Internet marketing is big money, and so is the $12 million recently raised by HubSpot, a consultancy and software provider for sites looking to improve their visibility online.
The Series B round led by Matrix Partners comes on top of the $5 million raised from General Catalyst Partners last September, bringing the company’s grand total to over $17 million.
In addition to providing paid SEO services, HubSpot offers a free search optimization tool called Website Grader that will automatically assess your website, score it on a 1-100 scale, and show you where to make changes that will get it in front of more eyeballs. The tool claims to have assessed over 300,000 sites, and your score on the 1-100 scale represents the percentage of those sites that your site tops (kind of like the SAT).
Congrats HubSpot! We are working with them for SEO. Great company.
By the way, we are live blogging at the DFJ Gotham 250K East Coast Venture Challenge. It is the biggest cash prize business plan competition in the country. The competition is fierce and technology impressive.
Check it out live at http://collegemogul.com
SEO has gotten to the point where regardless of what you’ve done from a design standpoint - you need powerful backlinks with keyword-rich anchor text to have even a prayer of getting any traffic.
Congrats on the funding. The whole SEO thing always seemed a bit esoteric to me (aside from a few basics) but I’ll for sure try it out for our new startup.
Peter
do you follow me @ http://twitter.com/peterurban
Nice! HubSpot rocks. I shut down my startup to join them. Best decision I made. We’re hiring too: Sales, developers, internet marketing consultants.
Guy Kawasaki helped put them on the map so to speak by mentioning them on his blog while back. Wonder if he is an investor
Their website grader is a really cool tool. The hubspot blog http://blog.hubspot.com/ is an interesting /useful blog too.
Great job Hubspot!! I’m sure the $12 million will make your service even better. The only problem is with the increased awareness some of my competition may find out how I got all those great organic search results. Darn. Can’t keep anything a secret these days.
Congrats to the entire team of Hubspot.
Doing good job
VC funded SEO - they sound expensive.
Website grader is a cool tool
SEO rules today….
so, no surprise to me here
Hubspot ranks their own website as being better than google.com.
Weird.
It’s probably important to note that we help clients generate traffic in a few different ways including SEO, PPC, Social media and blogging. We also provide tools that help clients capture more leads on their site. We do have some great tools for SEO and many clients buy our services because of the SEO tools and training.
@Imageco - Not sure what you consider expensive. If you compare it to a good SEO Consultant, we’re very inexpensive. We also work with many SEO consultants too - who use our platform for their clients.
I tried their free tool and while the information is compelling it isn’t anything that I can’t get on my own or don’t already know. I wonder if the the investment firms really did their due dilligence. Sites like Yahoo! and Google have very clear Terms of Service stating that the users will not access the sites using any form of automated scripts or crawlers. While the free report is being run they are clearly accessing Google in a way that violates the Terms of Service and the robots.txt file.
If anyone at HubSpot can address these concerns I would really like to see the reply.
A couple things to clarify from the comments and article:
Website Grader is a free tool that we developed for buzz. It is only one tiny piece of our software application. While Website Grader is a cool Web 2.0-ish app, at our core we’re business folk who like to build products to sell to businesses who pay us money for the software.
HubSpot (the name of the company and the name of the app we sell) is marketing software for small and medium sized businesses, and inludes software for SEO, blogging, landing pages, lead tracking & intelligence and marketing analytics (currently priced at $3500/year). We also have an app on the Salesforce.com AppExchange which integrates our marketing software with their CRM system (currently priced at $750/month).
We have sharp and experienced investors. In both our A and B rounds, the VCs did their diligence. They invested in the marketing software application we sell to businesses and our growing base of 400 paying customers.
If you are a marketing professional, check out HubSpot. We have some cool software I think you will love.
Mike Volpe
VP Marketing
HubSpot
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Congrats Team HubSpot! I’ve used your free online service in addition to other tools to guide many of our http://www.config.com clients SEO for some time now
There are a few other sites I’ll recommend, but yours is a top notch guide.