10 tips to gain visibility on the internet

The We Are COM team spoke with Olivier Andrieu, the leading SEO expert in France and author of the book Succeeding in your organic search engine optimization (SEO)Whether a fledgling brand or a century-old institution, all must fight to exist online. A real challenge for communications professionals! So, to stay up-to-date and improve, we asked 10 SEO questions to the "godfather of search engine optimization." Let's Go(ogle)!

Do I need to take specific actions to protect my brand on the Internet ?

In terms of SEO (natural referencing), we mainly talk about cybersquatting This means fighting against the "clever" individuals who buy up domain names similar to your brand's. There's no magic bullet in this area: buying the most obvious domain names to prevent them from being "stolen" remains the most effective action.

But ICANN (the organization that manages domain extensions like .com and .fr) isn't making things any easier by creating hundreds of new extensions (.shop, .xyz, .paris, .alsace, etc.). It's now impossible to buy your brand name for all these extensions; it would cost a fortune! So, we try to "do our best" with the most common extensions. But it's not easy. It's worth noting that, from an SEO perspective, these new extensions are considered by Google as .com. So, nothing more, but nothing less either. And no real impact on organic search rankings.

Should we think “100% Google"Or should we take other search engines into account?"

Today in France, Google holds approximately 95% of the search market. This represents a hegemonic position, and it's unlikely to change.

In the United States, Bing is a serious competitor with a 30% traffic share (and “only” 65% for Google). Then there are a few countries that still resist the US invasion: Russia (Yandex), Czech Republic (Seznam), China (Baidu), South Korea (Naver), etc., but these remain exceptions.

The Social Media Can they be a significant source of traffic for my website?

Yes, absolutely. It's important to note that social networks have no direct influence on Google rankings – not even Google+! Google doesn't take social signals into account (links, likes, shares, comments, number of fans or followers, etc.). However, they have the significant advantage of generating traffic and, precisely, making us less dependent on Google, which is a very good thing, isn't it?

I try as often as possible to convey the following message: Google shouldn't generate more than 50% of your website's total traffic, because it's traffic you don't have complete control over and that comes from a player who will one day be your competitor. Social media allows you to distance yourself from this traffic!

“OK Google”. What about the voice queries Is it the same SEO work?

Google's algorithms are evolving to adapt to voice search. Whereas for years users typed keywords into a search form, Google anticipates that in the future, users will voice their searches by speaking into their mobile phones. The search engine is therefore adapting to understand voice questions.

SEO is also adapting: it's now essential to answer users' questions, and therefore identify them early on. This is a significant and necessary evolution for our profession in the years to come.

Can SEO be local ?

Yes, of course. Local SEO is particularly relevant to... Google My Business and the “local pack” (the 3 links that appear below the Google Maps map when you type a query like “hotel Paris” or “restaurant Lyon”). The 3 main criteria are: the relevance of the My Business listing (whether it is filled out as completely as possible), authority (citations, reviews, links, etc.) and geographical proximity relative to the user's location at the time they ask their question.

Advertising links (AdwordsDo they have a beneficial effect on my site's organic search engine optimization (SEO)?

Yes, naturally: buying Adwords generates traffic to a site, and Google takes that traffic into account. So the SEA Paid advertising can impact SEO. However, the monthly budgets required are typically in the five-figure range to see a real impact. So it's not straightforward…

How to reference your videos ?

We don't really talk about "video SEO" on Google anymore because the search engine hardly ever inserts videos into its results pages (as it does with news and images). It still happens, of course, if you specifically search for a video, but generally, this type of result is now shown in the "Videos" tab of the results pages. Basically, "video SEO" today boils down to the question "how to rank well on YouTube?" [Editor's note: Another broad topic that Team WAC will cover soon!]

Writing for the web A different style? How to do it simply?

Simply put, it's impossible to say here 🙂 There are methodologies that work well. The main idea is to offer an interesting and, above all, semantically rich text (at least 200 words), with a broad vocabulary (synonyms, related words, etc.), centered around a single concept per page, all within a well-defined technical structure (H1-H6 tags). That's a bit of a simplified summary, but it covers the essentials! The goal is to please the user while respecting the constraints of Google's algorithms. And not the other way around 🙂

HTTP vs HTTPS Is it important?

Yes, today. The trend toward HTTPS is clear, and in a few years (months?), all websites will be using HTTPS. For the past few weeks, we've seen that HTTPS sites are ranking better. So it's time to switch.

What trends for tomorrow?

They are clear: mobile, voice, and semantic. SEO will now always revolve around these three keywords!

Olivier Andrieu is an independent SEO consultant and author of a fifteen books on SEO and creator of the company Abondance and the website www.abondance.com.