As a SaaS SEO agency, we’ve seen first-hand how quickly SEO can become more complicated as a SaaS company scales.
What works when you’re trying to rank your first few pages doesn’t always work when you’re managing hundreds of URLs and expanding into new markets.
Small SEO oversights can quickly turn into bigger problems that limit organic growth.
To help you avoid this, we asked 9 SaaS founders to share their top SEO mistakes when scaling their companies — and, more importantly, how they fixed them.
TL;DR: Top SaaS SEO Mistakes and How to Fix Them
1. Scaling content without a proper technical foundation
The fix: Make technical SEO an ongoing part of your workflow and continuously monitor crawling, indexing, site speed and other technical issues as your website grows.
2. Chasing traffic instead of revenue
The fix: Prioritize keywords and topics that are relevant to your product. Create content based on your audience’s pain points and needs.
3. Speaking to everyone at the same time
The fix: Create dedicated pages for each of your user segments and use cases instead of relying on generic product pages.
4. Not localizing content properly
The fix: Build the right international SEO infrastructure and localize your content around how people in each market actually search.
5. Not keeping your key information updated
The fix: Regularly audit and update important information such as pricing, features, products and company details so your website remains an accurate source of information.
6. Buying irrelevant, low-quality backlinks
The fix: Focus on earning relevant, authoritative links rather than chasing backlink volume or metrics such as Domain Rating.
7. Treating internal linking as an afterthought
The fix: Build internal linking into your content workflow and regularly audit your site for orphaned, broken and underlinked pages.
1. Scaling content without proper technical foundation
Many SaaS founders and marketers focus too much on content strategy, while overlooking the technical foundation underneath.
Publishing more content won’t necessarily translate into more organic traffic if search engines are struggling to crawl and index your website.
As you scale, issues such as duplicate pages, poor internal linking, crawl inefficiencies, and indexation problems can compound quickly.
Bogdan Nicholas, Co-founder of VINspectorAI, experienced it firsthand:
Biggest SEO mistake we made scaling VINspectorAI? Treating technical SEO as a “set it and forget it” thing.
We were so focused on shipping features and creating content that we completely ignored what was happening under the hood. Site speed tanked, mobile experience degraded, and we lost 30% of our search visibility almost overnight. The frustrating part — we didn’t even notice for weeks because we weren’t monitoring it.
Bogdan Nicholas, Co-Founder of VINspectorAI
Olga Radevskaya faced a similar problem at PhotoGov, where rapid product expansion broke the URL system.
As the startup launched new sub-products and features on a regular basis, they frequently updated the URL system and dashboards to better accommodate their presentation, without using server-side rendering or developing a system of automatic 301 redirects.
This resulted in a large number of indexing issues, causing the site’s visibility for several key feature-related queries to plummet.
The fix
Make technical SEO a part of your workflow rather than something you can set once and forget.
At Position Digital, we continuously monitor the technical health of our clients as we produce more content and secure more links.
We immediately fix urgent issues that could affect crawling, indexing, site speed or rankings, while regularly checking the wider technical foundation as the site grows.
2. Chasing traffic instead of revenue
Chasing more traffic isn’t inherently wrong. The more people you bring to your website, the higher your chances of turning that traffic into leads and customers.
The problem is when you start publishing thin content at scale or targeting popular topics simply because they have high search volume, even when they sit outside your area of expertise or have little connection to what your SaaS actually sells.
You might see your traffic numbers climbing, but if the people visiting your site aren’t your target audience, that traffic is unlikely to generate meaningful business results.
Divyanshu Jangid, SEO Manager at Venngage, has seen this happen first-hand:
The biggest mistake I have noticed and faced is scaling thin pages for more traffic; these pages usually don’t convert well, and you end up bloating your index with low quality pages. That affects your whole site including your good pages.
Divyanshu Jangid, SEO Manager at Venngage
Edward Cirstea also made the same mistake at Fotoria AI.
Our biggest SEO mistake early on was chasing high-volume keywords instead of targeting what our actual users searched for. We obsessed over ‘AI photo editor’ when people who needed headshots were searching ‘professional headshot without photographer’ or ‘LinkedIn photo at home.’ The traffic looked great in Ahrefs, but almost nobody converted.
Edward Cirstea, CEO of Fotoria AI
The fix
Don’t optimize for the biggest audience. Optimize for the right audience. A smaller pool of highly relevant visitors is far more valuable than thousands of people who have no reason to buy your product.
The first step is to target keywords and topics most likely to contribute to revenue, as Divyanshu explained:
Here’s my advice: conduct proper keyword research and focus efforts on ranking keywords that bring revenue, not just traffic.
Divyanshu Jangid, SEO Manager at Venngage
Edward offered another tip: find out what your customers actually need, and create content that satisfies those needs.
We fixed this by interviewing customers about how they found us. Turns out, people don’t wake up wanting AI. They wake up needing a headshot by Monday. The lesson: rank for the problem your product solves, not the solution you’re excited about.
Edward Cirstea, CEO of Fotoria AI
3. Speaking to everyone at the same time
One product can serve several distinct user segments, each with different needs, priorities, and search intent.
For example, a salary benchmarking platform might be relevant to jobseekers, hiring managers, and reward or HR teams.
Although they may use the same underlying product, they are often trying to solve different problems and will search for solutions in different ways.
If you create a single product page that speaks to all of them, the messaging can become too broad to resonate strongly with any of them.
That’s the challenge Liran Blumenberg faced with MultiGroupPoster:
A phrase like ‘Facebook group posting tool’ describes the product, but it does not describe the different problems our customers are trying to solve. A real estate marketer, recruiter, e-commerce seller, and coach may use the same product, but they search with completely different intent.
Liran Blumenberg, Founder of MultiGroupPoster
The fix
Create dedicated pages for your main audiences and use cases rather than relying on one generic product page to do everything.
Each page should speak directly to that audience’s problem, explain the workflow the product supports and show why it is relevant to their specific needs.
Liran shared his approach:
The correction was to organize our content around specific use cases instead of writing generic feature pages. Each page now needs to explain who it is for, what workflow it supports, what the product actually does, and when it may not be the right fit.
Liran Blumenberg, Founder of MultiGroupPoster
4. Not Localizing Content Properly
If you want to expand your SaaS into different markets, simply translating your existing content isn’t enough.
Using automated translations without the right URL structure or hreflang implementation can create thousands of indexed URLs and make it harder for search engines to understand which version of a page should rank in each market.
Yevheniy Tymoshenko, CMO at Skylum, explained how this mistake impacted his business:
When we started expanding internationally, our first mistake was using automated translation for localized landing pages, without setting up proper regional URL structures and hreflangs. We had thousands of indexed URLs, which diluted our main domain, making it rank lower generally and not appear in local SERPs for other languages.
Yevheniy Tymoshenko, CMO of Skylum
Even if your technical setup is correct, directly translating your existing content doesn’t guarantee it will perform in another market.
Different audiences use different terminology, search for products in different ways and may have different needs and expectations.
Yevheniy found this was the second part of the problem:
The second mistake was not localizing the content properly. We simply translated the content into different languages without considering how people in each market actually search, the terminology they use, or the local context behind their queries.
Yevheniy Tymoshenko, CMO of Skylum
The fix
International SEO requires both the technical infrastructure and the content itself to be properly localized for each market.
Yevheniy explained how Skylum addressed the issues:
We resolved the issue by actually doing the technical work of de-indexing everything translated by machines and re-building the proper infrastructure for hreflangs with real subdirectory URLs. We also hired native marketers to work on the localized landing pages and improve their presence in search queries relevant to their region.
Yevheniy Tymoshenko, CMO of Skylum
The result was significant.
Fixing the technical SEO issues helped Skylum reclaim their main domain’s authority, and the company increased organic revenue from international sources by more than 60% in 3 quarters.
5. Not Keeping Your Key Information Updated
As you publish more blog posts and landing pages, launch new features, and change your pricing, it can be surprisingly easy for outdated information to remain live across your site.
And that’s dangerous in the era of AI search. Outdated information can lead to AI giving the wrong answers to users about your brand or product.
Erin Perry, Co-Founder & COO at WebsiteTracker, explained why:
One mistake that SEO professionals make time and time again is forgetting the importance of accuracy in their content. When it comes to the future of search, accuracy is the new SEO when it comes to AI visibility.
As AI pulls directly from your website content to answer queries, the accuracy of that content has a direct impact on your brand trust. We’re heading into an era of misinformation driven by outdated content and AI hallucinations. Brands that maintain trustworthy, current content will have a real leg up over brands that maybe rank better but with bad information.
Erin Perry, Co-Founder & COO at WebsiteTracker
The fix
Regularly update your content, especially after a major change: brand repositioning, new feature or product launches, or price or plan changes.
As Erin Perry said:
Treat your content like infrastructure. Audit it. Update it. Make sure what’s live actually reflects reality. In a world where AI is doing the answering, getting it wrong isn’t just an SEO problem. It’s a brand problem.
Erin Perry, Co-Founder & COO at WebsiteTracker
6. Buying Irrelevant, Low-Quality Backlinks
When you’re trying to scale organic growth quickly, it can be tempting to look for shortcuts, like buying backlinks.
However, this is risky, as Google considers buying or selling links for ranking purposes a form of link spam, and manipulative link schemes can put your search visibility at risk.
Even if you somehow manage to avoid Google penalties, buying low-quality backlinks offer no benefit to your site’s growth.
Nikita Vorontsov, Founder of CharGen, shared his experience:
My biggest mistake: I chased backlink volume and Domain Rating. I treated a rising DR number as success. DR is buyable on marketplaces like Fiverr. A high DR link can carry zero real traffic. I paid for off-topic links from high-DR sites with no connection to tabletop gaming. My organic growth stayed flat.
Nikita Vorontsov, Founder of CharGen
The fix
Stop treating backlink volume or DR as the goal. Instead, focus on earning links from relevant, authoritative websites that already reach your target audience.
This is the approach Nikita took:
I retired DR as a target metric. I now target sites that already rank for terms close to mine. I check what links my organic competitors, not just any high-DR site. Every outreach pitch must state a real reason the site should care. Fewer links land this way. The links that do land move my rankings.
Nikita Vorontsov, Founder of CharGen
Prioritize quality and relevance over link volume. A smaller number of genuinely relevant editorial links can be far more valuable than hundreds of backlinks from unrelated, low-quality websites.
If you don’t have the resources to build these relationships in-house, working with a specialist SaaS link building agency like Position Digital can help you build a more relevant, sustainable backlink profile.
7. Treating Internal Linking as an Afterthought
Internal linking is easy to overlook when you’re publishing a lot of new content, but it plays an important role in helping search engines discover, understand, and prioritize the pages on your website.
Without internal links, valuable content can become invisible to both search engines and users.
Johann Flipo, Founder of Inclaria, shared how an important page of his site became orphan:
We wrote a substantial statistics page, put it in the sitemap and shipped it. No navigation pointed to it, so the only way to reach it was to already know it existed. We had treated internal linking as a finishing touch rather than as the thing that makes a page reachable at all, which was a big mistake.
Johann Flipo, Founder of Inclaria
We saw a similar issue with one of our clients, Decentriq. Despite having strong content and established authority, their rankings and organic traffic had stagnated.
When we audited the site, we uncovered several internal linking issues affecting its search and AI visibility, including:
- Broken links
- Orphaned pages
- Underlinked high-value content
After fixing those issues, their performance began to improve after 6 months:
- Top ranking keywords jump from 30 to 64
- 61.23% increase in organic traffic
- 221% increase in AI citations
Read the full Decentriq case study here.
The fix
Treat internal linking as part of your content strategy, not as a task to complete after publishing.
Whenever you publish a new page, look for relevant existing pages that can link to it. At the same time, identify older high-value pages that could benefit from links from your newer content.
Regularly audit your site for broken links, orphaned pages and important content that isn’t receiving enough internal links.
Need help scaling your SaaS SEO?
Scaling SEO in-house can become difficult as your website grows. New products, features, markets and content all introduce new opportunities — but also new technical and strategic challenges.
At Position Digital, we help SaaS companies build and scale organic growth through technical SEO, content strategy, link building, and AI search optimization.
If you’re ready to turn SEO into a more predictable growth channel, speak to our SaaS SEO team to find out how we can help.
