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Cloud technology is the infrastructure of our digital economy. Just like the roads, buildings, and utilities support brick-and-mortar enterprises, cloud service providers like Amazon, Microsoft, and Google are the foundation of digital businesses. These digital counterparts also require maintenance and upkeep.
Cloud monitoring has emerged as one of the keys to maintaining efficiency across increasingly complex cloud environments. These platforms continuously monitor cloud performance, providing key information on system health, resource usage, and security threats.
The ability to act on the insights from continuous monitoring is so valuable that industry spending is projected to reach nearly $6.5 billion by 2028.
One name leading the way within this highly technical niche is Datadog. The company, founded in 2010, has grown alongside the industry and developed one of the most comprehensive offerings in the market. The comprehensive monitoring and analytics platform integrates and automates infrastructure monitoring, application performance monitoring, and log management. This integration empowers businesses to ensure the high performance and availability of their applications and infrastructure.
As of mid-2023, here are some of Datadog’s major accolades and accomplishments:
- $147.9 million in funding across eight funding rounds
- More than $500 million in quarterly revenue
- 2,990 customers with an ARR over $100,000
Datadog’s extensive product offerings, meticulously detailed on its product pages, play a pivotal role in the company’s organic growth. These pages are not just a showcase of its diverse solutions but also a master class in B2B SaaS SEO.
By strategically leveraging high-value keywords and optimizing for search engines, Datadog’s product pages attract high-intent visitors, significantly contributing to the company’s revenue and market presence. The result is a seamless blend of technical prowess and marketing acumen, setting Datadog apart in the competitive SaaS landscape.
Product Pages—The Ultimate Asset for B2B SaaS SEO
Product pages are more than just digital brochures; they’re like a product display, infomercial, and check-out all wrapped into one. What I mean by that is that, depending on your growth strategy, product pages can drive awareness, interest, desire, and action.
These pages serve as a crucial resource for attracting and qualifying potential leads by detailing key features, screenshots, pricing, and more. Their role in capturing valuable digital real estate, especially on Google’s SERPs, is undeniable.
Moreover, leads generated on product pages often carry more value than other site sections, like blog pages.
Magnets for High-Value Keywords and High-Intent Users
From an SEO perspective, product pages are goldmines for high-value mid- and long-tail keywords.
As the length of a search query increases, so does its specificity and context. Most importantly, it reveals the search intent of the person. Prefixes like “What is” or “How to” denote someone who’s seeking educational content, while “best” and “top” signal that someone is closing in on a purchase decision.
Here’s how Ahrefs breaks down the keyword hierarchy:
These pages typically sit at the bottom of the marketing funnel, indicating a visitor’s readiness for conversion.
What’s Unique About SEO in B2B SaaS SEO
SEO is a different animal in SaaS compared to other B2B industries. This is mainly because the software industry is constantly evolving. That means new concepts, new products, and new words to name them. In short—there’s always a new keyword to target.
With new sectors and niches constantly emerging, keyword research and monitoring become crucial for maintaining a competitive edge.
Take the rise of generative AI, for instance. With large language models now a key commodity among enterprise companies, a number of related phrases, like ChatGPT or prompt engineering, are becoming relevant to SEO. The search volume, cost-per-click, and keyword difficulty of an entire cluster of phrases can change overnight as new technology emerges.
Datadog operates in a more established niche than artificial intelligence, but that doesn’t mean the pace of change is slow. The company has adapted its SEO strategy perfectly to build up more and more real estate in the SERPs.
The Datadog Product Subfolder Is a B2B SaaS SEO Masterpiece
Datadog has grown substantially since its founding in 2010. The company has gone through 12 acquisitions, which is a major reason its suite of products is so extensive—41 to be exact. This not only opens up opportunities for upselling and cross-selling but also 41 chances to expand its network of high-intent long-tail keywords.
The Datadog product catalog is currently separated into seven categories of enterprise use cases:
- Infrastructure
- Applications
- Digital Experience
- Platform Capabilities
- Logs
- Security
- Software Delivery
The Datadog website currently brings in more than 200,000 visitors through organic search each month at a value of $1.7 million in equivalent paid ad costs. The B2B cloud monitoring brand also has 564,000 backlinks and 53,200 keywords bolstering its SEO efforts.
The Datadog product subfolder brings in nearly 13,500 high-intent visitors monthly, saving the company over $107,000 in paid traffic.
The vanity metrics say the product subfolder is nothing to write home about.
It brings about 13,500 global visits every month, which pales in comparison to the over 200,000 who visit the site in general.
But, if we look at the traffic value, we see that there’s a lot more intent behind the product page visitors than the average site visitors. The product pages drive only about 6.6% of overall traffic but 10% of the traffic value.
That’s exactly what you want from your product pages. They’re at the bottom of the funnel for a reason—the people who aren’t likely to buy the product are weeded out earlier.
To see what makes this B2B SaaS brand’s product pages so effective, let’s dive into the SEO strategies they apply across the subfolder.
How Datadog Optimizes Its Product Pages for Search
Okay, it’s time to examine some of these product pages at a more granular level. We’ve got over 40 product pages to focus on, but in terms of organic performance, five pages stand out from the rest. Interestingly, they all fall under Datadog’s monitoring tools category:
- Application Performance Monitoring
- Network Performance Monitoring
- Real User Monitoring
- Network Device Monitoring
- Database Monitoring
The cloud monitoring brand has something of a templated approach to its product pages, and it’s clearly working. By deploying some staples of on-page, off-page, and technical SEO with effective technical copywriting and dynamic images, Datadog has secured a top-three SERP position for over half of the pages in its product suite.
Let’s take a closer look at how the company does it.
SEO Copywriting
There’s an art and science to copywriting in the digital era. Whereas the Don Drapers and David Ogilvys of old had more artistic freedom, digital marketers temper their creative flair with SEO and content practices. You must balance keyword incorporation and copy that engages, educates, entertains, and empowers.
Datadog operates across highly technical niches, so its marketing team rightly focuses on content that educates and empowers. Its target audience is made up of technical experts who are concerned with the smooth operation of multi-million-dollar operations (at the low end).
Whereas other brands might deploy an informal, edgy, or supportive tone to drive action, Datadog lets its products do the talking—supporting its assertions with clear copy that demonstrates its mastery of the industry. The Datadog Real User Monitoring (RUM) product page is a great example of this approach.
The RUM page begins with a simple header outlining the product category, followed by a straightforward explanation of the feature. Instead of pontificating on the benefits, the web design team places a carousel of testimonials next to the leading statement, followed by quick CTAs for a demo and free trial.
It cuts straight to the chase.
For readers who need more persuading or education before they move down the funnel, the page gives an in-depth overview of the RUM product across five key use cases. Each of these examples includes a product screenshot, a highlighted key benefit, and supporting bullet points.
It’s a simple recipe, but it’s working well for the cloud monitoring giant. Datadog captures top SERP positions for RUM and other target keywords while ranking for various related terms. This, in turn, helps drive even more traffic to these pages.
Across its product suite, the top cloud monitoring pages drive hundreds to thousands of monthly organic sessions while ranking for hundreds of keywords.
Meta and Alt Tags
Following best practices for meta titles and descriptions is an easy way to make a major impact on your SEO performance. Content management systems and web builders make it easy to insert these little bits of text throughout your assets so both search engines and users can identify what you’re offering.
Take a look at the B2B SaaS brands that populate the top SERP positions, and you’ll see they all approach product page meta titles and descriptions in a similar way. They all include the following:
- Meta Title: Hyperlinked text that provides a concise explanation of the page topic and includes the keyword.
- Meta Description: A short summary of the page content that incorporates the keyword naturally and piques the reader’s interest.
Datadog’s Application Performance Monitoring page is a perfect example of what an effective meta title and description look like for a product page in B2B SaaS.
However, this meta information, the meta description in particular, is conveyed to less effect by another brand—TechTarget—trying to rank for “Application Performance Monitoring.” In the screenshot below, you can see that the description copy hasn’t been optimized because it’s cut off with an ellipsis. Plus, it only includes the abbreviated form of the search phrase instead of spelling it out in full.
It’s a minor detail, but any inch you can gain in the SERPs is important. Taking the time to optimize meta titles and descriptions, image alt text, and other on-page SEO staples might be the difference between you and a competitor ranking on the first page.
Interlinks and Backlinks
Internal and external links, or backlinks, are pivotal elements in SEO, playing a crucial role in both website navigation and the establishment of a site’s authority and trustworthiness.
By connecting different pages within the same domain, internal links make website navigation easier and help search engines understand the structure and hierarchy of a site. They effectively guide users and search engine crawlers through a website, distributing page authority and ranking power throughout the site.
Backlinks are fundamental in building a site’s authority. High-quality backlinks from reputable, relevant sites signal to search engines like Google that others recognize the site’s content as valuable and authoritative, boosting its credibility. This is why search engines often consider backlinks as endorsements, heavily weighing them in their ranking algorithms. Backlinks enhance user experience, increase visibility, and improve SEO performance.
The Application Security Management page, leading the way in a key off-page SEO pillar, has over 1,603 do-follow external links. It’s got some serious link equity from over 550 websites, including some with a very high domain rating:
- GitHub
- AOL
- Read the Docs
- SaasHub
Securing backlinks from high-authority websites is a major contributor to SEO success for B2B SaaS brands. That said, they can be difficult to acquire and require regular monitoring. That’s why the Datadog team spreads around its internal link equity by directing tens of thousands of links to key product pages.
According to Ahrefs, the top Datadog product pages all have over 50,000 do-follow internal backlinks. The Application Performance Monitoring (APM) page leads the way with nearly 54,000.
Whenever possible, you should place contextually relevant (i.e., helpful) internal links to help move site visitors from your blog posts and other marketing pages to your product pages.
Video and Imagery
“Show, don’t tell.” It’s the motto burned into every marketer’s brain, reminding us that you need to do more than just talk about the great, amazing things your product can do for them. You must bring the benefits to the forefront—through compelling copy, images, and video.
Datadog, having a large array of highly technical products, uses dynamic content formats to showcase how its cloud monitoring and management suite makes life easier for enterprise IT teams. One of the types it uses to great effect are screenshots and recordings of Datadog products in action.
Screenshots are a low-expense, high-ROI asset for SaaS brands, especially technical ones like Datadog. Each product page contains a handful of screenshots that help set expectations for potential users and give them a glimpse of the user experience.
But the company doesn’t just stop with screenshots and recordings.
For high-priority product pages, like its Application and Network Performance Monitoring tools, the Datadog team includes high-quality video content instead of a header image. It’s an interesting strategy and not one that’s standard in the SaaS space, but it definitely helps bring key video assets front and center.
In an age where people often opt for the efficient, immersive experience of dynamic content formats over traditional text, incorporating graphics and video on product pages is a staple of B2B SaaS SEO.
Page Load Speed
We’re getting a little bit into the weeds here, but Datadog’s pages even perform well on the more technical aspects of SEO, like page load speed. Load speed refers to the amount of time it takes for your page to, well, load. It’s a simple metric but a critical one in B2B SaaS SEO:
According to Google, the probability that a visitor will bounce before interacting with your content increases by 32% as load speed increases from 1 to 3 seconds.
Google has a web developer tool that breaks down the load speed metric with granularity, giving you the amount of time it takes for the following events to occur on both mobile and desktop:
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): The amount of time it takes for a page’s main content to load, often used as a stand-in for the perceived load time of a webpage
- First Contentful Paint (FCP): The amount of time it takes for a visitor to see anything on their screen; another metric that helps determine perceived load time
- First Input Delay (FID): The amount of time between a user’s first interaction with a page and its response, including clicking a link, drop-down tab, or other button
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): A measurement of the largest change in the position of visual page elements which helps quantify the visual stability of a webpage
Unsurprising for a company in terms of its size and resources, Datadog product pages are well above average in terms of page load time performance. It passes Google’s assessment for LCP, FCP, and other core web vitals and has an overall performance score of 90%.
The one area where Datadog can improve is mobile responsiveness; the company scores well below average at 32% for performance. The majority of Datadog traffic does come via desktop, but there’s always an opportunity to increase conversions among the minority of users who reach its website through their phones.
People don’t like to wait for things—especially not when it’s online content. Whether it’s a video, Instagram story, or a blog post, the faster you can get your content in front of your customers, the better.
B2B SaaS Brands—Don’t Sleep on Product Page SEO
Datadog’s journey from a fledgling startup to a B2B SaaS powerhouse underscores the immense potential of SEO-optimized product pages. By adeptly combining technical savvy with strategic marketing, Datadog has crafted product pages that not only showcase its diverse offerings but also significantly drive organic growth. With a focus on high-value keywords and user intent, these pages have become instrumental in attracting high-intent visitors, playing a key role in the company’s revenue and market stature.
This case study exemplifies the critical impact of SEO in the digital landscape, particularly for B2B SaaS companies. For more insights and in-depth analyses of how top SaaS brands leverage SEO to transform their digital presence, explore our collection of Foundation Premium Case Studies. Gain unparalleled access to the strategies shaping the future of digital marketing.
