- WHAT IS NATURAL SEO?
Natural referencing, or SEO (Search Engine Optimization), encompasses all the methods and techniques which aim to position the web pages of your website in the first natural results of search engines (notably Google, but also Bing, Yahoo and others). This with the aim of improving the visibility of the pages in question, by applying a series of “rules” decreed by the search engines. - WHY IS NATURAL SEO ESSENTIAL?
Because there are more than 1 billion websites on the Internet and Google has indexed some 30,000 billion pages. When an Internet user launches a search on the Web, the only way to make a page visible to them is to optimize it by applying the rules of the search engine. You can have the most beautiful site in the world, but without referencing your website, it has every chance of remaining invisible. - WHAT MAKES GOOGLE SEO THE FIRST LEVER FOR ACQUIRING DIGITAL TRAFFIC?
Natural SEO allows you to attract qualified traffic to your web pages, likely to convert into prospects, then into customers. So optimizing your natural referencing allows you to capture the attention of those who are really interested in the type of services/products that you offer. This traffic generated by Google referencing is sustainable in the long term. Unlike a traditional advertising campaign, whose effects stop as soon as you stop injecting money, SEO continues to attract traffic (and produce profits) even when you no longer optimize it. - WHAT DISTINGUISHES NATURAL SEO FROM PAID SEO?
As its name indicates, the objective of natural referencing is to position pages in the so-called “natural” results, or “organic links”, of the SERPs (search engine results pages). This positioning is obtained without having to pay money to the search engine, unlike what happens with paid referencing (SEA). This consists of purchasing keywords to place “sponsored links” at the top of the SERPs, for example by launching a Google AdWords campaign. - WHY DO WE NEED GOOGLE NATURAL SEO?
Because Google is the most used search engine in the world. Its market shares vary between 75 and 95% depending on the country: in France, more than 93% of the population of Internet users use this search engine as a priority. Working on your natural referencing therefore means giving yourself every chance of making your web pages visible to Internet users. - COMMENT FONCTIONNE LE MOTEUR DE RECHERCHE GOOGLE ?Google indexes billions of pages every day and ranks them so as to position them in its results. Before indexing, there is the “crawl”: the exploration of all web pages by Google robots. If the conditions are met, a page is indexed – kept in memory in the database. It will then be positioned in the results. This positioning is done according to the relevance of the pages with regard to the requests formulated by Internet users. For example, if someone searches for “ natural referencing agency » on Google, he will obtain in response the pages that best respond to his request. To decide which pages are relevant, and which pages are not, Google has put in place several hundred criteria: these are the criteria that Google natural referencing aims to apply.
- WHY DOES A NATURAL SEO STRATEGY TAKE TIME?
With more than 200 optimization criteria, Google natural referencing requires know-how, experience... and time! A website referencing strategy only gives results in the long term: between the SEO audit, the definition of an action plan, the implementation, the work on the pages, the publication of content and net-linking, it takes on average 6 months to start obtaining positive effects. But subsequently, these effects last over time. In short, natural referencing is like a diesel engine: long to start, but effective over time! - HOW TO OPTIMIZE YOUR WEBSITE SEO?Optimizing the SEO of your website involves using a large number of levers (more than 200) which correspond to the criteria set up by Google. In order to help webmasters get started, the search engine provides a Google natural referencing guide – but don’t expect to find the secrets of successful optimization there! These are mainly working bases.
- WHAT IS NATURAL ON-SITE SEO?
On-site natural referencing brings together all the elements relating to the web pages themselves:- HTML tags (title, meta description, Hn title levels, alt attribute for images, etc.)
- Rich snippets
- URL structure
- Loading times
- The internal network
- Robots.txt and sitemap files
- Keyword relevance
- The placement of keywords in content and their density
- The semantic field around keywords
- The quality and originality of the content
- The mobile friendly aspect – Responsive These elements more or less impact the natural referencing of a page, but they contribute at least to its good indexing and/or to the improvement of its visibility.
- WHAT IS NATURAL OFF-SITE SEO?
Off-site natural referencing called Net-linking concerns elements external to web pages:- The popularity of the site
- Netlinking and backlinks (links that point to your pages from other sites)
- The competitive benchmark
- Social links The driving force behind Google off-page natural referencing is quality: a page that Internet users like will more easily obtain inbound links and see its popularity increase; 10 backlinks from a few influential sites are more important than 100 backlinks from sites with a bad reputation, etc.
- HOW TO CHOOSE THE KEYWORDS FOR YOUR GOOGLE SEO?
The choice of keywords depends on your sector of activity and your needs. Keywords are selected according to their popularity (the number of times they have been requested by Internet users) and their competitiveness. If it is difficult to position yourself on generic keywords in certain sectors (for example “SEO agency”), natural referencing on “long tail” keywords can prove to be easier – and generate more qualified traffic. Many tools allow you to choose your keywords, including Google Keyword Planner. - WHY IS IT INTERESTING TO USE THE “LONG TAIL” IN NATURAL SEO?
The “long tail” defines key expressions of more than 4 or 5 words. It allows you to position yourself on more precise and more qualifying queries, for example “natural SEO agency located in Paris” rather than “SEO agency”. These more specific keywords are less popular but also less competitive, and allow you to position yourself better; in addition, they record a better conversion rate. Note that the voice search, very fashionable, favors “long tail” queries. Appropriate Google referencing is therefore recommended. The “long tail SEO” brings 80% traffic and higher quality traffic. - HOW DO GOOGLE UPDATES WORK?
Google algorithms are programmed to provide users with the most relevant results. To this end, they are constantly evolving with Google updates. Some are minor (mobile compatibility, https protocol) and do not produce earthquakes in the positions of the sites. Others are considered major because they significantly change Google natural referencing and positioning criteria. For example:- Google Penguin for more qualitative netlinking;
- Google Panda for better consideration of the quality of web content;
- Google Colibri, and more recently Google RankBrain, to better understand user intentions in order to offer them results that are ever more in line with their queries;
- The Google Mobile Friendly algorithm to promote the natural referencing of mobile-friendly sites. The search engine also provides you with a Mobile-Friendly Test Google in order to check the level of compatibility of your site. These algorithms do not just check the relevance of natural referencing. They also aim to penalize sites that use abusive SEO techniques.
- WHAT IS A GOOGLE NATURAL SEO PENALTY?
Google SEO penalties arise from algorithm updates. The Penguin penalty, for example, is a filter that sanctions sites displaying poor quality backlinks. The Panda penalty targets sites whose content does not correspond to expected quality standards (typically: lists of keywords). These penalties are not only algorithmic: they can be manual, decided by Google engineers. A penalized site can go from the first position in the SERPs to the 20th page in the blink of an eye, and vegetate in the depths until the problem is solved! In his basic guidelines for webmasters, Google draws up a list of techniques to avoid so as not to be penalized. - HOW DO YOU KNOW IF YOUR SITE IS AFFECTED BY A GOOGLE PENALTY?
How do you know if your site or some of your pages have been sanctioned because of abusive Google referencing? You will know:- When receiving a message from the Google Search Console
- By noticing a change in the positioning of your pages or a sudden drop in traffic generated.
- HOW MUCH DOES AN SEO STRATEGY FOR YOUR WEBSITE COST?
The cost of SEO for your website depends on many factors (sector of activity, needs, competition, objectives, size of the site). The budget can only be determined after a thorough SEO analysis taking into account all these factors. However, count on around €15,000 per year for an SME (average budget), and up to several thousand euros per month for large accounts. - HOW DOES AN SEO AUDIT TAKE PLACE?
An SEO audit is an essential prerequisite for any Google natural referencing strategy: it allows you to determine the best possible action plan, based on numerous factors specific to your activity and your website. An SEO audit analyzes in particular:- Keywords
- Competitive strategies
- The performance of the site in terms of natural referencing
- The architecture and content of the site
- Technical performance
- The quality and extent of net-linking An SEO audit must rely on tools specific to the technical issues analyzed but the strategy must remain the responsibility of the SEO consultant. There is no generic SEO strategy, no secret recipe that would work for all sites. The natural referencing audit is the only way to build a suitable strategy.
- POURQUOI EST-IL IMPORTANT DE MESURER SON AUDIENCE ?
Since the aim of natural SEO is to improve the visibility of a website in order to increase its traffic, it is essential to be able to measure the volume of this traffic. This is the sine qua non condition for evaluating the effectiveness of your SEO campaigns and, if necessary, correcting any blocking points. Among the preferred monitoring indicators are:- Overall traffic
- The most visited pages
- Pages that convert visitors into leads
- The sites and platforms from which visitors comeMany tools exist to measure traffic, such as Google Analytics.
- WHAT IS LOCAL SEO?
A variation of Google natural referencing, local referencing aims to position itself in response to a localized query, generally accompanied by a city name. For example: “natural SEO agency Paris”. The objective is to reach local customers when they are looking for information on a service or a product. Knowing that 25% of all searches carried out on Google are of a local nature, and that 88% of localized searches carried out from a smartphone result in an action (phone call, physical visit) within 24 hours.Google My Business offers a very simple local Google natural referencing, which displays the contact details of the company, its opening hours, as well as its geographical position via Google Maps. - WHY ENtrust YOUR NATURAL SEO TO AN EXTERNAL SERVICE PROVIDER?
Google natural referencing requires advanced skills, specific know-how and constant monitoring of changes in the criteria set by search engines. Unless you have a team of in-house SEOs, it is more efficient and more profitable to use an external service provider (an SEO agency) for the SEO of your website. - HOW TO WORK ON NATURAL SEO INTERNATIONALLY?
Do you want to work on your Google natural referencing internationally in order to reach an ever-wider audience? To achieve this, you must:- Make your website multilingual
- Entrust the translations of your content to a professional
- Work on keywords in each country's language to rank in national search engines (Google.de, Google.es, Google.it, etc.)
- Target the right structure for URLs
- And call on an SEO specialist specializing in international natural referencing!
- WHAT IS NATURAL SEO?
Natural referencing, or SEO (Search Engine Optimization), encompasses all the methods and techniques which aim to position the web pages of your website in the first natural results of search engines. - COMBIEN DE TEMPS DURE UNE PRESTATION SEO ?
The first results appear between 4 and 12 months after starting the SEO service according to Google. To consolidate its positions, SEO must be considered over the very long term. - HOW MUCH DOES AN SEO STRATEGY COST?
The cost of an SEO strategy varies depending on the scale of the work as well as the competitiveness of your market and keywords. The average budget for an SME is 15,000 euros annually.