After acquiring a Silicon Valley-based startup earlier this year to fill a gap in content creation services, ScribbleLive has announced another acquisition to build on its content marketing platform.
ScribbleLive has acquired UK-based Linkdex, an SEO platform that uses data science to help marketers better understand what content is effectively reaching audiences. Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.
“They call themselves an SEO platform, but they’re complementary to the content marketing platform that Scribble has been building.” – Vince Mifsud, ScribbleLive CEO
“They call themselves an SEO platform, but they’re complementary to the content marketing platform that Scribble has been building in the sense that they help content get found on one of the biggest sources of audiences, like Google and other search networks,” said Vince Mifsud, CEO of ScribbleLive.
Linkdex’s CEO, Mark Smith, will act as general manager of Linkdex as ScribbleLive absorbs its operations. The entire LinkDex team will join Scribblelive in its London and New York offices.
“The complexity of marketing is increasing almost daily. It’s becoming harder as a marketer to distinguish yourself in the market. It’s becoming more complex to decide what content is going to work, whether to publish, when to publish it, and the frequency of publishing,” said Mifsud. “You can apply data science to take the guesswork out of the equation, or point the marketer in a recommendation model that’s based on data. It’s hugely powerful and becoming almost mandatory as a marketer to use data in their decision-making process.”
Linkdex was established in 2009 to help in-house SEO teams and agencies gain more insight into their SEO strategy. The platform allows companies to discover effective keywords, determine how pages on certain domains are ranking, and look at SEO forecasting. “Our vision is not just to have data, as we’ve always had the data,” said Smith. “You can very quickly see how you perform on a search engine, or what you need to do with content and have it resonating on search engines and socials. One of the key areas for us is to make it highly user-friendly.”
Smith said that the acquisition gives Linkdex “the right environment” to continue scaling. “It allows both companies to really service clients in a big and broad way; putting businesses together and creating an enlarged business will serve our products well,” he said.
For his part, Mifsud said that it wouldn’t make sense for Scribblelive, as a content marketing platform, to attempt to replicate what LinkDex already does well. “What we liked about the business is that we like the people. We had a great feeling when we met Mark and his team, we feel like we can grow a business together with this team. And they run a good business; they know how to make money and scale.”