SEO for IT Companies
A simple (but effective) step-by-step guide to build a targeted SEO IT marketing strategy.
What is SEO for IT Companies?
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of optimizing a website or web page to increase its visibility on search engines like Google and Bing.
For IT companies, SEO is crucial in attracting more clients and customers. The higher your website ranks in search results, the more likely potential clients are to visit your site and engage with your services.
Think of SEO like system maintenance for your website.
Just as IT companies perform regular maintenance on computer systems to keep them running smoothly, SEO involves making sure your website is ‘healthy.’ This means ensuring it is optimized to be easily discovered by search engines, driving more traffic to your site and helping you attract potential clients.
Did you know?
- 99% of people use the internet to search for local businesses. (Source: BrightLocal)
- Consumer use of Google to evaluate local businesses has leapt from 63% in 2020 to 81% in 2021. (Source: BrightLocal)
- Mobile devices are used for over 50% of all online searches. (Source: Statista)
A person searching for an IT company on Google may use a search query like “IT support near me” or “best IT services in [city name]”.
They may search for specific services such as “cybersecurity solutions,” “cloud migration services,” or “managed IT support.” Or they may even include industry-specific needs in the search query, such as “IT support for law firms in [city name]” or “small business IT services [city name].”
To benefit from SEO, you want your website to rank for these kinds of searches by optimizing for relevant keywords, local SEO, and service-based queries.
Why is SEO for IT businesses important?
Here are some of the benefits of using SEO for your IT company:
- Increased visibility: SEO helps increase your IT company’s visibility on search engines, making it more likely that potential clients will find you when searching for IT services or solutions.
- Cost-effective: Compared to traditional advertising methods like print or TV, SEO is a cost-effective way for IT companies to reach new clients, without the need for expensive campaigns.
- Targeted audience: SEO enables IT companies to target specific keywords that align with their services, such as cloud solutions, cybersecurity, or IT consulting, ensuring they reach the right audience.
- Local SEO: Local SEO boosts your website’s visibility for people searching for IT services in a specific geographic area. This is particularly beneficial for IT companies looking to target clients within a certain region.
- Building trust: SEO can help an IT company establish trust and authority with search engines and potential clients by providing high-quality, relevant content. It can also help build a solid reputation and attract more business opportunities.
Don’t forget!
IT companies must comply with regulations such as GDPR, CCPA, and industry-specific standards like HIPAA or PCI-DSS, depending on the services they offer. Therefore, SEO strategies and marketing efforts should be designed to align with these compliance requirements while effectively reaching target audiences.
How do search engines work?
Search engines work by crawling billions of webpages with their own web crawlers, known as search engine bots or spiders. These are then stored and saved in an index.
Google Search Essentials (formerly Webmaster Guidelines)
The Google Search Essentials define the actions that webmasters can take to make their websites better indexable or crawlable.
Read them here: Official Google Guidelines
The guidelines are based on three central aspects:
- Crawling – webmasters should support Google in finding websites.
- Indexing – webmasters should help Google to classify and “recognize” the content.
- Usability and user experience – webmasters should support the users of the websites in their use (usability and user experience).
Essentially, according to these Google guidelines, a website should support the search engine in crawling and indexing and ensure a good user experience.
Before you get started with SEO, there are a few prerequisites you want to check off first:
SEO Basics
At a bare minimum, you want to make sure you cover these basic standards before embarking on doing SEO:
- Website Speed – Have a fast loading site so potential customers don’t get tired of waiting for things to load.
- Mobile Friendliness – Make sure your site works on mobile as over 50% of users browse on mobile devices
- Analytics – Setup Google Analytics, Google Search Console & so you can understand what is and isn’t working.
- XML Sitemap – search engines use this to get your site’s URLs
- Robots.txt – tells search engine crawlers where they can (and where they can’t go) on your site.
Technical SEO
Technical SEO is the process of making website and server optimizations to help search engines to crawl and index your site more effectively (and therefore help to improve organic rankings).
Technical errors can hurt a website’s ability to rank. There are potentially a lot of errors, but here are some of the most common that will have the biggest impact when fixed:
- 404 errors
- Broken backlinks
- Poor URL structure
- Duplicate/thin content
- Poor internal linking
- Poor website architecture
- Missing metadata (page titles & meta descriptions)
- Missing H1 tags
Reach more clients with IT business SEO services
What is keyword research?
Keyword research is the process of identifying the words and phrases that people use when searching for specific products or services:
Once you understand the keywords your target audience is using, you can optimize your website to appear for these in search results.
Think of keyword research like a diagnostic test for your website. Just as a diagnostic test helps an IT company understand the health of a network or system, keyword research helps you understand what potential clients are searching for when looking for IT services.
For example, if people are searching for terms like “cloud storage solutions” or “cybersecurity services,” this information allows you to optimize your website to rank higher for those keywords. By doing so, you can attract more clients who are actively looking for the IT services you provide.
Why is keyword research important?
Keyword research is important for IT companies because it helps to:
- understand what people are searching for when they are looking for IT services, and to optimize their website accordingly.
- identify the specific needs and pain points of their target audience, which can inform the content they create and services they offer, ultimately leading to more conversion and better customer experience.
- identify the competition in the local area and understand what they are doing, so they can create a more effective SEO strategy.
What keywords are best to target?
Understand that there’s no “best” keywords, just those that are highly searched by your audience. With this in mind, it’s up to you to craft a strategy that will help you rank pages and drive traffic.
The best keywords for your SEO strategy will take into account relevance, authority, and volume. You want to find highly searched keywords that you can reasonably compete for based on:
- The level of competition you’re up against.
- Your ability to produce content that exceeds in quality what’s currently ranking.
Short tail keywords are broad, general keywords that are made up of one or two words:
- IT services
- Cybersecurity
- Cloud computing
- Data protection
- IT consulting
Whereas long tail keywords are more specific and longer phrases that are made up of multiple words:
- Affordable IT support for small businesses
- Best cybersecurity solutions for healthcare
- Cloud storage services for startups
- IT consulting for financial institutions
- Managed IT services for remote teams
How to do keyword research for your IT company
To start keyword research: put yourself in your customers shoes.
What words, phrases and terms might they use in order to find solutions to these problems? These are the keywords you want to find and target.
Here is a simple process to follow:
Step 1) Make a list of broad topics
Create a list of general topics related to your business. These might correspond to product categories, services or anything you believe your target audience would be interested in.
For example, broad topics like:
- Cloud Computing Solutions
- Cybersecurity Best Practices
- IT Infrastructure Management
- Managed IT Services
- Data Backup and Recovery
Step 2) Expand topics into a list of phrases
Now you want to take those topics and expand them into a list of related phrases to target.
Imagine yourself as a buyer looking for your product or service and ask yourself: what would I type into Google?
Whilst keyword research tools are useful here, you can do this for free by Googling your keyword.
For example, Google “cloud migration services” and you’ll see related questions, like “What are the benefits of cloud migration?” or “How much does managed IT support cost?”
Answering these in blog posts can boost your SEO and attract potential clients.
As well as related searches which may uncover other keywords to target:
Step 3) Analyze your keywords
Once you have a list of potential keywords, you need to gauge which terms are worth targeting.
You’ll need to use a keyword research tool here to pay attention to the following keyword metrics:
- Search volume
- Trends
- Search value over time
- Difficulty
- CPC
- SERP features
But most importantly, you want to consider relevancy and search intent:
Relevant keywords:
For relevancy, you want to ask yourself:
- Are these keywords relevant to my business?
- Do I have a chance of ranking for these terms based on the competition?
- Is ranking for these keywords going to have a positive ROI?
If you can answer YES to the above questions, chances are you have picked a relevant keyword
Search intent:
Search intent is the goal and purpose of a search query in Google. When someone searches for something, they are typically looking for more information before performing an action.
Search intent falls in four buckets:
- Informational – Searchers looking for information, they’ll use words like: how, what, why, when etc.
- Navigational – Searchers trying to find a specific site, they’ll use words relating to the service/product/brand
- Transactional – Searchers looking to purchase, they’ll use words like: buy, cost, pricing, cheap etc.
- Commercial investigation – Searchers researching prior to making a purchase, they’ll use words like: best, review, comparison etc
Not only is it important to select good keywords, but also to pick keywords you have a chance of ranking for.
For example, if you target “cloud migration guide” but don’t provide a step-by-step guide, you’re not matching search intent and may struggle to rank.
Find profitable IT services keywords
What is on-page SEO?
On-page SEO describes specific elements of the pages on your website that you control, such as:
- Title tags
- Meta descriptions
- Header tags
- Internal linking
- Images
- Content
Why is on-page SEO important?
On-page SEO is crucial for IT companies because it helps ensure that their website is easily discovered and understood by search engines, ultimately boosting visibility and driving more traffic. This can lead to more clients and business opportunities.
For example, if an IT company offers a service like “cloud storage solutions” and it is not mentioned or highlighted on the website, the site will be less likely to appear in search results when someone searches for “cloud storage” or related terms. However, if the company optimizes its website with “cloud storage solutions” as a focus keyword, it is more likely to rank higher in search results and attract clients looking for that service.
In addition, on-page optimization can enhance the overall user experience of a website, which can improve engagement and conversion rates. For example, having a well-structured, easy-to-navigate website with clear calls to action such as “Get a Quote” or “Contact Us” will likely convert visitors into clients.
On-Page SEO Checklist
- Use short & descriptive URLs – this helps people searching to understand what your page is about in Google.
- Write a good title tag & meta description – these show up in Google and help searchers understand what your page is about.
- Linking to relevant resources – this helps users to navigate your website.
- Optimize your images – give them a descriptive filename and alt text.
- Add schema markup – this helps search engines to understand your content
- Add internal links – these help Google understand what your page is about and to navigate your website.
Get actionable insights into your IT company SEO
What is off-page SEO?
Off-page SEO refers to specific actions done outside of your website, such as getting backlinks from other websites or social media.
What is link building?
Link building is the practice of building one-way hyperlinks (also known as “backlinks”) to a website with the goal of improving SEO. Common link building strategies include content marketing, building useful tools, email outreach, broken link building and guest posts.
Why is link building important?
Link building is important for IT companies because it helps to increase the visibility of a website on search engines. Google, for example, use links to a website as a way to determine the authority and trustworthiness of a website.
The more high-quality links that point to a website, the more likely it is to be considered an authority in its field and be given higher rankings in the SERPs (search engine results page).
This increased visibility can drive more traffic to a website, which can lead to more clients for the IT business.
Link Building Tactics:
- Guest posts (either DIY it or use a done-for-you guest post service)
- Buying backlinks (like authority links)
- Content marketing (like linkable assets or editorial links)
- Tried and tested SEO methods (like blogger outreach, broken link building
- Using what you’ve got (link reclamation and brand mentions)
Link building is crucial for IT companies because it helps establish the company as a reputable and trustworthy provider of IT services, which is key to attracting new clients. High-quality links from respected websites in the IT industry signal to potential clients that the company is well-regarded in the field.
Link building also helps increase referral traffic to a website, where visitors are directed to the site through a link on another reputable site. This can enhance brand awareness and help the company reach new audiences who might not have discovered the website otherwise.
In summary, link building is important for IT companies because it increases visibility, establishes reputation and trust, and drives referral traffic, leading to more clients and business growth.
Get high quality backlinks
IT Business SEO Best Practices (+ 4 Tips)
- Use HTTPs (SSL certificates)
- Make sure your web site pages load fast
- Target a relevant topic that has traffic potential
- Meet search intent
- Target a topic you can compete for
- Use your target keyword in your page title, H1 tag and URL
- Use a short (but descriptive) URL
- Write a good title tag and meta description
- Optimize your images
- Write good content
- Add internal links
- Get more quality backlinks
4 Actionable IT Company SEO Tips
Here are some things your company can do to begin the process of developing a good IT services marketing strategy.
- Add relevant keywords
- Optimize for local searches
- Start blogging
- Earn links
1. Add relevant keywords to your website
People looking for IT services often search for specific solutions like cloud migration or cybersecurity audits. Long-tail searches, while having fewer searches, often bring highly targeted traffic that is more likely to convert into real clients.
For example, instead of just focusing on optimizing your website for broad terms like “IT services” or “tech support,” you could include more specific keywords like “IT support for small businesses in [your city]” or “cybersecurity solutions for healthcare in [your area]” or “cloud computing services in [your city], [state].” These long-tail keywords help attract highly relevant clients actively searching for the services you provide.
2. Optimize your site for local searches
If your SEO plan doesn’t use local SEO to target specific areas, you’ll likely miss out on some great leads. Adding the name of your town and nearby towns to your website copy is the easiest way to get better results.
But don’t forget about things on your site besides writing copy. You should also add places to the titles and URLs of your pages.
Also, make sure that your business is listed on Google Maps and local directory sites. This will help your business show up more in local searches.
3. Start writing useful content
The main goal of IT service SEO is to get more clients by making your website more visible in Google.
One way to do this is by writing a blog. If you create blog posts offering tips on topics like cybersecurity best practices or how to improve IT infrastructure, you’ll attract interested readers and potential clients. As your traffic increases, so will your search rankings, and people looking for IT services in your area will turn to you as a trusted and knowledgeable resource.
4. Earn quality links
How high your site ranks in search results for keywords and phrases related to your business depends on how many and how good the links are to it. This means that you need to get good links if you want to keep your rankings.
You can do this by making good content and reaching out to bloggers and leaders in your field to ask them to share it. This will not only help you move up in search results, but it will also make your IT company look like a leader in the field.
Backlinks are a very important part of SEO for IT companies. They are like a vote of confidence for the content you put out. Because of this, links are one of the most important ways that search engines like Google decide how to rank pages.
- Not doing enough keyword research
- Not matching user/search intent
- Targeting keywords that are far too difficult
- Not building enough quality backlinks
- Breaking Google’s Terms of Service when building backlinks
- Missing out on internal link opportunities
- Not allowing Google crawl your content
- Not allowing Google index your content
- Having a very slow site
- Treating SEO as a one-time thing
How does IT services SEO work?
SEO for IT companies means making sure that your website is optimized for both search engines and users. This makes your website more visible in relevant and organic search results.
Optimizations include:
- on-page SEO
- link building
- technical SEO review
- content audit
- local citation audit
Why do IT companies need marketing?
It helps you stand out from the competition.
Your clients are your customers. A well-crafted marketing plan helps you identify your target market and communicate why they should choose your IT services over others.
An effective marketing strategy for IT companies should attract new clients, retain existing ones, and increase awareness of your services. The ultimate goal is to encourage potential clients to contact you or request a consultation.
How long does IT company SEO take?
Typically, IT company SEO takes at least six months to deliver results.
In some cases, businesses may start to see results like increased traffic, phone calls, and appointments, in faster time frame than this.
Although typically 6 months is a good benchmark as SEO is a long-term strategy vs. a short-term strategy like PPC.
How much does SEO for IT companies cost?
Prices for IT services website SEO depend on multiple factors, but the average cost for IT SEO is $1500 – $5000 per month.
If you’re looking to partner with a consultant or IT company SEO expert, the average rate is $100 – $300 per hour.
What’s Next?
Guest Posts
We do guest posts better than anyone else with complete transparency. You get to approve all placements before they’re made and even the exact anchor text that’s going to be used. Site owners themselves will produce your content to guarantee its a perfect match.
Content
Crafting the right message isn’t just a matter of choosing the right words. We develop site content and blogs using the latest tools to determine the right keywords and balance of terms to build high-performing content.
Managed SEO
Sometimes, it takes more than just one service to make a difference. Multiple services working in concert can amplify the effect and create the growth that’s evaded you in the past. Talk to us about managed SEO campaigns built around any of your goals.
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