage. The density of the startup ecosystem here means the honest comparison content, the public tooling and the technical documentation that earn links internationally can also be seeded through communities, meetups and events that are unusually accessible for a company of any size. That is not a search tactic, but it produces the links and mentions that make the search work land faster.
The summary
For a young product, search is not a category-building channel. It is a demand-capture channel, and the demand available is around the problem, the incumbent tool and the adjacent category — not around the name you chose for what you built.
Do the boring pages first, write the comparison the market leader will not write, make part of the product public, and report signups rather than sessions. That sequence is unglamorous and it is why the SaaS companies with working organic channels look boringly similar to each other.
If your current plan is built on the category name, checking whether that demand exists takes ten minutes. Open the dashboard, track the category term alongside three problem-level phrasings, and see which one has anything behind it.
Frequently asked questions
Our category has no search volume. Is SEO pointless for us?
No, but the plan cannot be built on the category name. Demand exists under the problem as users describe it, around the tool they currently use instead, and in the adjacent established category. Target those and explain your distinction on the page. Category creation is a separate, multi-year marketing project that other channels usually drive.
Should we write comparison pages against competitors?
Yes — they are typically the highest-converting pages a young SaaS can rank for, and incumbents rarely write them well. The requirement is honesty: state plainly where the competitor is the better fit, compare on dimensions buyers actually weigh including price, and keep them current. A table where you win every row is read as marketing and persuades nobody.
Should product documentation be public?
Almost always. Public docs rank for specific technical queries, attract people already trying to solve the problem, and are frequently why an engineer recommends a tool internally. Gating them behind a login removes all of that in exchange for very few leads, since the people reading documentation are usually evaluating rather than browsing.
How should we report SEO to a board or investors?
In signups and activation, not sessions. Report non-branded organic signups separately from branded, and include activation rate by source — organic signups often activate better than paid ones because the user arrived already framing their problem. Sessions compared against a paid channel measured in customers will always lose that comparison, whatever the quality of the traffic.
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