Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Search Engine Marketing (SEM) can make or break a business. It sounds like an exaggeration but not if you look at the kind of money serious businesses are paying for SEO/SEM tools. After all, being among the top ranked search results on Google is half the battle won for the never satiated, forever fun need for profit! Yes, there is Bing and Yahoo search as well but lets not digress!
SEM Compass brings all the popular tools you need to fine tune your online marketing strategy in one place, accessible with one subscription.
About the Founders
Ryan Kempe and Sam Cross, proud Aussies, are colleagues from a past workplace. Sam is the tech co-founder of SEM Compass – a great coder with skills and insights born out of pure necessity to get the job done and make an impact on the bottom line. Sam has been coding ever since his early teens. Leaving school early he got a job as a techy for an US hosting company (even though he was underage for the job). Years later he had carved himself out a career in internet marketing with a good technical understanding of SEO. This translated across to Sam being the go-to guy for large-scale technical implementations on e-commerce websites, tricky manipulations of data, and anything that required going beyond the norm.
Ryan is the non tech co-founder. He did Mechanical Engineering only to be bitterly disappointed by the lack of creativity in the field. Growing up with Lego and creating cool little structures he thought mechanical engineering was going to be the advance version of Lego. It wasn’t, so a career change was in order. Drawn to the internet for its outrageous optimism, and promise to change the world, he started SEM Compass.
About the Startup
SEM Compass is a SaaS that aggregates SEO/SEM data. You can generate reports and full data sets from the top tools in the SEO/SEM industry.
The idea started when the duo realized that they were burning through hundreds of dollars per month in subscription charges to the sundry SEO services and wanted an all-in-one solution. Getting the idea to materialize into a real product wasn’t easy. Explains Ryan, “SEM Compass is still privately owned with no investors and we borrowed from family and friends to get the funds together. Then we spent thousands of dollars on half-decent coders, only to put all the code in the bin and start again.” And as with any Startup, finding traction and going from zero to something substantial was hard but giving up wasn’t something Ryan and Sam wanted to do.
How about the Competition?
The best SEO/SEM metrics are fragmented across a range of providers and SEM Compass brings them all together in one place. The white label SEO data market has many players like MySEOTool and Upcity but SEM Compass is confident in its offering. They have superior integration with industry standard tools like Ahrefs, SEMrush, WhiteSpark and PlagSpotter and marks the data according to its origin so that marketers can leverage existing resources for these tools. And thanks to this integration, tool partners provide them with cheaper data because of the potential brand promotion.
About their Plans
“I am pushing for SEM Compass to make 30k in Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) this year and 100k the next”. Ryan is optimistic about his company’s potential and promises more features are in the pipeline, “Currently we have only just launched our MVP with the bare minimum. We plan on building out our product over the next 12 months, including modules for finding social trends, keyword and content discovery, and bringing about 20 data partners by 2016.”
They are targeting freelancers, single website owners, and SEO consultants from Eastern Europe, India and US. The revenue model is monthly subscription based and starts at $79 per month.
Special Offer!
Startup Dope readers can avail the subscription at 70% OFF for a lifetime – $49 $15 per month – for the VIP account! Just go to the link below and signup. And don’t forget to mention how much you love Startup Dope!
http://semcompass.com/