In today’s overwhelmingly digital and online world, the importance of robust cybersecurity cannot be overstated. Here are some latest statistics and data that clearly underline this fact. In Q3 2024, companies witnessed approximately 1,876 cyberattacks each week. This marks a whopping 75% increase compared to the same period in 2023. Again, in Q3 2024, more than 1,230 ransomware incidents were reported with North America alone accounting for more than 50% of these incidences.
With such relentless cyberattacks and unabating threats from hackers, the cybersecurity industry is witnessing an unprecedented boom. This in turn has brought a sharp focus on SEO. Today cybersecurity SEO is helping scores of data security companies in charting growth path amid intense competition.
In this latest blog post, we will share a step-by-step guide on cybersecurity SEO and how search engine optimization can help in propelling the growth of IT security companies.
Definition: Cybersecurity SEO
SEO for cybersecurity or cybersecurity SEO basically means adapting best SEO practices that eventually help cybersecurity websites to rank higher in Google and other search engine’s search engine result pages (SERPs). Higher ranking on Google or Bing drastically increases a website’s organic traffic, paving the way for more leads and conversions and ultimately increasing the profitability of companies.
Below we’ve shared a step-by-step guide about the best SEO practices that will most certainly bring a greater online visibility for cybersecurity companies.
Before going ahead, it is important to note that most of the best SEO practices are common and universal for almost all industries and companies. Therefore, companies belonging to other industries can also implement these practices for growing its organic traffic.
Best SEO practices for Cybersecurity Website
- Conduct thorough keyword research:
The very first step is to conduct comprehensive and thorough keyword research. In a way, strong keyword research is the foundation of successful SEO campaigns. That’s because it brings unprecedented clarity about which keywords have to be targeted and which keywords have to be left out. Talking specifically about the latter, keyword research will spare you from targeting wrong keywords or keywords that your potential customers are not searching for. Therefore, your website will attract zero traffic even if it ranks on the first page for these keywords.
The secret, or the underlying rule, of good keyword research is to find keywords that have high search volume and are also relatively easy to rank for. It is especially important to find easy ranking keywords if your website is brand new or is barely a few months old.
But many may wonder how or what are the steps to be taken to find keywords.
There are simple ways or tips to do this. The first easy step is to find out the keywords that your nearest competitors are ranking for. If your competitors are ranking for certain keywords then it certainly signifies that these keywords have good search volume and other favorable metrics. You’ll have to use SEO tools for finding competitors’ keywords (more on this in the next section.)
Another useful step is to make a list of primary and seed keywords. More often primary keywords usually constitute of popular jargons and terminologies that are closely associated with your industry. Since these jargons and terminologies are immensely popular, your target audience will obviously search for it and, therefore, if your website can rank for these keywords then it can attract good amount of organic traffic.
Below we’ve listed out primary keywords for cybersecurity website.
- Data security
- Hacking
- Malware
- Ransomware
- Phishing
- Data breach
- Data breach
- Firewall
We highly recommend that your team should brainstorm to come up with more popular terminologies that can double up as your targeted keywords.
Alternatively, there is one more useful way to find keywords and this is Google auto suggestion. Google auto suggestion is a feature that suggests search terms as you type in the Google search bar. These recommendations are generated from real search queries made by your target audience, making it a valuable source for finding relevant keywords.
As you can checkout in the below example, Google auto suggestion is showing suggestions and queries for ransomware after typing the term ‘ransomware’ in the search bar.
- Focus on On-page SEO
The next step in cybersecurity SEO is focusing on on-page SEO, which is one of the foundational pillars of SEO. On-page SEO is a practice of optimizing elements within a website to improve its search ranking. Since it seeks to optimize elements within the website, it is also referred as on-site SEO.
Here is a checklist or best practices for On-page SEO
- Content creation (creating high-quality content)
- Keyword placement in the content
- Title tag optimization
- URL optimization
- Header Tags usage (h1,h2 etc.)
- Image optimization
- Internal linking
- External linking
For your website’s static pages, On-page SEO will be mostly a one-time exercise. However, for your blog section, you’ll have to perform On-page SEO every time a new blog post is published.
Some popular On-page Seo tools will certainly prove handy and helpful for you. Mentioned below are some of the popular tools.
- Yoast SEO WordPress plugin.
- Rank Math WordPress plugin.
- UberSuggest (for keyword research).
Kindly click on the link to know more about on-page SEO.
- Prioritize link-building:
You cannot rank your cybersecurity website or any other website for that matter on the top of Google’s first page for highly competitive keywords without acquiring good number of high-quality backlinks. For the beginners, backlinks – also known as incoming or inbound links – refers to a link that your website receives from an external or third-party website.
These links essentially act as a vote of confidence for Google, signifying that your website is trustworthy and deserves to be ranked higher on Google’s SERP. Therefore, the more high-quality backlinks your website has, the higher it is likely to rank on Google. Here we’d like to underline the fact that links coming from low-quality and non-relevant websites will not have much positive impact on your website’s ranking.
Here are some simple methods for acquiring high-quality backlinks
- Creating high-quality content for attracting backlinks naturally.
- Writing a well-written and informative guest post for a high-ranking third party or external website that belongs to your niche or industry.
- Regularly interview leading industry experts or any popular personalities from your industry. In exchange of the interview, you can request for links from their official websites.
- Leverage content marketing and digital PR tactics.
- Seek opportunity from your network. Request your colleagues to link to your website. Make sure that the website has high domain authority and also belongs to your industry.
- Use SEO tools to identify broken links on other websites.
- Focus on content marketing:
In the above paragraph, we had mentioned about prioritizing content marketing. Content marketing includes the practice of creating and distributing valuable and relevant content to attracting and engaging with a clearly defined target audience.
From the context of the SEO campaign, it can yield great results including increased brand awareness, acquiring backlinks and increasing organic traffic. Due to its multitude of long -term benefits, today content marketing has become a go-to strategy for most of the SEO professionals.
Popular methods or types of content marketing
- Blogging: Posting regular blog posts in your website’s blog section is one of the most popular practices of content marketing. Regular blog posts aim to fulfill two important purposes. First, it helps in targeting competitive keywords that helps in driving organic traffic. Secondly and more importantly, your regular blog posts can help in solving several important pain-points of your target customers and covering trending topics in your industry. This in-turn will help in establishing your company as an important thought leader in your industry.
- Social media marketing: Regularly sharing and posting social media posts on platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram can greatly increase your brand awareness, which will surely prove to be more than a helping hand for your SEO campaign.
- Email Marketing: Email Marketing helps in maintaining a steady engagement with your subscribers by sending them regular updates about your products/services and your industry. The one big advantage of email marketing is that it allows you to engage with only those people who are genuinely interested in your products and services.
Other popular types of content marketing:
- Podcasts
- Webnairs
- eBooks and White Papers
- Use SEO tools:
Another very important and unavoidable step in cybersecurity SEO is using professional SEO tools. We’d already mentioned about few on-page SEO plugins like Yoast SEO and keyword research tools like Ubersuggest. However, using full-fledge SEO Tool will offer a decisive edge. That’s because it offers invaluable data for all the important aspects of SEO, instead of only one or two aspects. This includes keyword research, backlink analysis, spying on competitors’ backlinks and much more. You don’t have to use multiple tools. All the important data can be accessed on one platform.
Popular full-fledge SEO tools
- Run a paid ad campaign:
This particular tip may sound little off the mark considering that paid ads technically don’t fall in SEO. SEO solely focuses on organic traffic while paid ads focuses only on paid traffic. However, it is an established fact that usually SEO campaigns achieve accelerated results when the strategy of paid ads is concurrently used in an efficient way.
Paid ads bring immediate traffic that paves way for instant brand recognition and brand awareness. This potentially leads to a sharp increase in your organic traffic in a very short period of time, greatly reducing the time required for achieving desirable SEO results.
If you choose not to opt for paid ad strategy then you’ll have to be patient enough to wait for at least few months for seeing any meaningful growth in the organic traffic. This wait can increase further if your website is brand new or is only few months old.
Types of paid ads:
- Social media marketing (ads on Facebook, Twitter, Instagrams & others)
- Search engine marketing (Google ads and Bing ads)
FAQs (frequently asked questions)
Q) Is it really a good idea to outsource SEO campaign to a digital marketing or SEO agency?
Answer: Yes, especially if you’re planning to outsource to a reputable digital marketing/SEO agency. However, doing SEO through an in-house team has its own advantages.
Q) Is it mandatory to use SEO tools for achieving desirable SEO results for your cybersecurity website?
Answer: Yes, it is absolutely mandatory. SEO tools offer invaluable data about which keywords to target, which websites to go after for securing backlinks and more. Having access to such invaluable data can give a decisive edge to your SEO campaign.
Q) Is it feasible to buy backlinks for achieving faster SEO results?
Answer: Buying backlinks should always be your secondary strategy. It should never be a part of your core strategy. Aggressively buying backlinks can attract penalty from Google, which can obviously have negative impact on your campaign.
Q) How much time it will takes for brand new cybersecurity website to rank for highly competitive keywords?
Answer: This will mostly depend on the keyword competition in the cybersecurity industry. If the competition is medium-to-high then it can take anywhere between 4-6 months for your website to rank on Google’s first page for highly competitive keywords.
Conclusion:
Ultimately, the success of your cybersecurity website’s SEO campaign depends on efficient implementation of all the tips and best SEO practices discussed above. Kindly remember that SEO takes time and therefore exercising patience is critical. However, if you want relatively quick results then parallelly opting for paid ads would be a wise decision. Lastly, in order to keep your cybersecurity website safe from any potential risk of attracting penalties from Google avoid aggressively buying backlinks and don’t adopt any black hat techniques.