(The story so far: in April 2020 I acquired Saber Feedback, a B2B SaaS that, in my opinion, was under-performing. Saber Feedback lets you add a feedback button to any website.)
For the last six months, we’ve worked hard on rebuilding the Saber Feedback website. I thought you might be interested to hear what we’ve done and why and how we’ve done it.
Home page
We wrote to most of our customers, asking them how they’d describe Saber Feedback, and what they like most about it. In some cases we were able to talk to customers on a call, and ask more detailed questions.
We rewrote the home page content, using the customer responses as much as possible.
I’m still not happy with our main heading on the home page. It is proving to be difficult to get just right.
Pricing
We only made small tweaks here, as the pricing page seemed good as it was.
Customer stories
We wrote up two of the customer interviews into case studies we call customer stories. The aim with these is to give us more credibility and to offer some stories to read that are somewhat more interesting than usual B2B SaaS website pages.
We’d like more customer stories, and will keep adding more over time.
“About us” page
Adding an About us page was the first significant change we made to the site. It is a chance to give a human face to who we are, and to make would-be customers feel confident in choosing us by assuring some typical worries (are they profitable? is this an established, reliable product?). It is also a place to put our company name, address, and registration number, which helps assure people they are dealing with a real company. It is all about adding as many signs of credibility as possible.
Comparison pages
We added or rewrote several pages comparing us to competitors or alternative approaches.
These are pure SEO pages, designed to attract Google traffic. We’re still not sure exactly what the best search terms are for us to target. Having these pages up for some months will help us get an idea of what search terms people are using when they want a product like Saber Feedback to add a feedback button to their website.
Articles highlighting characteristics of Saber Feedback
These are more SEO pages. One in particular is worth mentioning: Improve your Zendesk user interface with a simple screenshot tool.
We would never have thought of creating this page, if it wasn’t for conducting customer interviews. One customer told us they use Saber Feedback with Zendesk because Zendesk is missing a good customer-driven screenshot tool.
Based on that, we knew we had to highlight this on a dedicated webpage, just in case anyone else using Zendesk has the same problem.
Blog
We’ve removed most of the blog content we inherited, because it was more about the personal business journey of the founder of Saber Feedback, rather than the product. It was no longer relevant now that he isn’t running Saber Feedback. The blog was getting us some traffic but generally not from people actually needing our product. (You can read the old blog content here.)
For now we’re regularly adding content about creating, selling, and running online courses on our blog. This might seem a bit odd, but we’ve discovered (from those customer interviews again!) that 1) a large percentage of our customers have online courses, and 2) they use us to make their courses better. So we want to make sure similar people can learn about us.
This is the most experimental of the content we’ve added.
(An aside: I half-believe that the era of having a company blog is over. A blog, in its classical incarnation, is a place for you to keep people up-to-date on what you, or your org, is doing. I don’t think anyone is very interested in regularly reading the goings-on at a B2B SaaS. So what to do instead of a blog? Take the content that would be on your blog and just post it as articles on your site, without the framework of being a blog. But I only half-believe this.)
One long, long post on “feedback buttons”
Our market is competitive. We have competitors with large marketing budgets creating lots and lots (really, lots) of content. Competing head on is hard. We did find, though, via SEO research tools and intuition that 1) the search term “feedback button” has decent, but not huge, search volume and 2) the first page of current search results in Google for this search term are pretty ordinary.
So we’ve created one bumper page covering just about anything you could possibly want to know about feedback buttons.
The content on the “feedback button” page probably seems overly obvious to you. But for our target audience - not developers but people who want “one of those feedback buttons they saw on another site” and don’t really know how it is done - it might be helpful. We’ll see.
We want to learn from SEO experts what we can do to ensure this page ranks as highly as possible for our target search term. In fact, I’m interviewing someone soon on the Bootstrapped podcast about how we might do this better.
Docs
Docs are often a neglected part of a website. There’s value in doing them well.
We moved Saber Feedback’s docs from their own separate site to be on our main site. They were hosted on docs.saberfeedback.com and had their own (sparse) template.
Bringing the docs onto our main website is good because:
- it is one less site to maintain
- it is one less subdomain to care about
- apparently it is better for SEO reasons
If we were using a separate content management system for our docs, I’d consider going back to using a subdomain.
Our docs still have a lot of room for improvement.
“Powered by Saber Feedback” landing page
Our feedback forms have a discreet “Powered by Saber Feedback” link.
Until recently, this link went to our home page. Now we’ve created a dedicated landing page for this link.
This allows us to write content that takes into account the context of how the site visitor reached us. Chances are they were using a site belonging to one of our customers, and were curious about the feedback button - and perhaps want to know if it is something they could use.
Note that this landing page:
- has no top navigation bar. Apparently that’s a good thing to omit on a this type of landing page.
- is excluded from Google search results, because we would rather not have people arrive on that page without the context of having seen us in action.
The future
Our site is still a work in progress. We’ve only just got the basics all in place, and will be building on this. But we’ve now done enough to be able to learn what works for us and what doesn’t.
I am, of course, all ears if you have feedback on what we could do better.
