Analyze This: Pear Analytics’ Website Analyzer Gaining Strong Momentum
May 6, 2009
The Pear Analytics Website Analyzer is picking up momentum after the Innotech Beta Summit win, and recently, the Capital Factory contest, where the product was a finalist out of over 260 submissions.
To date, the tool is on its third version and has run just under 2,000 websites, and now has garnered over 500 subscribers to the free utility, which went live on March 5, 2009.
If you are a small or medium sized business and are having difficulty finding your site on the major search engines, and oh by the way, you can’t afford an expensive SEO consultant, then this is the perfect tool for you.
Ryan Kelly, founder and CEO of San Antonio-based Pear Analytics, says “the tool has received an overwhelmingly positive response,” as he says that he monitors the comments on sites like Digg and Social Median, which drive a lot of traffic to the site. ”We just got our 91st Digg, and we just added the submission button on the site a few days ago,” added Kelly.
So where is all this going anyway?
Kelly tells me that the plan is to launch a white labeling system where any company can brand their analyzer with their logo and color schemes, and eventually offer a premium version with lots of additional functionality that will help you monitor where your site is on the search engines, as well as your competitors.
But he says the underlying strategy for the company is two-fold; first, he is trying to build the distribution network with the free version and the white labeling system, as well as the free widget you can copy and paste on any site.
Their goal is to get to 10,000 subscribers and 500,000 sites analyzed through this distribution network.
Second, as an SEO strategy he is trying to increase the number of inbound links that point to Pear Analytics.
How’s he doing? Well, in less than 6 months his site has over 16,000 web pages pointing to it, and has a Google PageRank of 5 out of 10. Just to put that in perspective, pitchengine.com has a Google PR of 4, slacker.com is 6, and twitter.com is a 9.
Who is paying for all of this? It must be expensive to build and maintain a tool like this, right?
Kelly says that he has two developers working on the Website Analyzer and has been bootstrapping the development so far. But he does have several VCs talking to him offering to help. VC financing would definitely speed up the process and the launch of a premium product, but we have not decided who or how much at this point,” added Kelly.
Kelly also said that a company called Conductor out of New York City recently secured a second round of $10 million in series B financing to build similar tools under a SaaS model.
His response was, ”I still think we have some unique features in our premium product, and I’m fairly certain we can get this off the ground for a lot less.”
