How to Choose High-Yield Keywords For Software & Technology Company Lead Generation

Many software companies today are not employing best practices regarding SEO, and in my opinion, are leaving some of the most qualified and cost effective leads on the table. There are obviously many facets to SEO; I would like to cover a topic/tactic known as Keyword Selection which I have deployed successfully at two software companies. The result was that each company saw organic search traffic grow more than 45% in a short period of time, and have seen conversion rates in excess of almost 6% on that traffic (conversions in both cases meant registering for a trial product).

Companies tend to gloss over keyword selection with an, "I know the keywords for my business. I don't need to spend a lot of time on this."An extensive and thoroughly researched keyword list will result in Google indexing more of your keywords, better search page results, and increased traffic to your website, and should be the foundational basis for a cohesive SEO strategy. For software companies that sell technical products such as developer tools, infrastructure software, and virtualization tools, keyword selection can be of paramount importance to a productive SEO strategy.

Here are a few essential questions and thoughts to consider during the keyword selection process:

1) Are you putting yourself in the shoes of your potential customer and the search terms they, not you, would use when searching for the goods or service you provide? You might call what your product does "Business Transaction Management," but does your potential clients refer to it by the same name? Is that the term your users are searching on, or one that Gartner is looking to propagate?

2) Technical users frequently search on technical phrases such as error messages and terms that contain how-to and download. They also search for very specific issues, i.e., "VMware IO Problems." To increase traffic you need to create optimized pages on your website for error messages and specific deep-dive problems your product solves.

3) Use the Google Keyword Tool and Google's "searches related to" suggestions on the bottom of most search pages to research keywords. Google's Keyword Tool enables you to view search volumes and competition for terms, and will help you discover research and select deep-dive search terms.

4) Dig deep & assess your competition. Get creative and think beyond the obvious broad keywords. Targeted keywords lead to more qualified prospects, and pick keywords where you can win. If IBM and HP dominate a certain keyword, you likely can not win, so think about derivatives of the broader terms that the behemoths go after.

Research your keywords before doing your on-page optimization. The results will be increased traffic and better qualified leads for your sales force!

Case Study

I did work for an Open Source Java Tools vendor whose target audience was Java developers. At first they had tried optimizing their site for the broad terms that generated massive search volumes such as Java, Java Development Tools, and Open Source Java. They quickly realized that they could not win (a win being on the first page of the Google search results) against the likes of IBM, Sun and HP, whose has deep content, well-established websites, and massive inbound links, which all were unbeatable. Deeper research and analysis illuminated three revelations:

· The broad search terms were attracting junior developers, who were looking to download free tools, get basic how-to information, or the newest version of Java.

· Senior developers searched for very specific phrases, such as actual error messages and detailed descriptions of the issues they were experiencing.

· We noticed that these error messages had commonalities and the web pages that we created were specifically optimized for these error messages and very specific problem descriptions. These new pages quickly made the first search engine results page, generating excellent traffic that was extremely qualified and converted at a very high rate.