BrightEdge acquires Oncrawl in enterprise SEO shakeup

BrightEdge, an enterprise SEO platform, has acquired technical SEO platform Oncrawl. The terms of the deal were not disclosed. 

Oncrawl will continue to run as its own company. Both customer bases will soon have access to additional technology without an accompanying price hike. 

What it means for BrightEdge. This acquisition mirrors the merging of SEO and data science. It will allow BrightEdge to perform sophisticated data scientist tasks in their website analysis to complement the work they are already doing on the platform, BrightEdge CEO Jim Yu said. He added that this acquisition is good news for digital marketers who want to scale campaigns with speed and precision.

SEO is creating more data than ever – too much for anyone to process without the right marketing technology, Yu said. Data analysis for SEO is complex – and most SEOs aren’t data scientists. So this acquisition means that BrightEdge users can combine Oncrawl’s “zero-code” data science with BrightEdge’s enterprise data and automation. 

“We saw a big opportunity to help SEOs be more effective at driving performance with data, without having to become data scientists,” Yu said.

Oncrawl is the third acquisition for BrightEdge, which was founded in 2007 and has more than 2,000 customers. In 2019, BrightEdge acquired Trilibis, which was crucial in developing their Autopilot offering. 

What it means for Oncrawl. Oncrawl will still run independently but under the BrightEdge umbrella, Yu said. Typically, when there is a merger, one company absorbs the other, and its customers and employees can suffer in the aftermath. Yu said that would not be the case here.

Oncrawl users will soon be able to start benefiting from BrightEdge’s advanced automation and data visualization technology. 

Oncrawl, founded in 2013, has 50 employees, more than 1,000 clients, and raised more than $4 million in funding since 2013.

Why we care. 2022 is shaping up to be a year of mergers and acquisitions in the SEO space – this is the third notable shakeup in the search market. Already this year, Semrush has acquired Backlinko, a move meant to prop up its content distribution. On the software front, Conductor recently acquired ContentKing. Plus, Moz was acquired by iContact last June. All of these changes have implications for users of these tools/platforms. In this case, for now, it seems like things will remain status quo for both BrightEdge and Oncrawl customers – we’ll have to wait until the company’s annual Share event in May to learn additional details about what the path forward looks like, and any implications or advantages for customers.  

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