SEO for Tech & SaaS Companies in Vancouver

Four Kinds of Search, and Only Some of Them Are Yours to Win

Software buyers search in roughly four ways, and each one needs a different kind of page. Problem searches come first: someone describes the thing that is going wrong — invoices stuck in approval, a team losing track of tasks — before they know which kind of tool fixes it. Pages that explain the problem well, and show where software fits, reach buyers earliest. Category searches come next: 'best expense management software', 'CRM for small agencies'. These are crowded, and large review sites and established vendors compete hard for them. A smaller company can still win narrower versions — the category for a specific industry, size or use case — where the big pages are too general to be the best answer. Comparison and alternative searches are the closest to a decision: 'X vs Y', 'alternatives to X'. They are also among the most winnable, because the person searching already knows the category and wants a specific answer. Honest comparison pages that say where a competitor is the better fit earn more trust than ones that pretend you win every row. Branded and documentation searches are the fourth: people looking for how your product does something. A help centre and documentation that Google can crawl answer those searches and quietly support every other page on the site. The work is choosing which of these to go after first, given the company's size and the competition, and then building those pages properly.