Botify: Driving sustainable traffic and increasing online revenue for retailers
About Botify
Enterprise SEO platform, Botify, delivers AI-powered insights to online retailers around the world to maximize sustainable traffic and drive revenue growth. Founded in 2012, and used by more than 500 brands worldwide, Botify is venture capital-backed with $82 million in funding. It has offices in New York, Seattle, Paris, London, Singapore, Sydney, and Japan.
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Contact usBotify leverages Google Cloud to help customers optimize their websites with greater efficiency, increasing each website's discoverability by search engines and users alike.
Google Cloud results
- Optimizing organic search to drive growth; on average, enterprises experience a 20% increase in traffic and 584% ROI
- Delivering customers’ website pages to search engines up to 40x faster
- Utilizing BigQuery to store and parse nearly 6PB of data monthly
- Aggregating and analyzing multiple datasets critical to organic search, providing over 1,100 metrics for each website URL
- Enabling users to export all their data into their own BigQuery projects and their own ETLs
Global COVID-19 lockdowns during 2020 and 2021 accelerated the growth of online sales. Deloitte reported a 34% increase in e-commerce purchases in the U.S. alone. Brands across all industries reassessed their digital presence. As businesses look to maximize revenue from e-commerce, the global search engine optimization service market is expected to be worth more than $100 billion in 2025.
One company that is reaping the benefits of this digital upsurge is Google Cloud.Google Cloud partner Botify, an enterprise software company that utilizes AI-driven analytics and automation to help customers drive sustainable traffic and increase online revenue. While many SEO services focus on keyword optimization to drive search rankings, Botify looks at the entire search process, leveraging a unified data model to determine the health and performance of a website, including which pages are being discovered by search engines, which aren’t, and why.
"Simply put, you are not going to drive conversions from organic search if the search engines aren't finding your website in the first place or are unable to render all of the content on a given page. So, we start at the beginning of the search process to understand whether your website is being crawled, whether the elements on the site are being rendered, and if search engine bots are putting the content into the index. If it falls short at any point within those stages, that content will never appear in an organic search result for consumers to see,” says Meryl Serouya, VP, Partner Strategy at Botify.
“Search engines, on average, miss 50% of the content on an enterprise website. For major retailers that content could and, often does, include key category and product pages. That translates to significant missed revenue.”
Since its founding in 2012, Botify has been using Google Cloud, and today, it helps power the company’s three product suites: Botify Analytics, Botify Intelligence, and Botify Activation. Serouya explains that it was chosen because of its flexibility and cost-effectiveness. She says: “Google Cloud’s position in the public cloud space is second to none. It was an obvious choice based on the economies of scale and price-performance ratio.”
“Google Cloud’s position in the public cloud space is second to none. It was an obvious choice based on the economies of scale and price-performance ratio.”
—Meryl Serouya, VP, Partner Strategy, BotifyEnabling large-scale data storage and rapid analysis with BigQuery
Botify’s most mature suite is Botify Analytics. Powered by BigQuery, it integrates customers' essential first-party data to analyze, filter, segment, and cross-index. Botify calls this the unified data model.
The company stores approximately 6PB of data and when querying data, it parses approximately 5PB of data per month, so data warehouse BigQuery has become an integral part of its operations. It saves hours of pre-computation time because it enables data to be crossed from different datasets in real-time. Its serverless architecture facilitates important computation workflows in the backend, meaning engineers can build tasks faster and at scale. And, it gives users the ability to export all their data into their own BigQuery projects and put it into their own ETLs.
While Botify Analytics provides the data, Botify Intelligence turns that data into actionable insights. It delivers AI-powered recommendations for website improvements, prioritized by business impact. And, it provides pre-emptive alerts to protect customers’ websites.
Botify has more than 500 customers, including some of the largest retailers, publishers, and marketplaces in the world, each with tens of millions of pages on their websites. Crawling that volume of sites, with daily or weekly frequency, Serouya says, demands a partner that can keep up. “We need a partner that can store and analyze data at the same pace,” she says. “One of our points of differentiation is the speed at which we can crawl and render content - up to 250 URLs a second, rendering JavaScript at 100 URLs a second.
“It's not uncommon for customers to come to Botify from a competitor because of the scale and speed we offer. If we are crawling and analyzing a 20 million page website, we want to be able to provide our customers with fresh data in days, not weeks, before it becomes outdated. For one of our big marketplace clients, for example, we crawl and analyze 10 million URLs at 25 urls/second and it takes less than three days.”
“The Looker partnership allows shared customers to centralize data across divisions, markets, and teams with greater efficiency and accuracy. Customers can use pre-built dashboards or further customize them for their specific needs.”
—Meryl Serouya, VP, Partner Strategy, BotifyGoogle Cloud partnership powers seamless implementation of activation
The third and newest suite from Botify, Botify Activation, allows you to actually implement the organic search improvements that are discovered and diagnosed through Botify Analytics and Botify Intelligence.
SpeedWorkers, part of the Botify Activation suite, addresses one of the most common challenges of the modern web. Because of the infinite content online, search engines simply don’t have the capacity to crawl the entirety of an enterprise website - especially when it has tens or hundreds of millions of pages. The prevalence of JavaScript creates additional complexity, because it takes search engines more time and resources to render all of the elements on a page. This leaves much of an enterprise website undiscovered and, therefore, excluded from search results.
SpeedWorkers is a high-performance dynamic rendering system that uses a combination of caching and pre-rendering to deliver the most bot-friendly version of a page to search engines, and it does so faster and more efficiently. With the dramatic improvement in how fast the content is delivered to the bots, more pages can be crawled, indexed, and discovered in organic search, ultimately driving more website traffic and revenue.
Botify Activation acts on behalf of the customer: every search engine request is forwarded to Botify at the CDN level, at which point it leverages Google Compute Engine, BigTable, and BigQuery to handle the requests.
Because Botify Activation not only addresses the needs of search marketers, but also the resource allocation and productivity of engineering teams, it helps to close the gaps between SEO, marketing, and IT teams, which, Serouya says, has historically been a challenge.
A major global retailer was one of the earliest adopters of SpeedWorkers and is now experiencing exceptional results. Not only are its website pages being delivered to search engines more than 40 times faster than before, as a result the search engines are able to discover twice the number of pages. This equates to more than one million new pages, leading to a 30% uptick in unique pages visited by users, and nearly $10 million in incremental SEO revenue.
Partnering with Looker to enable customized dashboards
In 2019, Botify also partnered with business intelligence platform Looker to help its customers easily surface their SEO data and analyze it alongside other key business or channel metrics. “The Looker partnership allows shared customers to centralize data across divisions, markets, and teams with greater efficiency and accuracy,” says Serouya. “Customers can use pre-built dashboards or further customize them for their specific needs.”
Partnership with Google propels digital strategies
To further develop its customer offering, Botify became a Google co-sell partner in 2021 and has now completed integration to the Google Cloud Marketplace. Many of Botify’s customers use Google Cloud, which was one of the reasons the partnership made sense, says Serouya. “It’s a value proposition that really resonates with our customers when we tell them that we are a Google Cloud partner.”
Together, Botify and Google help customers maximize the impact of their digital presence. While Google Cloud optimizes the user experience, Botify optimizes for search engine bots.
Opening doors to stakeholders in new markets
As Botify expands to APAC, its partnership with Google Cloud provides valuable support through introductions. “We have already leveraged the partnership tremendously. We have made connections with the teams in Japan, Singapore, and Australia. Our partnership with Google Cloud is helping us grow and meet clients faster than we would have as a newcomer to the region. It is accelerating our traction there and helping us to solidify our presence in APAC,” says Serouya.
Botify appreciates any help it can get from connecting with people that it wouldn’t typically have conversations with. Serouya concludes: “The Google Cloud team has been phenomenal in working with us to identify the prospects and clients that we share, and then introducing us to their teams. It has helped us gain access to stakeholders, such as the CTO, that we may not have had such access to beforehand.”
“Our partnership with Google Cloud is helping us grow and meet clients faster than we would have as a newcomer to the region. It is accelerating our traction there and helping us to solidify our presence in APAC.”
—Meryl Serouya, VP, Partner Strategy, BotifyTell us your challenge. We're here to help.
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About Botify
Enterprise SEO platform, Botify, delivers AI-powered insights to online retailers around the world to maximize sustainable traffic and drive revenue growth. Founded in 2012, and used by more than 500 brands worldwide, Botify is venture capital-backed with $82 million in funding. It has offices in New York, Seattle, Paris, London, Singapore, Sydney, and Japan.