A software company’s online presence, specifically their website, is very important to help them reach their business goals. 55% of consumers search online for reviews and recommendations before they make a purchase, and 47% visit a company website before making a purchase. Having a company website allows you to reach a wide audience at any time of day. To get the most out of your website, however, you need to spend some time on search engine optimization, or SEO.
What is SEO and Why is it Important?
Search engine optimization, or SEO, is a combination of techniques and strategies designed to drive traffic to a website by increasing its ranking on the search results page of a search engine such as Google, Bing, or Yahoo.
About 81% of B2B purchase cycles start with an online search, meaning for software companies, ranking high in search results is a must for your potential customers to be able to find you. Search engine optimization is key to ensuring a website can be found, read, and ranked by a search engine. Users often don’t scroll through page after page of search results, so ranking high in search results is key to increasing traffic to your site.
Technical SEO and Content SEO
Search engine optimization can be broadly broken down into two main categories: technical SEO and content SEO. Technical SEO refers to optimizing the structure and functionality of your website to help search engines find and index your site. Content SEO refers to writing and structuring the content on your website in such a way that it will rank high in search results.
How to Improve Your Technical SEO
Indexing
Website indexing is the process where a search engine adds websites into their search. To rank high in search results, it’s important that your website can be indexed by Google and other search engines. One step to ensure your website is being indexed by Google is to create a sitemap (a file that contains all the URLs in your website) and submit it to Google Search Console.
Page Speed
In addition to creating a good user experience, fast page speed is also important for SEO, as it is one of the many factors that Google takes into consideration when determining rankings in search results.
Mobile-Friendly
Another factor Google considers in search result rankings is whether or not a website is mobile-friendly. Approximately 51% of the world’s population currently accesses the internet using only their smartphones, and that number is projected to grow to 72.6% by 2025. Just as payment companies have a need for mobile payment solutions, these statistics show the importance of making sure your website is mobile-friendly.
Site Structure
Site structure is also important to search engine rankings. Make sure your site is free of broken links and unnecessary redirects. When adding new content to your site, make sure you’re also updating your sitemap. These steps will help provide a better user experience, as well as help with your search engine rankings.
Tips to Improve Your Content SEO
Research Keywords
To decide what topics to build your content around, you need to research keywords. What are some topics or questions that your audience will be searching for in relation to your brand or product? What are the keywords that you want your website to rank for?
Create High-Quality Content Around Your Keywords
Once you’ve determined the keywords you want to focus on, the next step is to create high-quality content around those keywords. High-quality content leads to backlinks (other websites linking back to yours), which is another factor that will help increase your search engine rankings.
Hosting a blog on your website and posting educational, informative blogs with current industry news or company information is a great way to ensure you are continually posting fresh content on your site.
Promote Your Content
Once you’ve created and published your content, make sure to promote that content. Sharing that content on social media is the best way to get additional eyes on your content and also to generate traffic back to your site. Make sure you’re strategic in your social media sharing - different social media platforms have different strengths and weaknesses, so some content is better suited to one platform than another. In addition, you don’t want to share the same content across all your social channels - if someone follows you on Twitter and they see that you post the exact same content on both Twitter and Facebook, they have no incentive to also follow you on Facebook.
Conclusion
Once you’ve addressed your technical SEO checklist and created and promoted high-quality content, be patient - it can take a few months before you start to see results. While it takes time, the importance of search engine optimization cannot be overvalued in improving your software company’s online presence. Check out more business tips here.