Home / Industries / Business software
You sell online software to businesses. Your buyers are few, they compare for weeks and they decide as a group. When they type the name of your category into Google, they first find software comparison sites, review sites and app marketplaces. I won't tell you you'll get ahead of them. I work on more precise searches, the ones where the buyer describes their trade or their problem. On those, a publisher that explains its product clearly has every chance.
15 years in SEO
4 books on SEO and GEO
200+ sites tracked every day
1M / month visits to my e-commerce site
They trusted me with their visibility
Darty
Eurofins
Cegid
EBP
CNP Assurances
Ingram MicroSeven results, only one that wrote the software
The owner of a construction company is looking for software to track his teams' hours. The first six lines are comparison sites, rankings and a marketplace. Your product, designed for this trade, is in seventh place. Move it up.
Fig. 1. Seven results for construction site software. Five have never written a line of code. (The comparison sites ranked your product ninth. None of them knew what a building site is.)
What this means for you. I build pages by trade and by problem, with your screens and your prices: that's what a comparison site can't write for you.
SEO for a software publisher is the work that makes its product visible on Google when a business looks for a tool for a specific trade, function or problem. It relies on pages by trade, by function and by problem solved, on honest comparisons with other solutions, and on documentation open to reading. It is judged by demo requests and trials started by companies in your target market, not by blog visits.
The problem
On “software for” followed by a function, the first page is made up of comparison sites, rankings and review sites. Your product sometimes appears there, among ten others, with a description you didn't write. These sites then sell visibility or leads.
The home page announces an “all-in-one platform” and the following pages list modules. The buyer, meanwhile, types their problem: planning rounds, tracking sites, chasing invoices. No page uses those words.
General articles on business transformation attract students and the curious. Visits go up, demo requests don't move. Useful content is what someone comparing tools reads.
An audit, for real
The site below doesn't exist, but its flaws do: they're the five I spot most often. Hover over a number.
Reinvent your everyday
An innovative, intuitive and collaborative solution to boost your teams' performance.
Request a demoFig. 2. Fictional site, reconstructed. Any resemblance to yours would be a good reason to call me.
What your customers type
Here are six plausible searches for a publisher selling to businesses. They are examples, written without product names. The real list comes out of the audit, with volumes that are often modest.
What works
If your software is used by tradespeople, professional firms and manufacturers, each has its page. It uses their words, their constraints and an example of use. It is on these trade-specific searches that a publisher stands out from generalist comparison sites.
I start from what the user wants to do, not from the name of your modules. “Chase unpaid invoices” gets searched. “Recovery Plus module” doesn't. Each page describes the problem, the solution in your tool and the expected result.
Your buyers compare anyway. They might as well read your version, written with verifiable facts and no disparagement. I also plan a “Who this software isn't for” page, which avoids pointless demos.
A buyer who finds neither a price nor instructions moves on to the next one. A clear pricing page and open online help reassure the user and the IT manager alike. The documentation also answers many precise searches.
The user looks at the features. The director looks at the cost and the time saved. The IT manager looks at security, integrations and data recovery. Each must find their page and be able to pass it on to the others.
What costs dearly
“The platform that reinvents your everyday” doesn't let anyone know whether the tool concerns them. The first sentence must state the function and the audience.
If visitors have to give their phone number to see a screen or a price, they leave. Show the product with screenshots, a short video and use cases.
These pages answer precise questions and prove the product is maintained. Hiding them deprives the website of a large part of its useful content.
An unchecked translation produces text that neither Google nor a foreign buyer takes seriously. Better to do one country well, then a second.
The method
Four steps. I start by listening to your sales team and your support team, who hear buyers' words every day.
One-minute test
Five frank questions to find out whether support makes sense in your situation. Sometimes the answer is no, and I'll tell you.
What it brings in
A ranking doesn't pay a salary. What counts is what it brings: enquiries, customers, revenue. Move your page up and see what it could bring in.
Example assumptions, open to challenge: 300 searches a month for software for your trade, 2% of visitors make an enquiry, one enquiry in three is signed (this varies a lot from one trade to another), €6,000 per client. Click-through rates by position are orders of magnitude, and they have been shifting since Google started showing AI answers above the results. Redo the calculation with your figures
Possible revenue€0
Close to home
A publisher based in Charente rarely sells only within the département. Its market is national. The area brings it something else: first clients close by, whom you can go and see, and specific trades to equip. I co-founded my agency, Newp, near Cognac, I live between Cognac and Paris, and we can meet in the département.
A publisher has to recruit developers and salespeople. Candidates type the company's name before applying. A page presenting the team, the offices in Angoulême and the way of working serves recruitment as much as client trust.
Négoce, production and export of spirits have their own constraints for tracking, stock and documents. If your product meets one of these needs, a page written for this industry, in its vocabulary, can also be read in other wine regions.
A neighbouring workshop using your software is a reference your salespeople can take prospects to visit. With its agreement, tell this story on a page: the initial problem, the roll-out, what changed. Buyers read these pages to the end.
Beyond Google
Software buyers are among the first to ask an AI such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude or Mistral before Google. They write, for example: “we're a forty-person construction company, we want to track hours by site and send them to payroll, which software should we look at?”. The AI draws up a short list and describes each tool in one line.
That line comes from what it has read: your website, your documentation, comparison sites, user reviews. If your pages say which trades the tool is made for, what it does and what it connects to, its description will be accurate. If they talk about an “innovative solution”, the AI will reuse a comparison site's listing, or won't mention you.
Question asked to an AIWe're forty people in construction. Which software should we use to track hours by site and send them to payroll?
Three tools to look at for this need:
Fig. 3. Reconstruction, names hidden. This is the spot we aim for: on the list, with the most precise description.
Three typical cases
These three publishers don't exist. I describe them to show three different orders of priority. Yours will depend on the audit.
Its software has thirty clients, all of whom came through the founders' network.
Its website presents modules and gets enquiries outside its target market.
Buyers always compare it to the same tool.
In practice
Pricing
The fee depends on four things. I give you a precise amount after a free first thirty-minute conversation.
Fancy a game?
A giant takes up the whole first page of your market. It has five weak spots. Take the coin and slide it into the machine.
INSERT COINSLIDE THE COIN INTO THE SLOT
Fig. 4. Sixteen seconds. No towns were harmed in the making of this game.
Together, let's devour your competitors.
One by one, and in order. Every spot gained makes the next one easier to take: that's why it keeps growing. See the method
Who you're talking to
My name is Kévin Papot. More than fifteen years in the job, four co-written books, and the Newp agency, co-founded in Charente. I also run my own online shops, in France and internationally: one of them went from zero to a million visits a month.
Before we talk tags, we talk margin, average basket and profitability. When you book a call, I'm the one who picks up.
FAQ
On the general name of your category, rarely, and I don't promise it. On searches by trade, by problem or comparing against a competitor, yes, a publisher can appear. These are the searches of buyers well advanced in their choice.
Having an accurate, up-to-date listing there is useful, because buyers and AI read them. Paying for promotion is a different decision. I help you measure what these listings bring in before you put a budget into them.
No, if each client is worth a lot and stays a long time. Ten visits from companies in your target market are worth more than a thousand readers of a general article. I target rare, precise searches, and I show you this with your own figures.
I advise it whenever possible. A starting price or a grid by company size is enough. With no price at all, buyers go and look for it on a comparison site, where the figure is sometimes wrong. The final decision is yours.
That's a point to check with your legal adviser before publication. On my side, I prepare a text based on verifiable facts, dated, with no value judgements. You decide what is published.
Not necessarily. I sort the articles: those that attract your target market are linked to the product pages, those that only attract the curious are merged or removed. The next topics come from questions asked in demos.
I structure the page and list the questions buyers ask. The answers come from your technical and legal teams. I write no statement about data protection without their written approval.
I check that as part of the audit. Some websites display their content in a way Google reads poorly or late. If so, I tell your developers what needs fixing. They stay in control of the code.
Comparison and pricing pages can have an effect within a few weeks on an already known website. Trade pages tend to take several months. I set no timeframe in advance. You follow progress in the monthly report.
I have worked on more than 200 websites in fifteen years, and I run my own online shops, where every page has to bring in a sale. Your sales cycle is longer and involves several people. The method stays the same: start from what the buyer types.
See also
30 minutes · video call · with me
Together we look at where you stand on Google and in AI, and what should change first.
