An SEO audit of Zopim, the $30 million darling of Singapore startups

Wei Leen does online marketing consulting for companies. A startup adrenaline junkie, he worked at 9flats and Moneysmart before starting his own practice. He tweets (infrequently) at @ngweileen.

Recently-acquired Singapore startup Zopim is all the rage right now. Founded and nurtured tirelessly by National University of Singapore grads from 2009(!), Zopim has finally come of age. It is a really interesting case. It’s a pure B2B product unlike social networks, so there’s is no virality. Since so few users from the free-tier turn into paying customers, each new user’s lifetime value (LTV) is not large enough to justify hiring a dedicated sales force.

For a product of its type, search engine optimization (SEO), search engine marketing (SEM), and pay-per-click (PPC) should be the top priorities. This makes the startup a perfect candidate for an SEO and SEM audit. If you consider both to be vital tools in your marketer’s toolbox, read on. (If you missed my earlier post on how to do a basic SEO audit, you can read up here.)

SEM

The foundation of our audit is keywords. In order to find out what keywords are likely to be important to Zopim, we’ll use the Google Keyword Planner. Skipping ahead a little, a quick search surfaced the following keywords that are likely to be effective for live chat providers like Zopim.

Head-to-head

SEO