MarTech Interview with Eugene Levin, Chief Strategy Officer at Semrush

Eugene Levin, Chief Strategy Officer at Semrush discusses a few pertinent SEO best practices while taking us through Semrush’s biggest highlights and updates of this year. 

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Welcome to this MarTech chat Eugene, tell us more about Semrush’s journey since 2021 started (there’s been some exciting updates!); we’d love the key highlights!? 

Thus far, 2021 has been an incredible year for Semrush.  Keeping the modern day marketer on top-of-mind, our team made significant updates to help them succeed in their roles. For starters, we made significant updates to our backlinks index and keyword difficulty scoring systems, both of which enable an even more reliable data to work with. In May, we released our brand new app center, providing our developer partners access to a massive number of digital marketing communities around the world. Most significantly though, Semrush launched its initial public offering at the end of March, marking a significant milestone for the company. When I look back at what the company has accomplished in the last six months alone, it really is incredible!

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We’d love to hear more of your thoughts on the changing SEO landscape and what you feel marketers-of-today need to be doing to stay on top of the SEO game?

When we look at marketing today, compared to even just 10 years ago, marketing teams no longer work in silos. SEO has transformed from a standalone method to a part of a much larger interdisciplinary approach. For example modern SEO is largely centered around things like:

• Making websites fast and responsive
• Improving UX, architecture and internal linking
• Creating valuable content
• Pitching this content to other people to earn high quality links (doing digital PR)

But those things are not exclusive to SEO. They are good for business and marketing in general. A lot of them are performed by other teams. For everything to work properly, all teams must work in sync. As such, SEO professionals have become a glue that brings teams together.

Can you share a few examples and learnings from leading brands that boast of a great SEO strategy and process?

There are several brands I can think of that have an incredible SEO strategy and process. The first that comes to mind is web development platform, Wix.  The digital marketing team at Wix has honed in on perfecting content marketing as a critical component of SEO. Their approach to content localization is quite commendable and continues to serve them well in their SEO efforts.

Moschino, an Italian luxury brand is another company that has really elevated its SEO strategy and process. They’ve expanded their SEO presence on Google beyond their own branded keywords, which in the world of Italian luxury brands, is a major step in online visibility. This company leverages the power of competitive intelligence to rank amongst some of the most revered brands in the industry.

Coming back to the story of Semrush going public: how does this impact users of the platform? 

Our IPO ultimately enables us to further broaden our capabilities and what we can offer to our users. With more resources, we’re able to build our already extensive data set. On top of that, marketers will begin to enjoy more educational and development opportunities on our platform to further master the art of digital marketing. 

On a larger scale though, Semrush going public helps further highlight Online Visibility as a critical effort for businesses both large and small. Historically, it tended to be a bit underappreciated, being overshadowed by email marketing and CRM software industries. But now, we see people investing more into Online Visibility and being more serious about it than ever before.

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We’d love to hear about Semrush’s upcoming innovations and how it’s been helping marketers during the pandemic and now through 2021 as businesses resume pre Covid time operations?

At Semrush, we’re always innovating and expanding our platform into new directions. For example, we recently acquired a company called Prowly. This acquisition allowed us to add four new product categories within the digital PR space to our already extensive portfolio. We are also building products for Amazon sellers under our new Sellzone brand. And our goal is to help millions of Amazon sellers make their listing more visible and attract more buyers. 

Semrush recognized that the pandemic critically hit marketing teams across a variety of industries. In response, at the height of the pandemic,we made our platform’s social media products free for all users. A year later, we recognized that this was so well received that we doubled down and are now continuing this effort throughout 2021.  

One thing that the pandemic taught marketers is how to be scrappy and creative in their marketing approach. By nature, marketers are masters at adapting to a rapidly changing advertising landscape–it’s no surprise that so many persevered and made their way through the pandemic. We were proud to support them during those trying times, but are even more excited to help marketers thrive in the years ahead. 

A few last thoughts and takeaways for tech leaders who are looking to go public in the future?

Once tech leaders understand their purpose and goals, the sky’s the limit. For Semrush, we always have, and continue to be, driven by the dreams and aspirations of marketers. Every move we made was for our customers–if a company follows that type of mentality, they’ll be destined for success.

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