Practical Guide on SEO for IT Companies (Software Development Houses)

SEO for technology companies requires patience. Results don’t happen overnight. Read on for our guide on creating and implementing efficient growth strategies for IT companies through content marketing and SEO. We created this practical guide on SEO for IT companies to help you start out or improve current positions.

The guide features practical SEO solutions for the B2B tech industry tried and tested to increase traffic, generate leads, and manage conversions for multiple software development outsourcing companies. 

Let’s revise how SEO benefits IT companies

• Organic traffic. Encourages people to click on your content and visit your website. The metrics here define how captivating or relevant your content is.
• Lead generation. Generating intentional traffic and influencing already existing traffic into becoming prospective customers. 
• Conversions. The prospects become customers. The leads subscribe to or agree to SEO’surchase your products or services.
• Brand awareness. It enhances your credibility and awareness throughout the market. The more people who know your business, the easier it is to find organic traffic and prospective buyers.

SEO optimization tips for IT companies 

Find your niche 

Determine your comfortable spot in the whole IT where you can thrive. The content and material you publish should reflect what is, in your opinion, the best-case scenario for your readers. Your posts’ content should provide practical solutions to their problems while being relevant enough to convince repeated visits and recommendations to other readers. Is it software development outsourcing,  app development, cybersecurity, idea validation and MVP development, IoT for Healthcare, or RPA for manufacturers?

SEO for IT requires you to understand what your audience needs and adapt your content to their peculiarities. Make a comprehensive look up what kind of content interests them, why they prefer a particular trend, how they want their content delivered, and what influence the content has over their decisions. Understand your audience’s specific personalities and needs. Define your SEO for IT goals regarding the content and the website, then center your content around increasing lead generation, sales conversions, brand awareness, and boosting organic traffic.

Thoroughly research the topics you intend to cover

Make a list of every issue, feature, grievance, hack, or tip you wish to cover in your posts. Look at community posts, top-rated solutions, statements from official websites and software platforms, user guides, and research publications on the same topics. 

Check out what other websites say about the same issue and how the audience receives their solutions. Find the highest-ranking keywords they used and cross-check them with performance metrics and competitor analysis tools. Proper keyword selection improves your B2B tech SEO strategies.

This will give you a bearing on the popular search engine terms used by the users. After compiling your research, draw up a blueprint or a skeleton of the article to guide what materials will feature in the post. 

Well, how do you do this? 

Understand all the concepts surrounding the topics

Search the internet for relevant material on the subject matter. Look for relevant research and official publications. Ask the experts. Getting a professional opinion in your article is a straight-up confidence boost for the readers. What are others doing? Check out other related posts and gather necessary pointers, pitfalls, and absolute winners from their posts. Draw up a draft of the key points and tips and add them to the post’s blueprint. A comprehensive blueprint should feature practical solutions improving SEO for software development companies.

Keywords

Keywords are exact search terms that people use to find your company, brand, and services on search engines. When your website has used relevant and high-frequency keywords, your content will appear on top of search results, increasing visibility and generating more qualified organic traffic to your site because of improved SEO for IT. Qualified traffic is much easier to convert into customers as they are already familiar with the kind of material they’re looking for.

With a large number of keyword search platforms and competitor analysis tools, you’d be going in blind without harnessing their power. Be intentional when choosing keywords and phrases: 

• Select keywords that are popular among competitors; this usually means they have a higher traffic ratio than lower-ranked keywords.
• Find location-relevant keywords; if your services are offered within given geolocation, ensure that keywords used will generate traffic from this specific location.  
• Browse the whole list; there are several keyword search tools and platforms that improve SEO for technology companies, exhaust their lists, and compare the keywords. Pick the most popular ones across the primary keyword search tools.
• Look for long-tail keywords; they usually include several words that relate specifically to your business. They typically don’t have as much traffic but have more qualified traffic, which is easier to convert. Long-tail keywords are also less competitive, so it’s easier to rank higher for longer keywords.

Don’t waste a lot of time here, choose the top B2B tech SEO keywords you’ll need and move on. When comparing the value of the SEO for IT keywords you are ranking for, select the ones with high search volumes, are not too competitive, are relevant to your audience, and are suited for your business goals. Make a list of the SEO for technology companies related keywords and craft your content around them.

Build a good reputation online

A startling reputation is already a huge selling point for most SEO giants. Major brands recognized all over enjoy the benefit of ranking higher owing to their already established rapport with the audience and mastery of SEO strategies for IT. It is harder to beat already established names, but it is not impossible.

First, aim at consistency and quality. Publish thoroughly researched, high-quality content regularly, and frequently. This gives the audience the impression that your site is committed to publishing reliable material.  Stand out from the crowd by developing a unique tone, informed by your audience’s demographics and your B2B tech SEO goals. When posting your content, vary your SEO strategy to include infographics, videos, and podcasts.

Create a content marketing plan

A content marketing plan is a guideline on what the content on your website will feature. Start by deciding who will be in the content development process. Will you need content writers, videographers, voice artists, marketers and strategists, graphics experts, or even programmers. Include professionals with a reputation in your field and relevant influence on the type of content you want to create. 

• Create and expand your keyword list and topics list. If you already have existing content, add it to the list and mark it as previous works. Previous works could prove useful when you need to repurpose your content or require a link to more information if you need to expound on the topic at hand.
• Decide where you’re going to publish your content. Is it your primary company blog, guest posting, medium, YouTube, Quora, Reddit, and GrowthHackers? Knowing your platform allows you to build your content to meet the members’ needs in the forum. Some platforms require a specific type of content, ensure that the content you publish meets their community standards.
• Timestamp your content. Decide when you will publish your work and how frequently you intend to be publishing. Managing SEO for IT requires having a controlled time frame that allows you to plan on the content to post instead of churning out article after article without necessarily building traffic or generating good leads.
• How are you going to promote the content? Putting your work out there and getting it to where the action is is good for business. Several platforms exist for this purpose. Whether it be social media sites or specific platforms like Reddit, make sure to work with other publishers and work on SEO for technology companies’ promotion strategies that guarantee traffic. 
• Monitor and evaluate the performance of your content in relation to SEO for your software development company. Keep track of how your work is performing. Are your keywords working? Is there any traffic change since you switched up your strategies? Are people coming back? Answers to these questions will determine how good your methods are working and how close you are to your goals.

Have continuous communication with team members regarding performance measures, traffic boosting, lead generation, and conversion strategies. After communicating, fine-tune, and adjust your content to meet the existing conditions, competitor’s behavior, or search engine requirements. Stay in the loop on what B2B tech SEO strategy is still working and retire others with no benefit to your goals.

Improve on and repurpose existing content 

Old is gold. The content consists of everything from how-to articles, podcasts, videos to infographics that you post on your site. Previous works usually show what has worked for you in the past and where you need to improve. Building on this ensures that you don’t start from scratch on getting traffic. Instead, you improvise and improve to meet the current trends.

 Content re-optimization for better SEO results

Older, improved content is a traffic magnet. Older content capitalizes on the existing traffic and their familiarity with your brand. An excellent place to start is choosing content that is older than six months from the current date. 

When choosing the content, look for those that:

• Still bring traffic and conversions.
• Rank 7-15 In search results because of main keywords
• Among the top 30 pages according to traffic

What to reoptimize?

Use competitor research to see which search queries return the article and what other competitor articles also rank the same or higher. Add more clarifying keywords to the content and then restructure the content with the keywords already embedded. If you have any charts or infographics and research, update the data or remove it altogether.  

Is it still relevant? If yes, try to add more information, evidence, or supporting arguments to your content before republishing it.

Push the traffic magnets to the top

Get more traffic from already high-converting articles-they are usually responsible for most of the leads. Find out which of your articles have brought in more conversions than others, then propel them further up to top spots based on search keywords relevant to SEO for technology companies.

You can update structure, add or remove irrelevant parts, and outdated content or references.

Improve on the keywords used. Include newer, higher ranking keywords to the content.

Try out link-building by promoting your work on other partner sites relevant to your niche.

Competitor analysis

Find out what your competitors are doing right to get ahead. Check out extra SEO for IT keywords they use, popular themes, and writing styles from other sites within your niche. But don’t copy the content; get the idea, and customize it to your advantage.

Define and understand the audience properly through their eyes. Your competitors might have a different approach to the whole subject. Is their system working? What areas need improvement? Capitalize on their B2B tech SEO weak points and try to find your base from their strong points. Use as many competitor analysis tools as possible and within your budget. Proper competitor research can be a traffic booster because of the additional content.

Research on the highest-ranking competitors within your niche. Focus on what they’re doing right and make necessary and practical adjustments to your strategies.

Compare them based on potential traffic, consider traffic distribution on their site, and the values of the traffic. Check out how their pages pull in the traffic and how their content marketing strategies are performing. You can check out competitor analysis tools for this purpose. Do thorough research on their other works and factor in your SEO strategy changes for software development companies.

Link analysis 

How good are their outbound marketing efforts? Make a list of which linking methods have brought success, adapt them to your strategy and SEO goals, compare the different domains affiliated with them, and compare them with yours. What are you doing wrong? Also, check out the link types and domain authority rank of their affiliated domains. 

Adding a reference to content adds weight to it. If you have a claim or an idea, adding supporting material, including research and case studies, makes it even more believable. The content you reference or draw from should support or expand on your original claim. The content could be:

• original research report or case study published in a reputable database,
• visual aids like pictures, charts, and infographics
• Unique information like how-to guides

Get high-quality links and use them purposefully. Build a relationship with influencers in the tech industry and link content simultaneously with them. 

Where to get your links

• Guest blogging. Guest articles are essential tools for B2B tech SEO and traffic growth on websites. Analyze websites you wish to work with and confirm if they suit your goals.
• Crowd marketing. Attract traffic from online communities, public forums (Quora, Reddit). To get ahead of SEO for technology companies, add an answer to related questions on the platforms, then include a link to your site as a secondary suggestion. Take note of community standards-the the last thing you want is your link marked as spam.
• Social platforms. They are an unregulated source of organic traffic. Build a stable online presence and following. Work with relevant platforms and try to stick to thematic material.

On-site technical optimization

Visitors and intentional readers are picky at best. Newer, fresher websites are mastering the art of optimizing user experience, UI /UX design. How do you beat them at their own game?

Other SEO for IT optimizations, like content promotion and link building, happen offsite. Technical SEO is somewhat complex and requires a fair bit of knowledge to make the most of it. Search index criteria for search engines change frequently. Optimizing the technical aspect helps the search engine algorithm find your site and content faster. Users expect a proper UX and UI design. They want responsive, lightning-fast web pages. Even if you hire a top-shelf content writer, no customer endures a slow, unresponsive, and buggy UI because of content.

Focus on:

• Using the relevant tools to increase the mobile responsiveness of your site.
• Increasing page-based load speeds.
• Implement structured data markup properly, a viable alternative for rich snippets, and proper indexation.
• Optimizing the interface, menus navigation, and layout to give visitors the best possible experience to keep them reading.
• Testing; repeatedly test how the UI and UX will handle different visitor scenarios and connections. 

Remove the duplicates

Get rid of any similar-looking content as it only drains your traffic and search ranking. Remove any duplicate pages from your internal indexing and only include the content that is still relevant. A lighter website is a faster website.

Optimizing the speed of your site

Improve your website speed by conducting the necessary loading time and scrolling speed tests. Draw up a detailed technical report on the speed and performance of your site’s design. A good start is Googles’   Google PageSpeed Insights. Make sure your 404 errors and 301, 302 URL redirects are working correctly. Correct any server errors, and you are good to go.