Yesterday marked a key “milestone” for enterprise SEO platform Linkdex, according to its CEO, with news that the group had been acquired by content marketing company ScribbleLive.

The buyout aims to bridge a gap between content marketing and SEO that continues to see the two live separately at an operational level. Toronto-based ScribbleLive says each discipline has “never been more co-dependent”.  

The acquiring firm has also called the takeover “the first major alignment” of organic search and content marketing software. Its predictive analytics and content marketing platform will benefit from Linkdex’s organic search performance data on billions of pages, as well as its reporting and productivity tools.

Hard decisions

Linkdex’s chief executive, Mark Smith, shared in a LinkedIn post that the decisions – in pending since December this year – had led to one of the “hardest” mergers and acquisitions calls made in his career.

There were slight hints of change at Linkdex a few months ago, with the separation of its Publisher Discovery arm from the business. Smith nevertheless spoke positively about the end result.

“ScribbleLive is an ambitious company, and adding Linkdex to their portfolio of companies is a great fit, for our staff, our customers and our product,” he commented.

“Bringing together content marketing and SEO is a relative ‘no-brainer’, and together these companies are far stronger.”

Team “in situ”

Smith, who has worked at Linkdex for over four years, succeeding former head Steven Brown in January 2014, will retain leadership of the former-Linkdex division, reporting to ScribbleLive CEO Vince Mifsud in the role of managing director.

In the wake of the announcement, Smith adds that the entire Linkdex team remains “in situ”, ready to continue forging a strong business going forward with the backing of a much larger company.

“We can put in place grander plans, expand out through the extended office locations of the group, leverage strength in product, marketing and development while building further the world-class Linkdex platform.”