SaaS Deep Dive - Q1 2025 (case study: Zapier)

Is SaaS held up by AI? Why are Buffer and Rippling winning? How to waste millions with botched site migrations.

In the last SaaS Deep Dive from November 2024, I laid out the basic industry overview and covered the following topics:

• SaaS is a highly competitive but lucrative market with over 72,000 companies worldwide competing for a market valued at $273-314 billion in 2023, where SEO serves as the second strongest traffic channel (24%) after direct traffic (60%).

• Since 2022, SaaS companies have pivoted from "growth at all costs" to "profitable growth" due to rising interest rates and reduced funding, making cost-effective SEO more valuable than paid acquisition.

• Successful SaaS SEO strategies require strong product differentiation, coordination between product and SEO teams, and the ability to measure impact (which is easier for low-ACV companies with shorter sales cycles).

• Companies can leverage multiple SEO growth levers including blogs, microsites, landing pages, lead generation tools, programmatic SEO, and product-led SEO (for UGC-driven models).

• AI creates both challenges and opportunities in the SaaS space—companies must be careful not to oversell AI capabilities (which can hurt brand reputation), while AI offers new possibilities for creating programmatic content and tools more efficiently.

Since then, a lot has happened: In this first SaaS deep dive of the year, I share a case study of Zapier, many examples of poor and successful site migrations and how Buffer and Rippling shine in SEO during challenging times.