SEO Camp Paris: what we retain from a semantic, technical, analytical, but also … ethical point of view

October 3, 2020

Reading Time 4 mins

At the beginning of this week, we were at the SEO Camp’us in Paris to take the pulse of the latest SEO trends, get a lot of information and get inspired by the practices of our French neighbors. We were not disappointed! Despite an edition under the sign of protective measures, a rich and varied program awaited us. We had the great classics: SEO strategy and the importance of keyword research, netlinking practices, SEO tools’ functionalities, the latest evolutions of the Googlebot or the eternal debate “White hats” vs “Black hats”, …
Here we relay to you what particularly marked us during these two days of SEO immersion: semantics, technique, analytics but also…ethical questions.
(link to all the presentations at the end of the article).

Wordpress SEO: optimizing your CMS for natural referencing

As soon as we talk about CMS, Wordpress systematically comes to mind as it has become the reference for most sites worldwide, combined with its e-commerce plugin (WooCommerce). The CMS is quite intuitive and allows, via Yoast or Rank Math, to integrate some good practices of on-page SEO.

But once you have chosen your template or customized your site from a design point of view, you rarely touch the Wordpress settings to improve your SEO. However, it is useful to consider this when you want to create a silo structure for your content (“SEO siloing”).

During his conference, Daniel Roch (SeoMix agency) of course recalled the importance of starting by conducting a semantic audit for its silo strategy. He then gave us some practical advice on how to perform a kind of “spring cleaning” in his Wordpress settings at three levels:

Taxonomies (= content classification method) and Gutenberg categories (= categorization of blog posts and the principle of linked posts), to reinforce the logical and semantic links between your content.
Superfluous navigation path and links, for a more efficient internal mesh
Optimization of its menus and footers, to avoid diluting the “SEO juice” of your important pages.

SEO Camp Paris: what we retain from a semantic, technical, analytical, but also … ethical point of view 1

In concrete terms, Wordpress facilitates this customization through “hooks”. This is a system that allows developers to add features at a key moment in the execution of the CMS. This remains simple and fast, without requiring major developments.

Result: you get an optimized content structure and internal mesh that reinforces the weight of your pages on the targeted keywords in coherence with the search intention of the Internet user.

Expand your playground with SEO Linkedin, but also Youtube and Pinterest

For this 2020 edition, the SEO Camp’us proposed a conference dedicated to the optimization of your Linkedin account. It is sometimes forgotten but Linkedin, Youtube or Pinterest are also search engines in their own right and it can therefore be interesting to optimize them to stand out in their own results, taking into account of course the flagship function targeted by each social network (Linkedin for BtoB objectives for example).

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Thus, when it comes to SEO Linkedin, you can get valuable visibility when you want to be noticed by an employer or a potential customer. This will include:

positioning your profile on the right keywords (title, abstract, …),
boosting your number of recommendations,
or paying attention to the commitment of the members that make up your network.

This is only a starter; you will find other useful tips in the presentation by Emmanuelle Petiau, Linkedin coach.

This is also an opportunity to remind you that Youtube and Pinterest are also interesting to consider for informational or inspirational content. A good optimization of these channels allows you to gain visibility when your prospects are looking for broader ideas or advice.

Whether it is for SEO on Linkedin, Youtube or Pinterest, the logic remains the same: you have to think about your SEO personas, your (thematic) keywords and start with a semantic audit! We can never repeat it enough, it is the basis of any good SEO strategy.

Google Analytics and SEO: the new APP + WEB (beta) version

We also participated in the conference led by Sebastien Monnier (Woptimo) on the new version of Google Analytics (APP + WEB) and its benefits for SEO. Three main points emerged:

This new version adds an indicator on user engagement, which takes into account the number of page views, average time spent on the page and conversions. (Currently Semactic already aggregates these metrics in its SEO software in order to provide you with a traffic quality indicator).
Most alternative search engines to Google (Ecosia, Baidu, Yandex, …) are now aggregated in Google Analytics in organic traffic, which is very convenient.
Extensive analyses on the conversion funnel and by segment are made available in the free version of Google Analytics (formerly reserved for Google Analytics 360).

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Alas, black spot for natural referencing, there is still no link with the Google Search Console at the moment.

It remains strongly recommended to install in parallel this new version of Google Analytics in order to benefit from the analysis possibilities offered as well as the export to Google BigQuery. Moreover, this will allow you to already have a good comparison history when you make Google App + Web your default analysis tool.

Data science SEO and machine learning… The rising trend that deserves reflection

Finally, we also wanted to talk to you about a challenging conference on machine learning, given by Rémi Bacha (Data SEO Lab). Some experts in France connected to the GTP-2 (Generative Pre-trained Transformer-2) model developed by OpenAI – the artificial intelligence company co-founded by Elon Musk – to automatically generate content on Wordpress. Thus, by simply clicking on a button, they can create 10,000 articles of relatively good quality at once. They expect this quality to improve further in the coming months with the release of the GPT-3 model, which is significantly more powerful than its predecessor.

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While fascinating, these new developments also bring the importance of a positive and reasoned use of AI. Indeed, what about the massive creation of content devoid of any human authenticity, which is fuelling digital pollution? We took the liberty of asking this question to John Mueller (Google), who sees no problem with this automatically generated content from an SEO point of view, as long as it continues to provide a relevant answer to Internet users. Personally, we think it’s worth taking the debate a little further.

What about you?

Find all the presentations in the SEO Camp’us Paris slideshare: https://fr.slideshare.net/SEOCamp/clipboards/seo-camp-us-paris-2020

SEO Camp Paris 2020 – Our videos on the spot

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Interested in SEO? Want to exchange on the latest trends in SEO? Contact the Semactic team, we are always happy to discuss SEO

Céline Naveau

Céline is the co-founder of Semactic, an innovative SEO solution launched in 2020. Passionate about SEO for over 10 years, she has accumulated a wealth of experience as an SEO consultant, with a particular affection for e-commerce and news sites. Before joining Semactic, Céline worked for a well-known digital agency in Belgium, where she coordinated a team of experts in search marketing, social ads and analytics. She also has extensive marketing and project management experience in national and international companies.