The Definitive Sanity check for SaaS Software - The Crispy Secret Sauce

Intro

This is the story of the SEO foundation that we’ve built at Crisp to make our technical SEO strategy efficient.

Crisp is an all-in-one multichannel customer support software for businesses around the world. Helping every month more than 200M users to get in touch with customers while gathering teams around one tool.

When I arrived at Crisp, the company had a bit under 100 000 companies using Crisp. Organic search was the 3rd acquisition channel behind referral (as considered by Google Analytics) and viral marketing.

Through this article, I’ll share a technical SEO sanity check that I have processed while arriving at Crisp. The idea here is to make sure you don’t try to build popularity on a pierced basket.

Few statistics I can share with you now as we speak:

• Our Ahref rank is 7900
• Our DR is 82
• We have more than 300 000 visitors a month
• Organic Search counts for 50% of our trafic (excluding existing customers here)

(Acquisition channels at Crisp)

In this technical SEO guide, I’ll share with you what are the steps I’ve taken to improve our website and make it fit with Google recommendations.

Here are the things you can expect at the end of this article:

• Understand the choice we’ve made when choosing to build our own CMS with no existing CMS
• Learn how you can review the technical SEO of an existing website
• Learn to create a simple audit you can submit to your teams for improvements
• Learn to analyze semantic relevance for a dedicated page
• Learn about the tools we use at Crisp to make this work

Building our own CMS to control our technical SEO

The first thing we can have an impact on is the heaviness of the website we are working on. At Crisp, prior to my beginnings, the team had already started to work on a website that was fully hard coded.

To do so, it’s quite simple, we use a programming language that is called JADE. It’s a simple programming language that compiles the code to generate static HTML pages that we serve to our website visitors.

Note that our software is not built using JADE but is using VueJS, we wrote an article on VueJS migration if you want to know more about.

Why are we building our own CMS from scratch?

Modern CMS such as Webflow or WordPress are good, I tell you no lies here. But not good enough for our requirements.

We want our website to be fast

We want our website to be as good as our product in terms of user experience. When you build a WordPress website, it comes with a dedicated database, requests to dozens of external resources such as plugins or JS script and therefore slows down the loading speed.

And it is the same for numerous CMS on which you have to rely on an existing structure to build a technical SEO strategy.

Since I arrived at Crisp, the website hasn’t stopped to evolve and improve through ideas and improvements we’re bringing to our website.

We want to fully control our development

The thing is with tools such as Shopify or WordPress, you rely on product teams to orient the product in the right direction, which you can’t control.

At Crisp, we have full ownership of our optimizations, technical choices and strategy we’re implementing to build the best SEO strategy at the fastest pace possible. In this pursuit, we have learned from various sources, including insights from the overcode mobile app development company, to enhance our approach.

For example, we’ve implemented schema.org markup on specific pages of our websites using a JSON integration.

We want to build a team of tech savvy people

At Crisp, we believe anyone should be able to modify a JSON file and compile a piece of code to modify the content of the website.

That’s why we’re gathering a team of technical people around the website: Front end developers, technical marketers and Sales engineers are helping to improve the website every day. Whether it’s through the copy or the experience itself.

It’s a way for us to recruit highly talented people that have a complete overview of technical and marketing strategies.

Now that you understand our philosophy and strategy, let’s deep dive into technical SEO optimizations and how we can build a better experience with simple tools, available for free on the web.

Review your technical SEO in one click

When I start a work, I like to see where I’m starting from and this is exactly the same process I applied 3 years ago when arriving at Crisp.

I like to build an audit that looks deep into:

• Technical audit
• Content audit
• Popularity audit

I’ll share the framework with you a bit later in this document.

Google Lighthouse is the light to guide you through the recommendations of Google requirements in terms of technical SEO optimizations.

We’ve written a guide on Google Lighthouse optimizations we’re running at Crisp, feel free to check it out! It allowed us to improve our Lighthouse score very easily.

Tired of reading the article? Here is a quick extract:

1. Go to web.dev and run an audit on your website

(Example of a Google Lighthouse audit results)

2. Prioritize the list of actions to fix
3. See your ranking improve naturally

You can also use the super Dareboost that offers a wide range of optimizations that goes deeper in the funnel of technical SEO.

As you can see, we’ve still some things we can work on to make the website even faster and easy to use.

With these two tools, you get a clear understanding of what you need to achieve to improve your technical SEO and rank higher in your beloved search engines.

Now that you have a clear view on what you have to improve, technically, let’s focus on the semantic relevance of your website to understand if you’re matching with your target market.

Understanding keyword density for technical SEO

As when I came in the game of getting the Crisp website to the moon, I had to make sure our content was properly crafted.

I had to make sure that the semantic website structure was well constructed. Here is my todo list when I check semantic web page structure. This is something you should really dig into as a very few amount of website builders, agencies, developers pay attention to.

Check your HTML web page structure in one click

I use Web developer, which is a Google Chrome addon. This is super easy to use and doesn’t get old.

Click on “View Document Outline” when you’re checking the page and how it is structured. Here is an example of what we’ve done at Crisp.

Each Hn has an impact on keyword density and the understanding Google has of the web page you’re working on.

And yes, that’s true, I could get rid of the last H2 because it decreases the density of the keyword I’m targeting on this page.

Did you guess the keyword I'm working on?

This analysis should be combined with a keyword density analysis so you make sure that Google understands your content the right way.

Check your keyword density page per page

To help you understand how well your keyword density is, you have tools to help you to better understand how you should structure your page.

As for myself, I use Alyze which is a french software for keyword density analysis.

For each page, it gives you a clear understanding of the most prominent keywords of your page.

Bonus: Analyze crawls from Google robots

Crawls from robots can be analyzed. You have to know that you have a special budget that is related to your website. This budget has to be wisely consumed by Google search robots.

To do so, feel free to use tools such as oncrawl.com to prevent your website from having errors, too many redirections or orphan pages.

Most people say that the crawl budget is insignificant for SaaS software websites because the number of pages is too small. That’s not what we believe at Crisp. We believe Google likes every optimization, whether you have 15, 150 or 1500 pages on your website.

At every new release of evolutions and improvements, I run an oncrawl analysis to see if everything is going well.

But that’s not the point here, we are talking about Google’s robots which are indexing your content.

To do so, you have to look for a specific user agent, which is called “GoogleBot”. If you have CloudFlare on top of your website because you’ve followed our previous recommendations, this is where you should get an extract of your “hits”. Otherwise, you can ask for logs on the server that is hosting your website, this should be stored at this level.

Hits are the visits done by GoogleBot. Contrary to a common belief, the GoogleBot doesn’t go through your entire website at once. It visits one page, then leaves the website.

This is why you have to be extremely careful about the quality of its experience.

By analyzing the frequency of visits for each page, you’ll understand what are the most popular ones on your website following Google and might spot some uninteresting ones that shouldn’t be visited by GoogleBot.

Author comment

I hope this article will help you to get things going in the right direction. If you want to further discuss this matter with me, feel free to add me on Linkedin or on Twitter, I’ll be pleased to have a chat with you.