I founded Botify with Thomas Grange and Stan Chauvin in 2012 in Paris, France, with one simple aim: help businesses get found online.
Botify is a search engine optimisation (SEO) platform working with some of the largest companies in the world, including ASOS, Trainline, and Conde Nast. We give companies the tools they need to drive more traffic and revenue from their websites through organic search. With the costs of digital advertising rising 41% in in the past year, being found through organic search has become more important than ever if brands want to succeed.
How did you come up with the idea for the company?
Whilst Thomas, Stan, and I were working at a marketing agency we saw first-hand the issues companies experienced when trying to improve their search rankings.
Almost half the pages of large corporate websites were not crawled and “seen” by Google and other search engines. It meant that valuable corporate pages, like blogs, did not appear when searched for online and were not ranked by the search engine. This meant these companies weren’t realising their full potential traffic–and revenue.
Botify was born to solve this.
We created an SEO platform that enables companies’ content to be better indexed, so they can appear more often in search results. Botify does this by taking a URL-first approach by focusing on all of a company’s metrics from page crawlability to revenue, to quantify the direct impact of their organic search. We also use our clients’ proprietary data to inform SEO problems specific to them. This gives us the ability to provide more accurate, timely, and relevant results for our clients.
Relying on our clients’ first-party data also allows us to utilise more sophisticated SEO practices, and not simply scrape search results for insights. We will never scrape search results for insights or create shady backlinks on other websites. We don’t try to trick Google and other search engines, but rather act as the interface between the search engine and our clients’ websites.
This approach means we provide value to both parties: by enabling search engines to get access to high-quality content, while offering businesses an affordable, legitimate way to rank higher in the searches.
More from Interviews
- Interview with Steve Elcock, CEO and Founder at UK HR Tech Company: elementsuite
- A Chat With Kirsty Sharman, Founder at Referral Software Company: Referral Factory
- Meet Tobie Morgan Hitchcock, CEO & Co-Founder Of SurrealDB
- Meet Stephen Kines, COO And Co-Founder Of Goldilock
- Meet Henry Wilkinson, Co-Founder at Drop-in, Ahead Of The Opening Of Drop-in Richmond
- Meet Oli Cook, CEO and Founder of ekko.
- Meet Marko Maras, CEO and Founder of Trustfull
- Meet Jeff Warren, Chief Technology Officer at Netwrix
How has the company evolved over the last couple of years?
Since launching we’ve expanded our product range and our presence.
In 2015, we launched the first of three products, Botify Analytics. As the name suggested, this is an analytics tool to give companies insights into their website, showing SEO managers the website from a crawler’s perspective.
We then launched two new tools in 2019 – Botify Intelligence and Botify Activation. The Intelligence tool helps SEO and marketing teams by providing them with to-do lists brimming with AI-driven suggestions of how they could improve their SEO strategy. Our Activation tool helps customers launch their SEO projects, automating the answering of Google’s search engine bot queries to companies’ websites.
Globally we’ve grown significantly. In 2016, we expanded into the US; the country now accounts for 60% of our revenue. We have recently closed a $55 million Series C funding round in 2021, which allowed us to expand into the APAC region where we now have offices in Singapore, Tokyo and Sydney.
What can we hope to see from Botify in the future?
For the rest of 2022 and beyond, our focus is on further automating SEO, data science and partnerships to deliver more ROI for our customers.
We intend to continue strengthening our Botify Intelligence and Botify Analytics tools with additional AI and machine learning capabilities. This will allow SEO professionals to identify revenue growth opportunities and mitigate risk by alerting them when a regression is happening.
Additionally, we want to broaden and deepen our relationships with partners to make it easier for an organic-search marketing team to quickly adopt and integrate Botify’s tools.
To achieve this, hiring is on the agenda too, particularly following our APAC launch in 2021. Asia-Pacific being the biggest market for SEO, we plan on doubling our team in this region by the end of the year and have hired 141 new team members across all departments in 2022.
