Botify founder: Half of enterprise pages not being crawled by search engines

Enterprise SEO platform Botify announced earlier this week that it had raised $20 million in a Series B funding round, a nice bump considering its series A round was just over $7 million. The company, which was founded in France in 2012 and entered the U.S. market in 2016, positions itself as an enterprise SEO SaaS platform but also offers professional services.

As a competitor to stalwarts like BrightEdge, SEMrush, Conductor and many others in enterprise SEO, the capital is surely going to give Botify a boost. We had a quick chat with the company’s CEO and Founder Adrien Menard to find out what his firm is focused on coming out of this funding round.

How does Botify approach optimization? 

Menard: Botify’s approach to SEO is a holistic one. And it starts with the different versions of website (mobile, desktop, AMP). Today, more than 50 percent of pages on enterprise websites aren’t being crawled by search engines, leading to missed opportunities to drive qualified audience, revenue, and an optimized user experience for search engines users.

Also: Enterprise SEO Platforms : A Marketer’s Guide

That isn’t because of content or keyword optimization, it’s a result of how these websites were built. So our approach starts there. Once we’ve crawled the entire site, we layer different data sets including client’s webserver log files and APIs from web analytics or from Google Search Console, to give the data, tools, and diagnostics to impact every stage of the organic search process.

What’s the typical Botify customer profile?

Menard: Botify works with every type of business from publishers to media sites to e-commerce to agencies. We built Botify as an enterprise platform to support websites with advanced SEO needs such as Expedia, Nike and The Home Depot.

What differentiators or features does Botify bring?

Menard: As I mentioned, Botify is a holistic SEO platform. We work directly with both agencies and companies. We believe that a successful SEO strategy optimizes every stage of the SEO process from technical SEO to content, to ranking and keywords. Botify was built to provide insights across each stage in order to drive the greatest return from a company’s website.

Are there any metrics you can share about performance or ranking improvements among your customers?

Menard: We have hundreds of success stories, but one relevant and very recent example is for a retailer who used Botify to analyze how they can improve the crawl ratio of their product pages. They identified that the low crawl ratio was due to unoptimized internal linking and performance delays. They fixed this and as a result Google discovered the unknown pages which led to a 120 percent increase in organic search traffic and a 35 percent increase in revenue from organic search.

What will the Series B funds be used for?

Menard: There are more opportunities and complexities in search today than ever before (javascript, structured data, mobile-first index, crawl budget, etc.) and we are passionate about ensuring our product roadmap anticipates and represents this. We will use this money to fund further and ongoing innovation. We will also grow our team of industry-leading experts to drive the success of our customers and expand our global footprint.

About The Author

Greg Sterling

Greg Sterling is a Contributing Editor at Search Engine Land. He writes a personal blog, Screenwerk, about connecting the dots between digital media and real-world consumer behavior. He is also VP of Strategy and Insights for the Local Search Association. Follow him on Twitter or find him at Google+.