saas seo – Mike Khorev – SEO Consultant https://mikekhorev.com Tue, 07 Apr 2026 14:44:24 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.6.17 SEO for SaaS: How to Create an Effective SaaS SEO Strategy https://mikekhorev.com/seo-saas-actionable-tips-grow-traffic-saas-company Sat, 20 Dec 2025 20:26:24 +0000 https://mikekhorev.com/?p=10812 SaaS SEO is the process of optimizing a Software as a Service company’s website and online presence to improve its visibility and attract relevant organic traffic. SaaS SEO differs from traditional SEO in that it targets different stages of the customer funnel that are unique to SaaS companies. This includes targeting keywords and focusing on content that correspond with potential customers’ awareness, consideration, and decision stages as they choose and use a SaaS product. SaaS SEO, in contrast to traditional SEO, also focuses on optimizing pricing pages, free trials, demo sign-ups, and other conversion-oriented elements to entice users to perform desired actions, like making a purchase or engaging with the software. SEO for SaaS businesses is fairly unique compared to other businesses: the sales cycle is surprisingly fast, with an average of just 40 days for SaaS products priced below $5,000. Meaning you don’t have a lot of room to nurture your prospects. The biggest challenge in SaaS marketing, however, is arguably about SaaS lead generation. SaaS SEO remains one of the most effective ways to generate more SaaS prospects, and in this guide, we will learn how. First, we will discuss the right mindset in implementing SEO for SaaS.   Building 7-Figure Companies With SEO Learn how founders, CEOs, execs and thought leaders use SEO and Content Marketing to grow B2B, SaaS, technology and startup companies from zero to 7 and 8-figure revenue. How Incapsula Doubles Their Business Year Over Year With SEO, Content Marketing and CRO Content Marketing and SEO are the main customer acquisition channels that helped Incapsula achieve: Market Capitalization: $1.5 billion Protects: 5,000,000+ websites #1 customer acquisition channel: Content Marketing and SEO Year over year growth: 100% Learn more How Content Marketing and SEO Helped BuildFire Become a 7-Figure ARR SaaS Company Content marketing, the first page rankings on Google and SaaS SEO helped...

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]]> SaaS SEO is the process of optimizing a Software as a Service company’s website and online presence to improve its visibility and attract relevant organic traffic.

SaaS SEO differs from traditional SEO in that it targets different stages of the customer funnel that are unique to SaaS companies. This includes targeting keywords and focusing on content that correspond with potential customers’ awareness, consideration, and decision stages as they choose and use a SaaS product.

SaaS SEO, in contrast to traditional SEO, also focuses on optimizing pricing pages, free trials, demo sign-ups, and other conversion-oriented elements to entice users to perform desired actions, like making a purchase or engaging with the software.

SEO for SaaS businesses is fairly unique compared to other businesses: the sales cycle is surprisingly fast, with an average of just 40 days for SaaS products priced below $5,000. Meaning you don’t have a lot of room to nurture your prospects.

The biggest challenge in SaaS marketing, however, is arguably about SaaS lead generation. SaaS SEO remains one of the most effective ways to generate more SaaS prospects, and in this guide, we will learn how.

First, we will discuss the right mindset in implementing SEO for SaaS.

 

Building 7-Figure Companies With SEO

Learn how founders, CEOs, execs and thought leaders use SEO and Content Marketing to grow B2B, SaaS, technology and startup companies from zero to 7 and 8-figure revenue.

 

Content is Definitely King, If Not Everything

For SEO in the SaaS industry, focusing on producing content with compounding effects over time is essential. Long-term benefits can be significant for businesses that consistently create valuable and relevant content. Content development is essential if it is to meet readers’ long-term needs as well as immediate SEO requirements. This strategy makes sure that even when search engine rankings change, the content will still be interesting and helpful. SaaS companies can built a loyal audience over time and establish themselves as reliable information sources by investing in persistent efforts in content creation.

First, we have to emphasize that nowadays, SEO is all about a good, if not excellent, SaaS content marketing strategy.

In the past, we can get away with aggressive optimizations like keyword stuffing, SEO cloaking, and other tactics to rank in a matter of months, if not weeks.

Nowadays, however, both Google and the customers are getting smarter: Google, with its various algorithm updates and especially the Google RankBrain can now better recognize content that will be valuable for the respective audience—and those that simply won’t—. Rankbrain, Google’s A.I. machine learning software, can learn which content that is bounced immediately, and the ones that are actually consumed with significant dwell time.

On the other hand, customers are also smarter. They can immediately recognize content that is not professionally made and sound scammy. With so much information and content available on the internet, some of your visitors can even recognize duplicate content.

So, to succeed in SaaS SEO, there’s no shortcut to actually having relevant, valuable content published regularly. Both quantity and quality are equally important here. While this might mean bad news for some of us, this will ultimately create a better environment for everyone: the ones that actually know about their niche wins, while those who are only looking for quick bucks will be naturally eliminated.

Thankfully, content is already an integral part of the SEO strategy for SaaS companies. However, this will also mean that you will compete with more content.

Source: Hubspot

 

Even then, simply publishing good content regularly won’t cut it. There are over 4 million blog posts published daily. So, it’s getting harder and harder to get noticed nowadays. Think of good, relevant content as a prerequisite to successful SEO for SaaS companies.

On the other hand, if our content didn’t get noticed, we can’t get backlinks, which are also a very important ranking factor in any SaaS SEO campaign. Promoting our content is just as important as the content development process, if not more important.

The SEO SaaS tactics and strategies we will discuss below will be based on these facts: publishing good content regularly and promoting them properly.

 

Important Ranking Signals

To be successful in SaaS SEO, we have to understand the SEO ranking factors and adjust our tactics to leverage this knowledge.

Google’s search algorithm is always evolving, and thus the ranking signals have evolved over the years.

However, it’s important to understand that Google’s (and the other search engines’) main aim is to provide better results for the audience. Understanding this fact can help us understand that SEO is ultimately about optimizing our SaaS site for the human audience, and not for the search engine bots.

With that being said, here are 5 of the most important ranking signals:

 

1. Technical Factors

There are three key technical factors that are especially important for SEO: secure and reliable site (including HTTPS utilization), mobile-responsiveness, and optimal site load speed. In short: having a site that is up to par with today’s standards.

This is fairly basic, but also very important. If your site isn’t perceived as secure by Google, you won’t rank. If you get a high bounce rate because your site is slow to load, you also won’t rank and your SaaS SEO strategy won’t be successful.

SEO performance depends on optimizing websites for Google’s crawling and indexing, as this has a direct impact on how search engines perceive and rank your website. Here are a few reasons why this optimization is necessary:

1. Improved visibility: Potential visitors can find your website more easily when search engines efficiently crawl and index it. Search engines can more easily display relevant results to users when your site is properly optimized. This is because search engines can better comprehend the content and structure of your website.

2. Enhanced user experience: A website that has been optimized for accessibility makes sure that users can find what they’re looking for with ease. You can give your visitors a seamless experience by making technical improvements to your website, such as optimizing the speed of your pages, making them mobile-friendly, and using proper URL structures. Increased conversions, longer visit times, and greater engagement can result from this favorable user experience.

3. Better search rankings: Search engine results pages (SERPs) display your website’s ranking based on Google’s crawling and indexing process. Through the optimization of technical elements such as robots.txt files, canonical URLs, structured data markup, and XML sitemaps, you can inform search engines about the quality and relevancy of your content. This can increase your website’s exposure and search engine rankings while driving more organic traffic.

4. Indexation of all relevant content: Search engines will properly index all of the important pages and content on your website if you optimize it. Your online visibility may be limited if certain pages or sections are not crawlable or accessible. As a result, they might not show up in search results. You can improve your website’s chances of having all of your important content indexed and ranked properly by making technical optimizations.

5. Future-proofing your website: Search engine algorithms are likely to place more weight on technical aspects as they develop. You can stay ahead of these changes and keep your competitive edge by actively optimizing your website for crawling and indexing. Maintaining a high search engine ranking and being able to adjust to algorithm changes will require regular technical monitoring and improvement.

 

2. Domain Age and overall authority

Yes, age matters. More than 55% of the sites that are ranked on the top 10 spots of Google SERP are at least three years old.

Obviously, there’s not much you can do about this if your site is fairly new, besides probably purchasing an old domain and make it your own.

You can, however, optimize other rankings factors like having more high-quality backlinks to improve your authority.

 

3. Content Optimization

We have discussed content and its relations to SEO for SaaS above, and how optimized your content is both for human readers and for Google’s algorithm will be an important ranking factor. Keyword optimization still matters, although Google is getting smarter in detecting keyword stuffing. Generally, if you use your keywords naturally and use semantically-related keywords, you are good to go.

The content must also be relevant according to the user’s search intent. Different keywords will relate to different intents:

  • Navigational: the user is aiming to find a specific site, often related to brand keywords
  • Informational: the user is looking to get an answer to a specific question.
  • Investigational: the user is comparing different products or searching for a product
  • Transactional: the user is looking to make a specific purchase

We have to develop content for each of these search intents.

The goal of content optimization is to provide better information for the human audience: focus on being relevant and valuable, and include your keywords naturally. Also, focus on being a thought leader for a certain topic.

 

4. User Experience

User experience metrics are now important ranking signals, thanks to the introduction of Google RankBrain. With the A.I.-based algorithm, Google can recognize whether a search result is relevant for the users. For example, top-ranking content that is not getting a high enough click-through rate (CTR) will be deemed irrelevant, and thus demoted.

There are three main user experience metrics to focus on while optimizing SEO for SaaS:

  • Click-through Rate (CTR): how many people are clicking on your link when it appeared in the search results.
  • Bounce Rate: the number of people who immediately exit your site after just a few seconds. This will be perceived by Google that your site is not relevant to the search query
  • Dwell Time: how long the user stays on your site after they made the visit. This will often be related to the relevancy and quality of your content.

 

5. Link Profile

Yes, backlinks are still very important for SaaS SEO, although some things have changed. In a nutshell, when a site links to your site, Google will perceive your site as more relevant.

However, while in the past it was more about quantity: the more links, the merrier, nowadays it’s more about quality. Google will check whether your site is linked by sites that are:

  1. already relevant and
  2. related to your niche and keywords.

For example, if you are a site about digital marketing, getting a link from a high-quality golf site is deemed irrelevant.

An efficient way to increase backlinks to your website and establish its authority is to incorporate “link magnets” into your content. Infographics, white papers, and in-depth guides are examples of high-value, link-worthy resources that readily draw backlinks from other websites. You can establish yourself as an authority in your industry and entice other websites to link back to your content by creating and sharing these valuable tools. This raises your website’s search engine rankings and attracts high-quality backlinks that can increase website traffic.

6. Social Signals

While Google themselves have declared that social shares are not counted as inbound links—and thus not a direct ranking signal—, the more people that share your site, the higher the chance of getting these links.

We can see that the top-ranking pages on Google usually have a lot of shares, so getting more social shares can significantly help in improving your ranking.

 

How to Develop a SaaS SEO Strategy

Based on the factors discussed above, here are the key optimizations we should focus on to succeed in SEO as a SaaS business:

 

1. Optimizing Your Content

The first step in developing a robust SaaS SEO strategy is optimizing your content. To find high-volume, relevant keywords that your target audience is searching for, you must conduct keyword research. You can raise your website’s organic traffic and search engine rankings by carefully choosing which keywords to use in blog posts, landing pages, and product descriptions.

As we have discussed above, the most important key to success in SaaS SEO is your content— both in quantity and quality. Here are the key areas to focus on when optimizing your content for SEO:

  • Above all, focus on optimizing for the human audience: delivering value and relevance. Don’t focus solely on pleasing the search engine algorithms
  • Proper keyword research is very important. In general, you should aim for three things:
    • Keywords that are relevant for both your SaaS business and your audience
    • Keywords with high enough search volume (will vary depending on your industry’s size, etc.)
    • Keywords with manageable competition
  • Use the topic clusters approach, where a more in-depth, longer “pillar” page is targeting the main keywords, and other, shorter content pieces are covering related keywords. All these pages are linked to the main page. For example, the pillar page can be in-depth content about “digital marketing”, while smaller articles can cover “SEO”, “social media marketing”, and more. This approach can help in building your credibility and authority over a certain topic, which is Google’s preference nowadays.
  • When approaching keyword density, the important thing is to include your keywords naturally for the human audience. This will include using semantically-related keywords (LSI keywords) to develop more natural content to help your SaaS SEO strategy be more effective.

Here are some tips for creating interesting, informative, and visually appealing content that will effectively optimize your content:

1. Conduct thorough keyword research: Determine the relevant keywords and phrases that members of your target audience are probably going to search firstly. To find low-competition, high-volume keywords to include in your content, use keyword research tools.

2. Create valuable and readable content: Focus on producing content that provides genuine value to your audience. Offer in-depth information, insights, and solutions to their pain points. When it comes to creating readable content, you should avoid using complex jargon. Instead, use words that are commonly known to readers. Doing so, if you face any difficulty, then consider getting help from an AI reworder to quickly simplify the content.

3. Craft compelling headlines: Grab attention with catchy and compelling headlines. Your headline should be concise, clear, and provide a glimpse of what readers can expect from your content. Incorporate relevant keywords naturally to boost search engine visibility.

4. Optimize meta tags and descriptions: Pay attention to optimizing meta tags and descriptions for each page or blog post. These elements provide a brief summary of your content to search engines and users. Include relevant keywords while maintaining readability and enticing users to click through.

5. Focus on user experience: Ensure your website is user-friendly and easy to navigate. Optimize the site’s loading speed, ensure mobile responsiveness, and improve overall user experience. Search engines prioritize websites that offer a smooth browsing experience.

 

2. On-page Technical SEO for SaaS

The second step in developing a robust SaaS SEO strategy is focusing on on-page technical SEO. To make your website more search engine friendly, you should optimize its headings, meta tags, structure, and URLs. Improved user experience and higher search engine rankings also depend on using schema markup and making sure your website loads quickly and is mobile-friendly.

On-page technical SEO for SaaS involves optimizing various elements of your website to make it more search engine friendly and improve user experience. Here are some key areas to focus on:

  1. Optimize headings: Use relevant keywords in your headings (H1, H2, etc.) to help search engines understand the content and structure of your pages.
  2. URL structure: Ensure that your URLs are concise, descriptive, and include relevant keywords. Avoid using dynamic parameters or unnecessary characters.
  3. Website security: Implement HTTPS encryption to secure user data and improve trustworthiness. Regularly update software and plugins to protect against vulnerabilities.
  4. User experience optimization: Focus on providing a smooth and intuitive user experience. This includes optimizing navigation, improving readability, and ensuring clear calls-to-action.
  5. Conduct regular website audits: Use tools like SEMrush, Moz, or Screaming Frog to perform comprehensive audits of your website. These tools can help identify technical issues, broken links, duplicate content, and other areas for improvement.

There are two main goals of technical SEO for SaaS:

Technical SEO optimization for SaaS can be a very broad (and deeply technical) subject, but this checklist by Search Engine Journal—designed for non-technical marketers— can help you.

In the SaaS niche, technical optimization is arguably even more important, since all your competitors are already tech-savvy with properly functioning websites.

 

3. Optimizing For Rich Snippet

The third step in developing a robust SaaS SEO strategy is optimizing for rich snippets. Rich snippets offer extra details, like star ratings, images, or price information, in search engine results. These details can improve the visibility of your listing and increase click-through rates. Search engine optimization and the use of schema markup can help to improve the likelihood that a rich snippet of your website will show up in search results.

Relatively new to Google is how they now include rich snippets in some queries. According to SEMRush, almost 12 % of all search results are now feature-rich snippets.

Rich or featured snippets are positioned above the top ranking position and can steal a lot of traffic. So, how can we get featured as a rich snippet? There are three main factors:

  1. The keyword itself must feature a rich snippet. Tools like Ahrefs can show keywords with rich snippets opportunities.
  2. More than 99.5% of rich snippets are from pages that already rank on the first page for the keyword.
  3. The page is properly formatted with structured data markups, which is essentially assigning attributes and properties to all the elements on your page.

Find opportunities for rich snippets, and optimize your page accordingly. This guide by Backlinko might help you further in this aspect.

 

4. Link Profile

The fourth step in developing a robust SaaS SEO strategy is building a strong link profile. Getting high-quality backlinks from authoritative websites in your industry is required for this. This can be accomplished by creating high-quality content that will naturally draw backlinks, like comprehensive guides or infographics. You can further improve your link profile by contacting influencers and relevant websites about collaborations or guest posting opportunities.

SaaS SEO is not only about backlinks—or inbound links—, as there are three key components of your site’s link profile:

  • Internal link: links within your domain from one page to another. A good internal linking structure will allow Google an easier time indexing your site, among other benefits.

  • Outbound link: Links from your site pointing to other sites. This will help Google in perceiving your authority over a certain topic/niche, as well as helping with overall indexing.
  • Inbound link: backlinks coming from other sites to yours. The more backlinks coming to certain pages and content, the more relevant the content is.

However, it is true that backlinks remain one of the most important ranking signals in any SaaS SEO campaign, and here are some effective tactics in getting more backlinks:

  1. There’s no shortcut to actually having good content. Good content will naturally get linked, and bad, irrelevant content will have a hard time just getting one link.
  2. Remember that the quality of the inbound links matters more than quantity. Build relationships with relevant sites and influencers of your niche. Guest posting is the common—and still effective— approach here.
  3. Building backlinks—quantity-wise—is still an effective SaaS inbound marketing tactic. We just have to be careful in getting backlinks from spammy websites that can be counterproductive for your SEO results and can compromise your SaaS SEO strategy. Integrate all your content promotion tactics with getting backlinks. That is, besides aiming to get more traffic by promoting your content, aim to also get links. For example, when implementing influencer marketing, you can also ask the influencer to link your content.

 

5. Voice SEO for SaaS

The fifth step in developing a robust SaaS SEO strategy is optimizing for voice search. Getting your website optimized for voice search queries is essential, especially with the rise in popularity of voice assistants such as Google Assistant, Siri, and Alexa. In order to do this, you must comprehend how users formulate voice search queries and include long-tail, conversational keywords in your content. You can also increase your presence in voice search results by concentrating on local SEO and making sure your website is listed in relevant directories.

More and more people are using voice search today, where more than 40% of adult users perform one or more voice search every single day.

It is worth noting, however, that most voice search queries are done in searching for local businesses, and it can be hard to implement this in the SaaS environment.

We can, however, still find opportunities for voice SEO for SaaS by targeting conversational search queries or Q&A queries, and there are three important factors:

  • Google tends to feature voice search results from content that already ranked in the top 3 spots, so follow the usual SEO optimizations
  • For keywords that also feature-rich snippets, generally the rich snippet is also featured as the voice answer
  • Focus on questions that are commonly asked in your niche, and include this question in the content (as a subheading or in the middle of the content). Attempt to answer this question better than your competitors, and aim to get featured as a rich snippet.

 

End Words

To reiterate, your content quality and quantity remain the most important factors in building a successful SaaS SEO strategy. This is even more true in the SaaS environment where content marketing is already a very important aspect. So, work on your content game, and the rest of the SaaS SEO strategies will be far easier to implement with better results.

The post SEO for SaaS: How to Create an Effective SaaS SEO Strategy appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.

]]> The Step-By-Step Guide to SEO for Startups https://mikekhorev.com/step-step-guide-seo-startups Mon, 10 Mar 2025 16:14:00 +0000 https://mikekhorev.com/?p=10319 Building a startup company is both fun and challenging activity. There are definitely a lot of things to focus on when building a startup, from developing your products to planning a killer marketing strategy to kickstart your sales. Yet, more often than not, startups don’t recognize SEO as an important part of their early marketing strategy. There are many reasons for this: SEO is a long-term game, SEO is difficult to apply or simply not believe that SEO is a valid strategy in 2025. SEO can be a really effective way to get ahead of the pack, especially in the tough competition of startups. While it’s indeed a long-term game, SEO can act as a strong building block for your startup’s inbound marketing strategy onwards. In this guide, we will share several effective tips on how to implement SEO for a startup company. Before we begin, let’s discuss the benefits of SEO services for startups.     The Benefits of SEO for Startups 1. SEO is About Content, And Content is King Your website is the modern-day equivalent to storefront, and is a really important promotional tool for your business. Now, in this competitive, content-driven world, a well-designed website won’t bring you much value without comprehensive, engaging content. The most common misconception for startup SEO is that we are only optimizing the contents for search engines, while in fact, optimizing for human readers is equally, if not the more important aspect of SEO. So, by practicing SEO, you will also optimize your content, one of your most valuable marketing assets.   2. SEO is Cost-Effective Compared to other forms of digital marketing for startups such as PPC advertising, social media marketing, influencer marketing, and others, SEO for startups is a relatively more affordable option, especially in the long run. SEO...

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]]> Building a startup company is both fun and challenging activity. There are definitely a lot of things to focus on when building a startup, from developing your products to planning a killer marketing strategy to kickstart your sales.

Yet, more often than not, startups don’t recognize SEO as an important part of their early marketing strategy. There are many reasons for this: SEO is a long-term game, SEO is difficult to apply or simply not believe that SEO is a valid strategy in 2025.

SEO can be a really effective way to get ahead of the pack, especially in the tough competition of startups. While it’s indeed a long-term game, SEO can act as a strong building block for your startup’s inbound marketing strategy onwards.

In this guide, we will share several effective tips on how to implement SEO for a startup company. Before we begin, let’s discuss the benefits of SEO services for startups.

 

 

The Benefits of SEO for Startups

1. SEO is About Content, And Content is King

Your website is the modern-day equivalent to storefront, and is a really important promotional tool for your business. Now, in this competitive, content-driven world, a well-designed website won’t bring you much value without comprehensive, engaging content.

The most common misconception for startup SEO is that we are only optimizing the contents for search engines, while in fact, optimizing for human readers is equally, if not the more important aspect of SEO.

So, by practicing SEO, you will also optimize your content, one of your most valuable marketing assets.

 

2. SEO is Cost-Effective

Compared to other forms of digital marketing for startups such as PPC advertising, social media marketing, influencer marketing, and others, SEO for startups is a relatively more affordable option, especially in the long run.

SEO might not have a similar short-term impact as with social media or paid advertising. However, it will be a great long-term foundation for your startup’s online presence. Controlling the budget is always one of the most important aspects of a startup, and investing in a startup SEO campaign is one of the very best bet to grow your startup.

 

3. Search Engine Has More Market Share Than Ever

We all know that more and more people are searching for reviews and information before deciding on virtually anything nowadays. Google now processes more than 3.5 billion searches daily, and that number continues to grow.

So, skipping on SEO for your startup means you are passing out on this huge market potential. Don’t forget the fact that even more people are going to spend most of their time on their mobile devices. Search engines will be an even bigger pillar of our lives, and without organic SEO, your potential customers will have a hard time finding your business.

The three reasons stated above are not the only ones, as there are many more benefits of practicing SEO for your startup businesses. We could probably even argue that SEO is no longer a luxury marketing strategy for startup businesses, but a necessity.

So, how can we apply the best SEO practices to a startup? For the rest of this guide, we will discuss the steps you will need to take to develop an effective SEO strategy for startup businesses.

 

Implementing SEO for Startups: The Right Mindset

What’s the first thing that comes into mind when you heard the term ‘SEO’? It can be different for everyone. But many people still think that SEO is about cheating Google and the other search engines to rank higher.

While it may be true in the early 2000s when blackhat SEO is still prominent, it’s actually no longer the case nowadays.

Nevertheless, there are still many misconceptions about startup SEO, and before we begin, we must address at least some of the important ones:

 

SEO is not a get-rich-quick scheme to cheat the search engine

There are, indeed, black hat SEO tactics that can give you short-term results. However, they are very risky and can get you penalized by Google, even got banned from ranking altogether.

Instead, you should change your perception that SEO for startups is a long-term, organic strategy. You might need to invest at least 6 to 12 months before seeing any results, but the results will indeed pay off.

 

SEO is not always about ranking

Too many startup SEO practitioners are too fixated on getting high search engine rankings, and solely that. Yet, being the first-ranked site won’t mean too much if you don’t get your investments back in the form of traffic, and ultimately, conversion.

But isn’t getting ranked high the way to get traffic? Yes, but not always. There are high-ranking sites with high bounce rates, and so they are losing potential leads. There are also sites with enough traffic, but nobody’s actually buying their products or services.

So, when you set up your startup goal(s) for SEO, avoid fixating too much on ranking, it is just a vanity metric. Instead, focus on your end goals: traffic, conversion and revenue.

 

SEO is NOT dead

Ah, this is also a common misconception. Almost every year, you will most likely stumble upon an article or two proclaiming the death of SEO, and quite often they are tied to a certain Google algorithm update or another.

Guess what? SEO is still living and breathing, and some might even argue that SEO is stronger than ever. There is, however, some truth in that statement, that SEO is always changing. So, a strategy that works in 2024 might need to change in 2025 and beyond. However, the good news is, as long as you are following the SEO strategy outlined here, you won’t need to worry about doing major changes every time an algorithm update is implemented.

In short, as long as you do SEO best practices, you are fine in the long run.

Step By Step Guide to Implementing SEO for Startups

Step 1: Defining Your Objectives

As discussed above, SERP ranking shouldn’t be the only goal of your startup SEO campaign, as most of the time, it can be misleading as a vanity metric.

Defining a clear and proper SEO objective is very important so you can adjust your priority in implementing the SEO campaign – which as discussed, is a long-term game. Knowing your SEO objectives alone can significantly save time and resources while maximizing ROI.

The general principle is that your SEO objectives should align well with your marketing goals and your startup business’s overall objectives. While the ideal objective(s) might vary depending on many different factors, here are some common SEO goals to consider:

  1. Increasing organic traffic: more visitors to your website would equal more opportunities to convert them into prospects and customers.
  2. Lead generation for startups: your content should be focused on how you can encourage as many people as possible to submit their contact information (email address). Lead generation should also be a part of your startup customer acquisition strategy.
  3. Brand awareness: pretty self-explanatory, getting more people to know your brand by  attracting them to your content
  4. Sales: especially if you are an eCommerce business performing direct sales on your site, with this objective you can focus on driving relevant traffic to maximize transactional sales.
  5. Customer service: targeting individuals that might need specific help/solution with your content to provide value.
  6. Reputation management: ensuring your startup company ranks on top of branded keywords to maintain a positive reputation and ‘bury’ negative content.

Define your objectives, and make sure your objectives are clear, specific, and measurable so you can integrate these objectives in the next steps.

 

Step 2: Keyword Research

The next thing you will need to work on is finding your target keywords. There are several different approaches to achieve this: you can do a bit of competitive analysis, and look at the keywords your main competitors are targeting. You can also target keywords based on your customer’s behaviors, or other approaches.

Nevertheless, work on your keyword research, and make the full use of the available tools.

In general, there are three main principles in performing your keyword research:

  1. Your target keyword should be relevant to your target audience. This is mainly done by measuring the monthly search volume for a specific keyword.
  2. The target keyword must be relevant for your brand/product/service. Not all keywords that are popular for your target audience are going to be relevant to your startup business
  3. Depending on your available budget and timeline, the competition for this target keyword must be realistic. The more popular the keyword is, the more competitive it would be. It might not be financially feasible to focus on overly-popular keywords.

 

Step 3: Content Planning

Next, plan your content based on your target keywords. There was a time when ‘content’ for SEO is just stuffing the keywords into an article, but that is no longer the case. To succeed, you will need to deliver content that gives value to your audience.

Content marketing for SEO is now about the consistent publication (both in quantity and quality) of your content. If you can consistently publish high-quality content, Google will perceive your site as credible and trustworthy and will recommend your content to rank on their SERPs.

It’s very important to understand that although we are developing SEO content, we shouldn’t blindly focus on ‘pleasing’ the search engine, for example by including too many keywords in our content. Instead, the focus should be to provide value for your human readers.

Although content marketing for startups can be a tough subject to discuss, here are some important principles to follow:

  • Obviously, the main optimization here is to include your target keywords in the content, and there are two key things to understand:
    • Include your keywords naturally. Again, focus on making the content as comprehensive and natural as possible for your target audience
    • Pay attention to the potential search intent of the keyword, and develop your content to satisfy this search intent
  • Do a quick Google search of your target keyword, and check the top-ranking pages. Your aim is to either create better content than these pages or cover the topic from a different angle and create something really unique.
  • Optimize your content’s structure both in the eyes of human readers and the search engine’s algorithms. That is, optimize the readability of each content, and maintain a good internal linking structure. Also, implement structured data markup to help with indexing and for your content to be eligible as a rich/featured snippet.

 

Step 4: Technical Optimization

The next step is to optimize the technical aspect of on-site SEO for startups, and there are two main objectives of this step:

  1. To  make sure Google (or the other search engines) can index your site properly and recognize all the different elements on your site correctly
  2. To improve the readability and user experience of your content and website in general, with the goal to keep your visitors as long as possible on your site.

Allimitedly, optimizing all the different technical factors can be overwhelming, especially for beginners. You can check our previous guide of technical SEO checklist here, but on this occasion, we will list the important ones you will need to focus on:

  • XML Sitemap: Having the proper sitemap is essential so that Google can properly index your site. There are several tools available to achieve this and don’t forget to submit your sitemap to Google Webmaster Central.
  • Title Tags: Include your focus keyword in your title tags, and make it interesting enough for your user to click. Remember that every single title tag must be unique.
  • Meta Description: Meta descriptions are not a direct ranking signal. Yet, it will improve your click-through rate (CTR) which is a ranking signal. So, your focus in writing meta descriptions should be your human readers. Make them interesting and unique.
  • Heading and Subheading: Not only using proper headings will make the content easier to read, it will also make it easier to sparse by search engines.
  • Page load speed: According to Google, if your page loads in more than three seconds, more than 50% of your visitors will bounce. Analyze your site using Google’s PageSpeed Insights, and optimize load speed as much as possible.
  • Mobile-friendliness: it’s no secret that nowadays, Google prioritizes mobile-friendly/mobile-responsive sites to rank on their SERP. Make sure your site is mobile-responsive, and test in as many devices as possible.
  • HTTPS: If you haven’t already, make sure to migrate your site to HTTPS rather than HTTP (SSL certificate). Google may block your site in Chrome if you aren’t yet using HTTP.
  • Crawl Errors: Use Google Search Console to analyze your site and fix any existing crawl errors.

Also, unless it’s absolutely necessary, avoid using sub-domains in your startup’s website setup. Google might recognize your subdomains as separate entities, and thus will require separate optimizations. It’s better to use subfolders in this case, if you still need the organization’s purpose.

 

Step 5: Link Building

Now that you’ve done the basics of on-site optimization, it’s time to start moving your focus off-site. Think of it this way: on-site SEO is, essentially, creating content with the right focus keyword and proper structure. Off-site SEO for startups, on the other hand, is putting your content out there and getting people to endorse your content in the form of backlink.

A backlink can be thought of as a vote of confidence on the internet: when a sitel links your page, they are saying that the content on this specific page is trustworthy. However, it’s important to understand that today, the quality of backlinks is more important than quality: a backlink coming from authoritative sites that are relevant to your niche will be worth more than a link from a brand new blog that is totally unrelated to what you sell or do.

However, obviously getting these high-quality backlinks can be easier said than done, but here are a few link building tips you can try:

  • The main principle is to create high-quality content: if your content is valuable and well-promoted, you’ll get these backlinks sooner than later. Promote your content using all available marketing channels while aiming to get backlinks in the process.
  • Give them a reason to link your content, which can be something like:
    • Unique information/data not available anywhere else, for example in the case of original research report, etc.
    • Data roundup posts where you list a lot of useful data/statistics in a page
    • Aesthetically-pleasing content, like a well-taken photo or infographic
    • An original, attractive story
  • Collaborate with other websites on your niche/industry, the more influential they are, the better.
  • Be active on your social media channels, and frequently link to quality contents
  • If you are a brick and mortar startup, build your local citations and reviews. Check the detailed guide on link building for startups and my SEO services for startup companies.

 

Step 6: Evaluate and Re-optimize

The last (but not least) step here is to evaluate your SEO progress so far and make the necessary adjustment.

Since, again, startup SEO is a long-term project, then monitoring your progress is a very important thing to do, and most likely you’ll need to make adjustments and re-optimization along the way. Especially evaluate the following metrics:

  • Ranking: pretty obvious, even though you haven’t reached the top spots or even the first page of SERP yet, you should check if your page is moving upwards the SERP gradually
  • Organic traffic: in general, your site’s organic traffic should go hand-in-hand with your increase/decrease in ranking. If, for example, your ranking goes up but you have a decline in organic traffic, then you should check the other metrics for possible issues
  • Conversion rate: the ‘conversion’ here would vary depending on your site, it can be email signups, form submissions, or even transactions.
  • Link profile: check for new backlinks and referring domains, also check you competitors’ link profile to find link building opportunities and possible gaps in your strategy
  • Local metrics: if you are also implementing local SEO (i.e. if you are a brick and mortar startup business), then you should check metrics like Google Maps ranking, number of local citations, session location, and so on

Adjust your strategy based on the evaluation, and don’t forget to check the latest startup SEO trends and updates, especially algorithm updates. Don’t be afraid to update or even revamp your content if necessary, for example if you can include more up-to-date information. In fact, Google tend to prioritize fresh content in its SERP.

 

End Words: Do’s and Don’ts

Implementing SEO for startups might not be a simple task, especially if you are completely new to SEO. However, by following our step-by-step above, you will have a strong building block on your journey ahead. Choosing the right SEO service is just as important as selecting the best LLC service. Each is the foundation of your online business.

To close this guide, we will share several do’s and don’ts as you start implementing your SEO.

Do’s:

  • Track your progress, and pivot when necessary
  • Put professional SEO consultant in charge of your strategy, or outsource it to an agency
  • SEO is always changing. So, keep yourself up-to-date with the latest tactics and knowledge base

Don’ts:

  • Duplicate content, or keyword-stuffed content
  • Never pay for links, ever
  • Never build links with spammy methods: forum comments, blog comments, posting on low-quality sites

The post The Step-By-Step Guide to SEO for Startups appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.

]]> SEO For IT and Technology Companies: Your Ultimate Guide https://mikekhorev.com/seo-tech-companies-ultimate-guide https://mikekhorev.com/seo-tech-companies-ultimate-guide#comments Fri, 07 Mar 2025 22:06:00 +0000 https://mikekhorev.com/?p=11299 Why SEO For IT and Technology Companies Is Unique? Let’s carefully consider three factors: The number of people using search engines is increasing at a rapid rate, each and every year. There are over 3.5 billion searches being made daily. The search engine results page (SERP) has significantly improved since the early days of the internet. In the past, we only get website results, but now we can get various “rich” and interactive results from featured snippets to embedded results from Google Maps, The search engines—and especially Google—is now a very important aspect of our lives. It’s now one of our main ways to find information—besides social media—. It is also one of the primary ways we learn about new brands, products, and services. So, SEO is obviously very important for any industry nowadays, an effective way to get noticed in this very saturated market where everybody got their voice (or rather, noise). With that being said, SEO is even more crucial in IT and technology companies due to several reasons: First,  in the IT niche, more of your competitors know about the technicalities of SEO and already have a strong online presence. In short, you are in the big leagues and the competition is even tighter. Next, your prospects—or leads— are generally tech-savvy. They expect more from your content, and you can’t use gray-hat SEO tactics to get your shallow content to rank. They will notice when your content isn’t well-developed and will be quick to jump to your competitor’s. Last but not least, especially if you are a B2B technology company, SEO is an important but risky tactic that can make or break your business. According to Junto back in late 2017, 57% of B2B marketers stated that SEO for IT and technology companies generate the most leads. On...

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]]> Why SEO For IT and Technology Companies Is Unique?

Let’s carefully consider three factors:

  • The number of people using search engines is increasing at a rapid rate, each and every year. There are over 3.5 billion searches being made daily.
  • The search engine results page (SERP) has significantly improved since the early days of the internet. In the past, we only get website results, but now we can get various “rich” and interactive results from featured snippets to embedded results from Google Maps,
  • The search engines—and especially Google—is now a very important aspect of our lives. It’s now one of our main ways to find information—besides social media—. It is also one of the primary ways we learn about new brands, products, and services.

So, SEO is obviously very important for any industry nowadays, an effective way to get noticed in this very saturated market where everybody got their voice (or rather, noise).

With that being said, SEO is even more crucial in IT and technology companies due to several reasons:

First,  in the IT niche, more of your competitors know about the technicalities of SEO and already have a strong online presence.

In short, you are in the big leagues and the competition is even tighter.

Next, your prospects—or leads— are generally tech-savvy. They expect more from your content, and you can’t use gray-hat SEO tactics to get your shallow content to rank. They will notice when your content isn’t well-developed and will be quick to jump to your competitor’s.

Last but not least, especially if you are a B2B technology company, SEO is an important but risky tactic that can make or break your business. According to Junto back in late 2017, 57% of B2B marketers stated that SEO for IT and technology companies generate the most leads. On the other hand—as mentioned above— if your content isn’t powerful enough, these leads simply won’t convert.

Building 7-Figure IT and Tech Companies With SEO

Learn how founders, CEOs, execs and thought leaders use SEO and Content Marketing to grow IT, SaaS, technology and startup companies from zero to 7 and 8-figure revenue.

The Future of SEO and The Importance of a Right SEO Mindset

Seemingly each and every year there’s always a piece of news or two stating the death of SEO—like this one.

Here’s the deal, if you think of SEO for IT and technology companies as a tactic, it will always die every couple of years or so.

Think about it. SEO used to be all about keyword stuffing back in the early 2000s. The practice is now mainly dead ever since the introduction of Google’s Panda algorithm update back in 2011, but there are still many marketers and “SEO experts” that are still focused on keyword optimizations and keyword density.

What about link building? Yes, backlinks are still important, but nowadays it’s more about the quality rather than quantity. Think about it. Is there any tactic or strategy that can let us consistently get links from high-quality websites and relevant influencers? None, besides actually producing high-quality content and build your credibility. So, link building as a strategy is also dead.

Thus, before anything else, let’s first change our mindset: SEO for IT companies is not actually a strategy, but rather, a philosophy.

A very common—and dangerous—mistake is to think of SEO for IT and technology companies as a way to “beat” the search engines, as we treat Google and the search engines as the enemies we must defeat.

Instead, a better mindset is to treat Google as a partner, and the job of SEO is to align our online presence—our website, our content, and even our social media presence— with Google’s and the other search engines’ goals.

So, here comes our next focus: what actually is Google’s goals?

What Google Actually Is About?

Let us be clear first. Google today has expanded tremendously as a company, encompassing several different industries outside the search engine focus, from its Android OS to hardware production (Google Home, Pixel Phone, etc.)

Here, we are solely focusing on Google as a search engine.

According to Google Search’s mission statement, we can summarize that their main focus is to: create a better search engine that can deliver the most relevant, reliable, accessible, and useful for the human searchers.

We tend to forget that the end aim of SEO is the human audience, not the search engine algorithm.

Also, we can see again in that mission statement that one of Google’s goals is to help creators succeed. Don’t forget that the search engine algorithm is being updated and perfected not to give SEO marketers a harder time, but on the other hand, to ensure that the best, most relevant content and the best content creators will be the ones found by the searcher/user.

So, to reiterate, don’t treat the search engine algorithm as the enemy you must beat, but a friend you must embrace—or even a lover—. This way, think of SEO for IT and technology companies not as a strategy to help beat this enemy, but as a dating guide to help you get this girl.

Let us finally begin.

Step-By-Step Guide to Building SEO for IT and Technology Companies

Now that we’ve established a better mindset to approach SEO, it’s finally time to start developing our SEO strategy for IT and technology companies.

Although we can always use the complex technical lingo and jargon to describe the process, SEO for IT companies is actually a pretty simple concept—as we’ll learn together—. So, below we’ll break down the process into a simple, step-by-step guide, starting with the first one.

Step 1: Define Goals, Assign KPIs, and Define Ways To Achieve These Goals

In short, have a working strategy. Above, we have stated that one of the most common mistakes is to treat SEO for IT and tech companies as a strategy to beat the search engines, but it’s surprising that even many of these people actually have no working strategy at all.

First, and arguably the most important. Define your SEO goals.

Wait, isn’t the goal of SEO is obvious already? To rank higher in the SERP?

Here’s another common misconception: SERP ranking—and even ranking #1—, is not the end goal of SEO, but rather, a means to an end.

You can, for example, rank #1 on an unpopular keyword quite easily, but that won’t bring any value for your business since you won’t get any traffic, right?

Instead, here are the common objectives of IT and technology SEO:

  • Organic Traffic: simply put, getting more people to click the content and visit your website.
  • Lead Generation: we go a little further from just “traffic for the sake of traffic”, and aim to get some leads by converting some of them into prospects—and in turn, customers
  • Sales Conversion (eCommerce or affiliate marketing): convert those who consume the content to purchase our product/service (or others’ through affiliate marketing)
  • Brand Presence: improving our company’s online presence to increase awareness and perceived credibility
  • Online Reputation Management (ORM): manage your online reputation, for example by preventing negative reviews to rank higher for your branded keywords (and let your own content rank on these positions)
  • Reaching to a Specific Target (Consumer or Company): Difficult, but possible, mainly by targeting keywords that are searched by specific customers. We call this Account-Based Marketing
  • Customer Service: optimizing content that can provide useful information and answer your customer’s specific questions. This can be effective in building continuous engagement with your prospects and customers.

You can define specific goals for all of these objectives. For example, x % increase in traffic, y% increase in lead generation, specific goals in brand awareness, and so on. Or, you can focus on just a select few, or even just one of them.

Nevertheless, make sure to define at least one goal that is:

  • Specific: that is, clear and well-defined
  • Realistic: achievable. If the goal is too big or too long-term, break it down into smaller, more realistic milestones
  • Measurable: fairly straightforward, you should be able to measure the performance by measuring a specific metric tied to a KPI. (i.e. measuring the number of social engagements instead of abstract

Next, develop a clear strategy on how you can achieve these goals. For example, if your goal is to increase organic traffic by 10% in a year, how can you achieve it? Should we develop new content to target a new audience? Should we create new landing pages or even a new site altogether?

No matter the strategy or tactic you choose, the core of any SEO tactic for technology and IT company will revolve around the target keyword(s), so this will be the focus of our next step.

Step 2: Proper Keyword Research

Above, we have established that today’s SEO is no longer about keyword stuffing, but it doesn’t mean keyword optimization is no longer important—we just need to approach it differently, as we’ll learn together further below—.

Keyword research remains one of the most important steps in developing an SEO strategy, and here are some key considerations:

  • The first and most important thing here is to define and understand your audience properly, based on the goals we’ve established above. Conduct market research and develop a buyer persona, and the key here is to especially find out your ideal audience’s search intent.
  • In a nutshell, search intent is the reason behind any search query: why the audience is making the search in the first place. The idea here is to align these potential search intent with your SEO objectives—as discussed above—. For example, if your SEO objective for your IT or technology company is to increase traffic, you might want to target keywords related to informational intent. Similarly, you might also want to target keywords related to transactional or commercial intent. You might want to check out a brief guide on the different types of search intent here.
  • Based on these possible search intents, find your target keyword by following these important principles:
    • The keyword must be relevant to your audience. This is commonly identified with a high monthly search volume.
    • On the other hand, the keyword must be relevant to your business. Fairly obvious, but often neglected.
    • The competition for the keyword must be manageable according to your budget and timeline. Some keyword research tools will display “keyword difficulty” or similar metrics to assist with this.
    • Last but not least, after the keyword fulfilled all the three criteria above, is it possible to expand the keyword into a proper content—or better, topics you can create several content pieces from—
  • Use as many keyword research tools as possible (according to your budget). You can use tools like Spyfu to check your competitor’s target keywords, Buzzsumo to search for trending keywords—and topics—, or SEMRush and Ahrefs, among others, for more traditional keyword research. (possible affiliates here)
  • However, even with all the available tools and technologies, sometimes going with your guts and trusting your instinct (and experience) is a better approach. For example, keywords like “slam dunk” might be obvious for us as humans if we are targeting the basketball-related niche, but it might not be noticed by the basic keyword research algorithms.

Make a list of your target keywords and divide them by SEO goals and user intents (as we have discussed above), and divide them by priorities.

Step 3: Starting a Content Marketing Plan

Let’s reiterate what we have discussed further above: as the search engine’s algorithm getting smarter, there’s no shortcut to SEO for technology and IT companies besides actually having high-quality, relevant content that is valuable for your audience.

So, planning how you will approach your content marketing ahead will tremendously help you in the process. We’ll always start, however, with why, which is the searcher’s intents, that should be the main driving force behind the content creation process.

In general, here are several key steps in developing a content marketing plan:

  1. Decide ahead on who is/are going to work in the content development process, which can possibly include:
    • You yourself (if you are willing and have the time, you can do it yourself)
    • Content writer
    • Videographer/filmmaker
    • Voice artist for podcasts
    • SEO marketer and/or strategist
    • Graphic designer
    • Programmer (for web design, technical optimizations of SEO, etc).
  2. Examine the keyword list you’ve made above and expand it into a topic list. If you’ve already published content in the past, you can include them and mark them as (done). In the future, you might decide to update or re-use them in one way or another, so having them on the list might help. Again, structure the list according to objective/search intent, and priority. This is the what.
  3. Decide on possible publication channels—how you are going to distribute the content—, or, the where:
    • Your blog
    • Guest posting opportunities
    • Medium.com and other similar publication sites
    • YouTube
    • Other video sharing platforms (Vimeo, etc.)
    • Email newsletter
    • Podcast publication
  4. Determine the when: when to publish the content, how frequent, and so on.
  5. Also very important, but often neglected: how are we going to promote the content (we’ll further discuss this one in the backlinks section here.)
  6. This is where we can develop an editorial calendar using all of our decisions above. You can create a basic spreadsheet containing:
    • Publication date
    • Who’s going to work on the content (creator/author)
    • Tentative title or just the topic name
    • Target keyword(s)
    • Description
    • Goal(s) for this specific content
    • Planned publication/distribution channels
    • Call-to-action (if any) and lead magnet (if any)
    • References/resources/ideas
    • Development/publication status
  7. Execute, monitor, and evaluate the workflow of your content marketing. This process will include maintaining consistent communication with your team members (if any) about:
    • Your overall marketing goal(s), content marketing goal(s) and SEO-related goal(s)
    • Whether the content is developed with the right tone, whether the quality is up there and whether it’s up to your standards. For SEO purposes, the main benchmark here is whether your content is better than the ranking competitors.
    • Make sure your team member understood your content marketing plan and can use the content/editorial calendar properly
  8. If necessary, adjust your content marketing strategy based on your evaluation, including and especially evaluation on SEO performances (more on this further below, or here)

In SEO for IT and technology companies, the phrase “content is king” can’t be any truer. On the other hand, however, the IT and technology niche is a sector with a lot of opportunities to develop various forms of content from technical tutorials to the latest news in technologies to actionable tips and tricks, among others.

An important thing to consider here is not to focus too much on keyword optimizations. Include your target keywords naturally, use synonyms and semantically related words. Focus on delivering relevant and valuable content for the human audience.

Remember that how good your content is will ultimately be the main factor in deciding the results of your SEO campaign.

Step 4: Proper Link Building

Further above, we have mentioned that today, the quality of the inbound links—backlinks— is significantly more important than quantity.

So, how can we determine the quality of a backlink? While there isn’t any one-size-fits-all approach to answer this, in general, the main thing to consider is that a backlink’s quality is directly proportional to the source website’s authority.

We can use various analytics tools—both free and paid—, to check website authority, for example, Moz’s famous Domain Authority metric, and Ahref’s Website Authority Checker, but there are also various free alternatives available.

The point is, getting backlinks from any high-quality, authoritative sites is going to be difficult, unless you are already a big website or brand in the first place—most of us simply aren’t.

So how can we do it? The answer lies in your content. If it’s any good, someone will link your content sooner or later, especially when your content is a good source of reliable data or unique information.

With the quality of your content as the prerequisite of proper link building, there are still several tactics you can use to amplify the results:

1. Deliberate add something linkable in your content but make sure it’s natural and relevant

What’s our most common reason in adding an external link to our content? It’s to back-up relevant data or to provide information about something—that is indirectly related to our content and usually too long to discuss.

For example, in this article, we might not want to provide the definition of backlinks but it might be useful for you—the readers—, so we can add an external link to content that specifically discusses inbound links/backlinks.

Another common reason is to add references to the data presented in the content to give it some weight. For example, if we make a claim that 50% of B2B technology companies are using Linkedin (it’s just an example), we can link content that provided the original claim.

We can add these kinds of data and information to our content—let’s call it a link hook— in various forms such as:

  • An original research report or case study (white paper, ebook, etc.)
  • Infographics, images, and well-taken photos (makes sure to optimize these images properly so Google can index them as valid inbound links)
  • Data roundup content like this one will always attract a lot of backlink opportunities when done properly
  • Unique information, how-tos, and interesting content will always attract links

Be creative, and don’t be afraid of trial and error. Thankfully in the IT and technology niche, there are plenty of ways to include data, actionable tips, and technical facts in our content. Meaning, many opportunities to get these valuable inbound links.

2. Promote your content to get backlinks

Here’s the deal: we’ve discussed how the quality of your content is very important in getting these backlinks. However, no matter how good your content is, it won’t bring any value unless someone actually notices and consumes the content.

This is where promoting your content has twofold importance:

  1. Getting more organic traffic to the content (which will bring various benefits for your website in general)
  2. Getting more backlinks in the process, which in turn will improve your SEO ranking, generate more organic traffic, and produce even more backlinks. This will create a long-term ecosystem where you can continuously generate traffic and backlinks.

Promote your content using all the available channels, and always aim to get both traffic and backlinks within each promotional channel. Always build relationships with business partners, influencers in the tech industry, and even your competitors. Be generous and link their content first, and they can be valuable sources for your backlinks in the future.

The good news is, you don’t really need to be aggressive in your link building effort.

In fact, building a lot of links too fast might be counterproductive and might get you penalized by Google—especially when you get a lot of low-quality links—. Instead, just aim to get 1 or 2 high-quality links per content, and you should be good to go. You can also check my link building services and consulting if you want to work with a professional.

Step 5: On-Site SEO Optimization (Technical Optimization)

Now that your content has (hopefully) performed accordingly, it’s time to optimize the technical factor and any other aspects of your website.

Optimizations are done outside our site, especially content promotion, and backlinks building, are often called off-site optimizations. Here, we will focus on on-site optimizations, both technical and non-technical.

Non-technical on-site optimizations mainly involve content optimizations like keyword usage, the readability of your content, and so on.

Technical SEO, on the other hand, can be really complex and cover various different areas from improving your website speed to structured data markup.

You might want to check out our previous guide covering a technical SEO checklist here for a better picture. But first, there are two main objectives in attempting technical optimization:

  1. Ensuring Google (or other search engines) can index and understand your website (and all the included pages properly
  2. Providing the best possible user experience (UX) to keep visitors on our site for as long as possible. UX metrics like bounce rate and dwell time are now both indirect and direct ranking factors.

Based on those two objectives, here are some important areas to focus on.

  • Mobile-responsiveness (or at least, mobile-friendliness) of your site. You can use Google’s mobile-friendly test tool to check your site’s current condition.
  • Page load speed. Some studies have suggested that 50% of visitors will leave the website immediately if it loads in more than 3 seconds (standard 3g connection).
  • You can follow this guide by Neil Patel for a series of steps to ensure proper and instant indexation of your site.
  • Implement structured data markup properly. This will allow your site to be viable for featured and rich snippets. You might want to check out this guide on how to implement structured data markup for SEO.
  • Optimize the website’s interface (navigation menus, layout, etc.) to ensure your visitor can get the best possible experience—to maximize dwell time—.
  • Optimize all the different elements in your content, including videos and images.
  • Test everything regularly, and test on as many different devices as possible.

Technical SEO optimizations are generally not a one-off thing, but a continuous process where we might need to readjust our approaches and reoptimize different aspects. This is where our next (and last) step comes in.

Step 6: Evaluation and Re-Optimization

This last step is about establishing a system where we can audit and monitor our website and specifically, SEO performance.

SEO for IT companies is—it’s important to note— a long-term strategy where commonly we’d need to spend 6 to 12 months before we see our site on the first page of Google’s SERP. This is why maintaining consistency and performing regular evaluation is integral.

We can use various tools to assist us in this step, from the free Google Analytics to premium tools like Ahrefs/SEMRush/Moz Pro to HubSpot. However, knowing what metrics to track is more important than simply using the most advanced tool out there.

Here are some of the most important performance metrics to pay attention to in an SEO evaluation:

  • Technical side
    • Whether the search engine can index your website properly
    • Loading speed (you can use Google’s PageSpeed Insights for this)
    • Mobile-responsiveness/mobile-friendliness
    • Title tags and meta descriptions on all pages, and whether they are properly optimized
    • Alt text on images
  • Content aspect
    • Whether your content is free of grammatical and spelling errors.
    • Check the relevance of the information, and whether there’s a more up to date data. You might need to update your content otherwise.
    • Proper internal linking structure
    • Whether the content has fulfilled the intended objective/catering to a specific search intent
  • Performance metrics
    • Traffic from organic search
    • Referral traffic
    • Pages that have relatively low/no traffic
    • Improvements/negative changes in rankings
    • Backlinks profile and its improvements over time
    • Best performing and least performing content
    • Content conversion rate

Based on these metrics, make the necessary adjustments to your SEO strategy for IT or technology business to improve the results.

Schedule a regular evaluation of your overall SEO strategy, and dedicate time to update and leverage existing content according to their performance—as this is often the most time-consuming aspect of the whole process.

End Words

Voila! Your technology company’s SEO strategy is set and ready to execute.

To reiterate, it’s very important to understand that SEO for IT and tech sites is a long-term game and you will need to invest at least 6 to 12 months before you see significant results from SEO services for IT and technology companies. Once your SEO strategy is well established, however, you will get a sustainable source of traffic and prospects that can generate revenue for years to come.

As we can see from the step-by-step guide above, there’s no secret tactic and holy grail strategy for improving SEO for your IT or technology company: it’s all about consistency both in quality and quantity. The quality of your content and quantity in publication. The quality of your backlinks and consistency in growing your backlinks profile naturally, and so on. It’s a marathon, not a sprint.

Everybody can certainly attempt and execute SEO, the hard part is to stay consistent until the finish line.

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