Julia Nesterets is the CEO and Co-Founder of JetOctopus, a SaaS-based crawler and log file analyzer. Julia has a deep understanding of the unique challenges that large eCommerce companies face with SEO. She's proven her insights and strategies to be invaluable in enhancing her client's online presence and search engine rankings.
On this episode, Julia and I discuss crawling and log line analysis, the gamification of SEO analysis, branding a SaaS company, and much more.
What is JetOctopus
Julia Nesterets: JetOctopus is a cloud based technical on page SEO platform, like all in one platform for on page technical analysis. So there are different models.
You are as a digital marketer, as an SEO expert, you have the fastest scroller on the market that can scan your website up to 250 pages per second. Then you have the log analyzer which visualizes the Google bot's behavior at your website and you do understand which part of the website is visible which is ignored and what to change so to increase your site visibility.
Then we have the Google Search Console model really on steroids that gives extensive tools to work with your keywords, cannibalizations, cures, et cetera. We have also a very powerful model, which, which is alerts. Absolutely beloved by digital agencies because yhey just become another level of partners for their customers because it is them who finds out if something is broken in terms of SEO and they're capable just to fix that right away and not get the SEO drop.
So it is a very powerful platform where you are capable to do everything with your own page and to make your SEO visualize, doable and predictable at the end of the day.
Alex Bond: No, that's beautiful. And I've talked with a few people about SEO and with a crawler and obviously all these other services that you provide. I'm curious on a very basic level, what you would consider Is the ultimate solution that JetOctopus provides to clients? I mean, is it as simple as just increasing visibility or how would you describe that?
Julia Nesterets: The ultimate value for let's say e commerce websites, this is to increase your crawl budget, your site indexability, your site visibility, because when you are working on a big e commerce website, there are a lot of web pages.
And the scroll budget is really the top priority and our tool is the best one to visualize what is scroll budget is right now. So what is the site visibility right now and how to increase it to the full because this is the only way how to get new rankings because your main customer is the Google bot.
If it doesn't visit your pages, they will never be ranked. That's why for the big e commerce websites, the log analyzer is absolutely the best, the best on the market. If you speak about the digital agencies. We don't charge for the domains. We don't charge for the number of users, et cetera. We don't care actually about that. And we give a lot of tools for you to optimize your routine.
So you don't have to pick up these customers to work during this month and those customers to analyze that month, or you have all at hand in one account at place really affordable and automatic. And which lets you work on a regular basis with your like a hundred customers on a regular basis. So it dramatically increases your efficiency and decreases your churn.
Exploring the Versatility of JetOctopus: Unveiling Unconventional Use Cases and Diverse Solutions
Alex Bond: I was just extremely curious. I guess what I'm trying to ask is what some people might use it for and what someone might see as the solution and what you who, you know, co founded and runs the company, what you see for the solution can be 2 very different things. So are people often using it maybe the way it's intended, or they find and maybe even creative ways to use it that you didn't even really imagine.
Julia Nesterets: Yeah, yeah, that's true. We are actually always working on this particular process because we have our understanding of aha moment for different types of the customers for our platform and we are doing our best. So to me, this user follow the funnel, we want him to follow.
And I do understand that sometimes they follow other way, and it all depends on their experience. First of all, on what they used to use before. And usually the crawler is the most attractive because it is the most understandable. And if you speak about the log analyzer, Like three years ago, almost no one really knew something specific about that and understood the value of it.
And we've spent a lot of time educating the market and writing a lot of articles dedicated to the efficiency of log files analysis. I mean, SEO log files analysis. And that is just the deal breaker actually and game changer, and you will never be more effective without your logs visualization and your decisions will never be more effective when you have the picture and understanding how Google bot behaves.
Because of these optimizations, what impact these optimizations had on the behavior on book, on Google Bot, on your website, and as I already said, the Google bot is your main customer. You have to understand his behavior on your website, and you have to multiply those things that impact your site visibility.
Unleashing the Power of Limitless Crawling and Log Line Analysis: A Cornerstone of JetOctopus's Business Model
Alex Bond: You mentioned earlier that part of the problem is multiple pages, and I don't mean like several, I mean millions or hundreds of thousands, and one of the things that jet octopus prides itself on is that it has no limit in the amount of pages that it can crawl. I guess my question is how important is that no limit ability on crawling and log line analysis to your business model?
Julia Nesterets: That's the great question. And that's the absolutely killing pro of JetOctopus comparing to other competitors. Why? Initially, JetOctopus was built for the big and huge websites. And we have a lot of customers with like millions and even hundreds of millions pages.
And actually, JetOctopus was born from our own pain. Our previous business had like 5 million pages and we know how to work with big data, et cetera, et cetera. And this type of the customer, they got used to work with partial data. The number one reason is because, for example, they use the desktop crawlers, and this is really the pain to crawl the whole website.
Absolutely impossible, actually, because it will take ages. And it paralyzes your PC, et cetera. From the other hand, if we speak about the cloud based solutions, they just charge too much. So to get full data, that's why even they don't have such a concept that you have to have this full data because it's impossible to have based on their pricing, we've entered this market from our own pain, having SEO world, a better place.
And to make a really powerful platform for big websites, which is affordable, not only to enterprise companies, but to all customers who have more than 100 K pages. Because when you have 100k pages, you have to need the correlating tools to be effective in terms of SEO, because when you just work with 10 percent of your website and you start multiplying these results of these audit to the rest of the website.
This is the very harmful approach because the crawler doesn't make this slice of your website, you know? So the logic of crawler and Google bots behavior as well. So it, this is the first page and then it finds the links on this page to the other pages and it starts adding, you know.
That's why you can crawl like this 10 percent of the website and never knowing what is going on here. And you will multiply this results to the rest and this will not be the right decisions. And in our case, we've built dramatically better solution in terms of even architecture of our platform.
So we build it dramatically other way. And we are capable to get all your data and to process it quickly and to show you the full picture of your website without any predictions, you know, that having 10 percent of the website, you have to think that maybe this is the same picture as the rest of the website. It's not working this way.
And in JetOctopus, you don't care about anything. You just scroll your web full website. You just have all your logs for the month or for even for a year And you can visualize this is your full website Word part of the website is visited by google bot for the month. This is a good period to analyze and then we have the sections dedicated why this part of the website is visited and this part is not visited?
And you just get this problematic URLs, which are ignored and optimize these technical criteria, which are impactful on Google bot behavior. Answering back the question of why it matters, because it just makes the only way of the right SEO analysis of a big website and of the right decisions, not predictions.
So your SEO becomes not hypothetical, but absolutely understandable, absolutely visualized and predictable because you definitely know what is working and you definitely know what didn't have any impact. And you just don't need to implement those optimizations to the rest of the website because it doesn't work in your case.
Alex Bond: Absolutely. And I find it so fascinating that it sounds like these companies, I don't understand how you'd be able to compare two web pages when you only scanned one of them or you only crawled one of them. And so to take 10 percent and try to apply that in mass onto an entire website.
Julia Nesterets: Yeah. You are just unable, for example, to analyze the interlinking structure, just one of the use cases. So very important thing interlinking structure for the big website. This is one of the most impactful criteria. And when you have just 10 percent of your website, you are unable to see any interlinking and you won't be able to do any optimizations there.
That's why when you work on a big website, you have to have the powerful correlating tools, which can manage your volumes, process them quickly and visualize. The insights for you. That's where we are very strong.
How JetOctopus's Limitless Crawling Capability Attracts Major Clients and Elevates Business Success
Alex Bond: And I'm curious if this ability as a brand to crawl as many pages as you want has landed you bigger clients, because I can't imagine a lot of small companies have more pages on their website than the bigger companies, especially when it comes to stores. Or a Shopify stores or any example like that. Is that the case? Is this actually helped you land bigger clients than say, maybe the last company that you worked at?
Julia Nesterets: Oh, yes. Our unlimited packages, they are really beloved by big customers who have a lot of like more than two domains in different geographies. And each of these domain have then more than 1 million pages.
Their usual model, behavior model is that they have to pick up the priority because it all, it is all about the budget, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And not in our case. So in our case, you just pick up the needed volume where you wanna work on. I mean, the volume of the pages.
And we just give you unlimited solution there and you forget about everything. And we've landed a lot of companies like classifieds are really just, they are fond of this unlimited solutions because they have a lot of pages there. They classifieds with different domains or with one domain in different, different geographies.
Then we have a lot of like real estate websites, after websites, eCommerce websites. So we have Amazon in Greece, which is like scrooge. This is a huge website and they are very tough at SEO. They have a lot of tools inside. And at the end of the day, after several calls, they just had to look at the platform and said that anyway we want it.
So the customers who have more than million pages, they are really fond of these unlimited solutions because usually they have to pick up, they have to prioritize, they have to choose and to skip something to avoid some not so important domains for now. And right now they don't need to do it. They have the right solution at hand to work on a regular basis with all the websites on their management and with all the pages under their management.
Revolutionizing SEO Analysis: Unveiling the Gamified Brand Experience of JetOctopus
Alex Bond: I'm curious about the brand. In and of itself of JetOctopus. So some of the graphics, you know, upon looking at your website, doing a little research about y'all, the graphics and the general UX of the website, giving me the implication that part of the jet octopus brand is to kind of like gamify SEO analysis. Is that off base? Is that accurate?
Julia Nesterets: Actually, if you speak about the name and why it is Octopus and why it is Jet?
Alex Bond: That is a follow up question, honestly, because I felt like that was part of it. It felt like a video game type name.
Julia Nesterets: Actually the initial idea was not just to make something fun, but we have the history. We have like several tools. And initially there were different animals for these tools. For example, we had like sitemap koala or different like analytical tools, like oval was the analytical tools, et cetera.
And we were in a sort of like SEO zoo tools. We had such a concept and when we've been thinking about the crawler, we started to think what it is doing, what this algorithm is doing, how it is working. And it is spreading. It is spreadin through the whole website, his hands. And that's why it is octopus.
So that this is not the accidental name, why jet? Because our crawler is, is absolutely the fastest on the market. And this is very, very important for big brands like Wallapop is our brand or Swiss market marketplace group is our brand or like the big digital agency, Cadastro, like number one in Brazil. So this is really, really important for them. And that's why Jet is not also the accidental name here.
Alex Bond: No, that's great. And I'm kind of curious if you don't mind me asking, like the octopus is quite quirky, you know, and the e commerce industry feel like if I'm being totally frank with you, the e commerce community is known for pretty self serious branding.
A lot of times where everything's very, I don't know, kind of ergonomic and defined and typography and everything's very straight. I mean, there's not a lot of room for companies that come in with a lot of like personality. I feel like people might not take them seriously or something.
Don't get me wrong. I really like what you did with the brain. It was one of the first things that kind of jumped out at me as I was like, whoa, this is kind of like kids game, something that my, my eight year old would play, but it's obviously more intense than that. My question, Julia, is do you consider it a pretty risky to kind of brand the company this way?
Julia Nesterets: Actually, frankly speaking, we never thought about that as a risky from the other hand, we do understand that it is different. It is absolutely different from our main cost competitors on the market. And we still have the logic in this. name, so this is like not the accidental name. We have this logic why we call that and we are five years old already.
And actually we've never had such a problem. Like you have a sort of like a gamification brand or something like that. I am open and I must confess that during like the first year, like first. Two years of our life, we had this sort of like you are newcomers and you have to show something, you have to prove something, prove something, et cetera, et cetera.
But I think that was not because of the brand visualization. That was just the stage of the company, the usual way when the newcomers entered the market, you have to do. something really exciting to prove your expertise, et cetera, et cetera. And then they will start perceiving you in other way. And you have to get some traction, et cetera, some reviews, feedback, et cetera.
So back to the question, we've never had such a problem that, that was not too serious. Not serious enough for serious companies, because, as I say, like for many years or more than two years, we're working with really corporate customers like. In Switzerland, like Swiss marketplace group, there are a lot of brands inside this corporation.
They're working with us at least for a third year or something like that. Or like the number one on Spanish market, like classified and all of these customers, like really enterprise or this cadastra digital agency in Brazil. So they're like top players on their markets. And we never had such a problem. The most important thing is the additional value you offer them comparing to the solution of what they use right now. And they are dramatic really.
Alex Bond: Yeah. The worst going to speak for itself nine times out of 10 and I find it fun to be working with a company that has a little personality, you know, I mean, even just the video that I saw was pretty funny, you know, you're kind of like, who are we video on the homepage? It was kind of funny and you don't really see that all.
Julia Nesterets: Yes, exactly. And actually when we are right now, like visiting different conferences, it says for other, a lot of these stands, booths of our competitors, et cetera, and they look really, really similar. Similar to each other, you know, they have even really similar names.
They have some soul crawl in their name, you know, and really different. And it is good for the brand because it is easy to remember, you know, and we have a very good creative banners, like marketing campaigns where we can play with this octopus in different ways. For example, like the fastest scroll on the market, we have a really, really.
Like great creative campaign when it is like the octopus, like driving a car and it is a really, really strong wind, you know, in his head. And he's like, and these gives us like pros even in marketing, because we all know that there are a lot of information, a lot of all these banners, marketing campaigns around us, we are like neutral to all of that.
So we don't care about it. And we start getting some. And so I started getting some interest when something is different, you know, and it is good for us when we have this personalization of a brand, only us have the personalization of the brand compared to our main or main competitors.
Alex Bond: And we're definitely about to jump into that conversation just to wrap up kind of the branding piece. I wanted to ask Julia, if that kind of gamification of the brand makes you more accessible to clients than some other businesses, but, you know, I mean, I can imagine there are very similar brands who just dump information into a client's hand.
And it says deal with it, you know, like I'm sitting here looking at a spreadsheet of a thousand million numbers and figures. And I think at least from what your website says, there's a lot of really cool graphs and it definitely feels more to the touch a little bit. And so I'm curious if that was intended to make it more accessible to clients so that you have more variety in the type of brands that are using your crawler.
Julia Nesterets: Yeah, actually, this is one of our, like, central approach to making any product updates on the platform. As I said, we are initially from the big business ourselves, me and my partner. And we do know this pain of working with a lot of data in different sheets and trying to. Merging and get some insights, whatever. That's why we are working hard on, first of all, on visualizing the data.
So not this limitless spreadsheets of URLs with like problems, but we try to visualize the big picture, like the helicopter view of all the problems you have with the scale of the problem for you, just for the two minutes. To understand where to start, because for example, when you are starting learning these sheets of URLs, each URL will have some issues, some problems, etc.
And you will start fixing something, something, something, but that was actually not the biggest priority, because actually For example, this type of issue, only 1 percent of your pages have this type of issue. And we have just one chart in our crawl over you. So when your website is scanned, this is the first chart you get all your problems by categories with the scale of this problem.
So for example, and all of your errors are red. And for example, the HTML will be the highest column and 70 percent of your website have duplicates. And for example, 10 percent of your website have some issues within links. It is understandable for you so that you have to start with HTML because this is one type of the problem that you will fix.
Just in one sprint and it will impact 70 percent of your website. So it will definitely have the big impact on your SEO. That's like the number one approach, we call it top down approach. So first of all, we show you the big picture of the problem and we let you dive deeper and decompose each of your problems, leading you to the least of problematic URLs at the end of the day.
It saves a lot of time and you are capable to start fixing the errors, which will have the biggest impact because you see that the biggest part of your website have this issue. The number two approach to our platform is a lot of preset reports. We are doing a lot of preset insights for you. For example, when you have your full crawl at hand. There is the section where the crawl data is automatically overlapped with your logs data and you are just getting the Google bots behavior visualization on your website.
So, for example, you have the chart how Google bots behaves depending on the depth. So how far the page is located and you see all your data just visualized in one chart and it will show you for example that in your case that the pages not deeper than third click from the main page, like 60 percent of the pages on third click from the main page there visited by Google bot and started from the fourth click click from the main page, only 25 percent of your pages are visited.
So the outcome here that your commercial pages should be like closer to the main page, like third, second, click from the main page. The same, you will understand how Google bot behaves depending on the number of internal links on the page. And you will understand that in your case. All your commercial pages should have at least like 50 50 in links, internal links on the page, and it will dramatically increase the visibility for Google bot.
Or you will see how Google bot behaves depending on the number of words on the page. And if the average number of your average number of words on the page is 500 words, and you see that the crawl ratio. is only like 20 percent of such pages. This is definitely the opportunity for optimization because when you increase it to 1000, the crawl ratio will be 75%.
And it will definitely bring you new rankings because you will get more pages visited by Google bot and of course, RAM. That's why we are doing our best to visualize a lot of data for you. Then to get a lot of preset insightful charts and words. And the third really, really important thing of JetOctopus. And actually this is also the game changer and the owners of big websites.
They really love this option is the joint data set option when you have the opportunity to blend all the data, which are integrated in JetOctopus and to play with it, with all this information, just in one data table, you don't have to export for, for example, all of your pages with loading time, more than like two seconds, then export the pages, which are visited by Google bot, and then apps for which pages which are getting impressions.
And then try to merge it and to understand if your slow pages are getting impressions, if they are getting Google bots visits. So this is the usual way and this is the manual and time consuming way. We don't like it. In our case, all the data tables, all the data sets that are integrating in JetOctopus, you can easily join all of them and pick up information from each data set.
For example, when you are right now at your 404 errors pages, so you are just the least, you have the least, so 404 pages, and you want to understand. If these pages are visited by Google bots, so you have your crawl budget ways here. If they're getting impressions, if they're getting clicks, you can easily just join your logs data, join your Google search console, just pushing the one button, and then you will have this information to pick and it will be added to this URL.
Just within seconds, really. And you didn't have to make any exports and any mergings. The human error is really high there. And on the other side, this is time consuming. That's why you don't do it on a regular basis. And here we don't limit you with these options of playing with the data. You can make like limitless number of combinations.
Because the usual way they make a sort of custom reports and custom combinations for you and you are within the limits of this. They say, they think this is the best way to go. We don't limit you with anything. You can play with any data which is integrated and just in one place. And this is really, really handy.
Thriving Against the Odds: JetOctopus' Remarkable Journey of Success Among Bootstrapped Competitors
Alex Bond: And I want to continue on that conversation about what competitors do and don't do versus what you do and don't do. How did you succeed playing on the market with such other strong competitors all being bootstrapped at the same time? I'm curious how that kind of happened.
Julia Nesterets: That's a really good question. First of all I have to say since the very first iteration of the platform, when we just entered the market with only the crawler, that was. Outstanding from the very first iteration. So it was the fastest, let's say. And for the big websites, it is important. Then there were a lot of product updates, et cetera, et cetera.
We have the best log analyzer on the market. And as I said, when you have the website, more than 10 K pages, this is a very helping thing, and it opens a lot of insights for you that. You won't be able to extract from any other tool. So if you don't have your board's behavior at hand, you don't understand your SEO at the end of the day.
So you have just hypotheses. I think it will work out. It depends, et cetera. The most important thing, why we succeed is that we have a very strong technical predominance over our competitors. So we've built our platform dramatically other way than they built. And it leads us to like. 10 time less cost line for processing these big data at the very beginning.
That's why we are capable to charge the affordable price for these customers and it won't be damping. You know, that's why we are so open about this unlimited solutions, et cetera, because we have our economics.
We don't understand what it is all about and we know what pains it covers. And our customers are just unable to offer such things. And this is our successful, successful story because we do give the big value they're just unable to get from our competitors and not paying a Ferrari each month. This is the important thing.
Alex Bond: It is really scalable, you know, again, perusing through the website. There are multiple tiers and you offer a lot of services with no extra fee. Now, if I'm crawling through 5, 000 pages, you have to pay a little more to crawl through, you know, 20, 000 pages or something like that.
But that's understandable and I don't know. I just found it very interesting that you offered some services on the very lowest tier and that same service on the very highest tier. It's just a matter of kind of the amount that it could be used. Is that another 1 of those differences between. You and those competitors, is this less packagey deals?
Julia Nesterets: I like that you've asked this question. Actually, right now we are the only players, the only cloud based platform, which has the open pricing page on the website and which is absolutely transparent.
Alex Bond: So everyone else requires you to contact them and get a quote?
Julia Nesterets: A lot of things they requires you a lot of things. So you have to request, you have to give some information about your financial revenue for the last year and they will bring you some pricing. And this is really tricky. This is not transparent and this is absolutely not our approach.
Our custom centric approach is not on the paper. It is really our value and it is our corporate culture. And that's why from, since the very first day, and we want close our pricing page, our pricing policies is absolutely transparent and it is based the main one main criteria it is based on the number of pages you want to process with the caliber of our platform.
This is the only thing we don't care how many domains there. We don't care how many users will be using this. We have all these options to share the whole account or to share only one customer's website to your customer. And if you are an agency, so we only care about the number of data you want to process through our platform which is absolutely fair.
So this is our cost line. It is based on that. We don't care how much money you made, you know, last year, because we had a lot of cases of the customers switching from our really expensive competitors, which is game they had like. 1000 pages, it's, it's nothing or 10K pages or something like that, but they are very good at making money like in brick and stone, you know, offline.
So they have some online presence, you know, but their main business is offline and they've got such absolutely strange packaging policy just based on their revenue, not on the data will, which will be processed. in this platform, but on the revenue that they've made for the last year, I think this is not the fair game. And this makes the situation on the market not fair.
I think that the websites, they have a lot of pages. They have really big SEO challenges because it is absolutely easy to make one, your 1000 pages, all your thousand pages visited by Google bot. It's not a problem at all. You can even make it without tools. But when you have like 1 million, 10 million, 50 million pages, this is really tough to do something if you don't have the right tools. And before JetOctopus came to the market, only the enterprise companies were capable to buy this tool.
So to make something with their ICO and not anymore right now, when you have more than 10K pages, you need the right tools and you have the solution for that. And it will be very effective, very powerful. We'll have much more tools inside really more often and it will be affordable to you.
