The importance of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is nothing new. Yet, it seems that more and more advertisers are realizing that the significance of SEO to their business has risen as they have essentially hit a ceiling with their SEM activities. As the SEMPO State of Search Engine Marketing 2008 report puts it: “Despite increasing ad spend and year-to-year growth in the value of search engine marketing, we are likely nearing a pricing plateau as advertisers near their maximum efficacy.”
A newly launched SEO platform called ‘Drive’ by Jerusalem-based RankAbove wants to assist large websites—ones that range from 1000 pages to as far as several million—to get the most out of their SEO juice. In many ways, RankAbove is the flipside of hotshot Kenshoo, which aims at the same target market but with an SEM solution.
Launched into beta, Drive provides a complete SEO management interface, handling everything from keyword research and on-page analysis, to link building and acquisition. The product begins by downloading and parsing the entire website on its servers, generating a complete analysis which is repeated upon site updates. Artificial intelligence and predictive modeling are used to determine how SEO changes will affect site pages—remember these can be in the millions—and keywords, which can reach up to the tens of thousands.
The site which is automatically divided into sections by Drive, can now be inspected for all SEO issues, with granularity reaching all the way down to single pages and individual page elements. Drive also analyzes competitor sites in order to determine the difficulty of ranking for each keyword. There is no limit on the amount of keywords and Drive will even perform automated tail keyword discovery. Testing the impact of new keywords and other SEO tweaks and fixes on the site takes minutes—an obvious plus compared to pushing it out to production and waiting for the ‘Google Dance’.
I’ve asked RankAbove to run an analysis on TechCrunch.com. Here are a few SEO basic issues it identified:
- TechCrunch rarely uses the <h1> tag. This affects proper keyword insertion in the page header tags that lets the search engines know the more relevant keywords for a particular page.
- Company Index pages all have the same title. Duplicate title issues prevent search engines from understanding which is the main page.
- Images could use better <alt> tagging. This impedes screenshots, pictures, and company logos to come up in image search results and will cause them to rank poorly for relevant searches.
Unlike most startups that begin their business from scratch, RankAbove been running an SEO consultancy business for several years. This has had multiple benefits: First, the team was able to gain product/market-fit insights from real customers. Second, the company is in a position where it can now leverage existing relationships with agencies and online retailers to establish design and beta customers, one of which is 1-800-Flowers. Finally, a major upside is that the SEO consultancy business has allowed RankAbove to self-fund development, placing it in a better negotiation position with investors. I’m told by CEO Mayer Reich, that the company is in negotiation with several investors to complete a Round A in the neighborhood of $1.5M.
I’ve been following RankAbove’s progress from the initial days of development and it’s one of the Israeli startups I’m most bullish about. Who knows, it might just be the next Kenshoo.
this looks pretty promising…
You guys did it! Great work Mayer and Eli! I hope this brings you lots of success.
Great company. I saw a presentation @TechAviv Looking very very cool @Mayer you did a great job
Why promising?! It doesn’t look like they add something on top of Google’s Webmaster Tools …
Look again
David,
Seriously?
Google’s Webmaster tools tells you if you are using H1 tags properly? If tags can be better optimized?
Just from the little info given in this article it is clear this software is something much more that Google’s webmaster tools.
Very cool stuff. I hope those other guys were wrong about TC not generating massive clickthroughs…
Great job guys – Eli still waiting for the sneak preview so walk the 20 secs round the corner one night with your laptop and show me!
Well done
It’s funny how 99% of the time when a new start up launches you discussed it’s competitors but in this case, no one is mentioned.
Guys like http://www.conductor.com have been in the SEO Tech space for a while now (you announced their series b http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/04/29/conductor-raises-10-million-in-series-b-for-seo-management-and-optimization/) and it’s great to see some new competition.
This post does read like someones got a friend inside of TechCrunch….H1 Tags?
+1
“Artificial intelligence and predictive modeling”… sounds like something from the product brochure.
Oh wait, blogging… not journalism…
It’s funny how people who have seen our product have only positive things to say, yet the ones who are making these comments have yet to see it.
You are also +1 a guy who’s name returns one result in search and that’s this post.
Also you must know better than 1800 Flowers, AOL, IAC all who have used our product.
Mayer
CEO RankAbove
Meyer – I have no opinion on your product but it certainly sounds interesting (though the points about TechCrunch’s SEO are hardly revolutionary).
However can I suggest, with the greatest respect, that you don’t respond so aggressively to comments questioning your tool, even when they’re slight;y (but not overly) sarcastic?
It doesn’t strike me as particularly professional and is, apart from anything else, a fool’s game as no-one ever wins in these sort of slanging matches.
The comment was tongue in cheek nothing more.
Wow. Welcome to PR and Media Mayer – lesson #1 – do not go on blogs about your company and defensively combat people who are anonymous. It sounds like you are worried and your product is weak.
If you cannot handle criticism, you should find a new gig.
I may be in the minority but don’t believe calling them the next Kenshoo is good. Having reviewed most of the SEM products, like Kenshoo, they aren’t that great.
While this kind of software does seems promising in its simplicity, it will be important for this company to keep up with the times. Google, for example, does not care as much about on-page factors as they used to. If Google continues its shift away from on-page factors, RankAbove will need to de-empahsize its commentary about these factors so people don’t focus their time on the wrong thing. Overall, it seems like a useful product – I may recommend it to my clients.
http://www.firstpagesage.com
Automating something like h1 tags, or even most of on page factors will get you only so far.
Even novice SEO consultants can give you the basic outline of what are the major onpage ranking factors and if he uses G Webmaster tool, he can export a complete site report with duplicate headers and other SE errors.
What about linking factors?
Don’t [quality] links carry the major weight in Google’s algorithm?
Dont see what the added value is here.
ATG
I was fortunate to see an early preview of “drive” and was very impressed. If I had it back in the days when I was heavily SEOing I could’ve taken much more work
I think busy SEO guys and agencies should take a closer look too (not just in-house promoters).
Love the company, the team, and the product! Been watching them for years! Kudos to RankAbove!
I’ve worked with RankAbove in the past — they’re top tier. Congratulations guys, looking forward to hearing great news on the product launch. Keep up the great work!
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