Covario Expands Rio SEO Product Line with Top Local Search Deal

San Diego’s Covario, which provides search marketing services for Fortune 500 companies, says today it has acquired Top Local Search, a San Diego-based firm that provides “hyperlocal” search engine optimization (SEO) products and services.

Covario plans to combine Top Local Search with its new Rio SEO business unit, which was created in April to serve a broader market that consists mostly of small and medium businesses, the in-house marketing teams at bigger companies, and other search marketing agencies. “The addition of Top Local Search broadens or extends Rio SEO’s line of automated search [software] products,” Covario spokesman Rick Clancy says.

In addition to offering a line of automated SEO software products, Rio SEO will provide SEO as a Web-based service, along with content marketing and social media software.

Covario did not disclose financial terms of the deal. Clancy says three of the five employees at Top Local Search will join Rio SEO. He wouldn’t say directly how many employees are at Rio SEO, but did say that Covario and Rio SEO together have about 160 employees now.

When Covario announced the formation of Rio SEO in April, the company described Rio SEO as a business unit and a brand that would focus on serving the automation needs of in-house SEO managers extending from large to mid-size companies, as well as search marketers at digital agencies. Before combining with Top Local Search, Rio SEO offered five search marketing and social media software modules.

“Rio SEO now has a larger suite of SEO and social media software tools that will appeal to a broader cross section of marketers and retailers—big and small—plus dealers, distributors, and franchise operators, as well other digital agencies. It’s a great fit,” Covario CEO Russ Mann says in a statement.

“Directionally, we see Rio SEO acting as a distinct business unit that has its own dedicated employees,” Clancy says. In an email, he adds that “the Rio SEO software automation tools provider and the Covario search marketing agency will be operating more and more separately.”

Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.