Botify raised a $ 55 million Series C round of funding led by InfraVia Growth with the participation of Bpifrance’s Large Venture fund. The company has created a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) platform so that your content is indexed better and appears more often in search results.
Existing investors Eurazeo and Ventech are also investing in the startup again. Nicolas Herschtel from InfraVia and Antoine Izsak from Bpifrance will join the board of directors. The valuation has tripled since the last round of the company.
While there are a ton of good and bad practices in the SEO industry, Botify defines itself as a ‘white hat business’. They follow search engine terms of service, they don’t fetch search results for information, they don’t create shady backlinks to other websites.
“We’re going to optimize every step of the search funnel, starting with the quality of the website, its design, how the content is going to be enriched, and so on. »Told me the co-founder and CEO Adrien Ménard.
There are now three different components in the Botify product suite. The startup first released an analytics tool that gives you information about your website. Basically, it lets you see how a crawler is crawling your site.
The company then released Botify Intelligence, which gives you a list of priority tasks you can do to improve your SEO strategy. And now the company is also working on automation with Botify Activation. When Google’s search engine bot queries your site, Botify can take over and respond directly to requests.
“We are not trying to fool Google’s algorithm. We define Botify as the interface between search engines and our customers’ websites. Search engines will access better quality content. And it’s probably cheaper than with a normal process, â€Menard said.
Businesses don’t necessarily use all three tools. They can start with the analysis and go from there. “You can use different products depending on the size of the business,†Menard said.
Over the past few years, Google has increased the number of ad spaces on search results. It also promotes its own services, such as YouTube and Google Maps, before you can see organic search results. I asked Menard if this could be a concern for the future of Botify.
“I agree with you that we are seeing more and more sections of search results from proprietary or paid results,†he said. “But the traffic generated by organic results is growing. It represents 30% of our customers’ website traffic and this average is not decreasing.
According to him, the research continues to expand. When you invest in research, you can see a clear ROI when it comes to online sales, traffic, etc.
Today, Botify has 500 clients, such as Expedia, L’Oréal, The New York Times, Groupon, Marriott, Condé Nast, Crate & Barrel, Fnac Darty, Vestiaire Collective and Farfetch.
With today’s round table, the company wants to improve its automation capabilities, enter into partnerships with more technology companies and increase its footprint with new offices in the Asia-Pacific region.
