SEO Blueprint Behind Omnisend's $55M ARR

Rytis Lauris, CEO of Omnisend, recently shared OmniSend's SEO growth story at the SaaS Open conference.

Omnisend helps online stores communicate with customers through email, SMS, and push notifications. Omnisend specifically targets e-commerce businesses, primarily those selling physical goods online.

It helps these businesses improve their retention marketing by enabling effective communication with existing customers. Omnisend goes beyond generic email marketing tools by offering a suite of options, including lifecycle emails, SMS messages, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and syncing with Facebook and Google ads.

Since 2014, they've grown to $50M in Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR).

Their market includes heavy hitters:

• Direct competitors: Klaviyo, MVMT

• Keyword competitors: HubSpot, Marketo

The competition is fierce - a single click in their space costs $30-60 in paid advertising.

Early Growth Strategy (2014-2018)

Omnisend started by focusing on app marketplaces:

• Shopify App Store

• BigCommerce marketplace

• WordPress plugins directory

These marketplaces become their primary customer acquisition channels.

In 2018, they shifted focus to SEO and content marketing. This became their second-biggest growth channel, after agency partnerships.

OmniSend’s SEO Foundation

Omnisend built their SEO strategy on three principles:

1. Revenue over volume: Omnisend focuses on outcomes (revenue) rather than outputs (number of articles). This means targeting more money keywords rather than top-of-funnel keywords. While TOF is important, it doesn't move the needle when your competitors are 10-year-olds with high domain authority and tons of backlinks.

2. Math over creativity: SEO is a math, it's not much creativity. There is a lot of calculations, analysis - keyword analysis, competition analysis, and then very pure calculation. Good quality of content is mandatory. You should not be writing shitty content... but good quality is not enough to rank.

3. In-house expertise: Omnisend maintains a small but dedicated in-house SEO team of five people, focusing on strategic planning and target setting. The CEO emphasized that keeping core SEO functions internal was one of their best decisions, as agencies typically lack deep industry knowledge and split attention across multiple clients. While they partner with freelancers and small agencies for content writing and backlink building, all strategic decisions and keyword research remain in-house. This approach ensures better alignment with business goals and more ambitious revenue targets.

This approach took them from zero to 40,000 monthly visitors in 3 years. They now receive 180,000 monthly visitors.

Building Authority Through Backlinks

The company acquired:

• 100,000 total backlinks

• 11,000 unique referring domains

• High-authority mentions from Bloomberg, CNBC, CNN, Forbes

They achieved this through:

1. Original Research: Omnisend conducted annual email marketing benchmarks, analyzing industry trends and metrics like conversion rates to provide insights that journalists naturally wanted to reference and quote.

2. Industry Studies: They performed studies like the Temu Marketplace Analysis, examining why Americans buy from the Chinese marketplace, earning quotes from sources such as Bloomberg, NBC, and Forbes.

3. Strategic Guest Posting: The company engaged in guest posting by reaching out to blogs and websites, offering high-quality content, and ghostwriting for external publications to gain backlinks.

4. Building Personal Authority: Omnisend developed personal authority for their content writers, exemplified by Bernard Meyer, who appeared on media platforms and spoke at conferences.

5. Competitor Collaboration: They engaged in mutual listing agreements with competitors, such as "you list us #2, we list you #2," to enhance visibility and authority.

Backlink acquisition from reputable domains is crucial for ranking higher but you also need backlinks from lower domain authority sites to not seem spammy. Google algorithms are smart enough to rank you lower if you have tons of backlinks from only high-authority sites.

Adapting to AI Search

SEO has changed with AI tools like ChatGPT and Google's Gemini. Omnisend adapted by:

• Targeting AI tool recommendations

• Maintaining top Google rankings (AI tools pull results from only top 10 pages)

• Creating authentic content with real authors (Google's EEAT Principle)

• Avoiding full AI-written content (which Google penalizes)

• Building cross-team collaboration between SEO and affiliate teams

Practical Tips for Modern SEO

1. Build real authority:

• Use actual employee authors

• Create genuine expert profiles

• Get featured in industry media

2. Create quality backlinks:

• Focus on mid-tier to high-authority sites

• Produce original research

• Build relationships with journalists

3. Balance AI usage:

• Use AI as a writing assistant

• Keep human oversight

• Maintain authentic voices

Omnisend proves that bootstrapped companies can compete in SEO against funded competitors. Their success comes from treating SEO as a mathematical challenge while maintaining authentic, high-quality content.

Top Tweets of the day

1/

WPEngine charges an insane amount of money for a blog. Their competitor WPX is 3x faster and 10x cheaper.

WPX has a massive opportunity to cold email all their competitor’s customers with a subject line "Save $x per year" to get WPEngine's customers.

Expect this to happen more as the cost of software goes down to zero.

Love this reply on the tweet:

"Most of these solutions - WP Engine, Webflow, Vercel - are just massive bullshiters using cognitive biases to overcharge people that have no idea."

2/

The comments on this one are interesting.

1. "Cheap land, cheap electricity, lower construction labor costs, low taxes. Just economics."

2. "xAI in Memphis, Tennessee; Meta in Louisiana. Future nuclear energy facilities most likely going to be in red states as well. My 2 cents is that red states so far have the advantage when it comes to investment from AI companies... with far fewer regulations in these states, expect this trend to continue. Who doesn't like less regulation? We may see a realignment of wealth from blue to red states in the near future if this trend continues. Time will tell."

Maybe the companies solving these problems will be a great stock pick like Nvidia was in 2020. Nvidia was $10. In 2024, its $145.

3/

Discretionary pricing is how you make more money.

Rich people don't mind paying 10x more money for the same stuff.

And if you aren't rich, you can exploit this to save more money.

Rabbit Holes

1. 99% of my time goes to this one skill by Leila Hormozi

2. Bootstrapped founder builds an AI app with Supabase and scales to $1M in 5 months by Supabase

3. Newsletter Landing Page Library by Grow My Newsletter

What’d ya think of today’s masterpiece? Hit ‘reply’ and let me know—don’t hold back, I can take it (probably). 😜

First time here? Join the cool kids’ club.

Also, I’m on X because apparently, tweeting is still a thing.

More Startup Spells 🪄

1. Meme Marketing on Largest Subreddits To Make Sales (LINK)

2. Reddit's Sneaky AI TLDR Strategy to Conquer Long-Tail Keywords for SEO (LINK)

3. John Fio: The Consumer Brand Wizard (LINK)