It’s been awhile since we’ve posted any updates here, but that has not been for lack of activity on our side. If anything, we’ve been busier over the last 18 months than anytime other than when I first founded the company. Due to the continued growth of this industry, we’ve managed to grow nicely with our customers.
We exist in an interesting industry and we continue to see two types of companies operate: grass-roots and high finance.
DemandSphere is, along with many others, a grass-roots company. We operate out of our profit margins and stay close to our customers. The high finance companies are those companies who have raised tens of millions of dollars in venture capital and may have somewhat divided interests. There are pros and cons to each mode, but you have to know who you are.
A lot of the early innovation, in my observation, happens in the grass-roots arena but the financed companies are always watching and looking for ideas. As a result, the smaller, more innovative companies have to keep some of their cards close to their chest and share things directly with customers instead of the market as a whole. This is something that I advise other startup founders whom I mentor from time to time.
For this reason, we’ll keep some of our updates here at a high level and reserve the details for our ongoing conversations with customers.
Platform Updates
Getting back to our roots
Over the last two years, we’ve really gotten back to our roots as a data and engineering-heavy company in SEO. And it feels great.
There was a time from about 2012-2018 where all of the SEO platforms acted like they were also going to be a content marketing platform, a social analytics platform, and more. We certainly fell into this trap as well, but this is, looking back, a mistake. Both social and content marketing are their own beasts to tackle.
The corporate agendas end up getting lost in their own hierarchies. It also depends on whether you are talking about demand generation in B2B, B2C, ecommerce vs. SaaS, etc.
SEO, in and of itself, comprises a broad set of concepts to work with. This one arena alone more than fills up our product roadmap.
New Analytics and Insights Features
As part of our ongoing platform upgrades, we’ve made significant improvements in our analytics and insights features.
One of our core theses is that rank monitoring, in and of itself, is an outdated mode of thinking.
SERP monitoring, on the other hand, is more important than ever.
As Google (and others) continue to invest in AI and improving their own version of relevancy, it becomes critical for our customers to understand the whole SERP and everything in it.
To that end, we have released a torrent of features over the last year that enable us to measure everything from pixel placement and density of elements on the SERP to categorizing domains, evaluate the best opportunities, correlations between page speed performance and visibility, and much more.
Limitless SEO Data Pipelines
Another major area of growth for us has been in our data business. Partly due to the forces mentioned in the previous section, there is an immense appetite for SEO data as a product. We’ve accomplished some things over the last 18 months that wouldn’t have seemed possible before we built it and we’re continuing to build upon this foundation.
More coming
Our team is busier than ever before and we are hiring as well. If you have a strong background in massive data architectures or distributed systems, a well-known language such as Python, Java, etc., and an interest in building the next-generation of SEO intelligence, send us an email with your resume / CV to jobs@demandsphere.com.
What you can expect from this blog going forward
We do plan on writing here more, going forward. Our focus will be less on seemingly-relevant but generic blog posts designed to drive SEO traffic and more on the inner workings of our industry, product updates, case studies, webinar announcements, and so on.
Additionally, we will be sending out emails about once a month, where we will be sharing even more details on all of the above.
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