2010 January, 13th

Phil Butler

Covario, a leader in enterprise class search advertising software, announced the acquisition of Netconcepts. In an apparent move to broaden Covario’s reach, client list, and product flexibility, the company captures not only another chunk of SEM market share, but Netconcepts’ GravityStream™ performance-based natural search technology. The integrated technologies of these two brands being a significant move within the search space obviously.

Covario, Inc., headquartered in San Diego, CA, was formerly known as SEMDirector before a rebrand and an infusion of $16 million in series B funding led by FTVentures two years ago this month. In 2009 the company spent millions in developing automated tools for large scale SEO program management. In effect, Covario is targeting large scale SEM channels where ongoing SEO and SEM monitoring requires “hands on” resources now – at least this is my view. Covario’s growth has been obvious since 2008, making the INC 500 Fastest Growing List just last year.

This latest news accentuates not only Covario’s growth, but an obvious strength and even expansion for search as the cornerstone of online advertising and marketing. Social media tends to get the spotlight a little too much in our view, when it is Google and search as a whole which still greases the wheels of commerce on the Internet. Social aspects, when all is said and done, are a drop in the bucket compared with search revenues from every sector. Take a look at a chart from Erick Sconfield’s TechCrunch article below.

Search powers the Internet – period. All the effectiveness of Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, and the rest of social media and networking scarcely pays the bandwidth bills, while Google runs its empire off of search. Covario and its competitors know this all too well. Sure most of these analytics driven SEO machines dabble in tracking Twitter trends and etc., but providing rock solid SEO management to suit Google and the others is what SEM and even online advertising is all about. We have our own experiences with these factors (to be revealed soon). In the end roughly 75 percent of all advertising monies spent this year will be aimed at search. As for SEO? Companies will spend something like $5 billion on SEO alone according to Forrester Research.

My partner Michaela being the resident SEO guru, will contact Covario if they do not contact us first. The combination indicated here, integrated, may well prove to be market changing. No numbers have been released on this acquisition, so maybe we can glean a little more on that as well. For now, the interested reader should think about this and other similar moves from SEO and search empowered companies. We leave you with a quote from Russ Mann, Co-founder and CEO of Covario:

“Search is the most critical part of the online marketing mix…at the end of the day it’s the true voice of the majority of customers …When people search, they’re expressing what they want right then. Search covers the whole spectrum and is scalable and easily deployable.”

• 2010/08/17 -- PR and Marketing Tech, BlueGlass Unveils SecondStep
• 2010/07/29 -- Digital PR Next Practices Summit by PRNews
• 2010/06/24 -- BlueGlass Interactive, the Huckleberry of Online Marketing
• 2010/03/30 -- Bing and Waggener Edstrom’s Long Road Ahead
• 2010/01/14 -- Pepsi Refresh Becomes the Stale Cola of Marketing Launches
• 2009/10/18 -- PR Tips: Five Terms to Never Use to Market Technology
• 2009/04/01 -- NuReach Global Discounts Internet Marketing Services

About the Author

Phil Butler is editor-in-chief of Everything PR and senior partner at Pamil Visions PR. He’s a widely cited authority on beta startups, search engines and public relations issues, and he has covered tech news since 2004. Phil wrote in the past for ReadWriteWeb, Mashable, Profy, SitePoint, Search Engine Journal, AltSearchEngines. Follow Phil on Twitter or send him an email at phil [at] pamil-visions [dot] com.

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