MarTech360 Interview With Adrien Menard, CEO & Co-Founder, Botify

“The future success of marketing will be increasingly data-driven due to consumers’ reliance on their digital devices and online presence.”

Hi, Adrien, can you give us a background of your professional journey, how has it been so far?

Before co-founding Botify in 2012 along with Thomas Grange and Stan Chauvin, we all worked together in a digital marketing agency where we collectively identified a major flaw in how companies were addressing organic search. They focused too heavily on procuring costly advertising campaigns, not giving much thought to the impact Google and other search engines’ crawling capabilities had on content visibility. 

The fact is, on average, almost 50% of large enterprise webpages 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 why Botify was born. We recognized a huge opportunity to empower enterprise organizations with the necessary insights and recommendations to be found by Google, helping to increase their brand authority in the process.

Botify entered the US market in 2016, now our single most profitable region, accounting for more than 60% of our revenue. Some of Botify’s first customers included eBay and Expedia, and we’ve since grown to service Fortune 100 companies, including Barnes & Noble, L’Oréal, and The New York Times. 

Tell us about your role at Botify.

Ever since its inception in 2012, the success of Botify has been the result of a team effort. As CEO and Co-Founder, I am focused on driving the sustainable growth of our organization. This is achieved by driving continuous innovation and delivering consistent value to our customers, but also by ensuring the company follows an egalitarian approach to management. I am very committed to fostering an inclusive, psychologically safe and supportive environment that fosters creativity, collaboration, and community. The success of Botify will forever be founded in these shared values and responsibilities amongst our entire talented workforce – regardless of level or role – to uphold them and propel the company forward from a collective perspective.

Also Read: MarTech360 Interview With Matt Swalley, Chief Business Officer, Omneky

What sets Botify apart from the competition?

Powered by AI and a proprietary unified data model, Botify’s platform ensures web and mobile sites can be fully optimized for search – increasing the number of pages seen, indexed and ranked by search engines – the foundation of being found by consumers in today’s dynamic digital environment.

Built on proven technology that connects organic search to clear business results, Botify offers an end-to-end solution that empowers our customers to leverage organic search as a high-impact, performance marketing channel.

Tracking the continued evolution of Google’s algorithm, we remain focused on ensuring our products reflect those changes in order to continuously support our customer’s content visibility.

As the long-standing leader in organic search innovation, Botify is trusted by more than 500 of the world’s most visible brands, including Expedia, L’Oréal, Crate & Barrel, Conde Nast, Groupon, Github, Carvana, FNAC Darty, and The New York Times, all of whom have succeeded in leveraging organic search for exponential, long-term results and revenue growth.

How has SEO evolved in the past 25 years?

“Search” has become synonymous with “find,” whereas 25 years ago, it was more closely aligned with “exploration.” Today’s consumer expects to find exactly what they are looking for, whenever, and wherever they are looking for it, and when they don’t, they move on impatiently. Historically, we were never quite sure what we would find and that was ok – it was a whole new world, and we were curious. Today, I think it’s fair to say the average consumer (myself included) can be defined more as demanding.

While it’s true that the way we find information, shop for products and services, network with each other, conduct research, are entertained and even educated, has all but changed in the last 25 years. First and foremost, organic search is the practice of optimizing web performance and surfacing key content. Unfortunately, the web is now like a giant library without a librarian and we are all responsible for helping keep the resources organized so they can be found. The reality is that search engines have limited computing power and capacity to crawl large enterprise sites in their entirety – often leaving large shares of content not indexed and therefore, having no chance of being found.

With the continued growth and evolution of the internet, search engines now have to be able to crawl, index, and rank websites that often have over 130 trillion individual pages and are constantly growing according to Google. Today, organic search drives the majority of traffic for most websites – this makes working with search engines and understanding their algorithm to help surface key content, every organization’s opportunity and responsibility. Leveraging deep expertise, ongoing innovation and a mature methodology, are just some of the proven ways Botify helps its customers stay relevant & effective in this ever-changing landscape.

According to you, what will be SEO’s impact on the future of marketing?

The future success of marketing will be increasingly data-driven due to consumers’ reliance on their digital devices and online presence. The internet is overflowing with pages and pages of information on websites, blogs, and social channels, providing marketers with a wealth of data at their fingertips.

The reality is, thousands of pages are created every minute, and large enterprises need the tools and resources to pull actionable insights in order to optimize their websites and remain visible and relevant to Google and their target audience. Decade-old strategies have become too time-consuming and costly for enterprises to optimize search by collecting, analyzing, and inferring data manually. It’s become crucial for these entities to enhance the back-end of their web pages with a holistic approach to make their site more discoverable and indexable by Google.

What is the difference between Organic Search and Paid Search? And which of these are useful to drive relevant traffic to a website?

The difference between organic search and paid search is relatively simple: organic is focused on optimizing site content and structure to improve unpaid search rankings, while paid search focuses on the cost advertisers are willing to incur to be promoted in search rankings. Many companies rely on organic search to optimize their site’s visibility and rankings over the long-term. In comparison, paid search allows enterprises to stipulate how much they are willing to pay to be visibly prominent to their desired target audience in the short-term.

Organic search can also be described as a sustainable approach to being found, as its foundations lie in the integrity of the website and its content, built over time and in response to how search engines behave, not limited by the extent to which an organization is willing to pay for results. In addition, because a successful organic search strategy is built on an integral content foundation, a secondary benefit is improved customer experience resulting from positive content exposure – a level of brand insurance money can’t buy.

How would you describe AI’s evolution and its importance in SEO in today’s time?

Since the inception of the internet, people around the world have come to rely on search engines as their first source of information, now accounting for roughly 93 percent of all web traffic. As a business grows and creates more product and content pages, it becomes difficult to properly manage potential errors in pre-existing pages while developing and optimizing new ones. 

Artificial intelligence can help simplify the complexities of robust organic search processes. Today, AI is needed to help bridge the gap between search marketers and web developers by integrating data in real-time to create an optimal digital experience for both users and search engine bots. This technology makes it easier for algorithms to analyze the relationships between sites, content pages, and search engine rankings. The result gives users accurate and relevant search results while giving brands fast and actionable insights to improve their organic website content, increasing their discoverability and traffic.  

What are the modern day challenges in SEO processes and how does Botify help in tackling these challenges?

An estimated 77% of pages on the average website are not getting organic search traffic, and this is often why large-scale e-commerce brands have to contend with crawl budget, or the number of pages on a site that a search engine can crawl within a given timeframe. To overcome this modern-day challenge, organic search teams need to work in conjunction with search engines and internet infrastructure companies to (1) analyze website performance, (2) develop prioritized action plans, and (3) implement search strategies to drive incremental revenue and ensure that a larger percentage of their website pages are indexed and visible. 

At Botify, we are combining the power of AI-enabled analytics and machine learning-driven automation tools that leverage more than 1,000 metrics to understand a website’s content, search engine algorithms, and users’ intent to ensure compliance guidelines are met. Doing so allows enterprises to significantly reduce lost time spent switching between several platform apps and gain real-time, competitive visibility into their competitors’ organic search performance—informing an even more powerful data-driven organic search strategy.

We are soon to enter 2023, according to you, what will be the biggest SEO trends in 2023?

As we enter a post-Covid era, it’s no surprise that consumer behaviors have changed. But what’s really interesting is the pace at which they shift, is increasing rapidly. The added layer of a potential recession and current economic uncertainty has made it increasingly difficult for enterprises to anticipate and navigate the landscape. A solution is needed to help power enterprises to quickly and efficiently adapt at scale to better suit the needs and wants of customers. This is why I predict many will turn to implementing automation and artificial intelligence in 2023 and beyond, as these modern technical solutions can help create efficiencies, reduce overhead costs, and streamline operations. Also, organic search will be seen more and more as a performance marketing channel to optimize the impact of other marketing investments and a top contributor to online traffic and revenue. 

What would you like to advise to all the aspiring entrepreneurs out there?

First and foremost, your universe shouldn’t solely revolve around your work. While building a quality product or service takes dedication, I often find that entrepreneurs can experience high levels of burnout and lose sight of why they started the journey in the first place if they are not careful. To remain balanced, I spend my weekends with my family, exploring New York, discovering new wines (one of my more indulgent hobbies), and playing soccer with friends in search of our youthful glory days!

Also, I don’t try to do it all by myself. I’ve learned to find people that are smarter than me in certain areas to take on other roles and responsibilities. As previously mentioned, fostering an inclusive culture that truly empowers a team to remain passionate about their work, makes a huge difference when growing a truly impactful, global business. 

Thanks, Adrien!