SEO for SaaS docs
How published articles reach your site, and how to render them with your own design.
SEO for SaaS researches, writes, and publishes articles for your product. Your site fetches them from a read-only API and renders them with its own design. When an article is published, changed, or unpublished, a webhook tells your site to refresh. Deliveries are signed once you reveal the signing secret.
How Google decides what to show for a search
Quick answer: Google finds pages by crawling, stores what it understands in an index, and ranks the indexed pages for each query by how well they answer it. Most of what you can influence happens in the last step.
Crawling, indexing, ranking
Google describes the process in three stages in its own guide to how Search works. A page that is never crawled cannot be indexed, and a page that is not indexed cannot rank.
- Crawling: discovering URLs and downloading pages.
- Indexing: reading a page and storing what it is about.
- Serving: choosing and ordering results for one query.
What a crawler needs
- A link to the page from somewhere it already knows.
- A
sitemap.xmllisting the URL. - A server that answers with
200.
Signals that decide the order
| Signal | What it measures | What you control |
|---|---|---|
| Relevance | Does the page answer this query? | Topic and structure |
| Quality | Is it trustworthy and original? | Sources and depth |
| Usability | Does it load and read well? | Your templates |
Our goal is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.
<meta name="robots" content="noindex">
FAQ
How long does it take for a new page to appear in Google?
Anywhere from a few days to a few weeks. On our own sites the median is three days to the first impression.
Does submitting a sitemap guarantee indexing?
No. It helps Google find the URL; whether it is indexed depends on the page.
Key concepts
| Concept | What it is |
|---|---|
| Base path | Where your site serves the articles, for example /blog. You set it in Dashboard → your site → Settings → Site and URLs → Articles live under. If it's empty, articles live at the site root. |
| Project ID | Identifies your site in API URLs, where the API calls it a project. Dashboard → your site → Delivery → Connection. |
| Content key | sfs_content_…, read-only, one project, published articles only. Delivery → Content API keys → Create key. Server-side only. |
| Articles | Title, slug, SEO metadata with JSON-LD, and a body of typed blocks (heading, paragraph, list, table, FAQ…), never HTML. |
| Webhook | A POST to your URL when an article is published, changed, or unpublished, signed once you reveal the signing secret. Delivery → Webhook. |
Pick your path
| Your site | Start with |
|---|---|
| Next.js (App Router) | Next.js guide |
| Astro | Astro guide |
| Another framework or language | Quickstart, then Other frameworks |
| A coding agent does the work | AI snippets |
Every page here is also Markdown: add .md to its URL (this overview's is /docs/index.md). An index for agents is at https://seoforsaas.dev/llms.txt.