Conductor raises $20M for SEO technology

The round, led by Investor Growth Capital, is the largest to date for an SEO company

With so much attention being paid to social media and mobile marketing, it’s easy to forget that organic search still turns up the best results.  To be specific, natural search converts twice as many visitors as paid search, and four times as many as social. 

With SEO still being the most effective way to reach Web users, it makes sense that investors would want to train a keen eye on companies that can deliver bigger numbers.  SEO technology company Conductor is seeing big numbers from Investor Growth Capital—the company announced Tuesday that it’s raised $20 million in a Series C round led by IGC, with help from existing investors FirstMark Capital and Matrix Partners.  The round marks the largest investment to date in SEO.

A lot of eyes have been zeroing in on marketing technology like SEO since Gartner analyst Laura McLellan wrote up a report earlier this year predicting that by 2017, the CMO will spend more on IT than the CTO.  Forrester Research specifically expects the U.S. SEO market to surpass $600 million by 2016.

“The new CMO is driven by data – and the data speaks volumes when it comes to natural search,” Conductor CEO Seth Besmertnik told me.  “The data shows that natural search should be top of internal mind share, resources and dollars.”

At the heart of Conductor’s business is its cloud-based SEO platform, Conductor Searchlight, which gathers and processes huge amounts of data to deliver real-time information to businesses.  The company serves more than 100 of the Fortune 500 companies, as well as the top four big agency holding companies, and more than half of the top 20 Internet Retailers.  Customers include FedEx, Best Buy, Siemens, and General Electric.  Conductor Searchlight reportedly boosts customer's Web traffic by as much as 6X while increasing conversion rates by as much as 15-fold.

Founded in 2010, Conductor has seen 300% year-over-year revenue growth and doubled its headcount this year. 

As for the size of the round, Besmertnik explained: “We believe more than 20,000 companies need a product like Conductor Searchlight, yet only some 225 have it today – that’s only 1% of the market.  Conductor takes this seriously.  We have an obligation to grow our technology base and expand or offerings globally to better serve existing customers and to attract those in need.  We felt that partnering with IGC for this investment, can best help us bring these solutions to market quickly and comprehensively, as we invest in our product development and global expansion.”