Last November, 15th we organized in Paris the first European SEO Night with some of the best SEO speakers in Europe. That afterwork was meant to deliver best practices for challenging SEOs daily life in 2018. From PWA to Voice Search or Machine Learning and Topical Mesh, we assisted to some very interesting talks to inspire the audience regarding their SEO practices.
This article is summarizing key ideas that have been covered during that night.
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PWA, should we go or not?
Audrey Schoonwater, SEO consultant at Résonéo
With 8 billions of connected devices and 1 billion Chrome users, the question of Progressive Web Apps is something that have become unavoidable over the last years.
In countries where load times are very low, latency high and where data are expensive, PWA is the solution. In India, 80% of users use their phone to access web pages.
Actually, PWA are actually way faster than native apps in term of setup, redeem offers or even load redirections. Moreover, PWA have the same advantages as native apps:
- They are reliable;
- They are secured through HTTPS;
- They have a home screen logo;
- They have an offline mode;
- They include push notification management.
But most of the time, web projects are first thought in term of desktop and not mobile. However, Google is now encouraging companies to use PWA because:
- It can improve your performance;
- It can increase your conversions as the setup processes are faster. Twitter got 38% more conversions using PWA;
- It gets a good indexation as it works as a simple web page;
- It improves user engagement. For instance, Forbes got 20% more page views on their ads with PWA.
With the Google mobile-first index coming up next year, the PWA concept is coming along and with the same logic.
Topical Mesh, the proven onsite SEO strategy that delivers results
Laurent Bourrelly, SEO Consultant
Why do we deserve to be the first on Google? How to prove Google that I am more interesting that another result? These questions have been the central pillar of Laurent’ talk.
Apart from backlinks, is there something we can do to show Google I am the most relevant result and help it understand my topic?
Actually, everything needs to be related to the page. And then around this page. And finally around the whole website. This is where the concept of Topical Mesh appears.
Topical refers to what is surrounding a topic and do not only focus on keywords. The idea is to connect pages around the main page subject of that first one. By doing this very precisely, you can help Google understand what is behind your first landing page. That way, you are extending your topic by linking to other relevant and topical ideas. Topical Mesh helps you to be directly useful for your user before being useful for Google.
In 2013, that concept was officially released and quickly become the number one SEO trend in France. And is still today.
Is your SEO ready for the Machine Learning disturbance?
Omi Sido, Senior Technical SEO at Canon Europe
The first thing to wonder is: do keyword rankings still matter in 2017? In fact, regarding your search location and historic, results won’t be the same. Relevance has taken the lead over rankings.
On the other hand, Rankbrain has started to shift the way we need to consider SERPs. Relevancy is the key to get users to click on your result. The better your CTR is, better your chances are to get a position on the first page. Similar pages with a better CTR will get better positions than you.
You can get these data by connecting to your Search Console. Then go to ‘Search Analytics’, download the data and then add them to your Data Studio by comparing CTR and positions. Everything that is below your average CTR is in danger of being replaced by Google Rankbrain in the future.
Pro tip: if you need to create a Data Studio dashboard, head to this handy article by Manuel Martinez.
Headlines must then be compelling to improve your CTR and bring relevance to users. But your content must also be interesting to get a good time onsite. To summarize:
- Decode the ranking factors priorities for your industry;
- Create irresistible snippets;
- Create comprehensive content that provide value and that is relevant to your audience;
- Study your customer behavior and adjust copy and website structure accordingly;
- Work with PPC and PR to increase brand awareness because it directly impacts click-through rates.
Should you be afraid of voice search?
Fernando Muñoz, SEO consultant at Grupo Raíz
Mobile has changed the way we use search engines. In 2000, Larry Page was stated that “Google would understand exactly what you wanted and it will give you the right thing. That’s obviously artificial intelligence and that is basically what we work on.”
Today, Google handles more than 2 000 000 000 000 searches where 60% are mobile and 20% of them are voice searches. The use of voice search as thus becomes huge and is currently facing a 128,9% market growth.
Voice search is changing the way we search by increasing the number of words used to request something. Indeed, voice search is seducing people because:
- 61% of users say it’s fast. Especially for people for are not used to research. There is no accessibility barriers using a micro;
- For 59% it’s because the answer is read;
- For 58%, it’s because you don’t have to type.
In other words, voice search have been adopted because we are lazy.
However, the main concern with voice search is to get the position zero. 66% of the featured snippets are text. Moreover, most of the featured snippets often answer to the 5W.
To improve chances to appear in voice search results, be sure to:
- Be mobile friendly;
- Have clear goals onto n-grams;
- Identify your audience;
- Fit your language market;
- Map the customer journey;
- Keep it short, simple, concise;
- Use schema.org.
The European SEO Night finally ended with a round table questioning the exercice of SEO with all speakers. We also had some great discussions between attendees around this event. Also, feel free to catch up by watching the replay.
The Oncrawl team really hopes you enjoyed that night. See you soon!
