Cybersecurity SEO Strategy Background
Cyber security teams are usually very IT literate, well educated, and used to self-educating – it comes with the territory. Cybersecurity systems, by their nature, are critical to organizations and this is only increasing with the rise in threats to both networks and data, but also to the global economy, food security, and rising prices. The looming recession doesn’t bode well – as economists noted: “When the US economy sneezes, the global economy gets a cold” – this often means the global recession will last longer overseas than here in the US and that will only increase the number of ransomware attacks. That’s why we’ve decided to share some of our top 5 ideas for your SEO Strategy to help your business – recession or not!
Read More on our Series of SEO Strategies:
- Defining an SEO Strategy
- SEO for the Aviation Industry
- Online Reputation Management Strategy
- Building the Best SEO Agency for Startups
SEO for Cyber Security Companies
Technical SEO defines a space of SEO aimed at building pages and using web technologies like Schema, Tables, and auto-build pages to advance an SEO Strategy. Technical SEO can also mean and appreciate the technical terms used in Tech and especially cybersecurity
Technical SEO for Security Agencies
Technical SEO is slightly different from SEO for cybersecurity as it has to take into account security and reputation management for security agencies, covering PR and development oversight on the technology front.
Top Cybersecurity Marketing Sectors
- Managed security services (MSS)
- Security information and event management (SIEM)
- Vulnerability management
- Endpoint security
- Identity and access management (IAM)
- Incident response
- Security consulting
- Security awareness training
- Penetration testing
- Risk management
Top Cybersecurity Services
- Cloud security
- Network security
- Application security
- Data security
- Mobile security
- IoT security
- Industrial control system (ICS) security
Cybersecurity Marketing Strategy Tactics
This often presents very interesting gaps for guerilla marketing tactics as part of your overall marketing strategy.
In recessions, IT teams also face reduced budgets but still gave grave concerns about security, detection, management, and remediation. If your product meets the requirements of your larger competitors but has a lower impact on the IT team’s budget, you could be in prime space to steal some of their space.
Larger players spend a lot of money on branding and market saturation. But it’s not just perfectly legal to compare yourself to them, it’s a vital part of an open market economy. As long as you don’t make any clearly false or slanderous statements, you’re good to go. After all, that’s exactly what Gartner does with PeerInsights and Capterra, G2, and everyone else do.
Spend less on PR Wires and get better results
PR is critical for Cybersecurity brands, products, and services to make themselves known to channel marketing, journalists, analysts, and the marketplace in general – that’s why we’ve partnered with Hi-Touch PR. Great PR is a great way to get noticed, get talked about, and reach a wide audience. But PR wire sites – with millions of press releases going out every day – is it really worth $800+ a shot? Do journalists have that much time to filter through them? Absolutely not, that’s why having a well-linked PR consultant is critical. But you can bolster this by tweaking your PR strategy for SEO.
Regardless of the wire you use, almost all of them will offer an online version that is syndicated. Some will get you syndicated on popular news sites like MSNBC, CNN, and Yahoo! News. And you can use their logos on your site (e.g. PR page). Paying hundreds of extra to get an unknown brand listed on a regional industry wire? Never seen it work either.
Sending a press release focusing on that same brand seems so intuitive that every marketing team does it without thinking about it but then sees the same results again. Sure, your dashboard shows your got 1,900 views on PRNewsWire10000.com – but all they all do is auto-feed hosepipes of Press Releases to Syndicated-sites. This volume of largely uninteresting content can’t be consumed by journalists/humans and just gets crawled and indexed at the bottom of the pile with all of the other millions of daily unread press releases.
What if instead you focused on the industry terms, the industry leaders, or the leading industry research and built and posted your PR that way? Immediately, you’ve opened yourself up to a literate, interested, and highly relevant audience and you’ve done this for free.
Now that you know this – what’s the difference between spending $1750 on a “top PR site” and $!00 on another? They’ll both get indexed by Google, that means by Google Alerts and they’ll all show in Google News.
Cybersecurity SEO Case Study
We have a number of SEO Case Studies which include Tech and Cyber security functions within that technology profile. These include
- IntSights (Dark Web)
- Critical Insight
- Kemp technologies
- Cloudbrink
- EDR
- Legacy Server Protection
- MDR
Cyber Security Technical Authority in SEO
Cyber Security companies need to adequately cover the adjacent areas that they integrate with. Far too many marketing campaigns try to sell on just vision, product strategy, and nebulous futuristic promises that DON’T resonate with conservative, risk-averse, and technically/engineering-minded buyers.
The CIO is NOT always your customer and the CIO/CISO/BISO is almost ALWAYS from a deep technical background.
Differentiation on Pricing
Many of the largest tech brands sell via channels like MSSPs – so they can’t mention pricing for that and many other reasons. They also tend to command the highest fees and typically have the huge overheads that require it like expensive vanity HQ addresses and lots of middle management. Not publishing pricing allows for special discounting, bulk buying, and incentives from sales teams who really despise it when their prospects have pricing guideline lists.
But if you have a market leader and pricing is part of that strategy, get a guideline price list for your region and publish it. The bigger and more commoditized the brand, the more popular the search. This is also very cost-effective in PPC – and these searches are at the Bottom of the Funnel ICP searches. In the continuous hunt for SQLs (Sales Qualified Leads), these leads don’t get any better qualified.
Better understand your ICP’s search behavior
With the demand for talent and the cybersecurity skills shortage, your target audience is diverse. Not only do you have people with different titles but they come from different backgrounds and levels of experience in IT. These environments shape how they think. Search marketing (SEO or PPC) has demonstrated for at least 2 decades that people have a herd mentality when searching – and this is very true in a Cybersecurity SEO/SEM Campaign.
But different generations will rely on different terms – and often some brand managers will prevent the use of certain words that they feel jar with their brand identity. There’s still this legacy view that – as you can with Advertising – you can control or influence how people perceive your product. With a search engine, you can’t do that. If you want to – and have the budget – to blanket advertise on television, at tradeshows and events, on airplanes, and at airports, then by all means you should. But if a systems security engineer is looking for a Ransomware detection platform that’s not present on your website, your chances are slim to none.
Searches are so mature and specific today, that it’s highly unlikely that a search for a software tool will yield results where the word “tool” is missing from the main heading of the web page.
Consider how your audience of Managers, Engineers, VPs, and Directors who could have an IT career spanning the 1990s through today will each search with their own preferred terms, like:
- Software
- Tool
- App
- Platform
- Solution
- Service
These patterns help inform research and content strategies much more than just volumes.
Use PPC Campaigns in Cybersecurity
SEO relies mainly on taking people searching for a problem and discovering a vendor who has a solution. The first search is typically referred to as a problem search but is also referred to as “non-branded” or generic. For example, somebody searching for “Ransomware Prevention” versus “ABC Ransomware Tool”. However, for vendors that the user shortlists or remembers, the follow-up searches are typically brand-based or “branded”.
Google and its customers (and your competitors) know this – and that’s why ANYONE can target your brand from ANYWHERE even if you have a registered trademark. What better way to find someone interested in your service than someone Google your direct competitor?
By focusing on key Google Ad metrics – by having a 10/10 quality score on your brand and domain names, you can almost stop your competitors from getting the required CTR rate to run ads but cost them a lot more money even if they try. It takes a while to establish your QS and best ad quality (from a user perspective, not just Google).
Brand defense is cheaper than new customer acquisition, making it much cheaper than losing otherwise convertible users to your competition.
To prove this – just start with a small experimental budget and see how high the click-through rate is and secondly, how high the conversion rate on branded terms is versus generic – that’s your leading and lagging KPI for your executive team in one.
Repurpose existing content
So much content is written for – and fails at – the idea of multi-channel. But a blog title that works for LinkedIn – where you have a direct and/or paid audience isn’t going to work for a search engine. A human reader will understand that “Ten ways that XDR will disrupt breaches” is relevant but for a search engine it doesn’t translate to “how to prevent ransomware” – that’s why revisiting old content is a gold mine to create new search prospects for free.
