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.
Thank you for being here!
TechTarget, the brand behind more than 150 technology websites that have 410,000 indexed pages in Google (their numbers) today revealed revenues of $58.4M for the second quarter of 2023. A 34.9% decrease compared to Q2 of 2022.
As a quick introduction, the TechTarget homepage doesn’t look like any kind of content site so you’ll be a bit confused if you go there directly. You’ll have better luck going through their menu to find all of their different “websites” (mostly just branded subfolders).
For instance, here’s how one of their different areas looks:
The domain hosts 100+ sections like this all covering some aspect of IT and technology news and research.
If you can’t tell from the focus of this website, I absolutely love when companies make comments about Google and how well they’re ranking, and TechTarget CEO Mike Cotoia didn’t hold back on today’s earnings call.
The first thing that caught my attention was him saying, “We dominate [..] Google organic search.”
He’s bold, but not wrong.
Semrush estimates that TechTarget picks up around 41 million visitors from search each month thanks to ranking for over 1.6 million keywords.
As always, to be respectful, I’m not going to dive into exactly what those keywords are.
I should note that Similarweb does not corroborate these numbers at all. In fact, they are worlds apart. Similarweb should be much higher since they take all traffic sources into account (not just search traffic, like Semrush).
Instead they estimate the TechTarget site picks up around 9.3M visits each month. The numbers are still huge of course, but it goes to show that third-party tools can’t always be relied on (we’re working on something privately in this regard).
A real journalist would tell you that the TechTarget homepage states the site picks up 19M monthly visits which is probably the best indicator overall, but I don’t know when those numbers were last updated (The Internet Archive doesn’t seem to be able to have backed up that part of their homepage).
Back to the earnings call, the whole quote from Cotoia is actually fascinating, so I hope you don’t mind me sharing it in full,
So one of the things that we’ve worked on, we hired Paul Healey, who’s running our Generative AI Strategic Strategy on this, is when customers go to Google, which we continue to dominate come to TechTarget site, we’re going to be able to as part of our roadmap, set up a prompt type capability set through GenAI to help serve up all the knowledge based content and the insights around that particular topic that those researchers are looking at.
And I’ll say this, like there’s nobody else that I can think of in this enterprise B2B tech area, because of their lack of investments in content and our strong investments in content, they can serve that up. So if I go in there as a buyer, I go to Google, I search X, Y, Z, I end up on a TechTarget community, I’m reading my articles and I get prompted, and what else are you looking for? What else can we help you with?
There’s a lot to take in here, but it’s fascinating they are very focused on SGE fully rolling out and how that might impact their business going forward.
TechTarget currently have over 1,000 people contributing content for their community, and it’s the kind of content where you really need experts involved who know what they’re talking about.
In other words, anyone looking to make a dent in their moat has a lot of work to do.
While TechTarget.com is the biggest site we track for them, it’s not the only one.
Other sites include:
- ComputerWeekly
- TheServerSide
- JacksFlightClub
- RevCycleIntelligence
- PharmaNewsIntel
- BrightTalk
- DataScienceCentral
The names of each should generally give you an idea as to what they cover, with ComputerWeekly sharing the top UK-focused tech and IT news.
On the TechTarget homepage that also share some sites about their network in total:
- 150+ technology websites (Note: These aren’t individual domains)
- #1 in Google for B2b tech (their words)
- 1,000+ full-time editors and contributors
- 410K indexed Google pages
- 20+ industry analysts
- 19M monthly visits
While their sites aren’t in the most exciting niches, I absolutely love that they’re not shy about dominating the search rankings for a very high-quality audience.
This is one brand that is going to be incredible to track the results of when SGE does fully roll out, and you know I’ll be here to give you the updates.
