MarTech Interview with Adrien Menard, Co-founder & CEO Botify

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:

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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. 

Along with ROI of SEO, marketers are always seeking to better understand and predict their customers desires, needs and concerns. Customer intent is a key focus for marketers and another area where Botify helps provide insight. 

Marketers have a range of data at their disposal so leveraging this in a way that is helpful is also a key concern.  Botify allows even highly sophisticated digital organizations to take control of and drive value from their own data, and use it to build an organic search strategy that maximizes performance not only for today’s organic search engines, but future ones as well.

There is no doubt for marketers that search is an incredible opportunity to drive brand awareness, traffic and revenue but organic search marketing is very different from other channels like paid advertising.  It’s harder to measure and predict and sometimes marketers may think  that SEO is hard to implement.

Botify eliminates these concerns. With Botify, SEO can be treated as a true performance channel with precise forecasting and automation capabilities, making it easier and more effective to implement SEO strategies to predict their impact!

Tell us how the Botify platform has solved some of these challenges for enterprise users?

Marketers have a wealth of data at their fingertips and want to be able to use it efficiently and effectively so that their decision making isn’t conjecture.  Our clients are reaching out because they want to analyze their SEO performance but in an integrated and holistic way, make informed decisions on action plans and implement SEO strategies faster and cost-efficiently.  This is what Botify enables.  

Botify helps marketers drive more revenue by accelerating their organic search marketing strategies.  Our three solutions help clients throughout the search marketing funnel – automating tasks that took weeks or months to implement down to hours.  Here are the three ways we help:

• With Botify Analytics, search marketing teams have real-time access to the right analytics; all of the data in a unified data model to get the most complete view of the search process
• Botify intelligence automatically prioritizes action plans using powerful ML and AI models
• Botify Activation automatically implements the solution without the support of the engineering teams. 

A few thoughts on the future of search marketing and how this will transform further in a digital first environment?

The most important part of a digital-first environment is getting your digital products and experiences discovered. Effective digital transformation should prioritize efficient, scalable discovery for your digital properties, and that means building everything from teams and functions to products and projects with organic search in mind. This can’t be done as an afterthought or cost-center that you deal with later, or worse -something you throw money at when things go wrong. Digital first organizations put SEO first and prioritize discovery. 

And, if 2020 proved anything, it’s that search is an essential part of our lives.  As consumers, we turn to search for anything and everything under the sun. For enterprises, this means that being found in search is a bigger opportunity than ever to generate brand awareness and online revenue. It’s no surprise that even in 2020, during a global pandemic, businesses accelerated their digital transformations and spent nearly $47.5 billion on SEO!

Botify is the ideal core performance technology for a digital-first organization and is built to handle the massive online properties needed to support the most valuable brands in e-commerce, publishing, and other increasingly digital-first verticals.  This is more important now than ever before.  

Botify is known for the unmatched depth and scale of its analytics suite, however analyzing large, complex sets of data can often be time-consuming. SEO data influences all aspects of a digital marketing and website strategy, so gleaning the most impactful optimization opportunities, and doing so quickly and easily, has cascading benefits. With the launch of Botify Intelligence in 2020, Botify leveraged data science to automatically surface new opportunities and critical issues, helping brands prioritize website improvements that lead to revenue, while also protecting hard-earned traffic. 

With this additional funding, we are doubling-down on machine learning to develop new, innovative features to speed the development of action plans. By modeling the business impact of any change and arming brands with the tools to automatically implement changes, they will not only maximize their time and resources, but also drive more traffic and revenue from organic search.

Some last marketing and martech takeaways before we wrap up?

The search industry is so pervasive in our world today.  If you’ve done a web search today – and who hasn’t – whether it’s to research information, plan a trip, or buy a new pair of shoes, you can appreciate what Botify does.  We make sure websites are more discoverable by search engines. It’s not about keyword stuffing or scraping – we take a tech-based holistic approach, fully compliant with Google best practices and make sure search engines find every strategic page.