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Leaders
March 2020 www.intellinews.com I Page 8
SEMrush to SEO success
SEMrush had turned down multiple offers of from investors before they finally caved and took in $40mn in April 2018 from a group of VC investors led by Greycroft, e.ventures and Siguler Guff. Even then the Boston-based competitive intelligence and end-to-end analytics platform for digital marketing professionals didn't really need the money, but were more interested in the strategic partnerships the deal brought.
“We were already a profitable company and didn't really need the money,” says Eugene Levin, SEMrush’s chief strategy officer.
The company was set up in 2008 in the midst of the global financial crisis by CEO and co-founder Oleg Shchegolev, whose vision was to create a resource for marketers to help them promote their sites and reach their customers beyond the simple search engine optimisation that has been the industry default for many years.
Hockey stick growth
Levin is of Belarusian origin and a VC investor that came across SEMrush several years prior to joining the team and began courting them, without much luck to begin with.
“It was one of the best companies I’d ever seen with revenues of over $50mn a year at the time,” Levin told bne in an exclusive interview.
Today SEMrush caters to the likes of Booking. com, eBay and BNP Paribas to name a few customers who use the software to improve reader insights, analytics and reach. SEMrush
works with one in four of the Fortune 500 companies as well as seven out of ten of the top advertisers. Since the company raised $40mn its growth has accelerated dramatically.
Business is rapidly going online so online visibility has become the key to any e-commerce venture. It used to be a question of getting search engine optimisation (SEO) right, but as with everything
to do with the internet these days simply filling in a few key words and phrases in the boxes at the bottom of the publication form is not enough.
Keywords and channels
Getting keywords is still important of course, but what SEMrush is attempting to do is turn the black art of choosing those words and phrases into a science. And the service SEMrush offers doesn't limit itself to making a page more visible to Google, but also offers ways to promote content across social media like YouTube, Twitter and the gamut of social media sites as well.
Dmitry Melnikov, Co-founder and Chief Operating Officer (left) Oleg Shchegolev, co-founder and CEO (right)