Featured Startup Pitch: Serpstat wants to make competitive keyword research easier and more accessible

ELEVATOR PITCH

Serpstat offers user-friendly and innovative software for everyone who strives to succeed in the fast-growing and fascinating sphere of digital marketing. It is basically a powerful keyword and ranking research tool that can be used for in-depth competitor analysis and building successful advertising campaigns.

Our users are SEO and PPC professionals, online shops managers, journalists and copywriters from all over the world. The fact that Serpstat helps them make otherwise tedious work done, just in one click, is what gives us inspiration for further growth.

PRODUCT/SERVICE DESCRIPTION

Serpstat is helping website owners, marketing managers and specialists optimize SEO and PPC campaigns using analytical information about their competitors, as well as develop a content strategy for their website.

Users can do both keyword and domain research, analyzing organic and paid keywords results, their volume, level of competition and cost per click. You can also see what keywords competing domains rank for in search and ads, what URLs drive the largest amount of their traffic and what ads texts those URLs include. It goes without saying that this kind of information is of paramount importance for everyone who wants to beat their competition.

Our database includes information on 6 geographical regions of Google (USA, United Kingdom, Bulgaria, Ukraine, Russia, Kazakhstan) along with regional databases upon Yandex.Moscow and Yandex.Saint Petersburg. We apply extremely rigorous approach to selecting keywords. Today our database includes ~ 55 million of the most popular keywords and over 70 million domains.

FOUNDER’S STORY

Prior to founding Serpstat, I have been working in search engine optimization industry for over 10 years, and all this time changing the essence of internet marketers’ work has been my greatest desire. Upon graduation from National University “Lviv Polytechnic” with the degree in applied mathematics, I was lucky to start my career at the leading digital agency, Netpeak, that works on SEO and PPC for business. I was the Head of Development and Optimization department from 2010 till 2013, and saw how frustrated my colleagues were at times, lacking a tool that would allow them monitor their own work along with their competitors’. That was how me and my team came up with ideas of various applications for optimizing SEO professionals’ work. Just to name few of them: there is Netpeak Spider – instrument for website crawling, and Netpeak Checker – for website metrics analysis automation.

Undoubtedly, Serpstat was the most challenging project to implement due to the efforts its maintenance requires.

Initially, it was used within digital agency Netpeak that became its investor, but once it proved to be a useful and advantageous tool, me and my colleagues realized that its usage would span far beyond our own immediate needs.

I strive to enlighten people as to the ways they can succeed in the field of online marketing and advertising. Lecturing students, giving webinars, participating in various seminars and conferences are highlights of my working weeks. Our team is successfully working in partnership with SEO course SEOM, and IAB Digital Masterclass NBU (Bulgaria), WebpromoExperts, Hillel (Ukraine), TopExpert.pro (Russia).

MARKETING STRATEGY

The cornerstone of our market research is crowd-sourced testing by SEO and PPC professionals at the digital agency Netpeak. Using Serpstat in their daily routine, they provide constant feedback, including feature requests and troubleshooting. Their suggestions and appreciation is what inspires our team throughout our daily struggle to make our product even better.

Thinking globally is yet another strong point for us. We are currently in the process of launching databases for Canada along with Australia, and plan to go far beyond.

MARKET OPPORTUNITY

Serpstat is an extremely sophisticated project, and requires cutting-edge technologies to run, so maybe that is why there isn’t that much competition going on.

The greatest thing about Serpstat is that you can get profit from competitors’ success by discovering the keywords that drive their traffic and thus improve your own website performance.

HOW WE’RE DIFFERENT

a. Extensive expertise in R&D. We pride ourselves on having a team of smart and resourceful developers who design our own unique software for both external and internal use. For example, we have our own applications for crawling search engines’ results.

b. Special live algorithm that keeps data fresh. The quality of databases for projects like ours is of utmost importance, so we use live SERP update to keep our data fresh. Unlike most of our competitors, we apply special online algorithm, updating certain percentage of data every day. All updates are shown on the service immediately.

c. Constantly growing database. We use an algorithm that steadily looks out for new relevant keywords and adds them automatically to our database.

d. Lots of unique features our competitors lack:

Making content-plan for any website. All you need to do is apply filter “Only questions” in section “Search Suggestions”. You will see the exact questions users are seeking answers to while searching for a specific keyword. Articles, giving answers to those questions will make relevant content that drives traffic.

Related keywords selection. The point is, that people are searching for products, services or information, using not exactly the words you think they would. Knowing those related keywords, our users will not miss an opportunity to reach a wider audience.

Relevance analysis. Analyze how relevant web pages are to a website semantics.
Identifying the informational and commercial degree of search queries.
Tag searching.

e. We provide service for markets where there aren’t any similar tools.

BUSINESS MODEL

Serpstat is a subscription-based project. We now offer 3 monthly subscription plans to choose from, allowing users a discount if subscribing for a longer period (3, 6, 12 months).

CURRENT NEEDS

Right at the moment we are not looking for additional round of investments. However, we are open to business opportunities. What we do need is like-minded talented and enthusiastic people to join our team, as well as local partners and representatives in different countries. Feel free to reach me via email: [email protected].

# # #