Expensive Readers, web optimization Execs, and Digital Entrepreneurs,
Whats up, I’m Jenise. I’ve been on the SEJ helm for 15 years, with Loren Baker and Brent Csutoras at my facet as majority homeowners and working companions.
Yesterday, I woke as much as a monumental piece of stories: web optimization information writer Search Engine Land was purchased by marketing tool company Semrush.
There’s an elephant within the room, so let’s begin there.
What occurs when a big search advertising business participant buys a outstanding media outlet centered on the search advertising business?
Will the writer’s protection stay goal and agnostic? Will its authoritative guides embrace the breadth and depth of instruments and platforms and companies out there – a few of that are in direct competitors with Semrush?
What occurs to Search Engine Land’s reams and reams of current content material – articles, white papers, ebooks, movies – that discuss with Semrush rivals (umm, to not point out their backlinks)?
What about credible viewpoints from revered authors that run counter to the brand new company social gathering traces indirectly? Will these voices nonetheless be printed, amplified, quoted on SEL? Or watered down, and even silenced?
So many questions.
Group reactions, thus far, have been both of a benign, congratulatory nature or else centered on issues of bias.
Screenshot from LinkedIn, October 2024
Screenshot from LinkedIn, October 2024
Screenshot from X (Twitter), October 2024
Screenshot from LinkedIn, October 2024
Screenshot from X (Twitter), October 2024
Screenshot from X (Twitter), October 2024SEL and Semrush each have been energetic in responding on social media, reiterating that:
“Our plan is to proceed to stay unbiased and unbiased. Our purpose is to supply high quality data as we all the time have.”
I do imagine that these are their intentions for the prevailing editorial group, for now.
I’m curious to see whether or not this independence will stand the check of time, after the mud has settled and the information of this acquisition is lining our digital chicken cages.
I’m curious about discovering out if SEL’s editorial freedom will stand the check of shareholder pursuits in an NYSE-traded firm that made $305 million in income final 12 months. I believe we might want to wait and see.
Right here’s The place Search Engine Journal Stands
As one of many final unbiased publishers within the web optimization business, SEJ stays bootstrapped and unbossed.
Nobody pulls SEJ’s strings, controls our backlinks, our protection, or our messaging.
That’s proper. SEJ is the honey badger of web optimization journalism: We report what we would like, once we need, how we would like.
SEJ remains to be dedicated to reporting the reality (properly, the reality till issues change with the algorithms) about what is occurring in web optimization and advertising.
SEJ remains to be dedicated to offering unbiased training and greatest practices for our readers.
A.ok.a. enterprise as normal right here at SEJ.
Who Is Search Engine Journal In any case?
Our group of 26 of us around the globe is made up of writers, editors, designers, technologists, the again workplace who hold issues operating easily, gross sales operations. They make me so proud, if I could brag somewhat.
We encourage transparency, experimentation, accountability. We don’t tolerate workplace politics or poisonous conduct. I prefer to assume we’re close-knit. We share, we cuss, we amuse one another with foolish memes. We have now laughed collectively and cried collectively.
Most significantly, when the sh* hits the fan, we pull collectively. We rally. We get gritty. Again and again. I ask the group to strive once more, to enhance, to continue to learn – they usually do it. And that’s when you realize you have an A-Team in your arms.
That’s all the roster 😎. SEJ has no buyers. No company overlords. And we would like it that approach.
Our independence has been difficult at instances. It will be good to have a company Daddy Warbucks who can “darken the skies with individuals,” as considered one of my favourite consultants preferred to say.
And so it does give me pause when a rival writer is now backed by a multi-national firm with over 1,000 staff. That’s a monumental quantity of sources, firepower, and attain.
However through the years, SEJ’s independence has ensured our group’s means to supply 100% unbiased journalism and training for the search advertising neighborhood.
We do what we would like. And that is what I think about: That our readers, our advertisers, our neighborhood will present what we must be a formidable David to this new Goliath.
I welcome your feedback, suggestions, and concepts to make Search Engine Journal what the search advertising neighborhood wants it to be now. Leave me a message here, and I promise to reply.
Jenise Uehara
CEO, Search Engine Journal
Featured Picture: Tanveer Anjum Towsif/Shutterstock
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