The ICT Industry in Costa Rica: General Country Profile

Costa Rica is home to almost five million people and an active workforce that puts a great deal of emphasis on education. With the lofty goal of becoming a completely bilingual nation in the next decade, Costa Rica is encouraging students to pursue careers in the technology sector – and the results so far are impressive.

Costa Rica’s technology exports are high, and hundreds of technology companies have set up offices in the country. In fact, 29 of the Fortune 100 companies have operations in Costa Rica, including Amazon, Intel, Dole, P&G, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, IBM, and many more.

Why Work With Costa Rican IT Companies

According to the Global Innovation Index 2024, Costa Rica ranks sixth among the 20 economies in Latin America for entrepreneurial activity. Costa Rica is home to a highly educated workforce and attractive incentives for investors.

For these reasons, businesses across a variety of technological sectors, including manufacturing, microchips, life sciences, software, and fintech, are flourishing in Costa Rica.

What to Pay Attention to When Working With Costa Rican IT Companies

On the other hand, there are also challenges when working with Costa Rican IT companies and web agencies. Based on a report of the Canadian Trade Commission, two important issues make it somewhat difficult to work with and in the Costa Rican IT sector: 

• Doing business with Costa Rican government companies tends to be slow and bureaucratic due to excessive procedures and slow decision-making.
• The agreement for the promotion and protection of investments of Chinese companies in Costa Rica, signed in 2016, could affect the investments of companies from other countries. This is supported by a Free Trade Agreement, and remains in force to this day.

How Reliable Are Costa Rican IT Companies and Web Agencies

Due to highly skilled professionals, Costa Rican IT companies and web agencies are considered an attractive opportunity for potential foreign clients in Latin America, compared to other countries in the region. 

Additionally, IT companies from Costa Rica benefit from a well-developed infrastructure and provide solutions based on the latest technologies, such as AI and Data Analytics.

How Does the Costa Rican IT Infrastructure Relate to the Neighboring Countries?

Compared to the neighboring countries, Costa Rica’s IT infrastructure and industry feel much solid but at the same time bureaucratic and less accessible for the international market. For a country with less than 5 million people and 600+ IT companies operating in the sector, the industry scores a much lower growth rate per year than its capacities, and the reason may be the systematic changes in government policies towards the ICT sector, and preferential foreign agreements with other countries also related to the ICT sector. 

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:

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• 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
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• 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. 

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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. 

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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.