I've been writing about SEO since I was 15 years old, and a decade later I'm fortunate to have consulted for companies I love like Ahrefs, Kinsta, Buffer, ConvertKit and multi-billion dollar brands.
The basics can be incredibly effective, but hundreds of sites cover them well and I want to focus on unique, creative ways to achieve better rankings.
Instead, here's my promise: I will put my absolute all into guides like this one to give original insights that help you get an edge over your competition.
That's it. That's my pitch for you to stick around (or perhaps let you know this isn't the site for you).
This is already too much text for a 'click-to-read-more-fade-thing' but there's more if you like.
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SEO SaaS platform Semrush today revealed their revenue for the second quarter of 2023 was $74.7M, a 19% increase year over year.
Their annual recurring revenue has now surpassed $300M for the first time ($302.4M to be specific), a 20% increase over the past 12 months, with customer growth up 14%.
Semrush are one of my personal barometers as to how the SEO industry is fairing in the age of AI so seeing them continue to grow is a really positive sign.
Of course, they’re not just an SEO platform, but SEO is still the focus of their homepage and SEO-related research is why everyone I know primarily uses their offering.
Semrush now have over 104,000 paying customers, and if my calculations are correct they’re adding around 1,200 paying customers each month. Note that this doesn’t account for people cancelling their subscriptions, which they don’t share data on, so it’s possible they’re adding significantly more new customers each month.
They also announced reaching 951,000 active free users, an increase of 35% year over year.
If we do some quick maths based on the numbers I reported last quarter where they had 885,000 free customers, they’re adding around 22,000 active new users each month.
I should clarify I don’t know the requirements for someone to be defined as active. I expect there’s some kind of flag such as the user “logged in during the past 12 months” but I don’t think the numbers they’re announcing account for every single signup.
I’ve been charting Semrush paying customer counts for quite a while, most notably for my guide to successful businesses in the SEO industry, so can update those numbers now:
- December 2019: 54,000 customers
- March 2021: 67,000 customers
- March 2022: 87,000 customers
- September 2022: 94,000 customers
- May 2023: 100,000+ customers
- August 2023: 104,000 customers
In their Q1 2023 earnings call they didn’t mention exactly how many customers they had – just noting they had passed the 100,000 mark – so it’s nice to get some specifics again.
Semrush reported a $0.3M net loss for the quarter, a vast improvement over the $8.3M net loss they reported in Q2 of 2022.
They expect to generate between $307 and $309 million for the full year of 2023.
Before I sign off, I do want to say that I’m a paying Semrush customer, but not an investor. I read financial reports daily but this is not my field of expertise so please do your own research before investing.
I’ll likely write an in-depth review of the platform in the near future because while there are some things I love about their offering, there are some aspects of the user experience I think could be massively improved.
Functionality wise I prefer Ahrefs overall but it’s far too easy to hit their credit limits, making Semrush more appealing from a pricing perspective.
