SEO Camp'us 2023: We went to Versailles
This year, SEO Camp’us Paris took place on June 29 and 30, 2023. We attended to get a broad overview of current trends in organic search engine optimization. Here are a few notes we took during the talks. This is by no means exhaustive (intentionally), because after all… you really had to be there!
Recordings are available here (registration open through July 20, 2023).
Backlinks: Tips for Success on Google, by Guillaume Pracht (Linksgarden)
Guillaume’s presentation asserts that a good link is a validated and active link that ensures a good PageRank between pages. He emphasizes the need to contextualize the link, particularly by selecting websites within the right topic that have a good TTF (Topical Trust Flow) and a semantically optimized web page. The speaker doesn’t hesitate to say that a link has a “distinctive scent,” and we wonder if it would be more like strawberry or chocolate. In any case, the more popular a site is, the more powerful it will be. In any event, we carry out our actions in a measured way and vary our methods.
"Contentis king, linking is queen"
Guillaume Pracht's favorite KPIs:
RD (Referral Domain): quantitative
TF (Trust Flow): qualitative
TTF (Topical Trust Flow): Relevance
the ratio of the number of TFs to CF (Citation Flow)
UR (URL Rating): qualitative
Analysis of the website itself
Extracting backlinks to take it a step further.
SEO Strategy for Small and Medium-Sized Businesses, by Alexis Fenaille (alexeo)
According to Alexis Fenaille, SEO should under no circumstances account for more than 30% of an SME’s revenue from customer acquisition. This is the “rule of thirds.” A long-term, five-year perspective allows you to plan ahead and set specific goals. While an SEO benchmark is obviously useful, you also need to tailor your various techniques to the context of the market you’re analyzing. For example, SEO and SEA can be combined, depending on the desired budget allocation.
Alexis Fenaille emphasizes that SEO alone is not enough to get a business off the ground. The product and service offered by the target website must be relevant and appealing. Otherwise, a customer acquisition strategy can end up being a waste of time and effort.
SEO Project Management: How to Save Time and Be More Efficient, by Jacky Giang (Semnaut)
Even though we can identify three different situations—a client project, an advertiser, and a publisher—we can say that the objectives are the same despite the different challenges. According to Jacky Giang, good project management should lead to: peace of mind, satisfaction, the achievement of objectives, and the ability to take time off without worry.
Jacky Giang
SEMNAUT
Jacky mentions recurring problems such as a lack of time, a lack of motivation, relationships with developers, bugs, communication challenges, managing contractors, and the difficulty of going live.
Unfortunately, even with all the goodwill in the world, we sometimes can’t help but notice setbacks that we can identify using tools like Content King, Oseox, and Semnaut.
The Rise of AI: Tools, Strategies, and Tips to Drive Growth, by Bastian Grimm (Peak Ace)
According to Bastian Grimm, prompting is how humans communicate with artificial intelligence. Care must be taken to create an effective prompt. Among other things, Bastian lists tools and models that can be used to create text-based content:
However, be careful… never post anything without checking the content first!
SEO Insights from the Largest French Websites, by Mathieu Chapon (Peak Ace)
The crawl budget.
"It's the amount of resources and time that Google will allocate to each site."
Matthieu Chapon reminds us of the challenges Google faces on a daily basis:
Provide users with the best possible response in real time
Crawl 6 million pages per second over the course of a year
Provide the most comprehensive result possible
"Everyday, Google processes 8.5 billion searches, 15% of which are new searches."
That is why managing websites with a very large number of pages is a unique challenge and requires the highest level of expertise.
Insights on SEO, Discover, and AI, by Paul Sanches
Paul Sanches reflects on his experience creating SEO content for Google Discover. Speaking of ChatGPT, Paul explains that it can be used to develop content by treating it as a personal assistant. The actual human writer, on the other hand, serves as a source of information.
Discover: The SEO Eldorado - Paul Sanches, SEO Camp’us 2023
WEBPERF & SEO: Debunking the Myths, by Alexandre Pinat (Primelis) and Patrick Valibus (410 Gone)
Alexandre Pinat and Patrick Valibus are co-presenting this session. They highlight a website’s performance as a critical business issue. The bounce rate can have a significant impact on the conversion rate! Improving a website’s loading performance automatically leads to increased revenue. This is all the more important when we consider the SEO implications related to the Core Web Vitals announced by Google.
Google's SERP: The Best Ways to Analyze It and Use It in Your Strategy, by Daniel Roch (SEOMix) and Axel Janvier (SEOMix)
Daniel Roch and Axel Janvier of SEOMix begin with “Once upon a time, there was the SERP”:
it is flexible and customized,
it is geolocated,
It depends on the platform (desktop, mobile).
The two consultants emphasize the importance of choosing the right target term by understanding the search intent that aligns with one’s objectives. Additionally, analyzing the SERP provides excellent insights into the competition, particularly by identifying the presence of rich results (images, Knowledge Graph, Position Zero). However, the volatility of the SERP makes it important to track its changes month by month.
The 7 Deadly Sins of SEO, by Emmanuel de Vaumoret (and How to Avoid Them)
Emmanuel de Vauxmoret explains what he considers to be the seven deadly sins of SEO.
Pride: Aim for both short-tail and long-tail keywords, not just long-tail ones.
The goal: Avoid copying a competitor’s strategy, but choose to draw inspiration from it.
Anger: Staying Calm in the Face of Google's Algorithm Updates and Changes.
Laziness: Don't Neglect the Basics of SEO.
Over-optimization: It's best to take both human and UX metrics into account.
Greed: You need to set a reasonable budget.
Greed: Don't view strategies solely in the short term—for example, by quickly accumulating low-quality backlinks.
