Content Marketing for IT Companies
Observations show that both beginners and sometimes experienced IT companies do not rush to use SEO to develop and promote their projects.
However, with the right strategy, including a clear plan of action, one can achieve significant success while saving much money.
We can highlight the following obstacles that hold back IT companies from investing in SEO marketing:
- High level of competition;
- The cost of attracting customers;
- Uncertainty about effectiveness.
For the strategy to work correctly and have the first results soon, you need to study the features and specifics of the client’s business.
Let’s consider the main types of IT companies:
- Product companies.
Organizations that develop products. The primary source of income for such companies is the consumers of their products. Product companies actively use Internet marketing and advertising service Google Ads.
- Outsourcing companies.
They provide services and specialists to perform various tasks for other companies. Accordingly, these client companies will be the main source of income for outsourcing organizations.
- Consulting companies.
Consulting companies that promote software and other services.
Getting to know the project: what do we pay attention to?
One of the most important points is to study your potential client. It is essential to highlight the features and main priorities, create a portrait of a potential consumer, and build a future strategy by taking this analysis as a basis.
Such a portrait can help you better navigate the target audience, allowing creating even better content, maintaining communication, and understanding what site structure to choose for work.
Competitive Analysis
Here we will talk about the main points of competitor analysis and the use of CTA in landing pages. Let’s start with the essential points:
- Finding a classification of competitor pages that generate traffic.
- Traffic assessment: sources of generation and technologies used to increase it.
- Analyzing traffic using a resource like Ahrefs.com will show how to accentuate the work with Internet resources. It allows considering which pages of the website structure need constant development.
- Clutch for IT. This resource is important for the IT industry, but it has its own ranking rules, such as the number of weekly publications, etc.
- A link profile is a collection of all links and anchors leading to this site. A detailed analysis will help you understand the number and authority of domains linking both to your site and competitors’.
- CTAs and landing pages of competitors. In fact, it is very important to track the key phrases of competitors because the analysis of landing pages will allow you to understand what brings potential buyers to web resources, which call-to-actions, designs, offers, etc., are better to use.
Why do you need a sales funnel?
The sales funnel is a so-called buyer’s path from the moment of attraction to the product to the moment of its purchasing. As a rule, such a path is divided into stages, ranging from interest in the product to purchasing.
Thus, your task is to lead the client from the first click to the first purchase. For this, you need to consider all the needs of a potential buyer, motives for making a decision and assess the main stages by which the buyer steps towards his ultimate goal – conversion.
As follows, construction communication with potential clients is one of the most important aspects here.
It is closely related to content marketing. An SEO strategy is built around quality content, just like a sales funnel. The funnel is a perfect tool to understand consumer behavior to better and build long-term business relationships. Thanks to it, it becomes clearer what content you should create for potential customers.
Specifics of the site structure
The filling of service or outsourcing pages should be based primarily on the link. Service pages must contain commercial pages with mandatory linking.
New sites are better promoted by low-frequency queries, gradually observing the dynamics. If the positions are growing, you can move on to medium and high-frequency queries.
For IT companies, it is optimal to rely on frequency in particular because when analyzing a competitive link profile, you might often observe that a competitor has up to 10 donor sites. Consequently, not all competitors’ links are viewed, and therefore sometimes services receive false data. And just focusing on the frequency of the keys will be the most optimal solution.
Content Marketing: First Steps
- Explore the sales funnel. If it is not there, conditionally model the path of a potential client;
- After analyzing competitors, determine the typology and manner of presenting content;
- Based on the priorities and experience of the company, build a content strategy.
Behavioral factors: what are the ways to improve it?
- Bounce rate. It should be closer to the average. To do this, you need to get into the search query’s intent.
- Session duration. Create high-quality sites with engaging and relevant content, and then users will not leave your web resource.
- Viewed pages. The higher their score, the more informative the site is for users.
Content syndication as one of the link building methods
What is content syndication? This is the re-posting of content on other resources. You published an article on your site, and it managed to get into the index. After that, the indexed article can be distributed on other web resources that are similar in the subject matter.
What benefits do you get by using this method?
- getting traffic and attention from users of donor sites;
- Development of a significant number of external contacts;
- Saving time and costs for writing publications.
However, there are also some disadvantages:
- when placing your article on another, more trusted site, there is a chance that search engines will rank this article first;
- Even with good views on donor sites, you will not be able to get all the audience, collect email addresses, or perform other actions.
TIER classification system
TIER is a kind of reliability characteristic of data centers. TIER is divided into several levels depending on fault tolerance.
How can TIER 2 – TIER 3 help us?
These systems allow driving crowd marketing into the index. Besides, it is not expensive and can help you to amplify existing anchors rather than spamming new ones.
However, this method has certain dangers:
- if Google can track your technique, it will be considered spam.
- Suspicious activity may raise doubts among web admins, and they, in turn, will remove links from the guest post.
- Due to technical malfunctions of links, the page may “sag.”
Crowd marketing
Crowdfunding is a method of communication with the target audience to increase consumer interest in the product. How does it work? The crowd marketing method is similar to the unobtrusive dissemination of recommendations and reviews about a company on web resources where its target audience meets.
It is better to organize such processes together with the client’s employees because they know the characteristics of their target audience better. In addition, the quality of publications will definitely influence the way they are perceived.
So, an SEO strategy for IT companies is a global and systematic work, and in the long run, with the suitable elaboration of a plan, it can give the first steps to success.
