It’s an exciting time to be in telecom, cloud, and IT! Technology – and the words we use to talk about it – is always evolving, creating new sales opportunities that will benefit both you and your customer. As customers become more tech-savvy about their business technology needs, you’ll want your website’s SEO to be fully optimized for new buzzwords. We’re all familiar with trends that fizzle and burn out, though; sometimes, new products just don’t catch on.
Whether you’re now offering an emerging technology or considering a rename of an existing product set to follow trending buzzwords, follow these tips to learn how to optimize your website for SEO.
Step One: Keep up With the News
In addition to traditional news sources like CRN, CompTIA, and Gartner, social media can also help you stay up to date with the latest trends. If you’re paying attention to hashtags, especially on Twitter, it’s even easier to notice what’s being talked about.
We recommend that you browse relevant news sources, social media accounts, and feeds at least twice a month to curate and revise an ongoing list of new and notable SEO topics.
Step Two: Check Search Volume
News sources are at the forefront of emerging technology and trends, and you want to be, too. However, we’ve all seen technologies burst onto the scene, then fizzle out without gaining traction. Before you put time and effort into optimizing your site for a new keyword, make sure it’s viable for inclusion.
In addition to making sure that technology news sources are continuing to talk about your new topics, you’ll also want to investigate search volume.
Plug your list of topics to Google Trends to get a high level overview of how often your topic is searched. As soon as you start to see some hits, take a look at relevant pages on your site to see where you may want to optimize – or consider creating a new page for the topic altogether.
For example, the below graph shows interest over time for the keyword “SD-WAN.”
If you don’t have this keyword on your site yet, now’s the time! Remember, your prospects are actively researching and you’ll want to make sure your website represents your full service portfolio – including SD-WAN.
Just keep in mind that optimizing your site for this keyword now, as opposed to September 2015, is a double-edged sword: while search volume and interest is higher, there’s also more competition and more pages optimizing for the same topic.
Make sure you’re staying up to date with trends so your website SEO isn’t caught flatfooted.
Step Three: Compare Keywords (& Check Your Work)
One keyword we’re keeping an eye on is Workspace as a Service (WaaS), often presented as an alternative to Desktop as a Service (DaaS). Many of our clients offer DaaS, so we were curious about whether we should encourage re-optimization of these pages to move towards WaaS.
After following our steps above, here’s what we got in Google Trends:
Looks promising, right?
In this industry, however, it’s also important to check for the spelled-out versions of everyone’s favorite service acronyms. Check out how the above search volume results differ when we spell out the words in full:
After looking at both comparisons, we concluded that it’s not yet time to optimize for WaaS or Workspace as a Service. However, we wanted to understand why the acronym results differed so greatly.
One more quick and easy Google search helped answer that question. We saw some hits for Wide Area Application Services (WAAS) for WAN optimization in our industry, but the search results for WaaS are dominated by pages on Wide Area Augmentation System (WAAS) for GPS.
As a result, efforts to move away from DaaS and Desktop as a Service and SEO for WaaS and Workspace as a Service would be wasted right now due to heavy competition from similar acronyms. The volume just isn’t there yet to abandon currently-searched keywords. Still, we’re not wiping it from our list of trending topics just yet. We’ll check again in a few months!
You Can Do This, Too
Thanks to Google, all this research is free, quick, and easy. You have the tools to keep up with ongoing technology trends, research interest, and check search volume – and use the knowledge gained to keep your website up to date. Leave a comment to let us know how you’ve adjusted your telecom website’s SEO to include an emerging technology, or contact us today to learn how we can help you do just that!
