Adrien Menard, Co-founder & CEO Botify shares a few thoughts on the future of search marketing and what B2B marketers need to keep in mind to drive better search marketing ROI:
Welcome to this MarTech Series chat Adrien. We’d love to hear more about your journey through the years and what inspired Botify?
Botify was founded in France in 2012 by myself and Thomas Grange and Stan Chauvin. The three of us worked together at a digital marketing agency when we discovered a major flaw in how companies were conducting SEO; they were focusing too much on content and keywords, without knowing if Google and other search engines were even crawling those webpages. In fact, almost half of the pages of large, enterprise websites are not crawled by Google. When a page is not crawled or seen by Google, it will never rank in search engines, and therefore cannot drive traffic or revenue. This is how Botify was born – we recognized a huge opportunity to make more of large enterprise sites be discoverable by Google. Some of Botify’s first customers included EBay, BlaBlaCar, and Expedia. We entered the U.S. market in 2016 and now the U.S. now accounts for more than 60% of Botify’s revenue.
We’d love to hear more about the evolution of the Botify solution over the years since its launch? Congratulations on your recent funding as well, a few thoughts on this new round and how it will impact immediate near-term goals and growth?
Botify’s longest standing and most mature product suite is Botify Analytics, which is powered by our unified data model. Botify’s data model integrates all of the necessary data sources to get the most complete picture of a website’s technical health and organic search performance. In fact, Botify Analytics provides more than 1,100 metrics for any individual URL, and also allows customers to segment and filter the data any way imaginable.
It’s a super powerful application, however, in order to make that data easily actionable, we built Botify Intelligence. Botify Intelligence includes prescriptive insights and prioritized recommendations, helping brands define their action plan quickly. It also includes a monitoring and alerting solution to make brands aware of any problems or anomalies on the website before they turn into potential disasters.
Our newest suite, Botify Activation, is premised on actually implementing those actions, streamlining manual SEO tasks and maximizing SEOs’ and developers’ productivity, time, and resources.
Our goal is to enable customers to maximize revenue and performance from organic search, and do so efficiently and quickly. With our recent funding, we will continue to invest in product innovation, doubling-down on machine learning to speed the development of action plans.
The funding will also enable us to expand globally especially in Asia Pacific (the largest regional market for SEO) by growing operations there and expanding our collaboration with key brands and partners in the region. We are actively hiring in Singapore, Sydney, and Tokyo across all departments.
Finally, we are expanding our partner ecosystem across technology, marketing, and solution partners. We plan to build upon the strong partnerships we’ve already forged; and continue to create alignment, interoperability, and collaboration opportunities with the partners that are essential to our customers’ strategies and success.
What are some of the top concerns still surrounding marketers when it comes to their overall search marketing objectives and strategies, can you talk about a few best practices that you feel marketers need to follow more on?
Marketers are embracing search as a way to generate profitable, efficient, and sustainable traffic, yet are still struggling with measuring its ROI. Historically SEO has been harder to measure than other channels and has been underutilized. Botify is working to quantify the impact of organic search by linking SEO to performance and ROI. We commissioned Forrester Consulting to conduct a study on enterprise organizations prioritizing SEO and its effects on their long-term revenue. The results showed that SEO can generate a 584% ROI in less than 3 months for companies using Botify.
