SEO For MSPs: A Comprehensive Guide

Just like all other businesses, Managed Service Providers depend on the quality of their leads and the sales funnel to ensure continued growth. Digital marketing can play a critical role in enhancing the results of their lead generation and engagement efforts by attracting more prospects.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is an essential facet of digital marketing, especially for MSPs that want better business visibility, awareness, and engagement.

Recent research suggests that 57% of B2B marketers found SEO more effective in generating leads than any other marketing tactic.

There is no denying that SEO allows you to acquire leads and grow your MSP business organically.

The following are three essential categories that you can focus on to maximize your SEO efforts and optimize your digital presence for search domination.

Highly-Targeted Content Creation

As an essential aspect of a robust SEO strategy, you need to craft highly relatable content relevant to your audience and offer them value. It should answer their queries while ranking your site higher for valuable content that includes keywords.

To determine the kind of content you need to create to rank high on the search engines, you need to focus on the following elements.

Know Your Target Audience

Before diving deep into SEO rich content, you need to find out who your target audience is and what kind of value they want to derive from your web presence.

Are they looking for thought leadership? Do they want how-to guides? Would they prefer videos to written content?

Find those people and brands, know what they want, and deliver on their needs spectacularly.

Create defined buyer personas that include info on the demographics, pain points, goals, motivations, and the size of the businesses you need to target.

Research High-Volume Keywords

Keywords are an integral part of search engine optimization for your MSP Marketing Strategy.

This is why you need to identify highly-searched primary keywords that align with your services and search intent. Leverage research and tools to tune in to the thought process of a prospect searching for an MSP on the search engine.

Use research tools that offer keyword suggestions and other features to help with your SEO efforts. Moreover, you can try Google to find related keywords to your services that you incorporate in your content.

A few keywrods you should consider:

• Managed Services [+city or State]
• IT Support Costs [+per user or per device]
• Microsoft Consulting [+city or state]
• Small Business IT Services [+city or state]
• IT Services [+city or state]

On-Site SEO For MSPs

On-site SEO refers to the optimization that you can do on your MSP’s website. All the technical specifications of on-site SEO culminate into offering an optimal experience to its visitors. Some of these factors include:

Create And Optimize High-Value Copywriting

Leverage the power of high-quality writing to enhance your digital footprint and maximize your SEO efforts.

As an MSP, your website’s blog is a vital tool in your digital marketing arsenal. It can keep your target audience updated with the latest trends in the IT industry or teach them how to scale their businesses with tech.

Also, optimize the content on the landing page, home page, and services page on the website with relevant keywords to help it rank higher in search results pages. Don’t forget to offer valuable and relatable information to increase the chances of conversion for your leads.

Separate Service Pages

A separate page dedicated to a specific service allows you to provide extensive information on your services and rank higher for that particular service.

This is achieved by including the service’s term in the page title, H1 header, and optimizing the key phrase’s body content. Moreover, ensure that your service page’s URL is optimized with the keyword to increase your chances of ranking higher for it.

Specific Industry Pages

If you offer services to a specific industry niche, you should create separate pages that display how and what you serve to that industry.

For example, if you cater to the healthcare industry, you need to show that you are HIPAA compliant or share your customer’s testimonials.

Optimize Page Speed

Improving your website page’s loading speed decreases the risks of losing potential customers that do not have the time to wait while the page loads.

To enhance the page speed, you need to compress all the images and remove unnecessary code that does not affect the website and browser caching. To test your website’s speed, pass it through Google’s page speed test.

Descriptive Title Tags

A specific page’s title tag is an HTML element that displays a particular page’s title on your website. Your title tag appears in the search results, web browsers, and even on certain external websites. Integrating a keyboard and creating a compelling title tag helps your web page rank higher on search engines.

Target A Specific Location

If you want to rank on the first page, it is difficult to achieve that when targeting the entire country, especially if you are a small business with a limited budget, ranking for a specific area is much easier if you include the location in title tags.

Ensure Indexability

You also need to make sure your website has content that can be easily indexed so users can find you on search engines. This diminishes the risk of crawlability issues such as broken links or dead ends that stops the user from accessing specific content on your site.

Off-Site SEO

The third essential element for a successful strategy is off-site SEO, it develops your site’s authority compared to your competitors. The following are some ways you can create a successful off-site SEO strategy.

Gain Authority By Backlinking

You will come across several authoritative websites that have established themselves as the ultimate source of information for customers and rank higher on SERP.

Get other authoritative websites to link back to your content, setting you up as an expert in your industry.

This can be done by:

Post On Guest Blogs

Create high-quality content for websites with high Domain authority that accept guest posts. This way, you get an authoritative backlink used to rank you higher and enhance your site’s exposure.

Publish Your Business On Local Chamber Of Commerce

The Local Chamber of Commerce is a relevant site for MSP businesses that generate high-quality inbound links once you publish your business here.

Write A Press Release

To relay any news about your business, leverage the power of a press release that can be forwarded to popular distribution networks that increase your SEO rankings.

Offer Case Studies To Vendor Sites

Write a case study and request your vendor to post it on their site.  These case studies must include a link to your website to direct the users to your business.

Get Your Business Listed On Google My Business

The most important thing you need to do is claim your business on Google My Business, to add and verify information about your company.

An optimized business profile on Google My Business helps you rank higher on Google and even gain credibility as a legitimate business. To get better results, you can even integrate images, reviews, and other essential information on the profile.

In Conclusion

While your MSP can leverage the power of SEO to get more clients, there’s no quick fix to dominating search engine rankings organically.

Use the best practices detailed here to enhance the effectiveness of your business’s SEO strategy. Create a buyer persona, target your audience, offer valuable content integrated with high volume keywords, and ask for feedback.

Why not get professional SEO specialists to do the job for you? Get in touch with us for an effective inbound marketing strategy that attracts more leads for your business so that you can focus on other business functions.