Lessons from the best Solution pages in SaaS
Product solution pages are the unsung heroes of SaaS SEO. They are easy to forget but, as I will show you in a moment, they can drive substantial traffic. I dug out some of the best examples and will explain what they do extraordinarily well so you can le
Product solution pages are the unsung heroes of SaaS SEO. They are easy to forget but, as I will show you in a moment, they can drive substantial traffic. I dug out some of the best examples and will explain what they do extraordinarily well so you can learn from it.
Solutions pages are often siblings of product landing pages (PLP) and split by industry, team, or function. Some companies call them features pages, use-cases, or something else. There's no guideline around what to call it and people have their own definitions.
Solutions pages are supposed to make the application of a product clearer and more relatable. Showing how well a product is suited for a specific industry or team makes it more likely for their members to sign up for it. In the same way, showing a set of problems a product solves helps you see the value.
From an SEO perspective, they allow you to rank for generic keywords with landing pages. That's very powerful because a product landing page can only rank for so many generic keywords and otherwise it would take a category or product page or blog article. But solution pages sit much closer to the main point of conversion.
Don't take my word for it. Take Jared's (who I recently interviewed on my podcast):
https://twitter.com/digagardner/status/1306380809025105920
First, let's dive into some best practices.
Qualtrics
Qualtrics has several solutions hubs like www.qualtrics.com/market-research/, which in itself hosts about 8 pages, e.g. www.qualtrics.com/market-research/product-development/.
With that hub, Qualtrics ranks for juicy terms like "opportunity assessment", "research and product development", or "market assessment". All of these keywords are very important to Qualtrics and, at the same time, unbranded.
Asana
Asana's solution hub (asana.com/uses/) feats neatly into their Land & Expand model and pulls about 5,000 sessions in organic traffic per month. Over 180 keywords rank in the top 10, including "project management tool", "task management software", and "group calendar".
What I like about Asana's solution hub is that they segment them by teams and by workflows. This is easy to navigate for users, provides targeted information for different personas, and easier to rank for long-tail keywords. For example, https://asana.com/teams/product-managers ranks for "engineering project management software" on #1.
Mailchimp
As I mentioned, some companies use "solutions" and "features" interchangeably. One example of that is Mailchimp. My former email hoster (no, I'm not sour) has 75 pages in the /features subfolder that drive about 40K monthly sessions in unbranded traffic.
Zenefits
Zenefits has integrated its solution pages in a little sub-navigation on its landing pages for 4 big topics (HR, payroll, benefits, and time & scheduling).
It's very interesting, actually. The PLPL lives under https://www.zenefits.com/hr/ and targets keywords like "HRIS" or "HR Software". Under the PLP live two landing pages, https://www.zenefits.com/hr/compensation-management/ and https://www.zenefits.com/hr/performance-management/, which each target topics that are related to HRIS but more specific.
Copper
Copper's solutions hub (www.copper.com/industries/) is relatively small but ranks well for some targeted keywords.
Link to case-studies and blog articles to nurture leads.
Hubspot
Can't go on without mentioning Hubspot (as I already did in Monday's article about competitor SEO).
Hubspot is interesting because they clustered their solutions pages under /products/. I think the line between features and solutions is pretty blurry here but it's fine because those pages rank like crazy in search and they're helpful for users.
Hubspot has a total of 127 pages in their /products/ hub that drive an estimated 70K monthly sessions (data by SEMrush) and take top positions for keywords like "crm", "live chat", or "lead management".
It's interesting to note that Hubspot is using tabs on one of their most important product landing pages (https://www.hubspot.com/products/crm) and it's working really well.
Second, let's look at lessons from those best practice.
Solution pages best practices
One. Create solution pages for industries (if you serve more than one), teams, and specific use cases. A big mistake I see especially young startups doing is that they have a single landing page around their product. That's a missed opportunity to serve different personas and market segments of your product.
Two. Build your solutions pages around your product landing pages like a topic cluster with the PLP being the pillar. The best companies manage to interlink PLPs, solution pages, and other page types in a way that a) useful, b) aligned to common user-journeys, and c) transfers PageRank through the construct.
Three. Link to solutions pages from the footer, blog articles, product landing page, and homepage. Solutions pages need links like any other page, especially when they go after competitive keywords, which they tend to do.
Four. Link from your solutions pages to help documentation, blog articles, pricing page, and other solution pages. Note that visitors can fall into an industry, a team, and face several problems. So, make sure you interlink between solution pages. Unbounce (https://unbounce.com/solutions/industry/ecommerce/) or Mailchimp (https://mailchimp.com/features/landing-pages/) do that pretty well.
Five. Solutions pages don't always need a lot of content but there is a minimum. Algolia, for example, has a great solutions hub with lots of pages like https://www.algolia.com/solutions/geo-search/ but the content on them is too thin and as a result, they don't rank very well.
You also want to make sure to optimize content, at least to a degree. MongoDB, for example, has a beautiful solutions hub under https://www.mongodb.com/use-cases/ but the pages don't rank well because the content isn't very specific.
Six. Add FAQs to your solutions pages like https://www.nextiva.com/solutions/small-business-phone-service.html.
Source them from sales conversations and use FAQ Schema to get rich snippets.
That's how you dominate the SERPs like this: