SEO Content Benchmarks for Seven B2B SaaS Industries

Generalized content performance benchmarks are about as useful as a screendoor on a submarine.

If you run content at an e-commerce SaaS, hearing about the traffic growth experienced by AI startups is not always helpful. And if you’re trying to get a B2B SaaS blog off the ground, benchmarking yourself against the growth of industry behemoths can be daunting rather than motivating. 

For content leaders trying to figure out what “good” looks like in their industry right now, benchmarks are most helpful when they’re vertical-specific. That’s why Campfire Labs has expanded the research done in our previous report, Is SEO Dead?

This time, we looked at month-over-month organic traffic performance for over 500 SaaS companies over the last year. We categorized those companies into seven verticals—sales, marketing, HR, design, developer tools, collaboration & productivity, and customer service software—and mapped out trends in organic traffic acquisition for each vertical over time.

 In this report, you’ll find realistic benchmarks to gauge your site’s organic performance in the context of specific industry verticals. You’ll also understand the wider vertical-specific trends impacting your organic traffic acquisition, and get actionable ideas for outperforming industry competitors.

How We Analyzed Traffic Data from 500+ Companies

For this analysis, we identified seven key SaaS industries that reflect a wide spread of users and use cases. We used the established categories and sub-categories found in G2 Crowd to identify the industries to focus on.

We then selected dozens or even hundreds of companies from each G2 Crowd category, aiming to represent the breadth of each industry. For example, we analyzed over 200 SaaS companies in the “marketing” category, comprising over 20 subcategories, from event management software to ABM and CDP solutions. We ended with a target list of over 500 companies for analysis.

 Finally, we used Ahrefs to collect monthly traffic data for each of these 500+ companies between July 2023 and July 2024.

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Our Overall Takeaways

The average SaaS company across all verticals we analyzed increased organic traffic 24% over the last 12 months. That translates to an average organic traffic growth rate of 2% month-over-month.

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Of the seven industries we focused on, marketing software sites saw the strongest organic growth—70% over 12 months. This vertical also has the 2nd highest number of organic visits overall, second only to customer service software.

Development software came in second, showing 57% organic growth over 12 months, and the 3rd highest number of organic visits. 

Our top-level takeaway: Content leaders in these two verticals should be setting some aggressive organic growth goals, as there’s everything to play for right now. We’ll get into the details of that growth in the next section.

Organic Growth Benchmarks by Vertical

Marketing Software - 70% YoY Growth

Companies in this category have seen 70% organic traffic growth over the last 12 months, or an average monthly growth rate of 5.8%.

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Within this category, there are some interesting trends. SEO tools, for example, are showing strong organic growth to their sites, which seems to contradict with the theory that SEO is dying:

• Semrush: +350% organic traffic YoY, hitting 21,049,113 organic visits in July 2024.
• Surfer: +378% organic traffic YoY, to 211,314 visits in July 2024.
• Moz: +18% organic traffic YoY, to 903,947 visits in July 2024.

‍Our takeaway: 6% MoM organic traffic growth is a realistic benchmark for content leaders in this space to aim for. The SEO landscape may feel saturated, but in marketing SaaS there’s a lot of opportunity for growth.

Developer Tools - 57% YoY Growth

Companies in this category have seen 57% organic traffic growth over 12 months, which translates to 4.75% MoM average growth.

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Over the first 4 months of 2024, this category saw over 50% growth in organic traffic. That dipped a little in May but has leveled off at strong annual growth.

What’s striking about this category is the growth seems to be partially driven by classic SEO content strategies.

HackerOne, for example, has grown organic traffic 104% through good old-fashioned listicles, “what is” content, and “how to” guides. Test management SaaS Tuskr has leveraged classic educational SEO content (check out their Learn subfolder) to a similar effect, growing traffic 240% from an almost standing start in 2023.

‍Our takeaway: Content leaders in the dev tool space might set 5% MoM organic growth as a target. To succeed, you don’t need to reinvent the wheel—classic SEO plays still work in non-saturated, niche sub-categories in this vertical.

Collaboration & Productivity Software - 29% YoY Growth

Companies in this category have seen 29% organic traffic growth over 12 months, which translates to 2.4% MoM average growth.

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Content leaders working in this vertical will be happy to hear that 2024 was the year that this category finally recuperated its previous organic traffic high from the COVID-19 days. There’s still traffic volatility in the sector, but the trend is up and to the right for organic growth.

‍Our takeaway: 3% MoM organic growth is an ambitious but achievable objective for blogs in this vertical.

Design Software - 23% YoY Growth

Companies in this category have seen 23% organic traffic growth over 12 months, which translates to 1.9% MoM average growth.

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Design software is a classic horizontal SaaS category, selling into multiple user sectors (compared to vertical SaaS, which sells to one specific niche group, like construction companies). And we can see that the horizontal SaaS playbook continues to drive growth for design tools—many of the companies we analyzed here are using search-optimized template pages to drive traffic and get folks into the product, then leveraging the templates to create ToFU content for related keywords.

‍Our takeaway: Set a benchmark of 2% MoM organic traffic growth, and leverage templates in different ways to build a critical mass of keywords.

Customer Service Software - 11% YoY Growth

Companies in this category have seen 11% organic traffic growth over 12 months, which translates to 0.9% MoM average growth.

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While 11% YoY growth is on the lower end of our benchmarks for the seven categories, customer service software has the highest overall organic traffic of all our industries. The SaaS companies we analyzed in this vertical drove over 15 million monthly organic visits in July 2024, compared to 2.6 million for the marketing software category. Basically, this vertical is already a huge driver of organic traffic, so double-digit growth is still impressive.

And the ongoing growth isn’t being driven by small startups, but rather the established players in this monster category. Atlassian’s Jira grew organic traffic by 37% (5,555,323 monthly visits), Zendesk by 5% (4,087,869 monthly visits), and ServiceNow by 41% (1,201,106 monthly visits). We’ll dig into what it takes to grow traffic to an established blog in a future report.

‍Our takeaway: Content leaders working with a customer service SaaS are facing a mature and competitive category, but it’s still possible to get organic traffic traction, even for large blogs. Set 1% as a realistic MoM growth goal.

HR Software - 10% YoY Growth

Companies in this category have seen 10% organic traffic growth over 12 months, which translates to 0.8% MoM average growth.

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Sites in this vertical see notable seasonality, with upticks in organic traffic December to January. 2023-2024 year-end was no different, with a traffic spike over the festive period.

‍Our takeaway: Content leaders in this vertical can celebrate if they hit 1% MoM organic growth. Strategies and expectations should take into account seasonality, and try to capitalize on the annual bump in December to convert one-time site hits to repeat visitors through sticky content.

Sales Software - 6% YoY Growth

Companies in this category have seen 6% organic traffic growth over 12 months, which translates to 0.5% MoM average growth.

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While the vertical saw a bump in organic traffic at the start of 2024, things have been declining through most of this year. AI-native sales tools seem to be the outliers, with FlashIntel, Fathom, and Convin all outperforming the category average.

‍Our takeaway: It continues to be a tough year for sales teams and the technology that supports them. But within the vertical, smaller sites and those built off AI seem to be finding more opportunities to grow traffic than established players.

Forget SEO Vibes, Benchmark Based On the Data

We’ve spoken before about how the reports of SEO content’s death have been overstated. This expanded data analysis supports our conclusion that SEO SaaS content is in fact alive and well. And we can go further than that—classic SEO strategies that we thought were outdated are still driving meaningful results for content marketers in 2024.

Across our seven key verticals, we see assets like listicles and definitional posts continuing to drive organic traffic (as a company that has generally put our nose up at this type of content—and prides itself on deeply researched, original content like this article—we were surprised by this). We see academy content drive growth, especially in new or niche technologies or sub-categories. And we see organic traffic as a whole continuing to rise across all the sectors we analyzed, even mature sectors that have been chasing keywords for decades.

We recommend you use this data to combat the “SEO is dead” vibes, and instead leverage our vertical-specific benchmarks to set realistic growth goals for the next 12 months. From there, think from first principles, talk to your customers, experiment, measure, and learn.

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