SEO for a tech company is rather unique in several ways.
First, in the tech industry, most of your competitors have a strong online presence, and most of them know their way around SEO. Second, your customers are also unique, especially in the way they demand contents that are complex with a unique vocabulary.
So, in this guide, we will discuss several tips to properly implement SEO in a tech environment. Let us begin with the first tip.
1.Know Your Audience, Know Your Keywords
The most important step in SEO, as with other marketing strategies, is to properly understand your audience. There are many different approaches to achieve this, such as
developing a buyer persona.
Specifically for SEO, you will need to figure out the search intents of your audience. What keywords are they searching for? And Why? If you can figure out their needs or their problems, you can offer a solution in the form of contents.
Generally, the tech industry audience is looking for detailed, highly technical information, as well as professional solutions.
After you’ve understood your audience, the next step is to find the right keywords. There are many different tools that can assist you in this process, such as the Google Keyword Planner Tool, SEMRush, MOZ, and many others. The main things to consider are the keywords often searched by your audience and the respective competition level. Keywords that are very popular are often very difficult to target, so you will need to find the right balance.
2. Content Development
Now that you’ve found your target keywords, it’s time to develop contents according to your keywords.
Check out how your competitors are doing with their content marketing: what kinds of contents are they publishing? What forms? And what channels? You can either use their approach or take different opportunities. You can work with
performance based marketing company like Nine Peaks to create content strategy that will help drive traffic and prospects to your site.
It is advised to develop an editorial plan listing all your topics, when to publish it, and which channels you will use to distribute it. You can start with a 3-month editorial calendar, although ideally, you should have a year worth of calendar.
There are many benefits of regularly publishing contents, both inside and outside SEO. Contents will signal Google that your website is active, and they will also help you in building credibility and authority.
3. Technical Factors
Google does account bounce rate and click-through rate as ranking signals, and slow load speed is one of the major culprits of bounce rate.
So, first, you should focus on improving your site's speed if you haven't already. On average, users will wait for just a maximum of three seconds before they'll move on. Check out this guide by
Kinsta on how to optimize your load speed. Also, you can use a
free tool from Google to test your current speed.
Also, Google does account whether your site is mobile-friendly, so make sure your site already is. Use Google's Mobile-Friendly Test Tool to test your site.
There are other technical factors that can improve your SEO results, such as HTML tags, content length, and Metadata. Check out this guide by
Search Engine Land to get you further.
4. Implement Schema Markup
Schema.org is a collaboration project between Google, Yahoo!, Yandex, and Bing, which is basically uniformed attributes and properties to allow the search engines an easier time parsing information on your website.
The main benefit of implementing schema markup is that you can get
rich search results, which tend to be clicked more often by users.
The good news is, schema markup (or structured data) implementation is still fairly rare among SEO practitioners. So, simply by implementing it, you are already ahead of most competitors.
Check out this guide by
Kissmetrics to help you further in implementing schema markup.
5. Go Local
Although local SEO is a pretty broad subject by itself, the core principles are relatively simple:
- Set up a Google My Business account, and don't forget to verify it
- Get your customers to leave good reviews on your Google My Business
- List your business in local directories, respective to your industry. A simple Google search will help you with this
- Make sure your name, address, and phone number are consistent throughout all your listings
6. Link Building (Off-Site SEO)
In SEO, backlinks are the most important, and often expensive asset. In principle, if your content is relevant, valuable, and high-quality enough, you will always get backlinks sooner or later.
Make connections to other authority sites in your industry, link their contents and they will probably link yours. Also, connect with journalists and influencers. Try to contribute to industry-wide publications, such as LinkedIn Pulse, and link back to your site. Also, make full use of your social media channels to engage with others.
7. Understand The Fact That SEO Is Long Term
SEO is a long-term effort. You might probably need to invest at least 6 months before seeing any significant results. Most of the time, you will need to wait 8 to 12 months. In the tech industry where the SEO is more competitive, you should also expect difficulties and challenges along the way.
So, the keys here are consistency and patience. Always monitor your progress by using all the available analytics tools. You can start with the handy Google Analytics. Be consistent with your efforts, but adjust your strategy when necessary.
End Words
While
implementing SEO for tech companies can be more challenging than other industries, it is definitely manageable. Always adhere to SEO best practices, if you are following Google's optimization guideline, you will always be safe.
Embrace the fact that there's no shortcut or secret strategy to SEO: it's all about execution and consistency.
