Software Marketing - An SEO Approach

Software Marketing - The SEO Strategy

Software Marketing comes in many flavors. Depending on if consumers (via standard software package sales) or business or enterprise are your target customers, your software marketing strategy will differ greatly.

This article is going to go over rather low cost but effective strategy that will kick off your online software marketing with effective medium to long term results. We will focus standalone packages that you will make accessible for sale from your website, or software directories.

If you sell b2b custom software you can still use the information in this article if you be a little creative!

So to begin, its important we maximize our time spend and get the things done that yield the best results with the least effort or cost. The following 8 steps need to be followed

Website Design

Its critical (obviously) to have a competent looking site, designed well, with great copy that convinces visitors to buy or download. Most visitors wont purchase your software directly from your website, but rather after downloading your software from elsewhere (software directories etc). They will most likely however check your website before making a purchase, to make sure you seem legit, can offer support etc. Therefore keep it professional!

Keyword Research

Its important to get a good understanding of the words people will use to search for your product. There are many tools and services will show you what search phrases are used on the search engines and the estimated number of searches a month. This allows you to know exactly what search phrases or keywords you need to focus on and provides a picture of the potential market size by search volume.

Competitive Research

The Internet allows you, quite easily, to tell exactly what marketing your competition is doing, the ads they use, the copy they use, where they advertise and who their affiliates are. Take advantage of the $$ and time they spent on market research and testing and simply copy and improve on their strategy!

Download.com Listing

This important step is where you need to get yourself a well written, professional download.com listing for your software, making use of your 1-3 top keywords you found via your keyword research. Download.com ranks very well in the search engines and is seen as authority site by google for down-loadable software.

Software Submissions

We want to make use a good manual software submission service (costs more - gets you more listings) or automated software submission tool (unlimited submissions for the upfront cost - less reliable) to submit our software to 600-1000 software directories. This gets you instant downloads, and if you know how, will greatly improve the search engine rankings for your main software listing!

Deep Links

We now use deep links to push our main listing up into the top of the search results in the search engines. Deep link directories and submission services are not that easy to find, but there are some great ones out there if you know where to look!

Link Building

The foundations of the strategy are now complete and you have set yourself up for consistent medium to long term downloads (and hopefully sales!) and a decent ranking for your listing (and the free traffic that goes with it). Now you want to regularly generate links to your listing to keep improving your results moving forward. You now want to outsource our link building through certain services such as elance.

Article Submissions

Build your trust levels and position yourself in your market with quality articles and information targeted at your niche. Sell ecommerce software? Write articles on related topics that online business owners will find useful. Show your potential customers your not just a bunch of programmers, but rather you understand their problems, their business, the niche etc and can provide software that delivers. Article submissions not only raise your profile in the marketplace but have the added benefit of generating quality back links to your listings, as well as sending good qualified traffic to your product pages!

The above steps are a good place to start for any software marketing strategy and provides a firm base to build on moving forward.