A competitive intelligence platform for online marketing

SEMrush is a competitive research service company for online marketing with in-house digital marketing toolkit. In 2018, SEMrush completed its 10 year of being an online visibility management platform, ensuring businesses get measurable results from online marketing. “SEMrush was born as an internal solution for another product to help founders see what their competitors were doing in digital marketing. From its early days as an SEO-focused tool, SEMrush is now offering solutions for CMOs, business development managers, search, content and social media marketers,” says Fernando Angulo, Head of International Partnerships at SEMrush. The company employs nearly 500 people in six offices worldwide.

Launched in the middle of financial crisis of 2008, product has seen organic growth immediately. “Ten years later, 3,000,000 users in 190 countries are using SEMrush, sharing the feedback and letting us provide them with a better product every day,” states Angulo, adding that in 2018, SEMrush raised US$40 million in investments for further development. SEMrush also launched its Competitive Intelligence 2.0 toolkit to provide the customers with the full range of market insights, revamped to meet the needs of marketing executives, heads of marketing, marketing strategists, market analysts, and business development managers.

The most comprehensive picture of online visibility provided by SEMrush is backed by the largest keyword database on the market – 7.7 billion keywords and 400+ million web domains covered in 190 countries and regions. Angulo informs that today with more than 30 tools, SEMrush meets all marketers’ demands. It provides them with solutions for competitive analysis, keyword research, enhancing backlink profile, technical SEO, advertising insights and strategy, planning and tracking social media activities, best content creation, brand monitoring, and many others. “One user will go to SEMrush for keyword research, while another has drilled down into the suite, checked out all our new reports, started a Content Analyzer and Ad Builder. And these two users have a completely different vision,” points out Angulo. He reminds that the product is constantly evolving and an enormous number of factors affect its evolution.

Angulo believes that SEMrush is essential for any company present online, whether it has a freelance marketer, an agency outsourced or an in-house marketing department. Now, SEMrush is entering the enterprise market to boost efficiency in the big in-house teams adjusting the product and separate tools to the unique clients’ needs. “SEMrush gives the power of knowledge and control. Knowing the market situation and investigating the trends are the key to understanding the actual state of things and how to improve it. SEMrush is a unique control panel of all marketing efforts you are making and about to start,” he states.

Innovation is an overused term for a great concept, asserts Angulo, adding further, “For me, it’s about how you adapt to the changing environment and how you choose your way of evolution. It is applicable both for the product and the management. SEMrush was driven as an agile-company from its first days. But growing up in a very rapid way makes keeping flat structure more complicated, so we adjust agile technics where it is possible to make our working processes efficient. As our CEO Oleg Schegolev says, don’t stick to the cargo cult mentality. That is a problem of many companies today – they are trying to seem innovative, recreate successful and ‘fashionable’ technics to the business instead of finding its own way of building a business that will be benchmarked instead of aligning with others.”

SEMrush will keep adding more tools to the suite and upgrade the existing ones. Angulo points out that the customers will win from bigger databases, more keywords, and a greater variety of digital marketing tools they would be able to use.

Earlier this year, the company had a lot of product updates. The database was expanded up to 8.3 billion keywords and CPC Map tool was launched, that gives marketers an opportunity to approach keyword research from a global perspective and have a more complete picture of advertising costs in a specific niche. “Our Traffic Analytics got to a new level with mobile data; we released several important tools for Local SEO – Brand new Listing Management tool and Position Tracking targeting by the ZIP codes. And that is not event the biggest part of what we’ve done,” mentions Angulo, affirming that bolstering its position as a trusted web data provider is one of the company’s targets as well.