SEO Strategies and Best Practices for Technical Audiences

Published on Aug 12, 2024 in webinars by Annika Puura
9 minute read

The world of SEO is a complex beast, with Google reportedly making thousands of changes to its search algorithm each year. For those catering to technical audiences – developers, engineers, the coding wizards – the landscape gets even trickier. Draft.dev’s recent webinar, featuring SEO experts Meg Scarborough (CEO of Megawatt) and Nate Matherson (Co-founder of Positional), tackled these exact challenges.

In this blog post, I’ll recap the key takeaways from the webinar and explore some ways how you can enhance your SEO strategy for technical audiences. Whether you’re a DevRel, developer marketer or anyone involved in marketing technical products, this discussion will provide you some insights and strategies to help maximize your SEO efforts. 

Unique SEO Considerations for Devtools

SEO for devtool companies requires time and a tailored approach. Just as there’s no one-size-fits-all devtool, there’s no single SEO playbook that guarantees success. As Meg put it, “There’s a learning curve in any industry.”

Unlike broader consumer markets, technical audiences demand a higher level of precision and expertise in communication. The slightest hint of inauthenticity can erode trust and credibility.

Meg emphasized that precision of language really matters and that understanding how your audience talks about their work is especially important when it comes to choosing the right keywords and optimizing your site.

Nate agreed, highlighting the challenges he faced when transitioning from consumer finance to the technical Kubernetes space. He emphasized the need for in-depth content like coding samples and tutorials to effectively engage technical audiences. Nate also mentioned that creating content that targets a technical SEO keyword is a lot pricier. 

“I also found that creating content for a more technical audience was a lot more expensive. Three to four times as expensive as what it might be for creating a piece of content to serve what is like a non-technical consumer keyword.” - Nate Matherson, Co-founder & CEO, Positional

Tailoring Keyword Research for Technical Products

Understanding your audience is the first step but diving deeper into keyword research and topic clusters is where things can get tricky. So what are some guidelines to follow?

Use Customer Questions as Baseline

KW research for technical products is all about uncovering the specific terms and phrases your developer audience is using to find solutions to their problems. 

“Before you ever use a keyword research tool…just listen to the questions you just keep getting.” – Nate Matherson, Co-founder & CEO, Positional

These recurring questions often reveal what challenges your audience faces and the solutions they seek. By addressing these questions in your content, you can attract organic traffic and establish yourself as a trusted resource. Forums and pages like GitHub and StackOverflow are valid alternatives if communication with your audience directly isn’t an option. 

Nate further suggested supplementing this approach with competitor research and identifying keywords that your competitors are ranking for, even if they aren’t direct competitors. This can help you uncover additional relevant keywords and expand your content strategy.

Balance Tools With Insights

While keyword research tools are valuable, they shouldn’t be the sole source of information. Nate highlighted the limitations of these tools, particularly when it comes to technical audiences. He pointed out that developers are often underrepresented in the sample populations used by keyword research tools, leading to inaccurate search volume predictions.

However, this also presents an opportunity to capture valuable long-tail keywords that might not be captured by traditional tools by actively listening to your customers and engaging with developer communities. 

“Developers are often the smallest sample population in these tools. So a lot of the times, the keyword tool, I don’t even care if it says zero traffic. I’m like, I know for a fact this gets searched a bunch.” – Nate Matherson, Co-founder & CEO, Positional

Meg agreed, emphasizing that keyword research should be driven by audience needs rather than relying solely on tools.

“Clients ask us all the time, ‘Do you start with the keywords? Or do you start with the audience’s needs?’ You always start with what the audience wants, what the audience needs.” – Meg Scarborough, CEO & Founder, Megawatt

Prioritize the Right Keywords

Once you’ve identified your target keywords, it’s important to prioritize them strategically. Nate recommended dedicating a portion of your resources (around 25%) to “keywords that are kind of an unknown.” These are keywords that might not have high search volumes initially but have the potential to become more popular in the future.

Make Sure Your Content Is Useful

The bottom line is, you have to make sure the content you’re creating is helpful and informative for the target user, not just stuffed with keywords. 

Nate stressed how important it is to cut out cookie-cutter content that has the right keywords in it. Increasingly, Google is asking us to do something unique and provide genuine value to our readers.

Optimizing Your Web Presence

While high-quality content is the foundation of SEO, optimizing your entire website is equally important. This involves various elements beyond blog posts, such as documentation, quick start guides, landing pages, and even product pages.

Technical Documentation and Quick Start Guides

Meg emphasized the importance of incorporating SEO into technical documentation and quick-start guides. These resources are often the first point of contact for developers and engineers, so ensuring they are well-structured, easy to navigate, and optimized for relevant keywords is important.

“You need to think about SEO when you are producing your technical documentation, your quick start guides, all those sorts of things…making sure they’re really well structured, they’re easy to navigate, they’re catering to the needs of your developers.” – Meg Scarborough, CEO & Founder, Megawatt

Strong internal linking within these resources is also essential. It not only helps users find related information but also signals to search engines the relationships between different pages, potentially improving your overall search rankings.

Landing Pages and Product Pages

Nate highlighted the importance of aligning the type of page with the target keyword. For instance, if the top search results for a particular keyword are blog posts, then creating a blog post is the logical choice. However, if the top results are product pages, then optimizing your product page for that keyword would be more effective.

“The biggest mistake that I see companies make is they build the wrong type of page for the keyword that they’re targeting…Go to Google and search for that keyword. And if you see that the top 6 search results are blog posts, you know you should create a blog post.” – Nate Matherson, Co-founder & CEO, Positional

Balancing SEO Strategies: Where to start?

From link building to user intention, technical SEO to content optimization, SEO goals can seem overwhelming. So, how do you determine the best path forward, especially with limited resources?

Meg recommended starting by understanding the buyer’s journey. Are they problem-aware, solution-aware, or ready to buy? This understanding will significantly influence your priorities.

“You need to understand the basic kind of concepts of is somebody problem aware? Are they solution aware? Are they ready to buy? And they’re comparing things? And you need to make sure that you have a good mix of content across all of those kind of aspects of the buyer journey.” – Meg Scarborough, CEO & Founder, Megawatt

But apart from understanding the buyer intention, your priorities really should depend on whether you’re just launching your blog or if your company blog post already comes up on Google’s first page results. Let’s look at those stages a bit more:

New Brands: Build a Strong Foundation

For those just starting their SEO journey, Nate suggested focusing on the fundamentals: keyword research and content creation. Building a solid foundation of high-quality, technically proficient content that directly addresses your audience’s needs and questions is essential. Once this foundation is established, you can then venture into more sophisticated tactics like link building and technical SEO optimizations.

Established Brands: Maximize Impact

For brands with an established online presence, the focus shifts towards maximizing impact. This often involves doubling down on conversion rate optimization (CRO) and tapping into long-tail traffic opportunities. This means refining existing content to better align with user intent, optimizing CTAs for higher engagement, and identifying niche keywords that attract highly targeted traffic. 

“If I’m a newer brand, I’m super focused on keyword research and then content that I can quickly turn around…But if I’m an established brand, I’m starting to think about, okay, I need to up my conversion rate on this piece of content…How can we capture that long-tail traffic opportunity?” – Meg Scarborough, CEO & Founder, Megawatt

Beyond the stage of your brand, other factors can influence your SEO priorities. For instance, the type of product you’re selling and the length of your sales cycle can dictate whether you should focus more on top-of-funnel content for awareness or bottom-of-funnel content for conversions. 

The bottom line is, your SEO priorities should align with your business goals, product type, sales cycle, and available resources.

SEO for Open Source vs. Enterprise

Once you’ve determined your overall SEO priorities, it’s time to refine your strategy further by considering your specific business model. In the developer tools space, two common models stand out: open source and enterprise. Each has its’ own SEO nuances, so let’s explore how to adapt your strategy based on whether you’re an open-source or enterprise company.

Open Source: Building Community and Awareness

Open-source companies often prioritize community building and education. Meg suggested focusing on creating high-quality educational content that helps users understand and implement your tools. This could include:

• Tutorials and How-to Guides: Step-by-step instructions on how to use your tools effectively.
• Documentation: Comprehensive and well-structured documentation that is easy to navigate and understand.
• Community Forums and Support: Active engagement with your community through forums, Q&A sessions, and other channels.

Enterprise: Targeting High-Value Keywords and Decision-Makers

Enterprise solutions often cater to a smaller, more specific audience. Nate recommended prioritizing high-value keywords that resonate with decision-makers and highlighting the ROI and business benefits of your products.

Your content should speak directly to the needs and concerns of decision-makers, such as:

• Case Studies: Showcase how your product has helped other companies achieve their goals.
• White Papers: Provide in-depth analysis and insights on industry trends and challenges.
• Thought Leadership Content: Share your expertise and perspectives on relevant topics to establish your company as a thought leader in the space.

Additionally, consider investing in account-based marketing (ABM) strategies to target specific high-value accounts.

However, many companies don’t fit neatly into either category. You might offer both open-source and enterprise versions of your product or cater to a mixed audience. 

In such cases, it’s important to balance your SEO strategy by creating a mix of content that appeals to both individual developers and decision-makers, using a combination of educational and business-focused keywords, and tailoring your messaging to different stages of the buyer’s journey.

Embracing SEO Changes

The SEO landscape is rapidly shifting towards human-optimized content, leaving behind the days of keyword stuffing, and the future holds both challenges and opportunities for those targeting technical audiences. As AI-powered search features like Google’s SGE (Search Generative Experience) become more prevalent, content creators must adapt their strategies to remain visible and relevant.

To do that, Meg and Nate both stressed the importance of creating differentiated, in-depth content that goes beyond simple questions and answers. With AI capable of providing quick answers to basic queries, the value of human expertise and unique insights becomes more and more critical.

In addition to SGE, other technologies like voice search are also shaping the future of SEO. Optimizing your content for voice search requires shifting your focus to conversational language and long-tail keywords that align with how people speak.

Therefore, the need for high-quality, technically accurate, and genuinely helpful content with unique and personal experiences will remain the foundation of technical content. 

I hope this blog post has provided you with some new insights for optimizing your SEO strategy. If you want to dive deeper into the world of DevRel and Developer Marketing, join our upcoming live webinars with Q&A sessions where we cover similar topics with insights from industry leaders.

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