Colombian ICT Industry: General Profile

Colombia is now a strategic center when it comes to the outsourcing of IT and business services, with international investors attracted by the skills and size of its workforce, its favorable business climate, and its geographic location.

The sector has shown impressive growth, with Colombia receiving 387 new investment projects in the BPO, KPO, software, and IT services sector in the past seven years, according to fDi Markets and PRO COLOMBIA reports.

Why You Should Work With Colombia-based IT Companies

One of the biggest draws for investors is the breadth and diversity of Colombian talent. Colombia is ranked in the 57th position, according to the IMD World Talent Ranking 2025, ahead of countries such as Brazil, Peru, Chile, and Venezuela.

Colombia's Ministry of Information Technology and Communications (MinTIC) certified more than 37,000 Colombians in digital skills in the third quarter of 2017, adding to the field of innovative developers in the software development sector. In 2025, the Colombian government continues to prioritize digital education, aiming to train 68.000 tech students in digital skills. 

Figures suggest there are more than 4,000 software and IT service companies across Colombia. About 3% of those are large companies, 80% of which are based in the central region of the country, with four percent in the north, six percent in the west, four percent in the east, and the rest distributed across the country.

What You Should Be Aware of When Working With Colombian-based IT Companies

South America tends to be a more attractive destination for the IT market, and Colombian IT companies and web agencies are taking advantage of this opportunity. However, there are several aspects that need to be paid attention to when working with companies based in Colombia. Lack of experience, underdeveloped IT infrastructure, and the incapacity of competing with the US and European IT companies create challenges and doubts for potential clients in deciding whether to choose a Colombian IT company as a partner for their next web project, despite the cheap hourly rate it has to offer compared to the international global market. 

How Reliable Are Colombian-based IT Companies

Gartner Inc., an international consultancy company, ranked Colombia as one of five destinations in Latin America to offer Business Process and Information Technology Outsourcing, highlighting the country’s bilingual labor force and salary competitiveness within the sector. In addition, Everest Group, the global consulting firm, mentioned Colombia as an optimal market for finance and accounting outsourcing (FAO), legal process outsourcing (LPO), and business process outsourcing (BPO). Likewise, the company asserted the country’s strengths for its commerce. 

How Does Colombian IT Infrastructure Relate to the Neighboring Countries?

As the third-largest provider of IT services in Latin America after Brazil and Mexico with US$ 2.579 million (According to the International Data Corporation – IDC), Colombia is rising to the top due to its skilled workforce of more than 1.2 million professionals in the financial and services industry, incentives provided by the government, a continuous free trade agreement platform, competitive free trade zone regime, proximity, and connectivity to North America. These features and benefits have created an ideal business environment for venture capital firms and angel investors looking to invest in innovative and attractive opportunities.

SEO (search engine optimization) is the process of optimizing your website in order to get a higher ranking in organic search results and consequently more organic traffic.

SEO is a long term strategy and requires advanced knowledge of ranking algorithms and some technical background, to be able to optimize websites for popular search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo, etc.

According to the latest survey on digital marketing conducted by TechBehemoths, about 70% of IT companies revealed that SEO is their main channel for leads, meaning that it’s a vital marketing activity that generates traffic, prospects and sales.

Some of the benefits of SEO are:

• Free organic traffic
• Brand awareness 
• Better control over brand traffic
• A vital marketing channel for leads & sales
• Supports other channels: social media, paid ads, direct traffic, etc.
• Optimizes your advertising budget
• Usually, has a higher conversion rate
• Gives you a competitive advantage
• Is a good long term investment, generating decent results

It’s not easy to find a reputable SEO company, as some SEO agencies used to provide questionable/suspicious services in the past, and lots of businesses became reluctant to pay for search engine optimization services.

When looking for and choosing an SEO service provider, you should consider a lot of aspects. Ideally, you should do some basic research, set up clear goals and ask yourself a few questions before hiring a company.

Here are some things to look for when searching for SEO agencies to partner with:

• Expertise
• Portfolio
• Years in business
• Case studies
• Price (expect to pay at least $30 / hour if you’re hiring an agency)
• Approach and particularities (technical SEO, link building, content optimization, etc.)
• Communication and reporting

TechBehemoths lists more than 30,400 SEO companies from all over the world. Check out their profiles and feel free to get in touch with them.

To ease the selection process, we’ve created a powerful filter which you can use to narrow down the results based on your requirements and shortlist the companies.

SEO and search in the AI era

SEO has dramatically changed since the launch of chatbots like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, etc. (post end of 2022), and disrupted the whole search industry for both business owners/publishers and users who search on the web.

User interaction has completely changed, with more users opting for natural language questions instead of search keywords.

While the traditional 10 blue links in Google or Bing are not gone, their importance has shifted , as traditional search engines now integrate summarized answers via AI (Eg. Google AI Overviews, Bing Copilot Search).

Traditional search engines are shifting to chatbot-like interfaces, where users discuss with AI and get relevant and customized answers, just like in ChatGPT or Claude.

This is good and bad news for both business owners and users.

On the positive side, AI chatbots offer endless possibilities for content creation, automation, customization, app/software development, etc. and the entry point is really low. But there are downsides too:

There have been many concerns that AI systems are using copyrighted content to train themselves and generate answers without giving credit or sending referral traffic to the original content creators.

Users can experience AI hallucinations (made up, false information), no real-time data, bias and might diminish critical thinking and evaluation of multiple sources to create an opinion or an action.

SEO is still the foundation

Being present and visible in both search engines and chatbots is critical these days. SEO is the foundation for that, as chatbots operate in a similar way: they use their large language models (LLMs) to answer questions and 3rd party sources (Bing index, web APIs, etc.) to provide real time or recent info and citations/sources within the answers.

If your website is present in Google or Bing index and ranks well in their organic search results, it’s most likely that it will be often cited in chatbots (although it’s not directly correlated).

This is why a new type of SEO has emerged: AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) or GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) which is basically SEO for AI.

To make sure that your website ranks well and is present in traditional search index and AI based search engines, you still need to have a good technical SEO foundation. Here are some fundamental aspects that you need to consider:

• Robots.txt - should be properly configured so that search engines can access your website

• Crawlability - make sure you have a sitemap and meta robots tags on pages that you want or don’t want to appear in search results

• Duplicate content - implement canonical tags, so that search engines know what are the primary/preferred pages to be indexed and ranked/cited.

• Site speed - is essential for users and search engines. Your web pages should load fast on all kinds of devices.

• Mobile first - smartphones are the primary devices for most users, so having a mobile-first website is highly recommended. For more advanced sites with high traffic volumes: PWA and mobile apps could work too.  

• Schema markup - chatbots and search engines rely on structured data to better understand your pages and the type of content you are serving to users. Common schema types can be: local business, event, product, review, rating, etc.

There are other parts of SEO that should be also considered like content creation and backlink/citation building.

Content creation is a significant part of SEO and many companies choose to either outsource or automate the process by using AI tools. It’s important to note that search engines don’t penalize content created by AI, however the quality of content is vital and often content created at scale with AI, doesn’t present much value.

This is why SEO agencies can have a smart/modern approach where they use humans/professionals and AI to help them create valuable content, not just generate content that has no value.

Before you hire an SEO agency it’s important to ask and know exactly how they use AI and what’s their workflow.

Some agencies offer link building/citation building services. Our advice is to avoid bulk/automated link submission services and opt for customized and high quality link building services. Focus on quality rather than quantity.

Managing technical SEO can be overwhelming, hence you can opt for reliable SEO agencies that can make sure your website is up and ranking in search engines, while you can focus on achieving the desired business results.

How to shortlist SEO agencies for your projects?

Finding the right SEO agency for your projects might be a difficult task. That’s why, TechBehemoths offers a few tools to facilitate this process:

Search

Simply search for SEO related services and include the desired location (city or country) and browse the listings. Look at companies with awards, positive reviews, great/excellent profile strength and strong portfolios. 

Feel free to get in touch with the right companies directly from listings.

Advanced filter

Use the advanced filter to narrow down your search results by lots of handy criteria like: location, technologies and tools, team size, hourly rate, review count and rating, and many more. 

You can also sort the filtered results to get a more organized view of your shortlisted companies.

There is an option to save your filter results and choose to receive notifications if new companies meet your filter criteria.

Submit project

Head over to Submit project techbehemoths.com/project-submission and include your project description and specifications, and our system will match it with the best possible tech service providers. You will get a list of curated companies ready to execute your projects.