Serpstat Founder Oleg Salamaha Interview: How He Built His Million Dollar Company

So here is another interview of SEO TOOL Serpstat founder Oleg Salamaha . Oleg Salamaha is one of the most outstanding personalities in the world of web design and development. Serpstat was first released in January 2013 under the name Prodvigator. In March 2015 Prodvigator was adapted for US market and got the name Serpstat.

Lets start with the interview !

Please introduce yourself to our readers in brief Oleg?

I’m Oleg Salamaha, founder, and VP Serpstat. I started as a SEO specialist in the internet marketing agency.

Why Content Marketing is playing a keen role in SEO 2017? Do you think that only content marketing is king, other SEO techniques are dead?

Other SEO techniques are definitely not dead. But using content marketing hand in hand with traditional SEO will boost the effectiveness of both. In Serpstat blog we create content for people, not for search engines. The fact that content helps with SEO is just an additional impact.

For instance, our article “50 Free Places to Promote Your Website” ranks in top 3. It is plenty of useful information gathered in one place and readers can turn to such an article regularly.

They get useful content, we get loyal readers that may convert into leads.

Where did the idea of creating Serpstat come from? Can you share brief about it?

During work in Netpeak, I created software, scripts, and tools for my colleagues. Netpeak is the biggest internet marketing agency in Eastern Europe. We needed to automate as much work as possible to be more efficient. I’ve made Serpstat because our team needed such tool and there was nothing in the market that could satisfy our needs.

It brings more pleasure to create a brand new product, rather than working on others’ projects. After a while, we understood that Serpstat was too good to keep it only for ourselves and decided to release it in public. Back then Serpstat used to be a SEMrush analog for Western Europe market because it didn’t have Ukrainian databases. We’ve come a long way from that to being a solid SEMrush competitor on the US market.

What is your marketing strategy for Serpstat and how you plan to fight against tough competition in SEO tools?

Having companies like MOZ and SEMrush as competitors is not easy, but on the other hand, we can learn a lot from them. The only thing we want to do is to make a perfect product that will serve any and all needs of an SEO and PPC specialist. Our main goal is to find our competitors’ weaknesses and give users what they cannot get using other tools.

We learn from our potential clients’ needs and get ideas for new features. I believe that it’s important that they can learn something from us too. We have launched Serpstat Academy, and it is a free learning center where anyone can learn SEO and tips for using Serpstat. We have a great online support and keep the conversation with our users via webinars and the blog. We’ve also opened a video production studio so there is plenty of useful videos on our Youtube channel.

Our key marketing strategy for entering the global market were actions on popular deal websites, for instance – Appsumo and Stacksocial. Both campaigns brought us 11.000 new users from US, Canada, Australia and Great Britain. They discovered Serpstat as a decent alternative to SEMrush and chose us. I advise this for all startupers if they want to get many new users in just a couple of weeks.

What are the features in Serpstat which you think are the most significant? Any special features you want to mention?

We’ve recently launched Keyword Clustering and Text Analytics tools.

Keyword clustering is used for grouping related keywords. After you have a group of keywords, you can adjust your website page so that it ranks for a certain group of keywords. The other tool — Text analytics which recommends you what keywords to use in Title, H1, and Body based on the top-10 search results of all keywords.

You can explore Keyword Difficulty in many SEO tools. Usually, it’s based only on the backlinks. In Serpstat there are more metrics to make “keyword difficulty” more accurate: external backlinks, referring domains, Serpstat Page and Trust Rank, number of domains and URLs that have the targeted keyword in the page title.
Compared to our rivals, we also offer more affordable and flexible prices.

What is your biggest achievement so far and how your family reacted to your success?

As I said, we appeared on AppSumo in 2016, and I am proud that Serpstat became the best selling SEO tool on AppSumo ever and the most upvoted SEO tool on Product Hunt. It is now named in the top-2 the world’s best SEO tools under the version of G2Crowd and we are eager to reach even more success.

Our team is doing a great job and since the previous year amount of users has grown three times. We now have the biggest keywords database in Google Uk (65M), Australia (7 M), Canada (54M) and we are working to expand our Google US database (83 M). All the success didn’t come all at once, and my family was with me all the way from the beginning. They believe that is just the first step.

What should we expect from Serpstat? What are your plans? Is there any discount offer for BloggersIdeas readers?

We are going to increase the number and the quality of our databases. We are adding new databases for Google every 2-3 months. For now, our main goal is to become leaders in the global market. The last database we added was French – 11M keywords.

Plus, we are going to update Site Audit tool. We have superb ideas on functionality, you’ll see soon 🙂 We have a special offer for all BloggersIdeas readers – access for 10 days to all Serpstat features. They are welcome to become new Serpstat users!

How are you building relationships with your Readers? How you make them stick on your blog?

The key is not to create content for the sake of content. We are not being self-centered on our blog, don’t talk only about ourselves. There are articles on advanced SEO techniques and study cases from our users. It is pleasing when you know that someone’s found an unusual use for our API! Almost every of our specialists has written for the blog so you can find advice from experienced SEO specialists and analytics here.

What are your predictions for SEO next year 2018? Do you think SEO is dead in 2018?

No, vice versa. I believe that search engines will be developing, search algorithms will become more complicated and serious, and so will SEO specialist’s work. I do not doubt that content will still be the king. Comprehensive, high-quality and valuable content. SEO is getting rid of the shadowy tactics now.

That is why SEO tools will become essential – with them, you can play by the rules. Links plus content – that is the key. I’ve often seen the prediction that next year will be the year of voice search. It is easy and fast, no wonder that more and more people are using voice search.

You may also like:

• Peter Nguyen Ad Exchange Group CEO Went From 0 to $100M Company

This changes the way we build our websites and the way we communicate with users through text. Mobile friendliness will be an important ranking factor.

How to increase your Facebook shared post reach to your audience? Any ideas.

I guess it is great to add your own thoughts, your opinion to what you share. Secondly, use a catchy title and don’t forget to tag everyone who’s mentioned in the post.

What is call tracking in SEO, why it is important? Please give examples?

Call tracking allows to determine which channel the call came from so that you know whether the potential client who’s calling came from organic search, PPC, retargeting or even offline advertisements. For instance, Ringostat call tracking tracks conversions and ties them to your website, so you know which landing pages work best.

For an SEO or PPC specialist, it’s essential to know and compare the effect of each action. Not having a reliable indicator of whether or not your traffic is converting is the same as working blindfolded.  

How to optimize 404 page errors on websites?

Step one: run a site audit and find all the page error. This can be easily done with Serpstat.

Step two: redirect 404 pages to a relevant page (homepage or the page with the same item, if it’s a web store and so on).

Not for all pages, it is convenient to make a redirect. In this case, your task is to make sure your users see a friendly message from the 404 page and don’t get too frustrated. There can be links to other relevant pages or search bar so that the user can find what he was looking for.

Did you like this interview with Oleg share your thoughts in the comments below !

>>> CLICK HERE TRY SERPSTAT FOR FREE NOW LIMITED PERIOD OFFER

Don’t forget to share this awesome interview on social media. Join BloggersIdeas on Facebook, Google+ & Twitter . Also do subscribe our Youtube Channel.