Your Customers are Using Google to Search for your High-Tech Products. No Really, it is True!!

I get this question quite a lot from the high tech marketing professionals that I interact with. "Our management does not believe that our customers are using Google to search for our products and services. They think it only works if you are selling toothpaste and the like. It's an uphill battle for us to convince them to start investing in SEO."


Well first off, SEO is free and you pay nothing to Google to get more traffic and leads - estimated CTR for a keyword ranked #1 on Google is 34.2%. Secondly, if you have the skills, you can do it yourselves. Even if you hire a highly qualified SEO, you are still getting a fantastic deal - the revenue you will generate over the long term will be orders of magnitude larger than your SEO's fees.

Getting back, you have to tell your management that it's just plain wrong. There's an easy way to show them what they are missing:

1. Go to Google and type in the name of your product or service and see who's ranking. Are your competitors listed there? If so, you know that they are being seen and you are not. Let's say that you make a PCIe retimer - the top companies that are ranking in this Google Search are Astera Labs, Renesas, TI, Montage Tech, Parade Tech and Intel. If you are not here, no one will know that you sell this chip.

2. Now, go to semrush.com. Get a free account - it allows you to search for 10 keywords per day. Good enough for this exercise. Let's type in PCIe retimer. What do you see? You see that globally 280 people searched for it, 110 from the US. If you look at keywords variations, the volume jumps to 420. These are monthly numbers. Their search intent is informational, which means that optimizing for this keyword would aid your demand creation activities. The keyword difficulty is 33% which means that ranking can be achieved with a proper content marketing plan. See the image below.




Now, having just established the fact that customers searching for a PCIe retimer are visiting your competitor's websites and not yours, do you need any more justification to act?

You can try out your own keywords. Let me know if you are having trouble getting the right set of results. Connect with me here on LinkedIn and reach out.

Things to note:

1. If you see lots of links to publications and magazines in your search, the keyword you have chosen is a coveted one and you are competing with the big dogs. Try searching for something like RISC V processors to see what I mean.

2. If you are unable to see much traffic on Semrush, you might be early to the market.

Way back in 2016, we optimized a small IP company's website for 'accelerating machine learning' and 'fpga machine learning' to second and fifth ranks respectively. It was acquired and is now part of a very large semiconductor company that doesn't rank in top 10 anymore, its competitors do. You know what it would give just to be on the first page of Google today.

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