BrightEdge Acquires Oncrawl To Help SEOs Do More With Data Science

BrightEdge, a leader in enterprise organic search and content performance, has acquired Oncrawl “to make data science solutions more accessible to SEO professionals,” according to the company.

Oncrawl is a tool that crawls websites similarly to how a search engine bot would, then generates reports full of actionable SEO insights.

In an interview with Search Engine Journal, BrightEdge CEO Jim Yu and CTO Lemuel Park explained that each company shares a vision that the future of SEO is data science, though they have a different approach in bringing this vision to life.

Ultimately, what BrightEdge & Oncrawl aim to do is demystify machine-to-machine communication so businesses can send stronger signals to search engines and other web entities, Yu said.

He added that now, businesses no longer have to choose which of these industry-leading organic search tools best serve their needs.

They can benefit from the capabilities of both, as BrightEdge & Oncrawl come together to combine resources while offering integrated and dedicated search marketing solutions.

Yu and Park went on to explain that BrightEdge users will be able to perform sophisticated data science tasks, while Oncrawl users can bring automation and data visualization into their workflow.

What this means for businesses is less manual labor, more scalability, and greater insights without the need to invest in an additional tool.

BrightEdge & Oncrawl Claim To Offer A World-First Solution

In a press release, the companies say this deal brings a world-first solution to market:

“The deal creates the world’s most comprehensive, flexible, and intuitive organic search software. In addition, it is the first and only one capable of addressing the informational data complexities faced by modern enterprise marketing departments of today.”

Where does this claim stem from?

Well, there’s a lot of data out there that SEO professionals aren’t using.

Traditionally, SEO has relied on assumption-based best practices. It still does, to a large extent.

According to Gartner, Martech teams (on average) only utilize 58% of their marketing technology stacks.

Data analysis is one area within platforms that is becoming largely complex, specifically for SEO.

It’s possible that existing platforms are too complex to navigate, which may be why so much data goes unused.

Pain Points Addressed By BrightEdge & Oncrawl

With the acquisition of Oncrawl, Yu and Park said, BrightEdge wants to solve the problem of unused data by helping SEO professionals accomplish what they haven’t been able to do with other tools.

In a follow-up email to Search Engine Journal, the company states:

“SEO teams need to adapt and become more like data scientists in how they approach SEO analysis without adding more manual work.

Businesses today need greater flexibility in building a SEO technology stack. Solutions need to simplify this while also allowing for greater sophistication in data analysis.

For organizations using a standalone technical platform, workflows and API hooks must be retained. At the same time, they need key capabilities for top level governance across web properties.

This is critical to maintain hygiene without interrupting testing and one-off projects.

Only BrightEdge and Oncrawl can provide the flexibility to do both under one roof.”

In addition to extracting robust sets of data, users have the flexibility to manipulate it in any way they choose.

The data is ready-to-use out of the gate, but the more technically inclined users can take it a step further by creating multiple pipelines to mix and match data into tables for analysis.

All of this can be automated using Oncrawl’s website crawling technology, and presented in a usable format with the data visualization technology from BrightEdge.

What Does This Deal Mean For Existing Customers?

As part of this deal, BrightEdge has ensured customers can benefit from independent and combined structures with no changes to pricing and no disruption to services, Yu said.

BrightEdge is making Oncrawl technologies available to users at no additional cost.

Oncrawl users will have access to mass AI and automation technologies (such as BrightEdge Autopilot), which will help advance their SEO efforts.

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