ChannelAdvisor Acquires SearchMarketing.com SEO Firm

ChannelAdvisor announced it has acquired SearchMarketing, a leader in natural and paid search optimization (SEO) for online merchants. The company said the acquisition would allow it to enhance its channel management solutions by adding a comprehensive natural and paid search suite.

ChannelAdvisor provides marketplace management solutions to retailers on sites like eBay, Amazon.com, Yahoo Auctions and Overstock.com, and comparison shopping engines such as Shopping.com, Shopzilla and Nextag.

ChannelAdvisor CEO Scot Wingo said, "After talking to our customers the overwhelming feedback was a lack of satisfaction with existing search engine optimization advertising-based tools such as rules-based and portfolio-based approaches. The ChannelAdvisor/SearchMarketing combination allows us to offer our customers from eBay's largest sellers to top online merchants a next generation ability to utilize search as a powerful new sales channel."

SearchMarketing manages over 1.5 million keywords for over thirty retail clients, including 24 of the top 400 Internet retailers. SearchMarketing's technology is directly integrated with the Google and Yahoo Search Marketing webservice APIs. Kevin McCarthy launched SearchMarketing in 1999.

According to the press announcement, SearchMarketing's product suite will be branded as the ChannelAdvisor SearchSuite and includes the following components:

• Natural Search Appliance (NSA) - The NSA allows online merchants with any ecommerce implementation to automatically and in real time optimize the site for natural search spiders. NSA automatically detects inbound spiders and provides them a crawl-able and optimized version of the retailer's or manufacturer's ecommerce site. This uniquely solves the online merchant industries problem of the searchability of database-driven ecommerce sites.
  
  
• Keyword Term Generator - The first of its kind in the industry, the Keyword Term Generator monitors how consumers find online merchants through natural search as well as conversions. The Keyword Term Generator then mines that data to harvest search terms that are candidates for paid-search optimization. Once integrated with ChannelAdvisor's existing solutions, the Keyword Term Generator will also harvest high performance search terms from the online merchant's inventory and other channel data such as marketplaces and comparison shopping engines.
  
  
• SearchTraq - A web-based, on-demand application that monitors all of a merchants search traffic and subsequent conversions. The data from SearchTraq empowers the other SearchSuite components to intelligently manage and make quick, profit impacting decisions on a real-time basis.
  
  
• Automated Bid Manager - The Automated Bid Manager works with SearchTraq and Keyword Term Generator to implement a paid-search optimization engine that optimizes the paid-search channel based on the search terms provided by the Keyword Term Generator and measured by SearchTraq. Online merchants can optimize on a variety of parameters including effective take rate and cost.

Terms of the deal were not announced.

http://www.channeladvisor.com/search