How to do SEO for IT & tech companies (5 steps)

I must admit:Tech is one of those rare industries where SEO can work really well.

In fact, I just did a quick search on Reddit’s r/brdev sub about whether devs are still using Google for their day-to-day work. The top answer is this:

Yes, AI is rising, new search engines are gaining traction, but it all comes down to doing good SEO. If you think about it:

• Developers, IT managers, and procurement staff live in Google. They’re browsing the Internet almost 24/7, so ranking well puts you directly where your buyers already are.
• Technical content usually has a long shelf-life. Once optimized and indexed, it keeps generating qualified visitors for months or years with minor upkeep.
• Tech has an endless tail of niche, low-competition queries (stuff like “TLS offloading NGINX config” or “SOC 2 Type II evidence list”). You can go as granular as you want, and with relatively small pieces of well-structured content (crafted by experts), you can dominate these long-tail queries and drive traffic.

But of course, there are some caveats. Doing SEO for tech companies requires a little bit of tech knowledge from the SEO person themselves (to do it well). That’s why tech SEO has never been an easy field to break into. But those who do it well will put themselves in a really powerful position.

And they’ll be able to enjoy tech memes too.

Anyway, in this article I’ll share with you everything I know about SEO for tech and IT companies, having done it pretty well for several companies like Katalon (automation testing) and OPSWAT (cybersecurity).

Here are the 5 steps I use to grow SEO of many tech brands I’ve worked with:

📚 The Playbook to Do SEO for IT firms

Step 1: Extract the experience
Step 2: Do keyword research for service
Step 3: Build a blog with thought leadership built in
Step 4: Interview experts in your field
Step 5: Launch a newsletter

Is it worth investing in SEO for tech companies?

Based on the data, it is definitely worth investing in SEO if you’re a tech firm:

To do SEO keyword research for tech companies (and service companies in general), I usually divide the keywords into two buckets to research separately:

• SEO goes hand-in-hand with content marketing: the former improves visibility, the latter establishes authority.
• SEO is a long-term game: everyone says this already, but I’m going to say this again. If you care about the long-term growth of your business, SEO is a must. But SEO must be tied closely with authority-led content to maximize its potential.
• SEO is not too costly: so far the most sustainable and cheapest (essentially free) channel to acquire customers is SEO, although having a healthy mix of other channels is highly recommended.

Let’s dive in!

1. Extract the experience

As I mentioned above, the audience for tech companies is typically made up of highly knowledgeable people who can craft remarkably sophisticated solutions and develop exceptional tools that outsiders may never fully decode.

To genuinely reach them, SEOs have to grasp who they are. And to grasp them, they must equip themselves with firsthand exposure.

So how do you extract the expertise? Simply find active communities around the subject you’re trying to cover. Dive into those groups. Follow their threads. Absorb what practitioners are building and debating. Learn directly from them.

For instance, when I produced content in the software testing space for a B2B automation testing platform, I spent a lot of time in related communities like Ministry of Testing to collect insights, mapping their challenges, and putting myself in their position.

2. Do keyword research for service pages

To do SEO keyword research for tech companies (and service companies in general), I usually divide the keywords into two buckets to research separately:

Commercial keywords (service pages): these are search terms that signal buying intent. For tech companies, they’re usually product- or service-focused, high-intent, and often tied to specific solutions. For examples:

• best cloud testing platform
• AI chatbot vendor pricing
• managed IT services near me
• test automation tool for fintech
• DevOps consulting firm cost

Informational keywords (blog): these are search terms where the user wants to learn, not buy yet. They’re usually educational, problem-based, or research-focused. For example:

• how to automate regression testing
• what is low-code vs no-code
• benefits of RPA in insurance
  top cybersecurity challenges 2025
• best practices for SaaS onboarding

From this table, here’s how I do keyword research:

1. Use Google to shortlist 10 domains ranking for the same services
2. Use a keyword research tool to check those URLs to see what they are ranking for. SEMRush is what I’m using.
3. Shortlist again for the long-tail, most relevant keywords

Let’s say that based on your Audience Mapping, you find that one of the audience is an IT Manager from an insurance company who already has a well-developed IT team, but need additional specialists to support them.

Some good keyword ideas can be co-managed IT services or co-managed IT services for insurance.

A quick search of them on Google returns these results:

You then plug those URLs into SEMRush to see what keywords are being ranked.

You can see how these keywords have decent monthly search volume ranging from 200 to 1.6K while having keyword difficulty of below 20 (green color indicates that it is very easy to rank for them). We should optimize for them.

Your job then is to create another landing page targeting the best keywords in the list (co-managed IT services) and offer a better UX.

You can also consider building an even more optimized Landing Page for the keyword “IT services for insurance”, which has a volume of 90 and difficulty of only 8% (perfect!).

With these pages, you attract very specific people searching for very specific services, and their intent is also high, which means high conversion!

📚 Tip: You can niche your service keyword down by:

– Company size (for startups/mid-sized companies/enterprises

– Industry (Finance/Healthcare/Government)

– Target audience (managers/practitioners/etc.)

3. Build a blog with thought leadership built-in

You don’t have to write a “thought leadership” article to demonstrate that you’re a “thought leader”.

To me, thought leadership starts from the small things. For example, here’s an article from Rainforest QA about 5 essential QA testing best practices. If they write it in the traditional SEO way, they would have written the title as a boring “5 essential QA testing best practices”.

But they chose to write about it as “The Rainforest Method”:

This accomplishes 3 goals:

• Traditional SEO (optimizing for a certain keyword)
• Authority building (showcasing the method that they are using for themselves, extracted from experience)
• Engagement (readers are more engaged with content that has originality)

Here are the characteristics of a blog post with thought leadership built-in:

1. It must come from people who actually have been in the trenches. I hold the content on Perceptric’s blog (and our clients) to the same standards. Expert-led content is the way to go.
2. It should hold an opinion. Even if you’re just writing a “What-is” article that’s trying to explain a simple concept to your audience, you should still insert some opinions into it to establish a vantage point. Because neutral explanations don’t help readers decide or act, this vantage point allows your content to engage with readers. A stance supplies hierarchy (“this matters, that doesn’t”), and this lowers cognitive load to make the piece much more memorable.
3. It should be written at least 80% by human. I have experimented with ChatGPT a lot, trying to tweak its writing to resemble a human as much as possible. However, at the end of the day, AI-generated content always lacks a sense of spontaneity that characterizes human writing. The audience doesn’t want that. Even if they click, they probably don’t want to read that kind of content that much.
4. It should be data-driven. Stats make your article convincing, and from an SEO perspective, it encourages others to link back to you to attribute you as the original creator of the charts. From a reader’s perspective, charts also make the content more visually engaging to consume.

In short, thought leadership shouldn’t just be a “category” in your blog, but the very essence of the blog itself.

The goal is to find keywords that are underserved in your niche. By underserved, I mean:

• Low Content Supply vs. Search Demand: these are topics or phrases where search volume is healthy, but there are few high-quality pieces of content covering them. Trust me, even in my field (B2B content marketing), which many believe that it is too oversaturated, there are still room for even better content.
• Weak or Misaligned Competition: even if there’s content, it might not match the search intent. For example, you may find that the top results might be vendor pages when the intent is educational, or they’re targeting a different geography/industry than yours. This leaves room for you to craft the “right” page and outrank them.
• Emerging or Unoptimized Queries: keywords for new trends or long-tail variants (e.g., people adding “AI” or “2025” to their searches) often have less competition. Also look for keywords where SERP features like featured snippets, “People Also Ask,” or Reddit/Quora threads dominate. That signals big brands haven’t created content yet.
• Low Authority but High CTR Potential: Keywords where you can rank even without massive backlinks because the existing content isn’t optimized for on-page SEO, UX, or readability.

4. Interview experts in your field

Now…what does interviewing people have to do with SEO?

Because SEO content that ranks is usually irreproducible. It should include original insights, first-party data, strong opinions, and proprietary visual that can’t be reproduced elsewhere.

Interviewing experts is one of the way to achieve that goal:

• Featuring authoritative voices also builds E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness), which is a factor Google looks at in assessing site quality, no doubt.
• Interviews often get shared by the person you interviewed and their network, which naturally leads to backlinks and social visibility. That’s SEO and social media done in one go.
• Interview transcripts capture natural language, questions, and answers that people actually search for. These can rank for long-tail keywords you might not have thought to target. Also, AI search optimization, anyone? LLMs love those pieces of natural language content.
• Interview content is GREAT for content repurposing. Snippets from the transcript can be reused in so many ways across the entire blog, while videos can be cut into shorts to use across blogs and YouTube. Each version creates additional indexed assets that build topical authority and funnel traffic back to the main site.

5. Launch a newsletter

Your newsletter is the secret hack behind your SEO, because:

1. It warms up your SEO content: When you publish a new article or resource, it can sit cold until Google decides to crawl and test it. But if you send that page to subscribers right away, you send traffic to your site, and it gives Google early behavioral signals that your content is worth surfacing. You’re priming the algorithm with proof of relevance.
2. SEO is still largely powered by backlinks: A newsletter effectively acts as outreach at scale without feeling like outreach. When you put your best resources in front of people who already trust you (journalists, bloggers, industry peers), you increase the odds of natural citation, and this is far more sustainable than cold link-building campaigns because the audience is warm and already aligned with your brand.
3. Brand signals: One of the most underrated ranking factors is branded search. When someone receives a newsletter and later Googles “YourBrand + [topic],” it tells Google you’re authoritative on that subject.
4. SERP Shelf Life: A blog post without distribution can fade into obscurity, but a blog post tied to a newsletter has legs. Every time you resurface an older piece in a newsletter, you push a fresh wave of traffic back to it, which can stabilize rankings and extend its lifecycle in the SERPs.

Here are some of the best newsletter platforms I can think of:

• beehiiv
• MailerLite
• Kit
• Flodesk
• Substack

Or, if you are using an CMS with integrated newsletter/email system, you can leverage that. HubSpot has a built-in newsletter feature that connects well with its analytics side, which is great if you are choosing the Integrated Marketing approach.

Conclusion

Learning how to approach SEO for tech companies can feel like a long checklist with lots of moving parts. But at the end of the day, effective SEO still comes down to one thing: publishing content that speaks to the problems your audience is actively trying to solve.

For tech companies, that means investing in:

• SME-driven SEO content
• Thought leadership built into every articles
• In-depth tutorials

SEO for tech (or for any industries) is basically building credibility. Pair that with community-building and strategic distribution, and you’re setting up a compounding SEO engine that drives sustainable growth.

If you’re serious about scaling your tech brand through SEO, lean into human-centered content. Share this with your team or peers who want to cut through the AI noise, and let’s build SEO strategies that actually resonate with the people searching.