Creating content for a STEM brand is hard.
If you’re in science, tech/fintech, or engineering, you’ve probably hit one or more of these roadblocks:
Sound familiar?
- SEO feels like a dead end. The high-volume keywords are too broad. The niche terms – as in the ones that feel relevant to your audience – get no traffic.
- Your audience is smart. Oversimplify the topic, and you lose credibility. Go too niche, and you’re talking to a tiny number of people.
- There’s not much content that’s highly relevant to your products or services online making it hard for marketers to research without direction. Google can’t always keep up, and AI tools can’t either.
- Your experts are busy. They’re brilliant, but content isn’t their priority. Without their input, marketing falls flat.
“As we offer SEO for fintech, technology and engineering companies, we’re fortunate to work with some truly brilliant STEM brands at Hot House, but quite honestly, even we have to work hard on this. Especially when it comes to gathering correct information. It means we’ve had to get creative in our approach and recognise our subject-matter limits. If we’re going to create strong SEO website content, expert input is everything.”
– Paddy, Hot House Digital
It’s a problem we see again and again in our work with STEM companies. These brands are solving highly technical problems, often in cutting-edge spaces, but their marketing doesn’t reflect that. Why? Because the people with the most valuable knowledge aren’t the ones writing the content.
Why traditional SEO doesn’t work in STEM (and why keyword research is a nightmare)
A lot of digital marketing advice out there is built for mass market product industries: fashion, lifestyle, travel, home technology etc. These sectors thrive on consumer trend takes, listicles, seasonal ideas and how-tos. That’s great if there’s an audience to consume it.
Thing is, when it comes to STEM, all of that stuff just doesn’t translate.
For one, the keywords that actually matter to your audience are often too niche to show up in SEO tools like SEMrush, Ahrefs, or Moz. Or, the terms that do show up are so generic that they completely miss the mark.
Let’s say you’re working on content for an advanced materials engineering company. You want to write about a new technique for enhancing structural integrity. A quick search in SEMrush might pull up terms like “structural integrity test”.
The problem here is that these terms might have search volume, (albeit small) but the search terms themselves are too broad and don’t reflect how experts (as in the audience who will actually read these articles) actually think or talk about the process.
But you try to get more granular – something like “modulus of rupture analysis for composite materials” you’re suddenly looking at zero search volume. It’s so niche that it barely registers.
So, what can you do? The challenge is approaching the topic in a way that you can naturally include the high volume keywords and the lower volume keywords, and both audiences can be addressed and have their needs met.
How to do STEM keyword research the right way
Instead of relying solely on SEO tools, you need to combine them with insider knowledge. Here’s how:
- Talk to your experts: Ask them how they describe the processes, challenges, and solutions. Often, the right terminology is buried in day-to-day discussions.
- Dig into internal documents: Technical reports, project outlines, and presentations can reveal niche terms that won’t show up in standard tools.
- Mine your own data: Your site’s internal search data or customer queries are gold mines for finding the exact language your audience uses.
- Check Reddit or AnswerThePublic to see if any other search terms show up there.
Tools like SEMrush can still be valuable, but only when combined with real-world insight. The trick is to start with a foundation of authentic knowledge, then validate your findings with search data, not the other way around.
And once you’ve got those insights, that’s where expert interviews come in. Use them to clarify the concepts behind the terms, making sure the content you’re about to produce is both accurate and audience-relevant.
So, what SEO does work for STEM brands?
OK, so now we’ve covered the keyword research woes and how to fix them, let’s turn our attention to SEO on the whole. Here’s the secret: SEO does work for STEM, but only when it reflects your internal expertise.
Search engines reward websites that add new information to the web. This is called “information gain,” and it’s a big part of how Google measures quality. That means content based on real-world experience (not blog filler) can outperform generic SEO articles, even if the topic is niche.
This is where expert input becomes your competitive advantage.
When your engineers, developers, or researchers weigh in, your content:
- Covers concepts others don’t understand well enough to write about
- Reflects your real-world process and IP
- Builds credibility in the eyes of both Google and your audience
And because EEAT (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness) plays a massive part in whether your content shows up in the SERPs and where (though, annoyingly, EEAT is not explicitly touted as a specific ranking factor) we can safely say that expert-driven content is both better and strategically smarter, so certainly worth doing.
What to do next…
Here’s the good news: you already have the expertise. You just need a system to access it.
In part 2, we’ll show you exactly how to convince your experts to take the time to side down and talk to you, and run expert interviews that:
- Get expert insights from busy technical leaders
- Surface powerful insights that no one else has
- Turn raw knowledge into polished, optimised content
Read Part 2: How to get STEM experts talking (without annoying them)
