Semrush Holdings, Inc. operates as an online visibility management software-as-a-service ('SaaS') platform.
The company enables companies globally to identify and reach the right audience for their content, in the right context, and through the right channels. The company's proprietary SaaS platform enables the company to aggregate and enrich trillions of data points collected from more than 808 million unique domains. The company's platform enables its customers to understand trends and act up...
Semrush Holdings, Inc. operates as an online visibility management software-as-a-service ('SaaS') platform.
The company enables companies globally to identify and reach the right audience for their content, in the right context, and through the right channels. The company's proprietary SaaS platform enables the company to aggregate and enrich trillions of data points collected from more than 808 million unique domains. The company's platform enables its customers to understand trends and act upon unique insights to improve their online visibility, drive high-quality traffic to their websites and social media pages, as well as online listings, distribute highly targeted content to their customers, and measure the effectiveness of their digital marketing campaigns. As of December 31, 2023, the company's differentiated platform empowered more than 1,041,000 active free customers and nearly 108,000 paying customers in over 155 countries.
The company's fully integrated SaaS platform leverages its proprietary technology, differentiated data, and actionable insights to improve online visibility. The company utilizes machine learning capabilities to synthesize broad and deep data sets to derive actionable insights and analytics. The company's ability to aggregate, crawl, and process massive data sets, including search engine, website traffic, backlink, online advertising, panel, and social media data, combined with the company's ability to obtain data from its customers through application programming interfaces ('APIs'), enables the company's software to generate a comprehensive view of a company's online visibility profile and identify the specific keywords, advertisements, third-party websites, and content that are driving traffic. The company's SaaS platform creates significant network effects as the company grows the number of its customers and the company's customers provide the company with more data. By combining the company's customer data with its own market data, the company is able to improve its algorithms, and in turn, increase the accuracy of the company's metrics and analytics. The company also integrates with third-party solutions to create comprehensive end-to-end workflows across the entire marketing funnel. These workflows include analyzing trends, identifying potential opportunities to optimize visibility, creating high-quality content efficiently, helping customers assess different marketing approaches, executing campaigns regularly, and measuring the effectiveness of their marketing campaigns. As a result, the company empowers companies to improve their online visibility across key channels through a holistic strategy.
In a highly fragmented market with a myriad of network- and channel-specific solutions, the company's differentiated and integrated platform provides comprehensive insights into a company's online visibility.
The company's technology collects, aggregates, and enriches a broad set of fragmented data across networks and channels, which the company leverages to derive valuable and actionable insights that the company provides its customers. As the company's data assets grow, its ability to provide insights improves, attracting more customers to the company's platform and enabling the company to invest in new and existing products, thereby further strengthening its competitive position. According to G2.com, Inc. ('G2'), the company's platform is listed in the Best Global Software Companies and listed as a leader across 17 software categories, including SEO, competitive intelligence, marketing analytics, content analytics, and social media analytics, which reinforces the strategic advantages of providing a comprehensive solution. G2 ranks different products and vendors based on reviews gathered from its user community (subject to certain minimum requirements concerning sample size and reviewer composition), as well as data aggregated from online sources and social networks, to which it applies its proprietary algorithm to calculate satisfaction and market presence scores ranging from 0 to 100 from which the products are ranked.
The company offers its solutions on a multi-price point, recurring subscription basis, which provides incremental levels of access to the company's products, tools, and add-ons across online visibility management. Some customers start using the company's products, tools, and add-ons on a free basis before purchasing a subscription to receive premium functionality and additional user licenses. The company's compelling value proposition, effective go-to-market strategy, and recurring revenue model drives efficient unit economics. These attributes have enabled the company to acquire nearly 108,000 paying customers as of December 31, 2023, spanning a broad range of industries and geographies.
The company utilizes a highly efficient, low-touch sales approach focused on driving customers to its platform through a self-service model, allowing the company's sales team to focus on retention and account expansion. The company includes both monthly recurring paid subscriptions, which renew automatically unless canceled, as well as annual recurring paid subscriptions so long as the company does not have any indication that a customer has canceled or intends to cancel its subscription and the company continues to generate revenue from them.
On February 23, 2023, the company completed a purchase agreement with Rank, LLC ('Traffic Think Tank'), acquiring certain intangible assets of Traffic Think Tank. On December 1, 2023, the company completed a stock purchase agreement to acquire approximately 60% of the voting equity interests in Datos Inc. ('Datos').
Growth Strategies
The key elements of the company's growth strategy are to acquire new customers; expand the use of the company's platform by its existing paying customer base; continue to innovate and develop new products and features; and pursue opportunistic mergers & acquisitions.
Platform
The company's SaaS platform has been purpose-built to help companies manage their online visibility and ensure they identify and reach the right audience in the right context and through the right channels. The company utilizes proprietary technology and machine learning capabilities to aggregate, cleanse, and analyze broad and deep datasets to derive differentiated insights and analytics for the company's customers to manage their online visibility. The company's unique set of data assets have been developed as its network of customers has grown and includes more than 808 million domains, 25 billion keywords, click stream panel data from billions of events per week, 43 trillion backlinks, 25 billion URLs crawled per day on average, and a range of data aggregated from social media networks.
The company obtains data through a mix of proprietary and third-party data sources. The company's data sources include:
Data the company collects from websites algorithmically through the company's proprietary data collection techniques, including web crawling of third-party websites;
Data purchased from independent third-party data providers, which includes clickstream data, search engine data, online advertising data, and data from social media sources; and
Reference data that the company's customers grant the company access to, which includes the company's customers' website and social media data. The company obtains social media data through APIs that connect to social media platform operators, including Facebook, X (Twitter), Instagram, Pinterest, and LinkedIn.
The company integrates with a wide range of third-party solutions to seamlessly create comprehensive end-to-end workflows across the key components of a company's online strategy. These workflows include analyzing trends, identifying potential opportunities, creating high-quality content efficiently, helping customers assess different marketing approaches, executing campaigns regularly, and measuring the effectiveness of their digital marketing campaigns. The company's intuitive, easy-to-use platform prioritizes customer experience and collaboration to empower companies to develop a holistic strategy for their online visibility across key channels.
The company offers digital online visibility products, tools, and add-ons across SEO, SEM, content marketing, market research, advertising research, local marketing, reporting, social media management, and digital PR.
Business Model
The company offers its paid products and tools to customers via monthly or annual subscription plans, as well as one-time and ongoing add-ons. The company's subscription-based model enables customers to select a plan based on their needs and license the company's platform on a per month basis. The company has four paid subscription tiers for the company's core product, Pro, Guru, Business, and an Enterprise product offering, as well as several add-ons for an incremental cost. The company offers time-limited free trials, which allow prospective customers to test the functionality of the company's Pro or Guru plans. At the end of the trial period, prospective customers either become paying customers or are switched to free customers.
Free. The company's free offering grants access to its platform and limits the number of results, keywords to track, and projects. Free accounts help generate demand for the company's paid offerings as active free customers experience the capabilities and functionality of the company's platform and are prompted to upgrade to a paid membership when they reach free customer usage limits.
Pro. Pro provides access to the company's platform and ongoing software updates. With Pro, customers have the ability to run their SEO, PPC, and SMM projects with advanced tools and features.
Guru. Guru provides the same features as Pro, with the addition of Content Marketing Platform, historical data, extended limits, and Google Data Studio Integration.
Business. Business provides all of the same features as Guru, plus API access, extended limits and share of voice metric.
Enterprise. The Enterprise SEO product requires a Business subscription and includes AI driven analysis, customizable dashboards, deep reporting capabilities, and extended limits.
The company has a demonstrated track record of upgrading customers to higher price point plans. Customers upgrade to higher price point plans to increase usage limits and add features, including content marketing tools and historical data tracking. Within the company's subscription tiers, customers have the ability to purchase increased usage limits by adding the ability to create additional projects, keywords to track, and user licenses without moving to a higher price point plan. The company's dynamic pricing model enables the company's customers to tailor a plan that is suitable for their strategic needs and affords the company the ability to expand within the company's customer base as customers seek additional functionality from the company's platform. Paying customers who discontinue their subscriptions have the option to return as paying customers at a future time, continue to use the company's products and tools that are available to free customers, or discontinue using the company's products and tools entirely.
Additionally, the company offers add-ons that are not included in the company's subscription plans and are sold on a one-time or monthly basis depending on the add-on. The company's add-ons include: local listing management tools; Trends, the company's competitive intelligence tool; and Semrush Marketplace, which can enhance customers' existing subscriptions. The company also maintains an App Center where third-party developers can create tools for Semrush paid users.
Sales & Marketing
The company's customer acquisition model is focused on promoting the company's brand, increasing market awareness of the company's platform and products, and driving customer demand, and a strong sales pipeline. The company utilizes its products and content assets to manage its online visibility and reach the company's prospective customers. Additionally, the company uses several other online marketing initiatives, including online advertising, webinars, blogs, podcasts, ebooks, customer success studies, and the Semrush Academy to build the company's brand and engage with the company's customer community. The Semrush Academy is a free online learning program that has enrolled over 864,000 students and issued over 357,000 certifications with 36 courses across 7 languages as of December 31, 2023. The Semrush Academy increases the company's brand awareness within the marketing community and helps the company crowdsource best practices and innovations that the company uses to improve its existing offerings, advance new products, grow the company's brand, and engage with the marketing community.
After attracting a prospective customer to the company's site, the company utilizes a highly efficient, low-touch sales approach focused on driving customers to the company's platform through a self-service model. Customers often begin using the company's products either on a free basis or immediately become paying customers. The company's sales team is largely focused on driving increased subscriptions of existing paying customers by encouraging the company's customers to fully recognize the potential benefit from the comprehensive platform the company offers. The company strives to increase monetization from paying customers as they seek to add additional features within the company's higher priced subscription plans, purchase additional user licenses, purchase add-ons, and renew existing subscriptions.
The company's sales organization is segmented based on size of the companies they are working with and regions they are covering. The company's Enterprise focused sales teams focus primarily on companies with more than 500 employees while mid market and SMB teams work with smaller companies. The company's sales organization is consisted of account managers, sales executives, the company's customer success team, and supporting roles.
Account managers focus on engaging new paid customers to help them better understand the company's software and lead them towards products, tools, and add-ons that align with their unique use cases.
Sales executives are responsible for managing customer engagement and increasing monetization of existing paying customers.
The company's customer success team is responsible for product training, assisting with usage of the company's solutions, and ongoing client support.
Supporting roles include management, operations, solutions engineering, product specialists, and enablement.
To increase brand awareness and generate customer demand, the company maintains partnerships with various entities, including agencies, influencers, strategic partners, and affiliates.
The Semrush Affiliate program contributes to the enhancement of the company's brand awareness and the generation of customer demand by offering a commission for each new registration, trial, and subscription activated through an affiliate's promotion. The company's program is hosted on an external provider, Impact, while the company's former internal program, BeRush, was closed on January 31, 2023.
As of December 31, 2023, the company had 73 contractors in its sales and marketing organization.
Customers
The company serves a range of customers from small and midsize businesses ('SMBs') to enterprises and marketing agencies, across a wide variety of verticals, including consumer internet, digital media, education, financial services, healthcare, retail, software, and telecommunications, among others. As of December 31, 2023, the company had nearly 108,000 paying customers and 1,041,000 active free customers on the company's platform across 155 countries.
Intellectual Property
'SEMRush' is the company's registered trademark in the United States, Australia, Bahrain, Belarus, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Brazil, Canada, China, the European Union ('EU'), Iceland, India, Iran, Israel, Japan, Kazakhstan, Liechtenstein, Monaco, Montenegro, New Zealand, Norway, Philippines, Russia, Serbia, Singapore, South Korea, Swaziland, Switzerland, Turkey, Ukraine, and Vietnam. The company has eleven additional registered trademarks in the United States, including for the 'Prowly' and 'Sellzone' marks, Semrush and Prowly logos, and three registrations of other trademarks in the EU and other countries, including for the 'Prowly and 'Sellzone marks and the Semrush and Prowly logos, with additional trademark registration applications pending in other countries. The company holds registered trademarks in the EU and U.K. for 'Kompyte'.
The company is the registered holder of a variety of domestic and international domain names that include 'www.semrush.com', 'www.prowly.com', 'www.backlinko.com', 'www.kompyte.com', and similar variations of them.
Research and Development
The company's research and development expenses accounted for $57.4 million for the year ended December 31, 2023.
History
Semrush Holdings, Inc. was founded in 2008. The company was incorporated in the state of Delaware in 2019.
