SearchEnabler : On - demand (SaaS) platform for all your SEO needs

With more than 300 million domains registered so far worldwide and 10m getting added every quarter, the need for establishing clear online identity and visibility has emerged as one of the major contributing factors in building successful online businesses. In this regard, Bangalore based QuickoLabs have developed an on-demand (SaaS) search engine optimization (SEO) platform – SearchEnabler for startups, small businesses and individuals seeking to improve online visibility. YourStory.in team got in touch with Khadim Batti Founder of QuickoLabs to understand more about their product and venture.How did the idea for SearchEnabler come about?

Most Startups / Small businesses manage to come up with brilliant product ideas but falter when it comes to increasing their market visibility, especially startups in India. Usually they do not put sufficient budget to online marketing which hits the product take off.

With an initial fascination for SEO as a potent tool for gaining online visibility, we started exploring the best ways to deliver this as a simple and viable solution to small and medium enterprises and created SearchEnabler SEO platform as an on-demand offering with pricing as a constraint. Being a startup ourselves, we felt the need for such a product and hence the inspiration.

There are already many SEO softwares in the market, what is it that differentiates SearchEnabler from others?

Most of the SEO softwares available in the market are either targeted towards SEO professionals or enterprise market and most of them are desktop softwares and have their own set of problems. It’s really challenging for businesses and marketers to find a single platform, which can provide research and discovery options, on page and off page recommendations, dashboard, multi-dimensional reporting and integrated analytics all within their budget. They often have to look for expensive solutions developed for enterprise customers.

Through SearchEnabler we provide complete search engine view of the website, comparative analysis with competitors, recommendations and unified dashboard with analytics on a single affordable platform. SearchEnabler is - SEO on the cloud, working 24x7 performing web crawling, data collection, analysis and sending timely notifications to users. All user needs to do is to sign-in and configure the system once and rest of the heavy-lifting of data and analysis is done by our servers.

How has the journey been so far?

We launched the private beta of SearchEnabler few months back with limited set of users and we are seeing steady growth in increase among startups, SMBs, freelancers, agencies and even bloggers who want to try out SearchEnabler.

So far we have released private beta credentials to users from 20 different countries (Spain, Brazil, Germany, UK, US, Vietnam, Japan, Canada and of course India) and iterating every month based on user feedback to refine our product.

Our website domain is less than 6 months old and it will take a while before we drive good number of organic traffic. Looking at the trend, we expect to have couple of hundred users on-board before commercial launch. We have not spent a single penny till date on any marketing activities and planning to go completely the organic way.

How do you see the SEO market evolving in India?

Even though SEO as a tech jargon is a decade old, the technology and implementations have just begun. All major SEO technology players have entered market in the last 3-4 years. We will see evolution in SEO technology to match Search Engines as well as a tight integration with Social media, IPTV and other interactive media in the coming future. By 2015, global SEO market will cross 5 billion USD, from current 2.5B USD and the share of SEO software in this market is rising rapidly.

But, organic marketing using search engine optimization (SEO) is yet to get wider adoption in India both from technology and business perspective compared to Europe and US. We do expect sizable market in another couple of years in India. We are targeting the global market for SearchEnabler as a Saas platform for SEO and not limiting ourselves to any specific geography. Going forward we would like to see SearchEnabler covering social media, blog and other forms of inbound marketing to provide complete organic marketing platform.

Tell us a little bit about your backend technology and implementation

A good on-demand SEO software is very computation intensive, as it is required to process terabytes of data, crawl 100s of thousands pages and filter right recommendations, resulting in high infrastructural costs and making it very difficult to bring it within the affordable range of small businesses.

We have setup a private cloud with locally assembled PC's and tailored crawl platform to ensure efficient utilization of available bandwidth and scalability with minimal cost.  Also with belief in DIY (do-it-yourself), we perform all activities in-house which helps to control cost, gather varied expertise and we are expecting in future it will also provide us various diversifying opportunities.

After gaining initial user traction, we would start focussing on increasing reach of our platform via affiliates and partnerships. On technology front, we would like to add more search signals to include geo, social media and   improve accuracy of recommendations. In longer run we might expand to include open link graph and add more by-products.

Now about the team – Briefly tell us about the founding members and the team behind SearchEnabler?Well, we are just a 2 member team now with a lot of well wishers from family and friends - myself and my colleague / co-founder Varakumar. Prior to SearchEnabler we have worked together for more than 9 years in Huawei Telecom, where I was heading R&D for business intelligence and packet inspection products and Vara was leading architecture group for same product line. I have completed my post-graduation from IIIT-Bangalore and Vara from JNTU.

Once the beta stage completed and with more user traction, we intend to pitch in for expansion - capital and manpower both. We would like to continue as a lean team and add only specialists in areas of cloud computing, infrastructure management, internet marketing and few java hackers.

Every day we strive to enhance our technology to ensure maximum utilization of available hardware and internet bandwidth for ensuring affordability of our SaaS solutions.

YourStory.in team wishes Khadim and Vara all the best in their entrepreneurial journey. Please check-out their website SearchEnabler.comfor more details. Mail us your feedback and suggestions at [email protected]

- Chandan Raj