The Beginner's Guide To Botify

Revised February 2023

With a constantly evolving digital landscape, capturing audience attention is more complex than ever before. Amidst the current macroeconomic climate and rising costs of paid media, finding a way to capture and keep that attention requires more creative and cost-effective marketing strategies.

As part of those strategies, Gartner's latest Fundamental SEO report tells us savvy marketing teams are increasing the amount of resources they dedicate to organic search by 45%, averaging about 9% of their organization's total marketing budget. As part of this spend, they consistently seek technology that can revolutionize their organic search strategy to drive revenue and demonstrate ROI.

This is where Botify comes in.

Many of the world's largest brands rely on Botify's proven track record of protecting and growing web traffic organically through analyzing performance metrics, optimizing opportunities, and finding quick ways to action on recommendations.

This article will guide you to everything you need to know about Botify, from quick summaries to more in-depth details on specific product suites.

Summary: Botify at a glance

For the last decade, Botify has been the leading enterprise organic search industry innovator. We've introduced the most ground-breaking solutions to solve the major SEO challenges our customers face to grow profitability and unlock their hidden potential.

Botify has transformed the organic search strategy of the world's most innovative brands. Our customers typically see double-digit increases in organic traffic within the first three years of implementation, resulting, in some cases, in a staggering 584% return on investment (ROI) (Forrester, 2020).

Botify delivers these results through our robust platform and services focused on Analytics, Intelligence, and Activation. Botify ensures consumers and search engines alike can find your most relevant and valuable content. With our platform, your team can assess sitewide analytics, action on machine learning-driven recommendations, automate processes, and remove reliance on engineering.

Botify partners with ambitious organizations like yours to achieve enterprise business goals by taking a performance marketing-led approach to drive success organically. Our SEO experts act as an extension of your team to develop a partnership that extends beyond just software.

About Botify

At Botify, we believe organic search drives growth and revenue. Sixty-five percent of mature organic search teams cite increased sales as a top benefit of their careful attention to optimizing organic search. Botify customers report even more impressive returns.

Nothing at Botify is possible without our groundbreaking, unified data approach to organic search. Botify analyzes every phase of the search process:

1. crawling
2. rendering
3. indexing
4. ranking
5. conversions

Many of the most widely used platforms focus primarily on a single phase, like ranking. The ranking phase of search certainly helps increase traffic to your site but, on its own, won't have a profound impact. A full-funnel approach gives you the comprehensive analysis you need to make dramatic, lasting improvements to your search performance - and, by extension, your business performance.

After all, search is a process with a clear beginning and end -- if search engines don't crawl your site, your pages can't rank in the index where they can earn traffic and revenue for your business. Botify approaches everything from that perspective, and it's the foundation upon which we built our platform. We call it the Botify Methodology.

With that foundation in mind, let's take a look at the problems we're solving.

The Problem Botify Solves

The fact is, Google crawls less than half of an enterprise website's pages - leaving far too much traffic and potential revenue on the table. With 37% of pages not able to be indexed, on average, a whopping 77% of website pages drive no organic traffic at all.

If search engines aren't crawling your website, your pages can't be indexed - which means they definitely won't rank. Leading brands understand the incredible, often untapped, potential to improve website traffic and revenue by helping search engines find your most important content.

Savvy marketers understand the immense potential that improving traffic has to protect and grow revenue by helping search engines find your most important content.

Botify works with organizations that count on their website(s) for a substantial portion of their revenue. That often translates into working with e-commerce, publishers, classifieds, and travel organizations.

Whether you're a content manager, a technical SEO responsible for identifying indexing issues, an e-commerce manager responsible for optimizing the customer journey, or an executive who's responsible for driving traffic to and revenue from your organization's website, Botify can help.

How Botify works

Botify enables you to see your website at every phase of the search process -- from crawling to conversions -- and how each part impacts another (ex: how crawl impacts ranking, how content quality impacts crawl frequency, etc.). You can layer 1,000+ data points for any URL on your website to identify exactly what's impacting your pages.

While knowing every detail about your site is critical - from information about your redirected URLs to the average size and uniqueness of your content - we know the most actionable SEO insights come when you unify your data.

That's why, on top of our crawler, we layer on your log file data, your query data, and your website analytics data.

With so much data at their disposal, our customers use Botify Analytics to analyze their website architecture for SEO, find, and fix indexing issues, identify trending keywords, and more -- the use cases are endless.

What sets Botify apart, besides our robust and comprehensive performance data, is Botify Intelligence, which offers the ability to use that data to power recommendations to sift through the noise for you and show you what can be done to ensure search engines lead customers directly to you more quickly.

Finally, Botify Activation allows you to leverage data and insights from the rest of the Botify Platform to turn them into action to improve website performance. Boost agility across marketing and engineering teams by leveraging automation and intelligence tools powered by machine learning.

Taking a URL-first approach

One of the reasons Botify stands out is by taking a URL-first approach to your SEO data rather than a keyword-first approach. We start by giving you a complete picture of every URL on your website - not just desktop, but also encompassing things like accelerated mobile page (AMP) versions, alternate language versions, mobile versions, etc. - and then layer onto that everything else you'd want to know about each individual URL, giving you a complete picture.

This makes it easy to identify what could be done at each stage of the search process to increase your SEO performance. Then, with Botify Intelligence's ActionBoard and AlertPanel, your team can efficiently identify the highest-impact tasks to tackle first.

What are the benefits of unifying your SEO data?

• Utilizing Botify Analytics uncovers vital insights you may never have seen before: Layering title tag data (from a crawl) with your click data (from keywords) lets you quickly see what might contribute to higher or lower CTRs.
• Layering Googlebot visit data (from your log files) with traffic data (from your engagement analytics) can help you better understand why your URLs are seeing higher or lower search traffic.
• Layering crawl data with log file data allows you to see how many total pages your website has and which of them Google is/isn't visiting.
• Layering revenue and conversion data (from engagement) with keyword data can show you whether pages that rank for more keywords generate more revenue.

With the added capabilities of Botify Intelligence and Botify Activation, you'll be able to make even better use of all that data, surfacing high-impact opportunities faster and automating actions to save you resources.

Botify Intelligence

It takes significant time to make sense of your data and identify the highest-priority items. This is where Botify Intelligence makes a difference. Botify Intelligence takes your search data to the next level with the power of machine learning by solving for pain points like "With all this data, I'm not sure where to start" and "Critical pages were blocked by robots.txt, and I wasn't aware until our traffic suffered."

AlertPanel

Botify Intelligence includes a proactive warning system that alerts organic search teams to urgent issues before they negatively impact traffic. You can maximize opportunities to increase traffic first by safeguarding your website's existing traffic with help from proactive alerts like organic visits decrease or increase in 4xx status codes. You can act on issues instantly using autonomous workflows before they impact your bottom line. AlertPanel analyzes your crawl, log files, and robots.txt data for your most strategic pages in real time with daily updates using machine learning.

ActionBoard

Botify Intelligence is designed to make marketers' priorities more transparent and utilize machine learning to estimate the impact of actioning on Botify's recommendations. Get a clear picture of why an issue matters for your site and how to improve your site's performance with goal-based guidance pages that provide easy-to-follow educational content and additional context.

Botify Analytics

Using the first-party data and competitive insights collected, analyzed, and segmented in Botify Analytics, you can understand your website's technical and content performance data.

SiteCrawler

The data Botify retrieves from each crawl helps our customers evaluate the structure and content of every page on their website -- from mobile to desktop -- just as a search engine would. Since all of your SEO data lives in Botify, you can easily keep track of changes in your crawl data over time.

Not only does Botify crawl HTML at a rate of 250 URLs per second, but it can also fully crawl and render your JavaScript (using the same rendering engine as Googlebot) at a rate of 100 URLs per second critical for JavaScript SEO audits.

LogAnalyzer

The log file analysis component of Botify Analytics enables you to see how search engine bots are crawling your site. You can feed your server log files into a dashboard built specifically for SEOs to overlay them with your crawl data. This lets you see which pages Google is ignoring and which they're visiting, enabling you to detect crawl budget issues. This data is key to increasing bot access to your most critical pages -- your top converters and top revenue generators.

RealKeywords

Through the Google Search Console API on our platform, you'll be able to see even more data than in the GSC performance dashboard and manage it more easily. Our customers generally use this feature to get their query data, such as what queries are driving impressions and clicks. The keywords dashboard also displays other keyword insights, such as where your audience is searching from, what devices they're using, missed clicks (i.e., where you're getting impressions but not clicks), and keywords that are trending up or down with your audience. Additionally, we don't violate Google's terms of service by scraping SERPs; we pull directly from GSC instead.

EngagementAnalytics

Botify Analytics works hand in hand with Google Analytics, Adobe Analytics, and Piano. We can connect with your site's analytics account to overlay valuable engagement and conversion data with your Botify Analytics data. This centralizes your engagement metrics, so you don't have to toggle between platforms or manually merge data sources to get a complete picture of your organic traffic trends.

Custom reporting

With Botify, there's no longer a need to export your data. You can pull data from Botify Analytics into Custom Reports, where you can view your report directly or download it if needed. We have APIs that tie into Google Sheets, Google Data Studio, or your CMS, and we have a Botify Chrome Extension that delivers SEO KPIs with a single click. Plus, if your business uses Looker as its business intelligence dashboard, our partnership with them allows you to view your SEO data alongside key business metrics through our custom Botify Looker Block®.

Botify Activation

With robust data and metrics, plus prioritized recommendations, the next step is to drive action. Botify Activation connects insights about your website's performance with taking action. By enabling scalable, automated implementation and content discoverability, the suite allows you to control how search engines find and interpret website pages - improving speed to market while also boosting efficiency across teams.

Speedworkers

SpeedWorkers is our search experience manager, helping search engines to discover your website content at the speed and scale they need. Search engine bots only have so much time to dedicate when it comes to crawling a site - and we want to ensure that they are seeing your critical website content. By delivering fully-rendered pages to search engines, SpeedWorkers autonomously accelerates the page indexing process 10-40x and guarantees that the right content is being found. Plus, it enables efficient use of your server capacity, freeing up server resources that can be dedicated to users.

Pageworkers

A collection of automation tools, Pageworkers enables you to make organic search changes to your website at scale. Fix complex SEO issues in minutes, rather than days or weeks, straight from Botify to keep your website up-to-date. You'll be able to implement recommendations surfaced through Botify Intelligence and make other optimizations that you and your team identify. Without pushing tickets through your engineering team's backlog, you can own the full optimization process and test new tactics quickly.

FastIndex

We know creating and optimizing sitemaps can be a daunting task for enterprise websites. FastIndex allows you to quickly and easily generate sitemaps to be sure search engines know precisely what parts of your website matter most. Gone are the days of trying to marry sitemap data from multiple sources or struggling to keep up with your constantly evolving web pages.

JavaScript rendering, structured data analysis, and more

We build Botify solutions directly in response to the problems our enterprise SEO customers are facing so you can:

• Render JavaScript at scale with our JavaScript Crawler. Track which resources are executed, and collect valuable user-centric performance metrics (time to first paint, time to interactive, and other performance metrics) to ensure your JS content is rendered and seen by search engines. You can render up to 100 URLs per second and conduct a 1 million page analysis in just three hours instead of waiting days or weeks!
• Automatically extract 15+ different types of structured data without needing to set up custom extracts to pull information.
• Evaluate content on your website for quality, parity, and more the same way a search engine would, and eliminate template content from your analysis.

What our customers love

Due to the fast-changing industry and appetite for satisfying our clients' needs, we're consistently iterating and improving the workflows in the platform. Everything in Botify has been designed to fit the needs of our customers.

Right now, our customers are most excited about Botify Activation and its power to drive growth through automation. Top e-commerce brands are already using it to overcome their SEO obstacles, like JavaScript rendering and implementing optimizations at scale, without solely relying on the support of an engineering team. Botify's continued investment in AI and ML capabilities enable SEO teams to work more efficiently and autonomously than ever before.

What are you waiting for?

Using Botify will help you unlock the potential of organic search to grow profitability and revenue with an end-to-end performance marketing platform. Ready to start a conversation? Get in touch.