The impact of SEO on promotion in the IT marketplace

IT companies most often belong to the sphere of B2B – “business to business”. This means that the approach to SEO-promotion will be different from the conventional one. It will be necessary to thoroughly work out semantics, pay attention to optimising content and functionality of the site, order expert copywriting, select tools and technologies to increase ranking for niche queries, increase trust in the web resource for search engines.

Why you need SEO-promotion in IT topics

SEO issues are relevant for optimisers, owners of IT companies and promotion departments, i.e. for those who need to make their company (product, service) noticed in an oversaturated, highly competitive market, create their strategy and take their business to the next level. As a result, the site should become beautiful, usable, adaptive and informative, helping to get customers from both organic and commercial traffic.

Search engine optimisation is useful for those IT companies that are interested in growth, have developed a long-term strategy to win the market, and are ready to make large investments “for the future” for a period of a year or more.

SEO planning involves:

• joint study of the IT product of two or three nearest competitors with the customer;
• interviewing the client;
• study of competitors’ traffic structure;
• collection of semantic kernel and its verification (performed jointly with the client);
• distribution of topics by levels of the sales funnel (which articles are written to inform, attract, activate, retain and make repeat purchases).

In the promotion contract, communication between customers and SEOs should be formalised. This minimises the risk of mistakes. Any uncoordinated change on the part of IT specialists, such as updating the design of the site, can nullify the promotion efforts, resulting in a web page sagging in traffic and positions within search engines.

Two factors are in favour of choosing search engine promotion for IT:

• The number of search engine queries is constantly growing as users use search engines to solve their tasks and get any kind of information.
• SERPs take into account the usefulness of the information for the visitor, placing it in a way that is as relevant as possible to answer the question.

This means that SEO takes into account the interests of the user, his choice of the most useful and informative page. Search engine algorithms only adjust to this decision.

Setting SEO promotion goals and objectives for IT companies

Clients in the niche are technically educated and have high demands for content. The channel allows generating maximum leads for IT-themed companies, but if the site disappoints users, the leads will come to naught.

The top place in the search engine does not always bring traffic and increase sales. Therefore, it is better to set promotion goals to increase organic traffic, lead generation, sales conversion, brand recognition, creating a positive reputation in the online space, attracting key customers, building continuous communication with customers, etc. The goal should be clear, achievable and measurable. Only then can you develop a strategy to achieve it.

The main goal of SEO is to attract organic traffic and improve the ranking of web resources. To achieve the result, you can work either through semantics (by compiling SEO and screening out irrelevant queries), or by parsing top competitors and selecting relevant topics for content creation.
In the first case, you need to perform market research, determine the portrait of the ideal client, his desires and intentions. Based on these, information queries should be selected, shifting the focus to transactional or commercial search intent. It is not recommended to mix different types of queries within one section on the site. This has a negative impact on promotion.

It will not be possible to promote quickly with SEO. Search engines must recalculate ranking factors, take into account every change on the site. Therefore, the real demand can be predicted only approximately, comparing the frequency of all clusters of queries. If the site is already launched, you should start analysing which articles (and with what semantics) bring the largest number of unique users. And if the content is created from scratch, it will not be possible to understand this until six months later. You can quickly test hypotheses on demand and potential conversions with the help of contextual advertising by running several advertising bundles.

The easiest option is to take a segment of semantics and target it to a quiz, estimating the conversion rate after a week. The easiest way to do this is through an auto-learning strategy. Seven days is enough time to check if there is a potential demand for an IT solution. It is enough to have a budget of about $108 for such a “test”.

If the work is done with a large cluster of queries, for example, “implementation of a Business Intelligence software product”, there will be many sub-segments (implementation in the company, implementation experience, commercial proposal for implementation, implementation template, implementation plan, etc.). In this case, there will be a lot of semantics.

According to the Pareto rule (20% of efforts bring 80% of result, the other 80% – only 20%), it is important to choose a minimum of basic (high-frequency) semantics to get a meaningful result and launch it on a new quiz with a small offer. It can be developed within a day. Next, you need to assess how the target audience reacts, whether it makes sense to parse this layer of semantics further, to write expert materials.

For example, more than 30 articles have been written on our website under the query “IT marketing”, and this is not the limit. To create such a volume of expert material, it takes at least a year of work. In order to understand how users interact with each article, we launched a campaign in Google, ran tests on minimal budgets, evaluated traffic figures, prioritised content, etc. In this case, a simple rule works – if the number of impressions is high, it means that the topic can bring a lot of traffic. If finances and time allow, a test run is better to perform on a landing page.

By the way, to quickly get targeted traffic can be placed on promoted resources and aggregators of their own banners on the semantic keys necessary for the company.

If you continue the topic of semantics, taking into account the setting of the task to cover the users that the promoted product can help, you will have to publish about 80-120 articles within one or two years after the release, involving experts in their writing. At wide levels of the funnel, copywriters are enough to write articles, but the lower down the funnel a user goes, the more expert the content should be. This is due to the fact that SaaS companies do not have deep niche knowledge, so they resort to the experience and competence of experts. Only in this case articles are really interesting to read and they bring not only traffic but also conversions.

You can go the second way, using parsing of competitors to reduce the time of collecting and processing semantics. Serpstat and other services are used for analysis. By selecting competitors’ pages and determining the maximum traffic volumes for specific topics, you can select the most relevant to the IT company’s business among them.

Everything that contributes to the top leaders’ high performance and arouses user interest is subject to analysis. Topical guides or expert materials can be a feature of competitors. Only after determining the topics suitable for your IT company, you can form a plan of materials. Thus, your competitors will do the work of collecting and analysing semantics for you, and they will also suggest relevant topics with high ratings that bring the target audience to the site.

Most competitors are IT companies that have a strong presence on the Internet and use the same techniques and promotional tools – interactive content that engages users to spend more time on the site, themed business calculators with “passphrases” or tests without entering questionnaire data.

The task of SEO is to meet the requirements of search engines, to make them your partners, not to fight them. The right SEO strategy helps to surpass your competitors at the top of the search engine results.

Invested in search engine promotion finances delayed start working for the company, bringing profit at a distance of 12-18 months from the start of work. This is a long-term investment in development, which can not be quickly scaled, and a valuable tool to capture the market. Theoretically, you can get traffic in SEO in as little as 3-4 months. But you have to take into account that the transaction period is long, it will still take a lot of time (1-6 months) after receiving a request from a client. That is why we are talking about the fact that you can get real profit (not so much money, but payback) only after a year or later. Suppose a company earns – $10,000 at a cost of $3000 and spends $3000 on search engine optimisation. In fact, of the earned 4000 dollars half will go to pay taxes, and the actual profit over and above the amount that was spent on promotion, will be 2000 dollars.

For IT companies, the value of SEO is invaluable, but it is not omnipotent. You can’t invest solely in optimisation and keys at the start. This is due to the fact that even if you write a lot of expert super-materials, it will take a long time for search engines to index them and traffic will flow.

For example, promoting a web application, the emphasis should be on targeting, and the benefit of using SEO and contextual advertising in general tends to zero. These channels are useful only in certain segments of mobile app promotion, when it is possible to create huge industry publications with a full staff – editors, copywriters and disproportionately high costs. Yes, the biggest market players use SEO to get real customers through their own web applications and SaaS services. But this strategy works only on a huge scale, because to promote in this way can only companies with multi-billion dollar turnover, which are able to create their own media structures and business units for promotion.

It is difficult to say exactly when SEO will start to bring traffic steadily. The same texts posted on different sites have a different time lag (1-6 months) associated with the “weight” and promotion of the resource. It is important to create pages as early as possible to accumulate “age”, as well as to set goals for selecting the most interesting from the point of view of promotion of pages. For SEO to work and bring results, a web page must be constantly in development.

In most cases in IT topics, SEO-promotion should be accompanied by competent PR, search for industry-specific platforms, balanced content marketing, careful audience targeting and launch of targeted advertising.

Finding your target audience is an important part of IT SEO promotion. The audience needs to be attracted, interested, and in some cases – deliberately cultivated. When the portrait of the user is formed, then it is possible to work on the content in a more detailed, individualised way, increasing conversion. It is necessary to invest in articles both commercial and purely informational, working on reputation. Gradually begins to build a base of promotion, when the articles can already make sales.

Given that SEO works with promotion in search engines, then an important factor in ranking become behavioural factors – metrics that indicate the interaction of users with the resource. These include CTR, response satisfaction, direct visits to the site, bounce rate, depth of browsing, session duration.

Interactive elements help to significantly promote an IT site, all other things being equal, including the same budget. When a search engine sees activity, it evaluates the site higher. Therefore, it is effective to place on the pages of the chips to retain attention and stimulators of activity. Calculators, quizzes, gamification – all of these encourage click-throughs and downloads. It is this metric that makes aggregators the search leaders, which always benefit from a well-organised island of content. They have a significant selection of filters, settings, buttons on which users “fall in love”.

When the target audience is defined, you can shift the focus to the quality of content, increase conversion, investing in articles that have not only commercial, but also informational demand. In this case, it makes sense to build a base of promotion so that a number of articles can be sold.

Key SEO factors for promoting IT products and companies

How to stabilise organic traffic with SEO for IT

It will be necessary to work out semantics, create expert articles, SEO-optimisation of site functionality, use of tools to hit industry queries accurately, increase user loyalty to the product (service) offered and search engines’ trust in the site.

To get large volumes of traffic, you can use one trick. For example, create many articles within the same topic, which are designed for different segments of the target audience and allow traffic to be summarised as a whole. For example, each article with a similar topic – “Mobile App Promotion”, “Marketing for Web App”, “Promotion in Appstore”, etc.. – can bring from 100 to 700 uniques in six months. In total, their number for this period can approach several thousand.

As a result, one IT product or application is able to satisfy many information requests included in an expert article. Thanks to the flow of traffic from paid advertising to specific articles, the target audience grows, it is hypersegmented and redirected to lendings again. In this way, the product is split into multiple destinations and customers come from both paid traffic and organic articles.

How SEO in IT topics helps to increase expertise

The quality of solving the problems of search engine promotion for IT services depends on the experience and qualifications of the specialists taking on the job. As a rule, unlike freelancers, SEO companies are focused on results, as successful cases and growth in the number of satisfied customers directly affect the reputation.

For example, the practice of not only teamwork but also involving the client in SEO optimisation is actively used. Content is ultimately created by copywriters, but the client or the client’s representatives set the topic and provide general data about the project in the form of a short text, often using information from the project passport.

In conference call mode, the project manager sorts out all the details with the client, packaging the text, capturing all the expert judgement applied. This is the best outsourcing option: clients do not write anything, but during meetings in video conference mode they tell in human language about their projects. It is already the task of the SEO team to transform the received information into a business format.

Based on such an interview, an IT copywriter creates an article. If it is intended for a foreign audience, the IT copywriter and IT translator – a native speaker – are involved in the work. The designer creates unique infographics and illustrations for the finished article. SEO specialists study semantics in advance and supplement it during such “interviews”, directing the work of the copywriting team in the right direction.

It is necessary to strike a balance between SEO requirements and human language. Technical development of ready-made texts is performed – markup, updating data in the webmaster or Google Search Console, re-linking, buying links, etc. The result is a simple scheme: the client shares information, and the rest of the work is done by a team of professionals.

Expert content for SEO promotion of an IT company

The trick of SEO-promotion for IT-companies lies in specificity: it is necessary to demonstrate mastery of the topic, clearly describe the details and subtleties of the product or service being sold. With the help of PR and interesting informational content, you can curl, make some articles in demand and frequently downloaded, placed on external resources.

The main costs of purchasing links arise in Google. It should be understood that the top companies in the field of promotion buy in thousands of links. This means that if one fintech company orders an advertising campaign from an agency, links, placements, etc. will be bought in all industry publications in the fintech sector. Such methods are impossible without huge financial investments.

One link in the United States can easily cost $250, and native placement in someone else’s material – dozens of times more expensive. Large companies are able to buy more than 1500 links, paying for each from 250 to 2000 dollars, but a small company can not afford it. Therefore, it will have to buy links not from the big players, but on simple sites to give search engine signals of the presence of external links. Work on the selection of relatively inexpensive but effective (for every dollar invested) sites, as well as building up the volume of links are SEO-specialists. Using linkbuilding, they improve the ranking of the resource, correctly creating backlinks and finding the best places for their placement.

In addition to cool optimisation, weighty link mass, fast loading speed, the position at the top of the search results is influenced by the expertise of the content. The principle of E-A-T (expertise-authorship-trust), has been implemented since 2018 in Google. Preferably, content should be written (or at least verified) by an IT professional. In some cases, it is possible to use proof of expertise in micropagination with the name of the expert.

The role of semantics for SEO promotion of an IT company

Selecting keys for SEO promotion in IT SaaS services means a deep dive into the topic, understanding how the product is searched in the market. To “make friends” with search engine algorithms, you should use only useful and unique content of the highest level. Knowing search queries makes it easier to answer the question “what do users want”.

Semantics is always the basis of SEO, contextual and targeted advertising. It reflects the main “pains” of the client, commercial and information requests. This allows you to build banners for targeted advertising, banner advertising in RFE, contextual advertising displayed on demand on the basis of real demand.

At the same time, the content optimised for the keys should remain meaningful, useful for users.
Each stage of search engine optimisation requires working with different clusters of queries – from high-frequency (“cloud providers in Europe”) to specific (“Amazon cloud”), as well as the preparation of materials for the queries of this cluster. Only by having a structured semantic kernel, a content plan is created.

SEO-promotion for IT-outsourcing or promotion in IT and SaaS-technologies differ in the tools and techniques used, being aimed at increasing targeted applications, growth of relevant traffic.
If the SEO team is experienced, it is possible to promote useful and keyword-specific SEO content in other channels. In this case, on the basis of an existing article, videos are created, posts are published in social networks. Due to the relinking of similar content, the effect of promotion is enhanced.

Developing and launching an SEO strategy for IT

The finished SEO strategy is once again checked for consistency with the company’s “general line”. It should detail and clearly present the competitive advantages of the product, a step-by-step promotion plan, list the necessary web pages, describe the resources and competences of the team, as well as the planned costs, expected results and selected performance indicators.

To solve the problem of traffic conversion within SEO:

• offer an IT product as a way to solve the client’s problem or position it as an add-on, getting which can simplify the process of solving the client’s problem;
• introduce the product to the target audience with an eye to the future, using text, banners, pop-ups;
• guide the client through all stages of the sales funnel, sending traffic to webinars, email newsletters, user manuals;
• collect a base on which they launch media advertising through retargeting, including in social networks.

By the way, some companies successfully use marketing application content that does not contain advertising as a lead magnet. Its second name is “White Pages”. Guides, studies, instructions can act as it. In fact, such a lead magnet (a file or brochure) explains how a programme works or a script is installed on a website.

Experience suggests that engagement on downloading lead magnets averages between 1 and 3% depending on the niche, content, relevance, etc. For example, you are currently reading a page on a website that has a lead magnet on it. The same lead magnet is used to subscribe to two funnels – a Telegram chatbot and a Telegram feed.

To convert cold traffic in this case acts, for example, a guide that the customer wants to receive in exchange for an email. You don’t have to create new content! For “White Pages” is enough to repackage selected articles, already promoted webinars or interviews with an expert, providing them with explanations of difficult to understand points.

Another working SEO strategy is to release a free product that has better functionality than similar free versions of competitors. It will be able to promote keys with high frequency, as well as due to its value to bring links to the domain, creating a base of those who want to get a paid version and increasing the loyalty of the CA.

Search engine optimisation for IT

In such topics as IT or SaaS, the amount of infotraffic is huge! But the initial starting point is that the biggest challenge is to get into the market. Profit from the search engine optimisation channel does not start to arrive until 6-18 months later. Therefore, while SEO is being promoted, the main support can be digital PR.

Using digital promotion tools, he is responsible for building the company’s public relations, promotion on the web, and managing information flows between society and the company. Digital PR tools include publications in expert publications, the use of targeted and contextual advertising linked to the company’s first cases. In addition to case studies, visual examples of how IT products help customers solve their problems in real life work well.

Articles are the basis for creating expert content, including for digital PR, but they do not sell anything, so you need to work out the sales funnel, deal with lead generation, and build the rest of the mechanics of contextual advertising, targeting and retargeting, mailings in messengers and via email.

If the project starts from scratch, then the first year, while only starting SEO, is the time to prepare for the arrival of traffic, leads and registrations. During this period there is an opportunity to actively prepare content, considering work on it as a key to success in the future. In general, the first two or three years of content will require a huge amount of content.

This is due to the fact that a cold audience always requires much more effort to arouse interest. For example, in order to warm up the audience, at least 160-240 articles aimed solely at introductions and first touches should be published within three years. Recommendations for solving specific tasks that are not tied to the product, as well as generalised reviews, for example, of all solutions and instructions for a certain problem, thematic resources that do not require in-depth expertise, upcoming events that the target audience can learn about from aggregators, are good.

Organic promotion for SaaS helps to compete on product queries with aggregators, market leaders and competitors. For example, you can collect demand from the first stages of the funnel, when a customer is just thinking about the possibility of finding a solution to their problem. In this case, competitive keys are placed on the company blog, and low-competitive keys are placed on product pages.

To meet the needs of a “hot” audience that is already looking for a specific brand product, about 45-50 articles on topical subjects, including comparative product reviews, are launched immediately after release.

It is notoriously difficult to gather search traffic in SEO topics. If you study your competitors, you will notice the widespread use of various comparisons and reviews. One company came up with the idea, others picked it up and replicated it. But there is a nuance here – each company can compare products, emphasising the advantages of its own solution and masking the disadvantages, rising to the top. In order not to lose in the “ratings race”, customers should find up-to-date and complete information about the product on the manufacturer’s website, not on the competitors’!

Other working strategies are:

• demonstrating alternatives by comparing direct and indirect competitors, products and solutions (at least two and no more than four);
• developing detailed instructions on how to integrate the product;
• creation of a branding for a single IT solution that is suitable for different segments of the CA (e.g., offering a service for the sales department, tech support, etc.). Lendings in this case convert traffic from the blog;
• creation of satellite sites, through which competitors’ traffic is collected, links are obtained, informal articles are created to generate leads;
• buying niche trust sites with a good history for the sake of getting a lot of useful links and the ability to convert traffic to your project;
• duplication (in different formats from the main site) of keys on partner resources in order to dynamically change the content when the product changes;
• multilingualism, use of separate regional domains for promotion abroad;
• creation of own aggregators, especially when there are queries that cannot be covered by articles on the main resource, and there is demand for basic cards and categories.

Case studies and logos of satisfied customers who have received a service or used a solution are a golden asset. They work for the brand, helping to convert cold traffic, effectively package pages and help with B2B sales.

Industry research is also created, replete with numbers, data, information that is later used for citations. You can improve ranking by writing a complete guide to a particular solution. But there is an important point here – it has to outrank the competitor’s guides!

SEO for IT is a set of methods and strategies used to increase the visibility of the resource in the organic issue, improving ranking. Only specialists with experience and knowledge are able to perform internal and external optimisation of the site and achieve the set goals of reaching the top of search engines.

POST AUTHOR

Pyotr Dzyuba

IT marketing expert