SimilarWeb and Rank Ranger talk acquisition, SEO challenges, opportunities

SimilarWeb, a web analytics company, acquired Rank Ranger, a rank tracking and monitoring tool, last month. Transaction terms, publication It was not revealed on May 16th.

I recently had the opportunity to do a Q & A with SimilarWeb VP, GM Digital Marketing Solutions. Bulk ToledanoAnd Rank Ranger CEO and Founder Shay Harrell..

Toledano and Harel discussed what the acquisition means for both the company and its customers. They are also currently discussing some of the biggest challenges and opportunities in SEO. Here are the highlights.

SimilarWeb

Founded in 2007, the company has more than 1,000 employees. We also have over 2,500 customers worldwide, from start-ups to Fortune 500 companies, including Adidas, Adobe, Booking.com, DHL, Google, MGM and PepsiCo.

According to Toledano, SimilarWeb’s mission is to:

• “Promoting digital growth by providing decision makers at all levels with 360-degree visibility into the digital world. Providing fine-grained insights into every website, mobile app, industry, and market around the world. To do.”

Why did SimilarWeb buy Rank Ranger? Toledano said:

• “Rank Rangers provide SEO managers with search term tracking and monitoring. Their data fidelity and ability to identify ongoing SERP changes have helped many organic search marketers. Believes that by combining SimilarWeb traffic analysis capabilities and datasets with ongoing rank performance, SEO managers can gain complete insights for designing, measuring, reporting, and improving marketing campaigns. From planning to continuous monitoring, practical insights, and improved rankings. “

The acquisition will give many SimilarWeb customers a comprehensive view of their business decisions, Toledano said.

• “For marketers, this means linking campaign strategy research activities to continuous performance and improvement. This means expanding topical ideas and tracking content visibility in search. For other roles that leverage our solutions, we provide additional report granularity to enable close monitoring of enterprises, products, investments, compliance, and competitive insights, for example, potential. And consider ongoing investment and the presence of its digital competitors. Monitoring for compliance of brands and their affiliates and marketing of branded products. Appears in search and other channels, and many other use cases. Investigate the trends closely. “

What do you like about Rank Ranger?

• “So far, all the reports related to ranking granularity. We also like the fidelity of unique engines such as Google For Jobs, which marketers can optimize across specialized search sites.”

This was the second acquisition of SimilarWeb within six months. In November, SimilarWeb acquires Embee Mobile, Mobile Insight Provider. The acquisition was aimed at enhancing the delivery of mobile app intelligence.

Rank ranger

Founded in 2009, the company has “hundreds” of customers, including H & M, Reckitt Benquiser, and The Motley Fool (specifically declined).

All Rank Ranger employees (more than 12 developers and SEO specialists) are currently working at SimilarWeb’s Tel Aviv office. The only thing that really changed was that Rank Ranger became a company owned by SimilarWeb.

Harel sees SimilarWeb as a complement to Rank Ranger. This gives you new opportunities to develop new SEO tools and analytics (traffic analytics, competitor intelligence, advanced reporting, etc.).

Here’s how Harrell summarized what Rank Rangers do:

• “Rank Ranger is an all-in-one SEO and digital marketing tool designed to give companies a strategic advantage through advanced reporting and analysis.”

For many startups, the goal is to be acquired. But that wasn’t the rank ranger’s goal, Harrell said:

• “We have been working closely with SimilarWeb over the past few years, but the synergies are appropriate and at some point we saw a great opportunity.”

I asked Harrell what he remembers most about the early days of the company. At that time, SEO was still in its infancy, and marketers were in high demand for tools to help them perform their daily and monthly tasks.

• “It was very exciting to work with digital marketing agencies to understand their needs and build tools to help automate everyday workflows for early clients. The SEO space is evolving rapidly every year. We needed to adapt and constantly innovate with new indicators and insights to keep up with the pace of rapid change. “

Harrell also shared some highlights from his time at Rank Ranger:

• “Technically, Insight Graph’s innovation has become a best-in-class reporting tool that combines source all-in-one marketing reports. When it comes to business, the earliest and most exciting moments are short-term with Booking.com as a customer. It was a challenging case of a good custom solution in the effort to devise a solution, which led to new offering concepts and many new businesses that emerged from that use case. “

So what does Harel like about SimilarWeb?

• “No doubt, the freshness of the keywords and the database is great, and it’s very different from the world of” our “SEO. Typical SEO tools build keyword datasets based on Keyword Planner, Google Suggest / Related, Search Console, and more. These tools are by nature very noisy and are like oceans where you have to spend a lot of time researching to get value. .. SimilarWeb’s clickstream data allows you to get the latest clean datasets that can be segmented from very different angles. In the next few years, we believe it will be the best general practice used by SEO. “

Today’s biggest SEO challenges and opportunities

According to Toldedano:

• “Coordinating and telling this story in the design of every marketing campaign is their biggest challenge, but it’s also their biggest opportunity. In addition, other non-marketing companies to benefit from SEO insights. By bringing in the role of, you can drive better business decisions and promote their excellence within your organization. “

He added that the challenge is an opportunity for SEO to play a central role within the marketing team.

• “SEO helps coordinate cross-channel marketing activities to have the greatest impact on other marketing roles that combine paid and organic activities. SEO is especially medium- to long-term. You can give the CMO relevant insights when creating a mixed marketing strategy for traffic and brand awareness goals.

SEO is at the crossroads of the creative, analytical and technical disciplines of marketing, so it best represents the voice of the customer and what it means for each of these disciplines, says Soldedano.

• “Customer needs and expressions for organic search are usually the most authentic and long-lasting forms of marketing with the most influential results, in order to promote stronger coordination of marketing campaign activities.”

According to Harrell, catching up with Google is the biggest challenge. More specifically, changes to SERP functionality and display of organic results.

• “These changes are creating new opportunities, intensifying keyword competition and clearly destroying the monopoly of a particular keyword space. For example, in 2015, 10 organic search results and 1 featured snippet = total. 11 domains were in conflict. Today we have 10 organic search results, blocks of related questions, featured snippets, and a new box that allows you to have 20 or more domains. This is one keyword. There is a lot of competition. “

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