Six Tips to Getting SEO Right For Your MSP

When prospects do a Google search on your MSP, where do they find you? Is your MSP landing on Page 1, or is it being relegated to Page 2 or even worse?

According to quicksprout.com, the top result on Google has a 33% chance of getting clicked, and they have found that 75% of people won’t scroll beyond the first page. (I know I never do—if what I’m looking for can’t be found on Page 1, why bother even seeing what is on Page 2?)

I talk a lot in my blog posts, boot camps, and Office Hours about developing an online presence for your MSP and building a quality e-reputation, but none of these efforts will matter if prospects can’t find you on the Internet. So, while building a digital footprint for your MSP is important, ensuring you have a good SEO strategy—that creates a top-ranking and highly visible website—is paramount to the long-term growth of your MSP. And to grow your MSP, you need a constant source of fresh, new leads; but this will be difficult to achieve if your target audience doesn’t even know your MSP exists. Developing a strong SEO strategy has been instrumental in helping a broad range of our MSP partners, including Managed IT Experts, in Edinburgh, Scotland, take their businesses to the next level. 

For those that may not be entirely familiar with what we mean by the term, SEO (or Search Engine Optimization) is the process of building your MSP website’s visibility in search engines and as a result increasing the quality of organic traffic to your site.  

Were you aware that 68% of online experiences begin with a search engine and 61% of B2B marketers state that SEO and organic traffic generate more leads than any other marketing initiative? 

So, if your MSP isn’t landing on Page 1 on Google, what can you do to help correct this?  

Six tips to improving your MSP’s SEO rankings

1.     Publish quality content

To outrank your competition, your MSP website must offer unique and tangible value to the prospects who are seeking out your services. And part of that value includes publishing high quality content that aims to address the key challenges being experienced by your target audience that only your MSP can help resolve. MSP content marketing ideas that could be leveraged here include blogs, FAQs, checklists, whitepapers, case studies, and reports that can help answer the most common set of questions and concerns raised by your target market. As an example: maybe you write a blog on “how to choose the best IT support provider for your business.” This is a common question a potential SMB may be asking themselves if they feel they need to switch MSPs, and generally their first step in finding an answer to this question is to ask Google.    

2.     Get setup on google business so local prospects can find you

If this is something that you are not active on today, this is a critical first step you should complete. Many MSPs I speak to don’t do a great job leveraging Google Business Profile to boost their local search results which can be beneficial in helping to drive consistent leads and traffic to their website. Ensuring you have a completely populated profile setup on Google Business can give your MSP a significant advantage over your competitors, especially if they too are failing to utilize this important aspect of SEO.  

3.     Ensure your website creates a positive user experience

When determining a website’s ranking, Google does take into account how easy the site is for visitors to navigate and use. It tracks the prospect’s experience after they have clicked through to your website, so it is very important to be mindful of how your MSP’s website performs. And if you find that your website is experiencing some navigational and performance issues, work to ensure you get those issues resolved as soon as possible.  

Some easy-to-fix and common items that Google takes into consideration when determining your MSP’s overall ranking:

• How quickly and reliably your website loads, especially on mobile devices
• How well you do in clearly explaining who you are, who you target, and what services you specifically offer to your ideal clients
• How accessible and prominent your contact form is on your website 

4.     Choose the right keywords, use them appropriately and select ones that prospects will actually use when conducting their online searches

When creating content, your keywords should be the ones that your prospects—your target audience—would most likely be familiar with. Do not select keywords based on how you would describe your services. Because the business owners you are trying to attract from an organic search activity won’t necessarily describe your services in the same way that you would. So be sure to keep your target audience top of mind when reviewing your SEO keyword strategy. And you should also keep long-tail keywords in mind when developing your content strategy—these are three or four-word phrases that could be found when a prospect performs a search of your MSP. 

As an example: a prospect likely wouldn’t use the terms “MSP” or “managed services” if they were searching for a new managed services provider. Those are our industry terms and not generally terms with which a regular business owner prospect would be familiar. Consider keywords that a business owner who was looking for a new MSP would be familiar with, like: “Computer support companies in Detroit” or “IT services and computer repair in Detroit”.  And if you are focused on supporting a particular industry or vertical, use that as well to help your website rank higher, for example: “IT support for dentists in Detroit”. 

To help with this, be sure to research and create a keyword list that you can continually reference to help keep your MSP on top and which will improve your lead gen and conversion rates. Google’s Keyword Planner is a potential tool that can help your MSP determine which keywords are best suited to your interests. 

Because if you are able to make your keywords match your prospect’s search criteria as they embark on their buying journey, then your website will have a greater chance of getting ranked higher and making it onto the coveted Page 1.  

5.     Write click-worthy titles and descriptions

Think of some headlines that you have clicked on in the past that caught your interest as you were either mindlessly scrolling through social media or actively conducting research for an upcoming purchasing decision. I’m sure they were written in such an enticing way where you just had to click to check out what was written and if it addresses what you are looking for. You want to keep this in mind for your MSP when creating meta titles and descriptions for your content.

Here are some good things to consider when creating titles for your content (think blog posts, articles etc.):

• Place your keywords at the front of your titles to clearly convey what your post is about so that it can quickly grab your prospect’s attention and encourage them to click
• Ensure your title takes the user to the actual page they are looking for (there is nothing more frustrating then clicking on a link and it takes you to a completely different page)
• Play on your prospect’s emotional tendencies and write titles that will pique their curiosity and motivate them to want to click on your link to see what your article or blog post is all about

6.     Continually run SEO audits to find and resolve website issues

 Your website requires regular reviewing and fine-tuning to ensure that your website content remains current, relevant and that there are no broken links or backlinks leading to old pages that were removed, but not re-directed.  

 As part of our commitment to helping our partners increase their lead generation and MRR sales, we invite you to a special MarketBuilder Office Hours session taking place on August 11 that will focus exclusively on SEO for MSPs.  

 We will be joined by Aaron Nihat, owner of Purple Cloud IT which serves businesses in Cornwall and London, UK.  With extensive experience in SEO, Aaron’s website successfully ranks on the first page of Google and his website acts as his MSP’s primary lead generation tool.  Register for this informative session to hear Aaron discuss his top tips for helping MSPs improve their SEO rankings to generate more quality leads.

 Stefanie Hammond is Head Sales and Marketing Nerd at N‑able. You can follow her on LinkedIn and on Twitter at @sales_mktg_nerd.