Why Did Semrush Acquire Backlinko? Part 1 - The Deal Discovery.

Why would a SaaS giant want to pay millions of dollars for a content project built by a solopreneur? 

Well, that’s exactly what happened a year ago when Semrush purchased Backlinko.

Here’s the story:

On January 19th ‘22 Brian Dean announced that he sold Backlinko to Semrush. Social media, news outlets and market experts exploded with opinions about Semrush’s motivation behind this deal. Some of them were really close to my logic when I was planning it.

Back then, I was SVP of Marketing of Semrush, leading the “Growth” department. I was focusing on the channels with the high anticipated growth rate. Including SEO + content, affiliates, Semrush Academy, YouTube, etc.

An enterprise approach to online visibility:

If you are the leader in your market or want to become one, high Google rankings aren’t enough. You’ll want to show up on multiple positions for your main keywords. There are several reasons why this is important.

The main one is that the B2B SaaS purchase decision-making process is long. Buyers can visit review services, software comparison platforms, forums, influencers’ blogs, and podcasts, other vendors, et cetera. The good old marketing “Rule of 7” is still valid here! It states that a potential customer needs to see or hear a marketing message at least seven times before they take action.

So in a perfect world, you want your product to be mentioned on all websites on Google’s first page. Especially for your best keywords with the highest search volumes and maximum product relevancy. Try to search “best photo editor,” and you’ll see that Adobe products are mentioned on every website in search results. This is what I mean.

The concept of “being everywhere” has different names. I call it “surround sound” because I first read about it from the HubSpot blog, and this is what they call it. It’s an advanced strategy used mainly by enterprise players because you must orchestrate several teams’ efforts to be featured on all the desired sites. This may include PR, online reputation, SEO link builders, affiliate marketing, media buying, and endless negotiations. In some cases, however, the best decision is to acquire the target website to ensure your control of its content permanently.

Website acquisition process:

Acquisition for growth is a vast topic alone. It is especially complex in the enterprise marketing field. Legal aspects, due diligence, and post-deal integration can involve several departments and tens of people. Each acquisition is unique, but there are a few things in common that you’ll have to learn and execute to reach success. Here is the rough list:

1. Motivation. What is your “why?” behind the possible acquisition?
2. Quality. Key considerations when evaluating a website for acquisition.
3. Price and ROI. Calculating and negotiating the fair price and assuming your return on investment.
4. Risks. What can go wrong, and how to protect your investment?
5. Process. What are the steps you need to take to close the deal?
6. Integration. How to make a new asset a good fit for your business.
7. Analytics. Things to take care of for long-term success.

I’ll cover them step by step in my articles, so stay tuned! For now, let’s get back to the Backlinko deal. 

The deal discovery:

In October 2021, I was testing the free tool Semrush built for enterprise clients to help them grow the volume of their “surround sound.” This is how this tool works:

1. Enter a set of desired keywords
2. List your competitor’s brands and domains
3. Launch the tool

The system will check the Google search results for every keyword. It analyzes the pages found for the brand’s mentions and active backlinks to their websites. As a result, you will see the leaders in Google search for your keywords and how frequently they mention you vs. competitors.

Let me take ten random keywords relevant to SEO software as an example:

The “Pages” report is helpful for the “helicopter view” of the websites leading for your keywords. In my case, tens of domains competed for these highly-desired SEO keywords. All of them were either other SaaS businesses or large news outlets like Search Engine Journal. All but one. Backlinko.com was ranked right under the three leading players in the SEO software world and higher than all other software vendors and industrial news outlets:

I started to dig deeper and found that Backlinko was often ranked even higher than all three leading SaaS SEO players. I was using Keyword Gap tool for the detailed research. It helps to find the overlaps and gaps in keywords and ranks for the selected domains. I’ve entered a list of 100 SEO product-relevant keywords, sorted them by search volume, and found that Backlinko was winning most Google ranks. 14 out of the top 20 and 56 out of all 100 keywords.

Let me translate all those tables and numbers into simple English: The Backlinko founder was able to rank his site to the very top of one of the most blood-red competitive niches in the world.

The shortest acquisition email ever 🙂

So I sent a message to Brian:

“Let me be direct to the point, like your famous emails. Backlinko is one of the best resources for content marketing. Semrush is seeking acquisition targets. LMK if you are interested.”

He replied even shorter: “Ahah, thank you” and phone number.

That’s it for today—story to be continued.

 I’ll cover the Backlinko deal terms and deliver my step-by-step process for the website acquisitions you can use in your business.

Stay tuned for the following chapters!

Questions or comments?

Feel free to join the discussion on LinkedIn.

DISCLAIMER. I’m not a Semrush employee anymore and am not affiliated with the company. Nothing in this blog post contains any material non-public information about Semrush. All data in this and future articles are either available via marketing research tools (including Semrush) or was published before