How technology firms get inbound enquiries from search

Read the first line of your last three enquiries. Count how many name your stack. A finance head types "Tally data not syncing with our billing software", not the name of your integration platform. So write one page for each problem buyers type, one for each industry you serve and one for each service a buyer can hire. End every page with a single, clear way to reach you.

What do buyers actually type into Google?

Most firms write their site from the inside: the stack, the certifications, the partner badges. Buyers start from the outside, with something broken or slow or about to be audited.

Look at how your own sales calls begin. "Our staff keep exporting to Excel and mailing it around." "We have three branches and no one can see stock." Or: "A customer asked if our data is backed up." Each of those is a search phrase waiting for a page.

A quick way to collect them: open your last twenty enquiry emails and call notes, and copy the first sentence of each in the buyer's own words. Group those that mean the same thing. Those groups are your page list.

Which pages does a technology firm need first?

Start with a small set, built in this order.

Hold the blog until these pages exist. A blog post that nobody can act on brings readers who never write to you.

How should a problem page be written?

Open with the symptom in the language of the person who has it. Then say what usually causes it, in two or three sentences without jargon. Then say what you do about it and where you stop.

Include the thing most technology sites leave out: who you need to speak to on the buyer's side. A page on "approvals stuck in email" should say that you will need whoever signs off purchases, because the tool will not fix a rule nobody has written down.

Keep the technology names, but move them lower. A line such as "We build this on whichever platform your team already pays for, and we say so if it is the wrong one" is useful. A wall of logos is not.

A worked case: a Vadodara firm and the dye traders

Imagine a four-person firm in Vadodara that connects accounting packages to the order systems of dye and chemical traders. Its homepage says "connected systems, scalable architecture". Traders arrive, find nothing about their own work and leave. Every rupee figure or count below is invented to show the method.

The founder reads the last twenty enquiry emails. Fourteen begin with one complaint: invoices raised in the order system are re-typed into the accounts package by a clerk at day end, and the two never agree at month end. The site had never used the word "re-typed". That gap is the problem: the firm wrote about architecture, and buyers wrote about a clerk's evening.

The firm writes one page, "Invoices typed twice: why a trader's books and orders never agree". It shows the same invoice in both systems. A four-field form asks which two packages the trader uses. A second page covers the trader's other repeat complaint, stock counts that differ between godown and office. Because the form records which page the visitor came from, the firm can later count how many calls each page brought. After two months one page has brought four calls and the other none, so the firm rewrites the quiet page around the clerk's task rather than the stock figure. Only one of the four calls turns into paid work in that time, which is a modest start, and the rest of the site stays as it was.

What on the page decides whether a visitor writes to you?

Four things, and a page that lacks any of them leaks visitors.

1. A reason to trust you in the first screen. One line naming the kind of firm you work for, or one finished job.
2. A single next step. Four form fields. Not a menu of six contact options.
3. A visible limit. "We do not work with firms below ten users" saves both sides time and makes the rest believable.
4. A reply route you will keep. If the form promises a call, someone must make it. A promise broken on the first contact may cost you more than having no form.

If you sell to buyers who also check with an AI assistant before they write, plain pages with direct answers may help there too. Our note on SEO, AEO and GEO explains how the three differ.

When should a technology firm not rely on search?

Skip search as your main channel in three cases. If your whole market is fewer than a hundred named companies, such as large manufacturers who buy only by referral, build a list and reach them directly. If your product is so new that nobody types its name or the problem it solves, you have to create the demand elsewhere first. And if you cannot answer an enquiry quickly, more enquiries will only expose that.

Search also takes time to show results, and nobody can promise a position. The honest expectation is that a few specific pages begin to bring a trickle of well-matched enquiries before a large set brings volume. Our guide on how long SEO takes sets out what to expect.

Three pages to write before anything else

Pull your last twenty enquiries, circle the three complaints that repeat, and write one page for each. Leave the homepage until later. Planning the page list is the work of SEO strategy, and other work for software and IT firms is under technology. When you want a second reader for your list of problems, tell us what you need.