Imagine you own the best store in the world. Stunning products, great service, and competitive prices. Now imagine that no one can find your store. Without footfall, there’s no way you can survive. The information superhighway paved the way for virtual shops and e-commerce sites to pop up everywhere, with the promise of a global audience. In theory, that sounds wonderful, but in practice, you’re just a needle in a haystack.
In fact, you’re even smaller than that. The key to doing business online is enabling customers to find you through various channels and then directing them to your site.
From SEO to a suite of market-leading apps
That’s where companies like Semrush step in. Back in 2008, they focused initially on SEO, however, by 2014, they realized that their marketplace was changing rapidly. Businesses now relied on multiple channels to attract clients and needed more and more tools to be able to successfully attract a customer base. The major insight that Semrush had was that people didn’t want to have 50 separate tools, constantly switching from app to app or page to page, but they wanted one comprehensive platform.
In the same way that Microsoft has a suite of business apps, or Google has productivity apps, Semrush offers its own collection of tools for the would-be entrepreneur to gain coveted online visibility.
How Semrush was born
Semrush was created by two self-professed SEO nerds: Oleg Schegolev and Dmitri Melnikov. Like most good inventions, theirs was born out of a personal necessity. They were frustrated with the challenges that they faced in trying to promote products online and realized that they had the ability to do something about it: Semrush was born in 2008.
An instrumental figure in the development of the company is Mr. Eugene Levin, Chief Strategy and Corporate Development Officer. After joining the company in 2016, he quickly helped them increase their annual recurring revenue (subscription-based businesses use the term to describe the number of customers using their service) as well as attracting investment to scale up the operation.
Levin often balks when he hears Semrush, and its services, wrongly described as ‘competitive intelligence tools’. Levin explains that Semrush has always been about, “ideas, experiments, trends, and research. We have always focused on helping clients find new, dynamic ideas.
It’s true that when we started 13 years ago, we offered services that allowed you to merely analyze other sites; but even then, we always focused on market research as a means to a greater, more comprehensive promotional strategy.”
What makes Semrush unique?
Let’s say, for example, that you want to build your own promotional strategy for a new business. Like many starting out, you want to see where your competitors appear in the search rankings. You want to know what keywords they’re using and where they’re picking up sales. You could do a ‘manual’ search, and try to figure out what’s happening behind the scenes, but that would be time-consuming and indiscriminate.
Semrush offers comprehensive reports that reveal how the competitor’s pages are ranked, what kind of SEO optimization is in use, what backlinks the site has and where site traffic originated. Armed with comprehensive information, business owners are able to strategize and find a way to make themselves stand out from the crowd.
Levin also points out that, “Semrush is different from other solutions because it is difficult to find a tool that solves so many problems in one place. Semrush provides a platform that facilitates your entire workflow: from learning about your niche targets and creating a strategy, to analyzing the final results. By providing all the necessary tools in one interface, we reduce the time people spend on switching from tool to tool.”
Continued expansion
Given the size of the Semrush customer base—over 72,000 paying customers from 142 countries, as of the end of March 2021—it seems that the company continues to expand its footprint in the market. Moreover, industry recognition—like G2’s list of Best Global Sellers in the software category for 2021–has only solidified Semrush’s standing.
As Levin puts it, “It shows how important these tools are and how willing our customers are to invest in them. Semrush is here to help businesses break through the noise and become visible to potential customers. I don’t believe that any other platform can offer everything we do…”
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