Botify’s Top 10 Innovations of 2017: Customer-Centric Solutions Enable Biggest and Boldest Optimizations Yet

2017 was a big year for Botify! Botify’s ambition has always been to build the best product for SEOs, with a complete suite of tools that’s bold, innovative, and above all, customer-centric. The innovations we released this year bolstered that vision, and strengthened the insights that our platform enables our customers to gain into the organic search process.

Now, at the end of the year, we wanted highlight the top 10 Botify feature releases of 2017!

Revolutionary Ranking Solution: Botify Keywords is the First to Pair Technical SEO with Real Rankings

Following the success of our multi-award winning applications, Botify Analytics and Botify Log Analyzer, we announced in 2017 the release of our newest solution, Botify Keywords. With Botify Keywords, SEOs have visibility into real rankings (not scraped keywords) and control over what impacts them for the first time. This industry-shifting release captures exactly why Botify is the next gen SEO platform.

Using real rankings from Google Search Console, Botify Keywords can track millions of actual user queries and rankings, tying them to 500+ technical SEO KPIs including compliance, crawl budget optimization, content quality and internal linking, for comprehensive SEO analysis. This offers unprecedented insight into:

• Search intent
• Ranking and search trends over time
• User behavior in the SERPs

Crawling, indexing, and ranking represent the entire organic search process, and Botify Keywords made Botify the sole platform that can illuminate and optimize all three stages.

Let There Be Light: JavaScript Crawl Illuminates JS Content

In 2017, we took crawling to the next level when we released JavaScript crawl, a solution that finally gives SEOs search insight into the JS content on their websites.

Most traditional web crawlers can’t analyze content and links rendered in JavaScript, like comment and recommendation widgets, despite the fact that search engines index this content routinely. This means SEOs weren’t able to analyze crucial content at scale, or identify optimization opportunities for users and search engines within routine crawls.

Botify empowers users to analyze JavaScript content with a robust set of SEO KPIs, extracting actionable insights that result in tangible ROI. Botify’s JavaScript crawl can evaluate text rendered with JavaScript, capture and follow href links rendered with JS, follow JS redirects, and display side-by-side comparisons of pages with and without JS elements.

Customers can also configure the Botify crawler to exclude certain JS files, such as web analytics, and cache resources to reduce stress on the crawled website. Botify’s JavaScript capabilities ultimately improve the comprehensiveness of your site crawls and help you to understand the implications of all your indexable content.

Choose Your Destiny: Custom Reports Allow You to Tell Your Website’s Story

Custom Reports allow you to easily build reports that tell your website’s story. Choose custom pairings from hundreds of SEO KPIs to illustrate a website’s unique search optimization narrative.

Use Custom Reports monitoring to send these incisive reports to all project stakeholders via email, as soon as a crawl ends. This allows you to easily communicate results to a manager, an agency, or a marketing team with the metrics that matter the most.

Generate reports by segment to isolate the important metrics for specific sections of a site. Develop project-specific reports to prioritize tasks and track progress after implementation. Compare historical trends.

Some examples of Custom Reports include:

• Desktop vs. mobile traffic (clicks by device, CTR by segment by device, impressions by segment by device)
• Tracking AMP page deployment (real rankings, visits volume, crawl frequency)
• Crawl monitoring for HTTPS migration (crawl volume, date first crawled, date last crawled)
• New ranking URLs (average position by segment, missed clicks by segment, ranking trends)
• Crawl budget reporting (active URLs, crawl volume on orphan URLs, average page depth)

Of course, these pairings are only examples. The actual number of customizations you can do is countless. SEOs can also build custom dashboards based on their industry (retail, travel, marketplaces or publishers) and track recent optimizations such as AMP, JavaScript, internal linking, HTTPS, and more.

Combine Control + Speed: Discover and Crawl AMP Pages to Harness the Power of AMP

Our customers (especially publishers) had been clamoring for AMP page analysis, and those who ask shall receive! In 2017, we added AMP analysis to our platform. Botify can now discover and crawl AMP pages, allowing customers to confirm the success of their AMP page deployments and monitor AMP pages for fluctuations and issues.

Customers can use Botify to audit their AMP pages with the full capabilities of the Botify platform. Understand how and why metrics vary between structural pages and corresponding AMP pages. Effortlessly compare how the number of visits, the number of impressions, real rankings, and other SEO indicators differ between the two page types to maximize AMP performance.

Push the Limits: Botify Enables Full Analysis for Up to 25 Million Pages Per Crawl

The full picture is 25 million times brighter! This year, Botify became the first SEO platform to offer a 25 million page crawl SaaS subscription, allowing customers to analyze up to 25 million pages per crawl. This blows the old record out of the water. But even at this gigantic scale, the 25 million page crawl still includes all the same analytics and features that make our platform the superior technical SEO solution for enterprise websites.

Yes, the scale of the feature posed a challenge for our engineers. But our customers didn’t notice a difference in terms of analytical capacities. Customers can analyze up to 25 million pages in a single crawl with all of their favorite Botify features, including segmentation, 500+ technical SEO KPIs, content quality analysis, custom reports, historical trends, real rankings, crawl budget analysis, unlimited data exports, and total crawl customizations. To name just a few features, of course!

Source Code Never Lies: Historical HTML Gives SEOs the Full Picture

Source code never lies and now you can harness its power in your day-to-day analysis. Historical HTML allows you to view and download the HTML source code of each page that Botify crawls. The source code is captured the moment the page is crawled, giving you an exact copy of the code that generated your crawl results. No more second guessing or wasted wondering: this feature takes the what if out of your crawl for good by giving you the cold, hard HTML.

Historical HTML allows you to engage in closer examinations of technical SEO properties and page evolutions over time. The feature also lets you monitor the modifications of a page’s content alongside metrics such as ranking, traffic, and other key SEO indicators.

This means you can directly compare changes on the page to performance impact. Pages that returned status code errors (3xx/4xx), redirect loops, bad canonicals, and other technical problems are easier to examine in-depth with historical HTML.

Turn Data into Dynamite: Adobe Analytics (Omniture) Integration with Botify Yields Explosive Insights

More data, broader insights, bigger picture. In 2017, we integrated Adobe Analytics (Omniture) with the Botify platform. This integration allows customers to combine visits data from Omniture with crawl, log file analysis, and ranking data from Botify, tying SEO indicators to performance metrics at both the site segment and URL levels.

This important integration closed the loop with a major data source, and opened our customers’ eyes to the impact their optimizations efforts are having on performance. Like our Google Analytics integration, the Omniture integration offers key analysis of active pages ratios, user behavior by device, AMP deployment, long tail traffic analysis, orphan pages, historical trending, and a voluminous number of other reports and visualizations.

Everything and More: Advanced Exports Enable Unlimited Data Extraction

Don’t keep all the Botify goodness to yourself! This year, we pushed our exports features to the next level with Advanced Exports. Our Advanced Exports feature allows customers to export hundreds of millions of data points into a .CSV file for external manipulation. Advanced Exports offers fourteen top level exports, including:

• All External Links
• All Internal Links
• Redirection Links
• Broken Links
• Non-indexable URLs Details
• Uncrawled URLs because out of scope

To add to the madness, we released Enterprise Advanced Exports, an expansion of the Advanced Exports feature that allowed for unlimited data exports via Amazon S3. For even our largest customers, Enterprise Advanced Exports gives them unadulterated access to critical data for important external projects.

Ever Want a Re-do? Segmentation Replay Let’s You Turn Old Data Into Fresh Insights

Ever wish you could get a re-do? Well, we have just the feature for you! It’s called Segmentation Replay. Segmentation Replay allows you to retroactively create data consistency by applying segments to previous data so you can identify trends over time, even in the past. Re-do delivered.

Background note: Ultimately, it’s useless to crawl millions of pages if you can’t isolate them into meaningful categories and subcategories (parent categories, children categories, sub-children categories). That’s why Botify’s segmentation is one of our customers’ most beloved features. Segmentation allows you to organize your website into groups of URLs that reflect the way your business works.

Highlight seasonal pages, trending products, or location pages, and isolate SEO indicators for those pages. Use segments to identify SEO trends and opportunities unique to those groups of pages and then prioritize projects. Whatever the size of your website, segmentation works and works fast – there’s no load time to access segmented analysis.

Segmentation Replay allows you to apply current segmentation rules to any saved analysis, including those that were conducted before the current segments were defined. This gives you the ability to generate apples-to-apples comparisons between your current crawls and your past crawls, so you can match your data sets and compare the evolution of your KPIs without having a messy analysis or re-crawl on your hands.

Open But Structured: Botify Organizations Enables Teams to Work With Fluidity

Put every project in its place with Botify Organizations. With this new release, each owner can create his or her own projects, add groups and members, and assign project rights to team members. This is helpful for teams working at brands and agencies, so members can work semi-autonomously without relying on a single owner to coordinate their work.

For agencies, this means new projects can be created for each client. Within those projects, members can be included from both the agency and the client teams. Smaller brands can define themselves by creating a single organization, then defining roles for key members on their teams.

For large companies, with multiple subsidiaries, an organization can be defined for each separate subsidiary. Within each of those organizations, teams can be identified and their individual roles defined, and individuals could operate (as guests) on the projects of the other subsidiaries. Botify Organizations ultimately makes the collaboration process more fluid between team members, clients, and stakeholders involved in SEO projects so you can focus on what’s most important.

2018, Here We Come!

2017 was a year of tremendous growth and innovation, and we look forward to taking this energy into the new year. The 10 innovations that we discussed in this blog don’t represent the entirety of what we released this year. But they do best embody the vision and boldness that we hope to instill in all of our releases, big and small.

Stay tuned for 2018. We have quite a few surprises up our sleeves! And feel free to reach out to us on Twitter and Facebook if you have any product suggestions of your own.