In the fast-paced world of technology, IT companies are constantly facing new challenges. One of the biggest challenges they face is staying ahead of the competition in the digital landscape, which is where SEO for IT companies comes into play. Motion has provided SEO services for some of the most competitive IT industries, including cyber security, fibre optical networking, software development and digital transformation. As such, we have plenty of SEO tactics and steps to help you gain a competitive advantage in the search engines
SEO for IT Companies: 8 Tactics to Consider
1. Find your market niche and capitalise on long-tail keywords
Finding your niche when strategically planning SEO for IT companies, will help you target more relevant users that have a higher intent of converting. For example, instead of targeting ‘software development’ expand the term to include ‘software development services’. This will increase the quality of traffic and therefore, the number of qualified leads.
Once you have your niche, write about it. Make the text educational and enabling, helping your target audience learn and, in the process, hook them into your business. Creating high-quality and detailed content that serves the audience will help you outrank the competition.
Keyword research can help significantly when finding your niche. Evaluating your seed list and expanding your search into relevant terms might uncover long-tail keywords that offer better ranking ability with lower competition, whilst maintaining a strong search volume.
2. Consider the breadth of your product portfolio
Understanding what your customers are searching for when it comes to your business offerings and considering how competitors are positioning their product sets will help considerably when it comes to how you name your web pages, product and solution sets.
We regularly work with customers to evaluate this information through extensive keyword research, marketplace and competitor analysis. Getting this information right from the outset can build strong foundations to deliver solid inbound SEO results.
3. Push new technologies to market quickly
In a competitive marketplace, it can often feel like a race to the finish line when it comes to launching new technologies and products. It’s of course extremely beneficial to be a trailblazer enabling you to establish authority and exude dominance over the market.
Pushing new products to market quickly helps this and remember, you do not need a completed product before you can start to promote your new innovative offering. Consider being open with your development path, both for physical products and software, and spread the word to your customers about what is coming to allow you to start drumming up excitement and jump the competitors.
Our recent blog on 3D printing demonstrates another method in which you can get new technologies to market quickly. Utilising 3D printing can provide you with a physical model of your product far earlier in the go-to-market process. This can be especially useful for early sales tools, lead generation and product proofs.
4. Grasp your business strategy well
The most important step of any SEO strategy is ensuring you understand your business strategy so SEO development can be targeted. Marketing, sales and business development go hand-in-hand, so without a clear direction of one, all three will go amiss. Make sure you understand your target markets, audience personas and the products you are going to market with. This will be specifically useful when defining what keywords will deliver the best value and sales.
5. Combine SEO with Paid Search and Paid Social Media
Organic search results deliver in a world where people want to enable themselves rather than be sold to, but an SEO strategy is a long-term investment. You might not see instant results when you start the process of improving your search rank, so combining your SEO strategy with paid search solutions will give you a useful interim solution whilst you await your SEO to start delivering those all-important inbound leads.
Your paid search options can include PPC, display advertising or social media advertising. Utilising these platforms will accelerate the process of brand exposure and lead generation to help launch new products, solutions or content to your target market.
6. Find Strategic Differentiation within Your Business
Finding your unique business angle could be the difference between no leads and lots! Do you have a specialist sector or industry that you can deliver a wealth of experience to? Or perhaps you are the only experienced specialist in your local area? There are plenty of ways you can find your unique selling point and once you do, your SEO strategy will start to deliver results.
Utilise SEO tools for guidance and be sure to perform extensive research into your competitors, as well as your customer target base to find a strategic differentiation.
7. Can You Upgrade Competitor Content?
Have your competitors created an article or new landing page that is lacking what your customers are looking for? Add the page topic to your site and upgrade the content with new and improved facts, opinions or downloadable tools. If the competitor’s content is popular in the search engines, your newly upgraded content is sure to be more valuable to Google’s search users and thus be pushed ahead in the results, outperforming your competitors.
8. Focus on Key Products or Solutions
You may notice a familiar theme throughout this blog of ensuring you find your niche and targeting wherever possible. That’s because going broad can mean you will likely struggle with a larger marketplace, SEO that is even more competitive, PPC that is more expensive and targeting users that have a low intent or relevancy to your offerings. Focus on a key product or solution and promote them hard.
If you are unable to focus on key products and solutions, then break up your broad subject into smaller sub-sections and write about them all, utilising keyword research to help guide you in creating content that your target user wants to read and is actively searching for.
Steps to create a successful strategy targeting SEO for IT companies
Developing Customer Personas
Customer personas help with the overall SEO strategy by providing valuable insight into the motivations, challenges and behaviours of your target audience. This information can then be used to create a more targeted and effective SEO strategy.
By understanding their target audience’s needs and preferences, B2B IT companies can optimise their website and content for the right keywords and topics. This will increase the chances of appearing in search engine results when the target audience is looking for products or services like theirs.
Additionally, customer personas can help IT companies understand the customer journey, which can inform their content creation and distribution strategy. For example, they may create blog articles that address the common challenges and questions their target audience has at each stage of the buying process. This can help establish the company as a thought leader in the industry and attract more qualified leads to their website.
By using customer personas to inform the SEO strategy, B2B IT companies can create a more relevant and valuable online experience for their target audience, which can help increase their visibility, attract more traffic, and ultimately drive more business.
Learn more about why customer personas have just become your most important marketing asset >
Prioritising Keyword Research
Keyword research is a vital component of SEO for IT companies as it informs on the terms used by their target audience to search for content. Writing about what your business finds valuable isn’t necessarily going to attract traffic unless your target audience is interested (i.e. searching for it). This means prioritising keyword research by using keyword research tools to understand search intent and trends so that you can improve the relevance of your content and ensure it reaches the right audience.
Once you have a clear understanding of the user journey, you can identify and target relevant keywords for each stage to create content that aligns with those keywords and gain a competitive advantage over competitors who may only focus on certain stages. Doing this helps ensure that your website is optimised for your audience’s search intent at every step of the customer journey, from initial awareness to final conversion, which helps to maximise visibility and boost website rankings.
For example, users at the awareness stage may be searching for general information or solutions to a problem, while users at the consideration stage may be comparing different products or services. You could create blog posts or videos that provide general information for users at the awareness stage and product pages or case studies that provide more detailed information for users at the consideration or decision stage.
Optimising Content for your Customer
After identifying your customers’ needs and the keywords they use to search for products and services, it’s time to create content. Creating and optimising content for your audience is essential for successful SEO as they help improve visibility in search engines and attract customers.
Content creation involves developing high-quality, informative, and well-structured content in the most appropriate format that resonates with your target audience. This can include blog posts, whitepapers, case studies and more. Using multimedia content such as images, videos and infographics where it is appropriate can make your content more interesting and visually appealing, which in turn can help make your content more engaging for your audience.
Tailoring your content to target keywords as well as relevant long-tail keywords can improve your visibility in the search results. This involves using relevant keywords strategically throughout your content, such as in your title, headings and the body of the content. You can also further optimise your content with meta descriptions, alt tags, and other elements. These elements should accurately describe the content on the page and include relevant keywords to help search engines understand the content and rank it appropriately.
Pay Attention to the User Experience and Use Effective Calls to Action
Just creating content isn’t enough to ensure success in SEO for IT companies. Your site’s architecture, user experience and call-to-actions also come into play:
- Site architecture: A well-structured site is essential for SEO. You need to ensure that your site is easy to navigate by using clear hierarchies and logical URLs. By organising your page so that it provides valuable information at the right time, you can help users navigate your site more easily and find what they are looking for. This can help reduce bounce rates and improve engagement metrics, which can have a positive impact on your SEO. Using internal links to connect related content on your site can also help search engines understand the structure of your site and improve user experience.
- User experience: The page should be set up to serve the user, so it should be presented in a straightforward and intuitive way to capture your audience’s attention. Your site should be visually appealing, easy to use and provide a seamless user experience with clear calls to action. The majority of users are now skim readers, so your site should also be mobile-friendly, with the information loading quickly and presented simply and clearly to prevent readers from getting frustrated by the poor user experience and jumping ship to a competitor.
- Calls to action: CTAs are crucial to driving traffic and increasing the chances of conversion, but it is important to consider where and how they are used. CTAs need to be clear and compelling to start with, but they should also be placed strategically to maximise their impact. By pairing a prominently placed and well-written CTA with good-quality content that is useful and aligned to a user’s buyer journey, users are more likely to take action – whether that’s filling out a form, making a purchase, or taking another action that can encourage them to take the next step in their journey towards conversion.
Monitor and Measure Performance for Continuous Improvement
When it comes to SEO for IT companies, it is important to monitor search engine rankings and track performance with analytics tools so that you can test and refine strategies based on data-driven insights. This way, you can assess your performance and adjust your strategy if you identify areas for improvement or when market focuses and trends change.
Ideally, goals would have been set at the beginning of an SEO journey. These goals could be to improve search engine rankings, increase organic traffic or generate more leads. It is important that these goals are specific, measurable and achievable to guide your SEO efforts and provide a target for assessing performance.
Analytics tools such as Google Analytics help track key metrics such as website traffic, bounce rate, session duration, and conversion rate. You can use these metrics in parallel with user behaviour analysis to monitor the performance of your SEO strategy and identify areas for improvement. Which pages are the most popular? And which pages have the highest bounce rates? This is all information that can be used to optimise your content strategy.
Conducting regular technical audits is also important for SEO. Are there any technical issues that may be impacting SEO performance? These could include broken links, slow page load times, or duplicate content. Addressing these issues can help make your website as optimised as possible for your users as well as search engines.
How can Motion Help with SEO for IT companies?
As a niche technical agency with extensive industry experience, Motion Marketing is in the best position to help IT and technology companies with their SEO strategy. Our technically minded team have a deep understanding of the technologies and processes that underpin the IT industry and have significant industry experience working with IT companies of all sizes, from start-ups to established enterprises.
Our unique skillset and experience give us a full appreciation of the specific challenges and opportunities that IT companies face in today’s digital landscape, which allow us to create effective SEO strategies that are tailored to the unique needs and challenges of IT companies to deliver the results they need to achieve their business goals.
Conclusion
Implementing an effective SEO strategy is crucial for IT companies to succeed in today’s competitive world. By embracing effective tactics and implementing the right steps in their SEO strategies, IT companies can provide good-quality, engaging content and offer a better user experience to ultimately improve search engine rankings, attract more potential customers and increase conversion rates.
Here at Motion Marketing, we work regularly with customers in the competitive IT landscape and our full-service marketing enables us to enhance all marketing channels to help you get the best out of your SEO results. Contact the team to find out how a robust SEO strategy can help you gain a competitive advantage and achieve your business goals.
