Most search engine optimization (SEO) efforts on MSP websites see nominal results at best. With many “SEO experts” quoting fees of at least $1,000 a month (more in larger cities) to manage your MSP SEO strategy, it’s no wonder you turn to other marketing channels to generate leads. But there is one area under your control that can have a big effect – your blog. Read on for my best MSP blog tips.
Why You Need A Blog
There are two main reasons why you need an MSP blog for your IT services business.
- Website traffic. A well-written blog drives traffic to your website.
- Lead conversion. You can convert your blog traffic into leads with a drip marketing campaign.
If you have a prospect list already, I’d start with drip marketing to promote your blog. Your house list is going to be easier and faster to cultivate new leads from than trying to generate SEO traffic.
MSP Blog Tips
If you’re looking to capitalize on natural organic search to drive new leads to your site, here are my best MSP blog tips, laid out step-by-step for you to follow.
Clarify Your Strategy. Think about your customer. What topics are relevant to them? Are they looking for advice on IT strategy? Examples of what MSP services can do for their business? Cloud services? What will the focus of your blog be? Who will write the content? What is the tone? Professional and technical? Or more focused on IT strategy? Your blog should reflect their needs and be a valuable resource for your customers. You’ll also want to determine how frequently you’ll be posting — posting one blog per week is ideal.
Determine Your Call To Action. Every blog post should have an offer. Ideally, the offer is tied into the blog topic (e.g., offer an Office 365 Migration Plan and Consultation when writing about Office 365). To create more efficiency in the process, consider writing five or six articles on the same primary topic, and use the same call to action.
Here are some content offer ideas.
- eBook, report, white paper
- Webinar recording, slide deck
- Research or survey results
- Checklist
- Cheat sheet or swipe file
- Migration plan (for IT managers; free Office 365 migration plan)
- Resource lists
- Templates (disaster planning, acceptable use policy, etc.)
- Calculator (cost of downtime, what you should pay for IT services)
- Assessment, audit
Use engaging headlines. The headline is one of the most important elements in your post. It will determine if your post gets read or ignored. Write engaging, attention-grabbing headlines that entice readers to click through to the post.
Publish well-written, valuable content. A good blog takes work. It should be concise informative and well-written.
Optimize for SEO. It’s not enough to write your post and hit publish. It needs to be optimized for Google’s search engines.
The most important elements for SEO are:
- Page URL – Make sure the main keywords you want to optimize are in the URL with hyphens separating each word.
- Page title – This should match the headline for the blog.
- H1 tag – The H1 tag tells search engines what the content of the page is all about. A good sample H1 tag would be: [Company Name] | X Things To Demand From [City] IT Services Firms.
- Internal links – Create a link in your article that links back to the primary page on your website that talks about the topic you are writing about.
Broadcast it. You’re not really getting an SEO boost by broadcasting your post, but if you did the work in writing, you might as well repurpose the content! Periodically, you may want to send it out to your house list, and every post should be placed up on your company Facebook page, your personal Facebook page, your LinkedIn news feed and LinkedIn newsgroups you belong to.
Want to get your online marketing strategy fully in place? All of the MSP blog tips in the world won’t help you if you don’t have it backed up by a Check out the Technology Marketing Toolkit today.
