• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, June 14, 2010

BrightEdge on Monday will officially unveil a platform that lets large enterprises find the return on investment (ROI) from search engine optimization (SEO) campaigns. The company has been flying under the radar for about three years as engineers build out the platform and sign on a few big names.

The platform aims to give marketers a tool that lets them measure revenue from organic search, prioritize projects based on revenue forecasts, identify opportunities to drive traffic and sales, and execute strategies. Reports are available, too.

Working with customers like MySpace and VMware to build out the product, Jim Yu, founder and chief executive at BrightEdge, says the platform can manage more than $1 billion in organic search revenue, as easily as paid search campaigns. MySpace, for example, uses the platform to manage SEO campaigns across its site, he says.

Measurement of ROI is the biggest challenge faced by marketers seeking to improve their search marketing and social media efforts, according to the State of Search Engine Marketing Report 2010 published by Econsultancy and the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization (SEMPO), released earlier this year.

For SEO, 42% of respondents say ROI measurement remains one of the three biggest challenges, while 43% cite this problem for paid search. On average, companies expect to spend 43% more on SEO in 2010, compared with 2009, according to the SEMPO report.

Attempting to assist companies find the ROI, the BrightEdge platform starts with closed-loop analytics and pulls in data from organic rankings and backlinks, tying the stats to the number of pages a person views and other raw data. Identifying a map of keywords and phrases where competitors are getting organic revenue also becomes part of the process. Through a series of data points, the platform lets marketers understand SEO campaign contributions to revenue generated.

As part of the push to perfect the platform, engineers had to create an index of keywords to build a reporting system it uses to identify any domain's SEO footprint. This allows marketers to identify competitor's strategies, as well as understand where their company should focus to see positive results.

The platform requires no integration, so clients can get up and running within a day. Evidently, the company has attracted venture capital funding, as well. In March, BrightEdge reported securing a second round of funding for $6.5 million it will use to expand engineering and operations to support a growing customer base, as well as increase marketing and sales.

The funding led by Battery Ventures adds former Google manager Satya Patel, who helped build Google's AdSense business, to BrightEdge's board of directors. Existing investors also include Altos Ventures and Illuminate Ventures, which participated in the latest round.