A decade ago, getting your website to show up on Google and Yahoo was a fairly straightforward matter of seeding your website with just the right keywords to describe your business or product. If someone conducted a search containing those keywords, your website would show up in the results and you had a shot at the page views or sales you were after. Those were simpler times in search.
Today, both Google search and Microsoft's Bing are far more sophisticated in how they intelligently understand what you're poking around the web for. The search engines use an approach called semantic search, which makes connections between terms and infers meaning of words in a much more human-like way. For example, today when you search for "sprained ankle" you'll get symptoms, treatment and the nearest sports injury clinic, rather than a simple definition. In that world, picking out a handful of keywords and hoping for the best doesn't cut it.
Enter BloomReach. The Mountain View-based company is trying to reinvent search engine optimization for semantic search. VCs are betting its a big opportunity. The three-year-old company just raised a hefty $25 million from NEA, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and Bain Capital Ventures. BloomReach came out of stealth mode in February. Co-founders Raj De Datta and Ashutosh Garg hail from Cisco and Google, respectively.
Powering all of BloomReach's ad marketing services is the company's Web Relevance Engine. It crawls billions of websites, and analyzes sites users' searching and social behavior, to see how people interact with a particular website. It then crunches all the data, and spits out a web page that is catnip for the subtler semantic search results. At least that's the claim.
For example, if you searched Google for pink headphones and an audio retailer lists its headphones as magenta, BloomReach would create a new page with magenta, fuchsia, and coral headphones that would show up the next time you're Googling or Binging for pink earbuds.
The company's early customers are already seeing good results, says head of marketing Joelle Kaufman. "Our clients experience an increase in visitors in the first month," she says. "And over the course of a year, new natural search traffic grows 92 percent on average." Customers also only pay when BloomReach's products actually work, but with those numbers, the startup is already into real revenue, Kaufman says, though she wouldn't specify how much.
Right now, BloomReach is primarily used by ecommerce clients including Crate & Barrel online, ModCloth, and Drugstore.com. But with the new funding, the company plans to expand its product line to include hospitality, education, and business to business companies, says BloomReach CEO Raj De Datta.
Optimization for semantic search engines is becoming increasingly important because more people are using Google or Bing as the way into a site rather than typing in a URL or going to a homepage, says De Datta. "The challenge for companies today isn't to just build a beautiful website with a hierarchy," he says. "It's to make sure that relevant content is always present on every webpage."
