B2B SaaS Benchmarks: Optimise Your Organic Search Strategy (with trends report)
Software as a Service (SaaS) has never been more crucial to the running of businesses, but that also means that the market has been flooded with competition. To shine some light onto what can be a complete minefield, we delved into the numbers behind SaaS to find out how you can optimise your organic search strategy to maximise impact while minimising spend and resource.
Why Organic Search is Critical for B2B SaaS Growth
Organic search is an important element of any business’s digital strategy, but for a company that focuses on SaaS, it’s essential. B2B SaaS have long sales cycles, requiring your marketing to penetrate layers of management and decision makers in order to reach the people it’s designed to reach.
Having said that, the B2B SaaS industry shows substantial high-intent search volumes, meaning that by the time it’s being searched, users are already ready to make a decision, which is why it’s so important for your business to have a comprehensive digital strategy so that your business is like a coiled spring, ready to offer solutions.
You might be wondering, ‘Why would I put so much time and money into organic search when paid ads can target exactly who I want to target, when I want to target them?’ We’re not here to discourage paid ads; they’re an incredibly useful weapon in your marketing arsenal, but organic search has some key benefits that differentiate it from paid ads. Firstly, organic search has a lower cost-per-acquisition than paid ads, and organic assets reduce their cost-per-acquisition the longer they stay on your site.
B2B SaaS Organic Search Benchmarks
We have conducted extensive research into the organic search performance of leading B2B SaaS providers to establish industry-standard benchmarks. By analysing top players in the market, we have uncovered critical data points regarding keyword rankings, traffic distribution, and brand awareness to help you navigate this saturated sector.
Download Our B2B SaaS Benchmark Report for Full Insights
Average Ranking Keywords
This metric represents the average volume of keywords for which a website appears in UK search results, acting as a primary indicator of a site’s overall search visibility and reach. Our research indicates that the average B2B SaaS site ranks for 9.7k UK keywords. While many businesses sit closer to 3k keywords, the average is significantly higher due to larger, global brands pushing the numbers upward. To reach this benchmark, you should focus on mining competitor keywords using tools like Ahrefs or SEMrush to identify gaps, specifically targeting “Alternatives to [competitor]” or “best [software type]” variations.
Keyword Rankings & Visibility
Ranking visibility measures the quality of your keyword portfolio by looking at how many terms sit in the “golden” top three positions of the Search Engine Results Page. Our findings show that on average, only 5% of a site’s ranking keywords sit in these top three positions. Even the largest market players do not rank in the top three for every term, so the goal is to find your specific place in the search landscape. You can work toward this benchmark by using Google Search Console to identify “quick win” pages currently ranking in positions 4 through 10 and refreshing them with updated stats, FAQs, and strengthened E-E-A-T signals.
Branded vs. Non-Branded Performance
This metric looks at the split between traffic coming from searches for your specific brand name versus non-branded industry terms or solutions. We found that branded search drives 70% of organic traffic for the average B2B SaaS business. This high percentage highlights how essential brand awareness is to a successful organic strategy. To improve this performance, you should publish annual data-driven reports or industry benchmarks that attract media mentions and high-quality backlinks.
Content Marketing Performance
This benchmark identifies which types of content are most effective at driving users to your site, such as informational guides or transactional product pages. Our analysis of top-performing pages found that 40% of these pages serve informational content, followed by solutions or product pages at 21%. You can reach this level of performance by adopting a “topic cluster” model, which involves building authoritative pillar pages supported by subtopic blog posts that interlink to signal topical authority to search engines.
Stay Ahead of Software Industry Trends: Our 2026 Report
Ready to stay ahead of the curve in a rapidly evolving market? Download our latest trends report to ensure your strategy is future-proofed for the year ahead.
Why Do Benchmarks Matter?
In the B2B SaaS industry, market saturation is a significant hurdle because many businesses offer near-identical products and extremely similar messaging. Benchmarking provides the baseline data necessary to understand where your business stands relative to the competition and identifies exactly what is required to set yourself apart. Without these insights, it is difficult to determine if your organic growth is keeping pace with the industry or falling behind.
Organic search benchmarking is particularly vital because it reveals the health of your long-term growth engine and helps justify marketing spend. By understanding metrics like keyword quality and branded traffic splits, you can move away from guesswork and ensure your resource allocation is optimised for maximum impact. This data-led approach allows you to transform your digital strategy into the coiled spring that we talked about, which is ready to offer solutions the moment a high-intent user searches for them.
How to Measure Your Business Against Benchmarks
To accurately monitor your standing, you should leverage a suite of digital tools, including Google Analytics 4 (GA4) for tracking traffic sources and user behaviour on-site. Google Search Console is also essential for providing direct insight into your keyword impressions and average positions, particularly for pages ranking just outside the top three results. Furthermore, SEO tools such as SEMrush allow you to track your competitors’ performance alongside your own, which is crucial for ongoing benchmarking as it reveals shifts in market share and emerging keyword opportunities in real-time.
Using Benchmarks to Direct Your Strategy
Once you have established your benchmarks, you can use them to adapt your strategy by defining clear areas of improvement and filling gaps or missed marketing opportunities. If your top-3 ranking percentage is below the industry average, your priority should be content optimisation and enhancing technical SEO factors like page speed. If your informational traffic is low, you should shift focus toward creating educational blogs and guides for the awareness stage of the buyer journey. Benchmarks ensure that your priority KPIs are being focused on, allowing you to move beyond vanity metrics and toward strategies that drive actual business growth.
Ready to take your organic search performance to the next level? Let’s discuss how we can help you stand out and grow your presence in a competitive market.
