Introduction When it comes to marketing your MSP business, you have to stay up to date with changes, particularly when it comes to using search engine optimization (SEO). SEO is one of the most common forms of marketing because it’s free. It’s also something that most people can do … with a little bit of training. Unfortunately, most people use outdated methods to market their MSP businesses and wonder why they never seem to attract new clients to their websites.

This white paper will dispel some commonly held myths about SEO and help you understand what will or will not work when it comes to marketing your MSP business to prospective clients. Prepare to be surprised.

Metatags Don't Work

Neither Google nor Bing – the two biggest search engines – indexes them. They did once upon a time, but not anymore. That doesn’t mean that you should discount them entirely. The more relevant your content is to a particular search term, the better.

In the example below, the search term “MSP coaching” yielded a result that was third among the top ten. Everything below the URL is part of the metatag. As you can see, the more relevant the content is to the search term, the higher up your website will appear in search results.

Inbound Links Are Not Your Friends Once again, quality matters. In fact, if you want to ensure that your MSP website gets penalized by Google in some way, have a lot of irrelevant links driving traffic to it. That wasn’t always the case, of course. At one time, all that mattered was how many links a site could get coming in. The smart SEO experts knew early on the importance of having most if not all of those links coming from other quality websites.

It’s always good to have links coming from clients’, vendors’ or strategic partners’ websites. Their websites are relevant to your business. You do business with these companies so it just makes sense that you would have links coming from their sites to yours.

Keywords In The URL Don't Hold Much Weight There once was a time when having certain keywords in the URL of a website ensured higher placement in search results, regardless of the quality of the site or the business behind it. So, if your URL was managedservicesprovider.com, that would appear higher

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in search results than snappy.com, even if snappy.com was a legitimate, authoritative managed services provider website and company. Fortunately, that’s no longer the case.

Now, website owners have to prove the worth of their websites. So, you can give your MSP business any name you want as long as you’re providing legitimate MSP services and have relevant content on your site.

Good SEO Is Not About Tricking Google There have been all kinds of methods of trying to gain Google’s attention. Once people said that you had to mention certain keywords in an article over and over again and put them in bold type. Then people said that you had to have certain keywords in the first and last paragraphs of every article that matched keywords in the title. And the list goes on and on.

Keywords aren’t a bad thing. They just aren’t the be all and end all of SEO. Where people went wrong was in putting keywords into their articles in ways that rendered articles virtually nonsensical. That, of course, did nothing to help the articles get high on the search results list.

Providing clients and prospects who visit your site with quality, relevant content is the best way to market your MSP business. Every page should be a reflection of what your MSP business does or has to offer. The articles you write don’t have to always be serious. With all the new technologies coming out, it’s easy to have fun, interesting articles that are still relevant to what you do.

Conclusion

It’s not easy to market a business, especially online. So many other MSPs are vying for the attention of many of the same prospects you are. That’s okay. A lot of MSPs specialize, serving particular industries like hospitality, healthcare or financial services. Some serve a variety of industries. Others generalize. The point is that there’s room for everybody.

By populating your MSP website with relevant, compelling content, you’re doing all that you possibly can to market your business via SEO. There are no tricks or short cuts, regardless of what others may tell you.

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