The Standard Approach
Here I’m talking about how to make a content plan for a SaaS website.
Most of the time, what an SEO person usually does is go to the SaaS team, have a first meeting with the client, and try to understand — first of all, take a demo with the SaaS client and understand what their SaaS product is, what’s their ICP, and how does it work. What’s the target audience?
Then, on the basis of that, identify what are the core features, what are solutions that we are providing. Have a meeting with all of the team for that particular SaaS.
Once you have gotten an understanding based on the ICP and the buyer persona, you go into an SEO tool like Ahrefs or SEMrush, and you start doing keyword research. You find out there are 500 keywords, and you can classify them on the basis of TOFU, MOFU, BOFU. Or you can classify them based on awareness stages — for example, product-aware, solution-aware, or other stages.
Once you have classified all those keywords based on those stages, you put them in a database or any sheet. Then, out of those keywords, you get approval from the SaaS client on which of those keywords are relevant, and then we can write a blog, feature page, or solution page on them. What kind of page we should write depends on the intent of that keyword.
Also, before writing a particular kind of page, we need to look at the Google SERP and understand what the majority of intent is — whether the majority of pages are feature pages, blog posts, or listing pages. That also plays a factor in what kind of content you write.
So this is the most basic pattern for a SaaS. But I think there is something lacking in this approach of doing content planning and keyword research for a SaaS website.
A Better Approach
So if I were to create a content plan for a SaaS website, what I would do is — instead of taking the usual route of doing keyword research, classifying keywords according to funnel stages, getting approval from all the SaaS teams, getting the content plan ready, and then doing keyword research each month to find new keywords — instead of that, here is what I would do.
Step 1 — Stakeholder Meetings First
First, I would have a meeting with the SaaS founders, the sales team, and the product managers. I want to understand what the SaaS is, what’s the need for it, what’s the ICP it was created for, what are the different audiences, what is the TAM (Total Addressable Market), SAM (Serviceable Addressable Market) & SOM (Serviceable Obtainable Market).
One thing regarding the meeting with SaaS client stakeholders — I think it’s very important to have proper battlecards for your SaaS.
Battlecards contain information about what your SaaS does best, what your competitor does best, and a complete comparison of your features as well as the competitor’s features. That is also important, and I would love to get hands-on battle cards from the SaaS team, because that would help me in defining buyer personas, doing keyword research, and everything.
Step 2 — Define Buyer Personas
After that, I want to find out what are the core features of this particular SaaS and what pain points it addresses.
Based on the ICP, I would define the audience and create buyer personas. For example, let’s say we have four buyer personas that we want to target. For each buyer persona, I would define everything — what’s the demographic, what’s the job profile, what’s their age group, what’s their occupation, what are the pain points they encounter in daily life that they can solve with this SaaS, and what are the other players in the market that are already there and trying to solve those pain points, or still not doing a perfect job that my SaaS could do.
Regarding buyer personas, I also want to say that if you don’t have a clear idea of what your buyer persona is, then that is an issue.
The buyer persona should be created based on real research and the help of a subject matter expert. If you don’t have access to real research data and don’t have an SME on board, then create basic buyer personas that focus on the basics — job title, goals, pain points, triggers, and objections. This is enough to get started on.
Step 3 — Topic Mapping Before Opening Any SEO Tool
Then, on the basis of buyer personas — even before I open a keyword research tool like Keyword Planner, Ahrefs, or SEMrush — I would not open any SEO tool. I would just make a mind map on a mind mapping tool, and I would draft out all the topics that my user might be interested to read.
So we would make a list of initial TOFU queries — for example, if my user is trying to gain an understanding of the initial topic and is searching around that pain point, maybe on Google, maybe on an LLM. I would list out all those topics.
Then once the user has cleared the information queries and is now in the consideration phase, what are the MOFU queries for that? I would find out all the topics for that as well. And then finally, what would be the BOFU queries?
Classifying keywords into TOFU, MOFU and BOFU is sometimes not so simple because some SaaS user journeys are messy. That is why If you want to bifurcate more accurately then do it by customer awareness stages which are unaware, problem aware, solution aware, product aware, and most aware.
Another thing is finding JTBD keywords. JTBD keywords are Job To Be Done keywords.
For example, let’s say you have an SEO tool, and there’s a function for doing interlinking in that. “How to do semantic interlinking” is a JTBD keyword which you can target on your blog post — and it also has search volume.
In case a JTBD keyword doesn’t have any search volume, then your SEO person has to map it out to a real keyword which has search demand on search engines, as well as is being searched on LLMs.
JTBD keywords convert very well because they address the pain point of users very clearly.
This would be very time-intensive research because I would have to do competitor research, go through forums, communities, and everything. I might have to take some interviews with subject matter experts. If we already have customers, I would like to go through the sales call data, and I would like to take an interview with some existing customers — because I want to understand what topics people want to read, what they want to learn more about, and which topics would eventually lead to our SaaS being a viable product for solving that particular problem.
Step 4 — Build a Topic Map
On the basis of that research, I would identify all the queries in terms of TOFU, MOFU, BOFU — and I’m still not opening any keyword research tool like SEMrush.
After that, I would make an interactive map of all the topics — what topics we will write initially, then what topics we would write in the second phase. This depends on the topic and the SaaS. If it’s a new SaaS or a new category, we would have to focus more on the awareness stage. Otherwise, I would focus more on BOFU and MOFU queries.
Step 5 — Create Outlines and Interlinking Strategy
For each topic, I would create an outline beforehand — even before I open Google SERP or any SEO tool. An outline covering what topics I would address for that particular piece, and how I would address the pain point of my audience or the buyer persona for that topic.
So even before we go into content strategy and SEO planning, I would have all the topics pre-defined — with outlines as well as the interlinking strategy.
Because I don’t want to do interlinking the usual way. Right now I see people publish blogs and pages and interlink them to each other just on the basis of related topics. I don’t want to do that. I want to do it based on the journey flow of the user, based on the natural topic flow.
For example, if I am a user, I first want to understand what the problem is. I’m searching around my problem. Once I know that there is a solution for that particular problem, I’m searching MOFU queries — how can I solve that problem? Then later on, I move to BOFU queries. The interlinking should reflect that natural journey.
Step 6 — Keyword Research Comes Last
So now we have a basic content plan — maybe 300–500 topics, with content outlines and an interlinking plan. And we haven’t done keyword research yet, because we have already covered all the topics there are in our current niche.
That will build 70% of my whole content plan. I will leave 30% out, because new topics emerge as times change and sometimes there are trending topics that come into the content plan later.
Once I have that complete content plan, this content plan would be given to an SEO person who, for each topic, would have to find a search query or keyword that has search demand on the web. He will then attach that keyword to a particular topic.
In some cases, a topic could be very relevant but there might not be much search volume for it on Google or any other search engine. I would still write on that topic because it is relevant. So we are verifying search demand, but I would still write all the content in our plan regardless.
We are doing SEO keyword research and attaching keywords to our topics, because if there is no search demand, then there is no point writing on it — but relevance to the buyer journey comes first.
This whole keyword research process is very useful however this is still a continuous process. I would continuously monitor SERP, competitors, analyze Search Console, Reddit & other communities/forums, monitor LLMs and any new feature launch or update in the product.
A content map is never truly finished.
The core map may be 70–80% complete, but discovery never stops.
Note: A lot has changed with the introduction of different LLMs like Perplexity, Gemini, and everything else — but this is still the foundation of keyword research that any SaaS marketing team should follow._