How can development companies get organic traffic? Top tips for SEO and content marketing
Do you own a development studio, or basically any company that offers development services or consulting for clients? Especially if you're just starting out, most if not all of your leads would be through word of mouth or referrals. But as you may be aware, depending solely on this channel could be unsustainable - what if you don't get any referrals for a long time? For long-term growth, it's vital to pivot to a channel that offers a consistent, sustainable stream of leads. The best way to achieve a continuous influx of organic leads is undoubtedly getting to the top of Google. If you show up at the top page, you can attract thousands of warm users who are intentionally searching for your target keywords.
However, development studios generally have a harder time ranking on Google compared to other companies. Because they can develop such a variety of products with a diversity of use cases, it's hard for Google to determine exactly which topics to categorize and rank these websites for. Fortunately, there are ways to overcome these hurdles. Here are some SEO and content marketing tips for development studios to rank higher on Google and capture more organic traffic.
Create separate pages for each product or service
Development studios often offer a variety of services and products from software to hardware development, from mobile to web to desktop apps, from AI/ML to blockchain solutions. From Google's perspective, these are all separate topics. If you lump all of this content onto just one page, it'll essentially confuse Google, and that page will not rank well. Therefore, the best course of action is to create separate pages for each product or service offering. For example, if you offer both mobile and web development solutions, create one page that is mostly about mobile app development, and another page on web development.
Create separate pages for each target industry
Similar to the point above, development studios often create products that can be applicable to a variety of industries. For example, if the apps that you develop could be used for edtech, fintech, e-commerce, etc, rather than lumping all of these topics onto one page, it's much more effective for the purposes of SEO to create separate pages for each industry. In this example, you can create a separate page talking about your development solutions for edtech, and insert more education-related keywords onto that page. Do the same for FinTech, e-commerce, and any other target industry. The focus here is to create individual pages that are more specialized towards a specific topic or industry. This gives Google more clarity on what your page is about and how to rank it.
Add blogs with relevant, low difficulty keywords
Just having the standard pages (ie. home, about, services, contact) are not enough to drive your site to the top of Google. You need to consistently create new content, such as blogs, whitepapers, webinars, podcasts, to keep attracting traffic to your site. Think of each page as a potential avenue for you to show up on Google and attract organic visitors. Focus on creating informative, engaging content with low difficulty keywords that are relevant to your product or service. It's best to do keyword research and understand what keywords your ranking for already, and focus on creating more content around these keywords.
Add case studies or testimonials for social proof
Similar to the point above, not only does adding case studies or testimonials provide more opportunity for you to insert more low difficulty keywords across your site, it also helps convey credibility and increases conversion rates. If a prospect comes across a case study that resonates with what they are looking for, they are more likely to convert.
Implement SEO best practices
Aside from creating more pages with specialized content and low difficulty keywords, it's also important to remember optimizing your site according to the best practices based on Google's standards. This includes improving your page speed and performance, by making sure your images are converted to next-gen formats (eg. webp), you have deferred the load time of non-essential scripts, and that you have enabled page caching. Additionally, make sure your metadata is optimized, and making sure there are no crawlability issues like broken links or 404 errors.
Try non-standard ways of getting to the top of Google
Currently there are multiple ways for you to show up on the top page of Google besides the traditional search results. For example, you can show up in a featured snippet, in a Google my business listing, on Google maps for local search queries, or from a video search. Learn about all these different options here.
Conclusion
It's generally much harder for development studios to rank well on Google because they have such a diversity of service offerings, use cases, or target industries. For the purposes of SEO, it's important to specialize your pages and content as much as possible, instead of throwing everything onto one page. Each page should be focused on a specific topic, with low difficulty keywords that your ideal customers are searching for. A lot of especially young development companies rely on word of mouth or active outreach for clients, which is not sustainable in the long run. In order for them to scale, it is essential to focus on getting to the top of Google in order to attract a continuous influx of organic leads.