SEO is a pretty tricky game – but when it comes to nailing SEO for an IT or tech business, you’ve got a whole extra set of challenges to overcome. The trouble lies in your audience. Typically, professionals in these industries don’t search for and consume content in quite the same way as other audiences do. Your professionals are looking for technical, authoritative and highly specialised content that educates and informs and so there are nuances you will need to consider when creating successful SEO content that another industry might not need to think about.

The good news is that SEO can be the game changer you need to get your business seen and give your website a boost. At the end of the day, search engine results are essentially an answer to a question. If you know the questions your target market will be asking you can tailor your website and content to answer that question – simple, right?

Almost. To help get you started, read on for Electric Sheep’s top tips to boost your SEO:

Know Your Audience

First off, you’re going to need to fully understand what your target audience is searching for – what search terms are your customers going to use to look for your product or service? Do they want to purchase something from your business or are they just looking for more information on a certain subject?

It might be helpful to flesh out your typical customer – what do they do, what do they like, what are they struggling with? Take some time to really find out who your audience is and tailor your content to target their specific pain points.

If you know exactly who you’re talking to then you can target the kinds of questions you anticipate them answering!

Choose a Solid Set of Keywords

Keywords are vitally important in any SEO strategy – both dictating how you appear in your customer’s organic search results, and giving you potentially big impacts without big spending! Essentially keywords are your customer’s roadmap to your website. By getting your keywords right, Google will understand that your page and content is relevant to their searchers.

As a tech business, it’s likely that your audience will be looking for specific, highly technical information – something that will educate and enrich them. Identifying hot topics of interest will allow you to create an effective working list of keywords that you can rank for in organic search engine results. We say ‘working list’ because that’s absolutely key. Especially true for a tech business where terms and phrases evolve all the time, your keyword list should be a constantly evolving beast – you’ll need to keep on top of that bad boy to ensure maximum effectiveness.

Think about exactly where in your sales funnel you’ll be targeting with your keywords. For lead gen, think about bottom-of-the-funnel keywords that mention specific types of software or services; for top of the sales funnel, think about information-heavy keywords that talk about more general categories or questions that your customers may be interested in.

Nobody Likes Stale Content! Keep Things Fresh

To increase your SEO ranking, you need to frequently and regularly post new content. Even if you’re in a B2B market, creating relevant and engaging content is crucial for staying on top of search results.

If you don’t already have a blog going on your website, then you should really think about starting one. And if you’ve already got going, but rarely post, or only post intermittently, this is one area you should really think about focusing on. Not only will a well-informed and well-written blog contribute to your SEO ranking, it can also help to boost your company’s profile and is a great way to build your brand.

A word of warning though – there’s a massive difference between a blog and a ‘blog’… By that we mean it’s vital that your content is relevant, authoritative and authentic. You’ll want to split your blogs between a couple of basic formats:

Evergreen content that offers in-depth, useful information to your readers and prospective customers is vital. By offering well-written pieces with regularly updated topics, you can make yourself a useful resource for your target audience. You can regularly update your blog with refreshed data or new points of view and each update will improve your ranking on search engines.

Next, think regular contributions. Find someone who has both subject matter expertise and can write interesting content and put them to work! Blog posts like these can be short and snappy, but should always be well-written and engaging to reinforce your company’s image for both your customers and the omnipresent Google!

Finally, once you’ve written your wonderful pieces of content – don’t forget to shout about them! This is where having a multi-channel presence is helpful. Link to your blog through your social media channels, your profiles and other sharing sites you may be part of.

Get That Site Up to 88mph

Or at least, down to 2 seconds. And here’s why:

Every SEO expert worth their salt will tell you that nothing blocks visitors (and so leads and conversions) more than a sluggish website. If your website is loading slowly, especially anything over 2 seconds, you risk losing customers to the next search result that pops up for your keywords – this is especially key if you’re marketing a tech service or product!

In fact, in 2018 Google itself started using speed as a ranking factor in its search engine results and slow sites and high bounce rates are likely to be penalised by both the algorithm and your customers.

As well as making your website lightning fast, also consider reviewing what is ON your site that might be preventing conversions, or halting your customers on their journey with you. Simply fixing large image sizes and optimising them for the web, reducing the number of H2 and H3 tags to those that are necessary and keeping your content light but relevant are all small but impactful steps you can take to improve your webpage performance on and off site.

How Trustworthy Are You?

Getting the on-page (importantly the keywords) and the technical SEO (speed etc) up to scratch is great, but Google still needs to trust that you know what you are talking about. If Peter Jones gives you business advice you’ll take notes, if Dave down the pub gives you business advice, you might take it with a pinch of salt. Google works in the same way. One of the factors that helps Google understand how authoritative you are on a topic is the quality, relevance and quantity of backlinks to your website.

If you are a tech business that has developed software for the construction industry and you consistently get links from construction related websites, then Google will start to see you as an authority on the topic. Remember, the key is relevance and quality above quantity. A handful of high-authority links to your website from relevant industry websites is far more impactful than a load of low value, non-relevant links.

It is those ‘dofollow’ links you’re looking for! Download all of the backlinks of your competitors and cross-reference them against each other and yourself and any websites sending ‘dofollow’ links, (especially those with a high domain authority to more than one competitor) – these are more likely to send you a backlink than cold outreach.

Things Are Only Impossible Until They’re Not…

Need some back-up? We’ve got you…

An effective content marketing strategy will help you stay ahead in the SERP (search engine results page) war but it does take a little knowhow and a lot of dedication to deliver top-quality content and stay on top of the ever-evolving tools and processes involved.

Nailing SEO marketing keeps even the most hardened marketers on their toes.  Done properly, it can be a powerful tool, building your brand and getting your company in front of the right people to convert traffic into genuine leads and sales. But SEO is a complex topic and sometimes can seem daunting for smaller technology companies and startups to find the correct resourcing or knowledge to stay on top of their game in a competitive SEO world.

Alternatively, you can let a smarty pants agency like us do all the hard work for you. Talk to us today and see how our team can help you towards fortune and glory, kid. Fortune and glory.