WHAT IS NATURAL REFERENCING?
SEO (Search Engine Optimization), encompasses all the methods and techniques that 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). the aim of improving the visibility of the pages in question, by applying a series of “rules” enacted by search engines.
WHY IS SEO NATURAL SEO ESSENTIAL?
Because there are over 1 billion websites on the Internet and Google has indexed some 30 trillion pages. When a user searches 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 may have the most beautiful site in the world, but without referencing your website, it is likely to remain invisible.
WHAT MAKES is GOOGLE REFERENCING THE FIRST LEVER OF DIGITAL TRAFFIC ACQUISITION?
SEO allows you to attract qualified traffic to your web pages, which can convert into prospects and then customers, so optimizing your SEO will catch the attention of those who are really interested in the type. of services/products that you offer. This traffic generated by Google SEO is sustainable in the long term. Unlike a traditional advertising campaign, the effects of which stop as soon as you stop injecting money, SEO continues to attract traffic (and generate profits) even when you no longer optimize it.
WHAT DISTINGUISHES NATURAL REFERENCING FROM PAID REFERENCING?
As its name suggests, the objective of natural referencing is to position the pages in the so-called “natural” results, or “organic links”, of SERPs (the pages of search engine results). This positioning is obtained without having to pay money to the search engine, unlike what happens with paid search engine optimization (SEA). This involves buying keywords to place “sponsored links” at the top of SERPs, for example by launching a Google AdWords campaign.
WHY DO WE NEED GOOGLE NATURAL REFERENCING?
Because Google is the most used search engine in the world. Its market shares oscillate between 75 and 95% depending on the country: in France, more than 93% of the Internet population uses this search engine as a priority. Working with its natural referencing, therefore, means giving yourself every chance to make its web pages visible to internet users.
HOW DOES THE GOOGLE SEARCH ENGINE WORK?
Google indexes billions of pages every day and ranks them to rank 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 made by Internet users. For example, if someone searches for “SEO agency” on Google, they will get the pages that best meet their request. To decide which pages are relevant, and which pages are not, Google has set places several hundred criteria: these are the criteria that Google’s natural referencing aims to apply.
WHY DOES A NATURAL SEO REFERENCE STRATEGY TAKE TIME?
With over 200 optimization criteria, Google’s natural referencing requires know-how, experience … and time! A website SEO strategy only produces results in the long term: between SEO audit, defining an action plan, setting up, working on the pages, publishing content and net-linking, it takes an average of 6 months to start getting positive effects. But thereafter, these effects are long-term. In short, natural referencing is similar to a diesel engine: long to start, but effective over time!
HOW TO OPTIMIZE YOUR WEBSITE REFERENCING?
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. To help webmasters get started, the search engine provides an SEO Guide natural Google – but don’t expect to find the secrets of successful optimization! They are mainly bases on work.
WHAT IS SEO ON-SITE?
On-site natural referencing brings together all the elements that relate to the web pages themselves
- HTML tags (title, meta description, Hn title levels, alt attribute for images, etc.)
- Rich snippets (enriched extracts)
- URL structure
- Loading times
- The internal network
- The robots.txt and sitemap files
- The relevance of the keywords
- 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 OFF-SITE SEO?
The 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 off-page Google natural search engine is quality: a page that appeals to Internet users will more easily obtain inbound links and will 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 OF YOUR GOOGLE REFERENCING?
The choice of keywords depends on your industry and your needs. The keywords are selected according to their popularity (the number of times they have been requested by Internet users) and their competitiveness. 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 the Google keyword planning tool.
WHY IS IT INTERESTING TO USE THE “LONG TRAIN” IN NATURAL REFERENCING?
The “long tail” defines key phrases of more than 4 or 5 words. It allows you to position yourself on more precise and qualifying queries, for example, “SEO natural agency located in Paris” rather than “SEO agency”. These more specific keywords are less popular but also less competitive, and allow a better position; in addition, they record a better conversion rate. Note that voice search, very fashionable, favors “long tail” queries. A suitable Google referencing is therefore recommended. The “long tail SEO” brings 80% of traffic and higher quality traffic.
HOW DO GOOGLE UPDATES WORK?
Google’s algorithms are programmed to provide users with the most relevant results. To this end, they are constantly evolving over Google updates. Some are minor (mobile compatibility, https protocol) and do not produce an earthquake in the positions of the sites. Others are considered major because they significantly change the criteria of Google natural referencing and positioning. For example :
- Google Pingouin pour un netlinking plus qualitatif ;
- Google Panda pour une meilleure prise en compte de la qualité des contenus web ;
- Google Colibri, et plus récemment Google RankBrain, pour mieux comprendre les intentions des utilisateurs afin de leur proposer des résultats toujours plus en adéquation avec leurs requêtes ;
- L’algorithme Google Mobile Friendly pour favoriser le référencement naturel des sites compatibles avec les mobiles. Le moteur de recherche met d’ailleurs à votre disposition un Mobile-Friendly Test Google afin de vérifier le niveau de compatibilité de votre site.Ces algorithmes ne se contentent pas de vérifier la pertinence du référencement naturel. Ils ont aussi pour but de pénaliser les sites qui utilisent des techniques SEO abusives.
WHAT IS A GOOGLE NATURAL SEARCH PENALTY?
Referencing penalties on Google arise from algorithm updates. The Penguin penalty, for example, is a filter that sanctions sites with poor quality backlinks. The Panda penalty attacks sites whose content does not meet the expected quality standards (typically: lists of keywords) These penalties are not only algorithmic: they can be manual, decided by engineers from Google. 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 its basic instructions for webmasters, Google lists the techniques to avoid in order 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 penalized for abusive Google SEO? 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 A WEBSITE REFERENCING STRATEGY COST?
The cost of referencing your website depends on many factors (industry, needs, competition, objectives, size of the site). The budget can only be determined after a sharp SEO analysis taking all these factors into account. However, count around € 15,000 a year for an SME (average budget), and up to several thousand euros monthly for large accounts.
HOW DOES AN SEO AUDIT WORK?
An SEO audit is an essential prerequisite for any Google natural SEO strategy: it helps determine the best course of action possible, based on many factors specific to your business and your website. An SEO audit analyzes in particular:
- Les mots-clés
- Les stratégies de la concurrence
- Les performances du site en matière de référencement naturel
- L’architecture et les contenus du site
- Les performances techniques
- La qualité et l’étendue du net-linking Un audit SEO doit s’appuyer sur des outils spécifiques aux problématiques techniques analysées mais la stratégie doit rester à la charge du consultant SEO. Il n’existe pas de stratégie SEO générique, pas de recette secrète qui fonctionnerait pour tous les sites. L’audit référencement naturel est la seule manière de construire une stratégie adaptée.
WHY IS IT IMPORTANT TO MEASURE YOUR 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 prerequisite for evaluating the effectiveness of your SEO campaigns and, if necessary, correcting any blocking points. Some of the preferred monitoring indicators include:
Global traffic
The most visited pages
Pages that convert visitors to prospects
Numerous tools exist to measure its traffic, such as Google Analytics.
WHAT IS LOCAL SEARCHING?
Variation from the Google natural referencing, the local referencing aims to position itself in response to a localized request, 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 product. Knowing that 25% of all searches done on Google are local and that 88% of local searches made from a smartphone give rise to 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 schedules, as well as its geographic position via Google Maps.
Why entrust your natural referencing to an external provider?
Google’s natural referencing requires specialized skills, specific know-how and constant monitoring of changes in criteria set by search engines. Unless you have a team of internal references, it is more efficient and profitable to do call to an external provider (an SEO agency) for the referencing of your website.
HOW TO WORK NATURAL REFERENCING INTERNATIONAL?
Do you want to work on your Google natural referencing internationally in order to reach an even wider audience? To achieve this, you must:
- Switch your website to multilingual
- Entrust the translations of your content to a professional
- Work on the keywords in the language of each country to rank in the national search engines (Google.de, Google.es, Google.it, etc.)
- Target the right structure for URLs
- And call on an SEO referencer specialized in natural referencing internationally!
