14 DAY TRIAL // SEO can be a very lucrative business, if solely because it’s so tough for an outsider to have a very good understanding of the practices involved. This shroud of mystery is great for SEO experts and companies, in a way, but not so great for their clients. A startup, BrightEdge, has been working on changing that and, in the three years that it has operated in stealth mode, it has managed to convince some pretty big clients like MySpace and VMWare. Now, the company is making the BrightEdge SEO Platform available to everyone.
"SEO can completely transform a company's ability to generate leads and increase revenue online," Jim Yu, founder and CEO of BrightEdge, said. "What's held SEO back has been the difficulty in proving and measuring its ROI -- until now. With today's announcement, BrightEdge offers online marketers the first comprehensive solution that provides clear visibility into the business value of SEO. Now in broad release, our unique SEO platform is already enabling our customers to drive more than $1 billion in organic search revenue annually," he added.
BrightEdge promises that its tools are able to, for the first time, allow companies to get clear data on how effective a SEO campaign is. It also enables marketers and SEO companies to provide their customers with real and reliable numbers. Users can see how different SEO campaigns are performing and focus their attention and money on the ones offering the best return of investment (ROI).
The problem so far has been that, unlike search advertising, the results of a SEO campaign can be difficult to quantify. With search ads, knowing the ROI is trivial, you know what you pay for the ads and you know how many people end up being your customers. With SEO, it’s hard to know if users end up on your site organically or because of the optimizations. BrightEdge says it already manages over $1 billion in search revenue for its few existing customers.