Botify Looks Back at 2019

Whew! We can't believe 2019 is over. It's been a big year for us, and we couldn't have done it without our amazing team, partners, and customers. With all of the memories rushing in at this time of year, we thought it was only natural to share our reflections with you.

Take a trip down memory lane with us!

What (and who) we're celebrating from the past year

This year was particularly special for us because we gained $20M in Series B Funding - giving us an incredible opportunity! With the funding, we doubled the size of our team, opened a new office in Seattle (our fourth location), and launched some amazing new initiatives.

While we released some exciting updates to our existing products like Botify Keywords and JavaScript Crawler, 2019 was really all about innovation with the launch of brand new products like ActionBoard (See a live demo here!).

The new Botify Keywords gives you more granularity

The new version of Botify Keywords brings customers more granularity in their keywords insights. For example, you can identify "winners" (top-performing keywords) and "losers" (keywords that aren't performing well) daily - and so much more!

New-and-improved, faster JavaScript Crawler

Just a few months ago, we introduced our new-and-improved JavaScript Crawler to provide customers with faster JS rendering, reduced server load, and expanded SEO insights. Now, you can render up to 100 URLs per second -- in other words, conduct a 1 million page analysis in just three hours!

ActionBoard: your SEO to-do list

This is where things really start to get exciting. ActionBoard is the first product in a line of innovations dedicated to saving enterprise SEOs time and resources. ActionBoard acts as your SEO assistant, creating an automated SEO to-do list sorted according to task priority. Using machine learning and all the data Botify knows about your website, ActionBoard personalizes the suggested actions and their predicted impact.

Introducing Botify to Japanese brands

To round out the year, we received some amazing news! Dentsu and Fast-Track presented us with the "Innovative Marketing Technology" award to introduce our platform to brands in Japan. After rounding up the best French startups in the fields of Data, EduTech, Content Marketing, e-Commerce, and Blockchain, they awarded us a $30,000 grant. We are grateful for this opportunity to expand our reach in 2020!

A deep dive into the state of SEO with Forrester Consulting

We also got the opportunity to commission a study from Forrester Consulting about a topic that was top of mind for us this year -- how are executives prioritizing SEO?

In their research, Forrester Consulting found that, out of 250 executives, only 14% were considered to be "Optimizers" (vs. "Learners" or "Maintainers"), meaning that they had the most mature SEO programs, we're investing more in SEO, and had a company-wide SEO strategy. Of that 14%, 75% believed SEO to be the most effective revenue-generating strategy. Find the full report (debuted in October) in "Realize Greater Revenue by Prioritizing SEO."

But enough about us.

Let's talk about Google

Earlier in the year, we saw Google's Chrome74 / evergreen update, followed by Googlebot updating its user-agent string. There were also robots.txt updates and BERT, which came into play to better understand searcher queries in order to serve more relevant content - and it's rolling out to over 70 languages worldwide!

We also attended Google's Webmaster Summit in Mountain View, CA and heard about some really cool insights. Find out what we learned in our Google Webmaster Conference recap.

And Bing!

At our Crawl2Convert event in New York, Bing's Principal Program Manager, Fabrice Canel, announced the new Bing API, which will promote fast indexing of your newest, most critical pages. We're excited to share that the API will be directly integrated in Botify with the upcoming launch of FastIndex - debuting in early 2020.

On that note, there's so much more to look forward to!

What to look forward to from Botify in 2020

We've been listening to what plagues our customers most and are excited to share that the next iteration of Botify - Botify Intelligence and Botify Activation - is all about intelligent, prescriptive actions, and automation. Botify Intelligence and Botify Activation build on top of Botify Analytics to help you identify high-impact issues and opportunities faster, as well as automate certain manual tasks.

In addition to FastIndex mentioned earlier, AlertPanel will also debut in 2020. Part of Botify Intelligence, AlertPanel is an early warning system for critical issues - pulling from 1,000+ metrics it knows about your site and only reporting on true anomalies (not seasonal trends).

2019 has been full of change and innovation -- from algorithm updates, to growing our team, to innovating our products for you.

With that, we want to extend our deepest appreciation. We promise to continue listening, anticipating, and improving - no matter the challenge!

Cheers, and happy holidays!