SEO in France (Webinar)

Is doing SEO in France any different to doing SEO in English speaking countries? In this episode on Old Guard vs New Blood we explore whether you should be aware of any differences if you want your website to be riding the top of the SERPs in France.

Join us on Wednesday 6th April when host Dixon Jones will be joined by Laurent Bourrelly from laurentbourrelly.com, Lydia Arzour from Ubefone, Rebecca Berbel from OnCrawl, and Jason Barnard from Kalicube.

Watch On-demand

Listen to the Podcast

Transcript

Dixon Jones

Hello and welcome to Old Guard, New Blood, episode 27. Today we’re talking about French SEO and doing SEO in France. I’ve got a fantastic lineup, I have to say. Thank you very much for coming on guys. Why don’t you just introduce yourselves. Lydia, why don’t you go first? Who are you and where do you come from?

Lydia Arzour

I’m very happy to be here. I’m Lydia and I live in Paris and I started in SEO in 2001. So I’m very young as you can see, and I’m mainly really involved in the SEO industry regarding branding content and so on. So I’m very happy to share my view in France because I had the chance to work in a large company with a colleague based in UK and in US. And I really saw the difference between our French view and the English speaking language country, when they’re doing SEO.

Dixon Jones

Thanks very much for coming on. You’re going to be perfect in this group. Jason, why don’t you go next? How are you, sir? Tell us who you are and where do you come from?

Jason Barnard

I’m doing fine. Thank you very much, Dixon. I’m actually English by birth and now French by adoption. I got my French nationality a couple of years after Brexit. So I’m now officially French and English. So I’m allowed to talk about both rudely, which is delightful. I’ll try to be polite today. I started on the internet in 1998, but I was a blue dog in a cartoon as opposed to being an SEO. I did SEO along the way and I’m kind of new blood because I started SEO seriously in 2012, maybe. And I focus on brand SERPs and knowledge panels, how Google understands, how we can educate it, how we can get it to represent our brand the way we want it to when people search our brand name. And I’ve been doing that since about 2013. And it’s my absolute joy and specialty, and I spend all day doing that and just that.

Dixon Jones

And he’s forever running tests on Twitter at the moment, tagging me for things I’m not quite sure, which is all very interesting. Thanks very much for coming on Jason. It’s good to have you here. And thanks for bringing Kalicube Pro to the world as well. Rebecca, hello. How are you? Who are you and where do you come from?

Rebecca Berbel

I’m Rebecca. I work for OnCrawl, I’m the product marketing manager here. I’ve been in Bordeaux for the past 15 years. Before that, I grew up in the US. I got into SEO through copywriting and content marketing, and I’m now much more on the technical side of things.

Dixon Jones

And yeah, OnCrawl, amazing technology. And thank you very much for coming on. And I hope to see you in a couple weeks. Are you coming down to BrightonSEO again in a couple weeks?

Rebecca Berbel

I will. I’ll be in Brighton. I’ll be riding my bike up.

Dixon Jones

Oh, brilliant. Okay. I’m not taking my e-bike down, so it’s… Anyway.

Rebecca Berbel

It’s staying upstairs.

Dixon Jones

Yeah. Laurent, how are you? Where are you and where do you come from?

Laurent Bourelly

I’m the anomaly in the matrix. I do everything reversed. I was born in France, but then I was educated in New York city. And I started with branding back in the early ’90s. So it’s even very special because it’s downtown New York City type of marketing, not for every one. More like [inaudible 000336] type of marketing. And then I moved on to SEO in 2003, 4′. So it’s been 20 years of amazing journey.

Dixon Jones

And I think you’ve been a bedrock of the SEO industry in France for sorry, mate, a long time. So it’s you and Lydia in the old guard, unbelievably Jason and Rebecca in the new blood. So there we go. So thanks very much for coming on. I really appreciate it just before we get into the fun and games, David… I’m going to bring in David, my producer, just to check that I’ve covered everything and make sure that we’re all good to go.

David Bain

So this particular episode hasn’t been recorded live, partly because at the time of publishing, we’re going to have BrightonSEO. So it’s good to be able to record everything beforehand with anyone going to BrightonSEO. If you would like to see the next episode live, just go to majestic.com/webinars. We’re going to have a great episode next time as well, a little bit more technical in focus. So majestic.com/webinars is where to sign up for that one. I want to tell you more about the next episode later on in this one.

Dixon Jones

Excellent, brilliant. So guys, thanks a lot for coming in. I love that we’ve got people that have got experience of France and the US or England. And so you’ve got this balance between the two. So you guys are going to know a huge amount and I think there’s going to be a very interesting conversation. So let’s jump in here and start with question number one, if people can stay for 45 minutes. What one tip would you say that you’ve got to pay attention to if you are going to do SEO in France? And Jason, you had one before he came on. I don’t know if that’s the one you want to go for. I’ll let you go first.

Jason Barnard

Oh, I don’t even know which one I mentioned earlier on. For doing SEO in France, what I found to be a really neat trick is to, for example, for features snippets or for other rich elements like video boxes, Twitter boxes, and all of that really rich stuff that Google is pushing into the SERP now. A really neat trick in France is to look at what’s got a features snippet or people also ask or a video space on the UK or US markets, and then just create the content in French. And it’s a really neat way to get yourself a feature snippet or people also ask or a video box.

Dixon Jones

Oh, that’s a good little tip. I like that one. Rebecca, give us a tip.

Rebecca Berbel

I think I’d have to say brush up on your technical SEO. I think your average SEO Joe, if we can call him that, in France is often very solid on some of those things, at least compared to your average SEO in some of the other English speaking countries.

Dixon Jones

Okay. That’s also an interesting tip, although it does point to the fact that we are a little bit laissez-faire in the UK possibly. So excellent.

Rebecca Berbel

I’m not pointing any fingers. I said English speaking world.

Dixon Jones

No, no, no. It’s all right. I’ll point the fingers. It’s all right. Lydia, how are you? Give us a tip.

Lydia Arzour

The tips. I think in France, we are already mad about net linking and how we build back link. So I will just suggest to build an irresistible brand with an irresistible content with quality content and answers user expectation, because there is a lot of fight in the SERP in France due to a lot of buying links and so on.

Dixon Jones

All right. Okay. So back link are a big thing in France in that case it being sponsored by Majestic Event then I think we might flip back to back links and talk about the buying culture of back link in France. Preferably, can you tell me where to buy the best ones? No. All right. Okay. Laurent, what’s your tip there?

Laurent Bourelly

Come see me if you want to buy that. I have to, because I was just told about a tiny one because Lydia use the word net linking. So sometimes the French use English words that you don’t understand, it’s link building in English. And there’s a very funny story about that. But anyway, my tip is, well, the main problem is you guys make 10 times more money for the same job. You are smart about it. There’s one zero missing on the final line when we ask for the check, for the bill, clients.

Dixon Jones

Okay. So you guys are cheap. Is that what you’re tell us?

Laurent Bourelly

Well, we’re French, it’s…

Dixon Jones

So I should be getting French SEOs because they’re better value for money. Let’s put the positive spin on that.

Laurent Bourelly

Oh, yep.

Dixon Jones

Well, I think also there’s a thing in France as well, isn’t it? I would guess a lot of SEOs in France are kind of that legal consultant status where… correct me if I’m wrong, where rather than a full employee, because SEOs like to do their own thing and they kind of go that. But if you do that, then you can only earn a certain amount of money before the French government decide to tax you all the way to the moon and back, is that right?

Laurent Bourelly

As a matter of fact. I moved away from France in a place called Andora, which is next to France, but I pay barely any taxes. So that’s why…

Dixon Jones

And I bet Jason is still using British taxes too as well, so.

Laurent Bourelly

But for sure. Everything, you… they take away like 45% of what you make, so.

Dixon Jones

Yeah, but then again you get other things.

Jason Barnard

Yeah, in France, the independent status is actually from my perspective, you can get up to 36,000 euros a year before you have to start declaring VAT, then up to 72, I think it is before you actually start having to-

Laurent Bourelly

Lydia might know better, but I think they increased that. But [crosstalk 000931].

Jason Barnard

… 72,000 before you actually have to start doing serious paperwork. And after to 72,000, I hit that and I had to create Kalicube, which had the happy consequence of me building the Kalicube Pro SaaS platform. So it did have a positive effect the fact that I made too much money, which is-

Laurent Bourelly

Nice.

Jason Barnard

… slightly strange to say.

Lydia Arzour

Yes. And what I have noticed is that in France, you can be like your salary in a company and also be an entrepreneur and working for a small company doing SEO, like local ESO, just for a restaurant and so on. So this is the really also presenting for the students who are working on SEO by their own, they are selling some advice to very, very small company.

Rebecca Berbel

I see that a lot as well. That somebody will be working on SEO or working with SEO, and then on the side they’re doing something. They have some side project with a small, independent status that’s really driving either small companies or associations or even just research.

Dixon Jones

And I think that’s the same in the US, that’s a very, very common practice. Not so much in the UK. It is there in the UK, but there’s a feeling by British employers I think, that if you’re working for the company, everything that you do for the company, probably in your contract is signed over to the company. And it’s a question of who owns the IP and stuff there. So there’s definitely some differences. Anyway, let’s move on. But that’s interesting. I’ll probably cover the business side of things. But let’s move on and go to the word that you guys use for SEO is Referencement, which I understand means indexing. I thought it was referencing, but it’s indexing. You told me before the start. Now I wonder whether the fact that you guys are focusing on a word called indexing and we are focusing on a word called optimizing or ripping off Google as some people might like to call it. Does that mean that we’ve got a different approach to SEO just in the language. Does that change anything or am I just making too much out of language there?

Rebecca Berbel

Well, you don’t get made fun of for saying that you are optimizing your SEO.

Dixon Jones

You don’t get?

Rebecca Berbel

… because there’s… Made fun of for saying you’ve optimized your SEO because you’re not saying, I [foreign language 001158].

Lydia Arzour

… I think words are really important. I think when you say SEO, it’s a part of SEM, so it means search engine marketing and SEO is how you do marketing in search engine. So when you say Referencement it means only indexing, which is okay, I will have my pages in Google index. So it’s reducing our impact when we are doing SEO properly. So I think it’s really important to use the right words. And in France we get some problem. Just make a test on Google trends in France, comparing content marketing and brand content in the same. And in the US there is no reality in brand content, it’s only content marketing. And in France we have a lot of terms, you have Referencement natural, Referencement pay organic, it means natural. So it’s a little bit confusing for some marketer.

Dixon Jones

I think in English we use all sorts of TLAs as I call them, three letter abbreviations, like SEO and SEM, which tends to also frustrate those that want to be further in the industry. And then they just hear people on Twitter and Facebook just coming in and using SF for screaming frog, or TF for trust flow, and they just kind of use these things and don’t explain them in a middle of a tweet, as if it’s some kind of power trip that people are going on. I don’t understand why people are not just playing with what they say. I wish people would be easier with language, regardless of whether it’s English or French, to be honest with you. Laurent, Jason, any thoughts on language?

Laurent Bourelly

Oh yeah. For me, it’s very simple. Anyway, nobody understands what we are doing. Okay.

Dixon Jones

Let’s use [crosstalk 001403].

Laurent Bourelly

So how I use it is very simple. When people say Referencement, it’s one type of bio persona, when they use the word SEO, it’s another type. And well, it translates as when they use SEO, they know a little more about… they’re usually in-house or whatever they… Referencement is usually the boss of the company or he’s a secretary or something like that.

Rebecca Berbel

I want to jump on what Laurent just said. That I see more and more use of SEO, so English terms in French, around everything that is SEO in France. So that might be a little bit what you’re saying, Dixon, sort of the thing that you have to know when you step in, so why are we not using French words for this? Another question? Is it a entrance barrier or is it really just, we’ve adopted a different language?

Jason Barnard

Yeah. I use English for the cabie an awful lot and I get caught out in France because people don’t understand what I’m talking about, because I should be using the French version. But from an English person who’s learned French, I find it quite difficult to remember which terms I can use and which terms I can’t use. So yeah, my big advantage is now I’m focusing on brand SERPs and what appears when somebody Googles your brand name and that kind of gets me out of that Referencement side of things because I can focus on branding and content and pushing a brand message out there and reaching new audience elsewhere and using Google as a bonus. You repackage that content and present it to Google in a way that Google can digest it, so that Google will rank it and use it and show it to its users when they’re searching for something, for which you’re relevant. Which I’ve side stepped, I think can offer lot of the Referencement, SEO kind of discussions. I don’t really need to talk about it a great deal, which is lovely.

Lydia Arzour

Yeah. And just to remember as I work for companies like agency and for clients, I see the different between the two. And most of marketer, marketer director called it Referencement, because it’s they have so much channel to manage. Like Referencement is the last one. So they say it [clif-ferencement 001618]. They’re not talking about-

Dixon Jones

With a spit in their voice.

Lydia Arzour

Yeah. They’re not talking about SEO, which is really for the industry, for the SEO industry, for all the acquisition responsible in company to talk about SEO. But for the main direct marketing director, I hear more Referencement than SEO.

Laurent Bourelly

Just to be clear, they are scared of us, even within the digital marketing industry. They [crosstalk 001650].

Dixon Jones

It’s only because you wear a black hat Laurent, that’s why.

Laurent Bourelly

I’m part of the problem for sure. But don’t get… Yeah, really, they’re really scared of us.

Rebecca Berbel

No, but what you just said, Lydia is something that we’ve seen as well. That there are personas here in France that we don’t necessarily see in other countries. For example, the marketing director. Most of the marketing directors are not good going to be as hands-on in SEO as we do see in some agencies here. It’s on very sort of a high level hands-on, but they’re still involved.

Laurent Bourelly

Yeah. Because for them, it’s still the voodoo thing. Like SEO dreads under the full moon cooking [crosstalk 001729].

Dixon Jones

Which is ironic really, because marketing in the ’80s was pretty damn voodoo as well, ’70s and ’80s. They just kind of waved their hands and magic was supposed to happen. So the marketing people were pretty voodoo-ish. So now they’re all directors. They should well get on with the program and understand us.

Jason Barnard

But in the ’80s, marketers got paid an absolute fortune and Longhorn was saying we’re underpaid. So that’s not fair.

Laurent Bourelly

Well, that was the ’80s, Jason. The ’80s. Yeah, the ’90s until 2008, everything was cool. Now it’s [crosstalk 001804].

Dixon Jones

I think we all believe that we’re underpaid. I second, we’re underpaid. We’re never paid enough.

Laurent Bourelly

No, but check that zero missing from a French budget compared to UK or US budget. It’s crazy.

Dixon Jones

Well, that’s partly in… the fact that there’s a lot more people speaking English, I suspect that for products that have a non-geographical boundary, they’ve got a much bigger playing field to play in. But the other side of that is that by going deep surely or going into individual languages, not just French, but will go with French because it’s the French session, it’s an opportunity surely for traditionally English speaking companies to detour-

Laurent Bourelly

No, Dixon, you make it way too complicated. Okay. So we were at the beginning, look us. We, Lydia and I well set up the score, and you set up the-

Dixon Jones

To the bar.

Laurent Bourelly

The score. Yeah, the bar. So we’re just, I don’t know, doing things in the afternoon after lunch, after we drink wine. You were just like, “Okay, da, da…” With your Excel files. And-

Dixon Jones

I see.

Laurent Bourelly

We must [crosstalk 001925] up.

Dixon Jones

I don’t know if that’s true because as Rebecca says the French are better at technical SEO, which is… Or, your average person coming out of school is going to pay more attention to the technical stuff than the-

Laurent Bourelly

No, but look at it. Okay. We have lunch, we drink wine and in the afternoon it’s hard to make money, but French wine helps you go into the matrix. And what Lydia, we, I am a search engine hacker. That’s what I am really at heart. I found the flaws that the other one make money on. If you can go back to dark SEO team and look it up with what [Marcus 002008] did with us. And so yeah, we find the flaws.

Dixon Jones

Yeah. Not everyone though. [crosstalk 002015], if Rebecca’s cycling from Bordeaux to Brighton.

Rebecca Berbel

It’s from Paris.

Dixon Jones

Oh, from Paris to Brighton.

Rebecca Berbel

Paris. Yeah. I couldn’t get enough days off that one.

Dixon Jones

I don’t suppose you’re spending too much time drinking wine in the afternoon, Rebecca.

Rebecca Berbel

No, that’s not going to happen [crosstalk 002030].

Dixon Jones

So more in that door right then, Laurent?

Rebecca Berbel

Yeah. I think that there’s something to what Laurent is saying. I know there’s been a lot of black hat or even gray hat, pretty much everywhere. If we see a flow, we’ll take advantage of it. That’s sort of our objective, how to make sure that our content is in front of the people that need to see it. And if there’s a way to sort of get through a back door, we’ll take it. And I think that’s true of SEOs everywhere. What I specifically saw when I first really got into SEO in France was that there were some techniques that are considered seriously gray hat that were very, very prevalent here. And that continue to be more so than in other places.

We talked about link buying, that’s sort of a foundational strategy. Personal blog networks. I was really surprised when I first started doing SEO, how many brands were saying, “Well, yeah. Of course, we have a personal blog network. How are we going to work otherwise?” So there are a couple techniques that are still floating around there that in some of the English language areas would be targeted by Google and not really be an advantage.

Dixon Jones

Let’s go on to back links because I think obviously it’s the mainstay of Majestic. And not surprisingly Majestic has quite a few friends in France, which is good because the French buy links, it would seem. Not that Majestic sell links, we just [crosstalk 002207] track what’s happening on the end internet and show people links. But why do you think this came about? Why are the French so obsessed with links?

Laurent Bourelly

That’s the only thing that works.

Lydia Arzour

You say because it works?

Laurent Bourelly

Well because that’s the only thing that works.

Lydia Arzour

Yes.

Laurent Bourelly

You got to build links. If you don’t build links, well, good luck ranking.

Jason Barnard

Well, I would like to disagree with that in fact, because there is also philosophically, if everybody’s doing one thing, Google doesn’t have a choice. So it’s having to rank these things. And if you do something different, you’re giving it a different choice and link building is one of the examples that I would use. Is that I’ve got two clients, both of whom rank very near the top or at the top for short head queries with no links at all-

Laurent Bourelly

Of course.

Jason Barnard

… and they’re doing it using topical authority. And I would argue that one of the reasons we are managing to do this is because everybody else is using links. Google is ranking those with links because it doesn’t have a choice. And if you give it a choice with some quality content that doesn’t necessarily have links, they then you’ve got your end. Not always, but it’s worked a few times for me.

Rebecca Berbel

I think that’s something that’s linked to that. If we can talk about linking concepts, is the fact that Google will often roll out new strategies and particularly new technologies and NLP, whether we’re talking about BERT or even MUM, rolls out in English language first. So older techniques will work longer here in some areas, the gap is closing. But there isn’t as much new content or new strategies being taken advantage of at the moment. That content is lacking in France at the moment. We’re starting to balance things. Like you said, you have two clients, Jason, but I expect tomorrow, you’ll have a bunch more.

Jason Barnard

Oh, I hope so. I need clients right [crosstalk 002355] not because I didn’t get the act zero that Laurent was talking about.

Laurent Bourelly

No, they suck at branding. I come from branding, remember. I come from branding. So I know what you’re talking about. And I came full circle. I agree 100% with you. But trust me, every day that’s my pain in the brain. They suck at branding, period. So what do you do? Links.

Dixon Jones

Lydia?

Lydia Arzour

Yes. We are obsessed with link building in France. And there is a lot of platform where you can buy links and those links are related to content anywhere. Yeah. You are buying text with links. It’s not only buying links. And there is no… it’s a search engine view only. It’s not a branding and all strategic view. And most of people are confusing about that. They are producing content, relevant content in their company. But when we are talking about SEO, they say, “Okay, I need to buy links.” No, maybe we can work on your content strategy to build link, why we have to buy them? We can build them through your content strategy. So they make a huge boundaries and separation between content on a way and links on the other way, because maybe it’s our fault. We educate the population like that to say, okay, search engine optimization is internal ranking creator area and external one. And in the external one, you have popularity, which means back links.

Laurent Bourelly

Well, links is not all just about back links. Okay. We’ll come to that later. A link is a link anyway. But I just figured it out guys, just right now. It’s very simple.

Dixon Jones

Yeah. But it’s taken you 25 years though.

Laurent Bourelly

No, no, no. It’s very simple in fact. Why bother about something that’s coming up in three to five years? Okay. In three to five years. Yeah. Well, the SEO we knew in 2004 will be over in France and UK. Maybe it will work in Brazil or in like Southeast Asia, in Malaysia. But it’s done Google won. We still have three to five years. So the French, when they’ll be in front of the wall, well, they’ll figure out something. But it’s like the metaverse. Everybody’s tripping out about the metaverse, I’m tripping out about Google lens. AR is here. VR, okay. Why do I care about VR right now?

Dixon Jones

Yeah, but I’m always a believer of trying to do what’s going to come next, not what’s here now. But that’s probably because of the kind of person I am, I don’t know.

Laurent Bourelly

It’s now. Google lens is just brand new. So by the time everybody’s using it, we’ll be ready. But of course we look at what’s coming up, but we’re very clear about what do we need to focus… Basically. Okay. That’s what I wanted to say. Why do a great job when it works by doing half of the quarter of the job?

Dixon Jones

Okay.

Laurent Bourelly

No.

Dixon Jones

Okay. More about offense, less about defense then. Okay. Sorry, Jason. Carry on.

Jason Barnard

No, just coming about really quickly when Lydia was talking about content marketing and branding. I’ve written this book here, the Fundamentals of Brand SERPs of business. I’m making some headway in the English language community, but it’s tough going. In the French community, I’ve made absolutely no headway at all. It’s not in French, which is probably the first blocking point. But the idea is saying, if I’m building a company, a brand, a long term business, I really should be focusing on what I’m doing for that branding online. And my personal opinion is now increasingly the SEO, Referencement natural is the bonus that I get once I create this great content that suits my audience. And the trick there, as I said earlier, is just to package it, so Google loves it, Google can digest it and Google wants to present it and understands in which circumstances it can present it useful to its users as a solution to their problem.

Dixon Jones

So that brings me on really to a couple of other points I wanted to bring in. Well, sort of to mold them together, which is links is also about the content that’s on the page of the links. So it’s about content marketing, as in putting content in other places other than your own site, as well as your own site as well. And then combined with that, when you are writing content, is there a particular style of writing in French that works better in the search engines than others? So how do you go about getting that content and that messaging out on other websites, which will get you your link and it will get you that content indexed? And I get some amazing traffic from a couple of OnCrawl blog posts, by the way. I thank you very much to [Curry 002855], who’s been doing some stuff on your site, which is getting picked up very, very well. And so yeah, I know whatever OnCrawl’s doing, it works. It’s good. It generates some powerful stuff.

Rebecca Berbel

It’s all content.

Dixon Jones

Yeah. It’s all content based. So the questions are, how do you write content in French that’s going to get understood by Google? And how do you place that content? Who wants to go with that?

Laurent Bourelly

Well, the French language is complicated. We really saw at the beginning, how Google had trouble understanding just the accents on the letters, it’s really a pain. The average number of words in English sentence were like six, seven words, something like that. In France, it’s 12, 13 words. You are guys are very precise, a word means something very unique, and in France could be… There is a guy who wrote a book, Philippe Sollers, 300 page book, with just one sentence.

Rebecca Berbel

So you see that with titles and descriptions as well, where things get truncated, there’s less information if it’s expressed naturally than if it were in English. And I know that’s been a frustration for some of our French clients, who’ve really wanted to be able to work on what is the best description we can provide? What is the best summarized content of this page? What is the best title we can give it? They’re long. So that does play in there.

Jason Barnard

Well, there is a tendency for French sentences to be long. But one thing from my perspective, and English is such an international language that you also have the problem that different people from different cultures write English very differently, especially when it’s their second language. And for me, that must complicate things vastly. Whereas French is relatively kind of enclosing itself, at least in France. In our bathroom, we’ve got the rules of French grammar on one piece of poster that I’m supposed to actually learn. And the other thing, from my perspective, that kind of means that French is more structured than English as a general rule when you look around the web.

But the advantage I have in French is my French isn’t as good as it perhaps would be if I had schooled in French. And my English reaction is to tend to simplify and keep sentences short anyway. So maybe that’s a trick. I don’t really know, because I’m not saying I’m ranking incredibly well in French. But the fact that I don’t speak French so very well is perhaps helping me to simplify my language and keep it within Google’s grasp, as it were.

Rebecca Berbel

I think there’s more of a difference between writing for what we want to see on the SERP and writing for a normal person who’s reading content. So obviously you really do want to write naturally, that’s what’s going to help Google be able to understand content, that’s what’s going to help readers want to stay on the page, that’s what’s going to earn you links. But sometimes I find that it can be difficult to use that content as a standalone to perfect what we want to see on the SERP.

Dixon Jones

So Lydia, you’re a content specialist. Do try and write in short sentences in French, or do you let the natural flow French flare of long sentences roll out?

Lydia Arzour

It’s complicated. I think we have to imagine several type of content, not only like we are talking about content in general things. But sometimes it’s better to build a video for example, to express exactly what we want to say rather than an article. If we need it, or if we want to stick to the customer expectation, I think we have to play more with the diversity of content rather than in English. Or we can have everything on a page.

Dixon Jones

I get-

Lydia Arzour

So from my point of view, we have to better choice, for example, a video in some cases, and we have to convince the client that content is not just a text or web pages, it’s also several things. So sometimes an image is better. We can optimize images, but we need to have one content and then we can split it and create other content to answer one idea.

Dixon Jones

My French partner, when he writes, he tends to use that on tables. So he’ll use tables to simplify concepts and give nice little bullet points, which hopefully will end up in rich snippets and stuff. So maybe that’s a powerful tool in France to get beyond that problem of long sentences. But surely the takeaway from there, Rebecca, would be the customer’s got to figure out how to write shorter titles and descriptions that make sense in French.

Rebecca Berbel

Yeah.

Dixon Jones

So, okay.

Rebecca Berbel

It will be a cultural revolution.

Dixon Jones

Yeah. It’s never going to happen, but we can try, so. But this is a thing about optimizing, isn’t it. Google goes around in English and says, “Look, write what’s good for the user.” But if you’re sitting there and saying in French, writing what’s good for the user is long sentences that then get curtailed in the SERP so they can’t see the whole sentence, so they can’t understand it. Then Google’s got a problem with that, because they need to put longer snippets, I suppose, on the French SERPs.

Laurent Bourelly

The main problem is okay, long sentences, accent, all this, but the nuance also. You know that Google is struggling with nuance anyway. And nuance in French is even more nuance.

Dixon Jones

More nuance.

Lydia Arzour

More nuance.

Dixon Jones

Yeah. True. Okay. So guys, what about technologies? So technologies and approaches. Now Laurent, a lot of French people talk about topical mesh and I think that’s your invention. So right or wrong, and I don’t know if the other three know or care about topical mesh, but tell us a little bit about your topical mesh, because it sounds to me a strategy that is used quite a lot in France.

Laurent Bourelly

It’s just a timing thing. You guys discovered… it was there. I didn’t invent anything. I just put it in a form that people understood what you call topical clustering or semantic SEO that didn’t exist. So I invented a word called cocon semantique, which translates to semantic cocoon, but that doesn’t mean anything in English, so I say topical mesh. But it’s basically… Topical clustering, it’s more than that. But basically it’s about, we have a treasure of links that we don’t use well.

Dixon Jones

Internal links.

Laurent Bourelly

It’s called… Yeah, exactly. Internal links. So I said, why don’t we want links? Why don’t we use wisely those internal links? And guess what, it works wonderfully. So it’s just magic when you take say a website and you just do a proper internal linking and you do 10 X, period.

Dixon Jones

Okay. And it seems to be a good thing. But what about the technologies that people use in France? Obviously, OnCrawl this big in France. Rebecca, give us your plug for OnCrawl.

Rebecca Berbel

That one’s a hard one not to do.

Dixon Jones

You know I’ve just been bought out by an American big company anyway, haven’t you? So…

Rebecca Berbel

Yeah, but that’s because they like French technology so much, they couldn’t help themselves.

Lydia Arzour

Yes. We have a lot of tools.

Rebecca Berbel

Yeah. Anywhere from [crosstalk 003655].

Dixon Jones

For the benefit for the audience, OnCrawl and [crosstalk 003703].

Lydia Arzour

… we’re talking about OnCrawl, sorry.

Dixon Jones

Go on.

Lydia Arzour

OnCrawl and Bright edge now.

Rebecca Berbel

But there are a ton of other tools that we’d want to mention, whether we even want to talk about things like Babbar Tech. There are an amazing number of French tools, often a little bit more on the technical side.

Laurent Bourelly

Remember guys, I told you, we suck at making money. We have the best tools in the world. The best.

Lydia Arzour

Yeah.

Laurent Bourelly

OnCrawl, Francois Is my buddy. Adrien, Botify is my buddy. [inaudible 003730], my buddy. [crosstalk 003733].

Dixon Jones

I’m going to throwing Kevin from SEO Observer.

Laurent Bourelly

[crosstalk 003739].

Lydia Arzour

Yeah.

Laurent Bourelly

On [Frenchdutchseo.com 003743], you got the best tools and you got surrounded. And it’s crazy because we have the best tools, but why do it in English?

Dixon Jones

So you got the best tools and your marketing directors don’t understand the concepts. Do you think it might be the marketing director sort of the problem here? They can’t get the pricing. They can’t understand the technology.

Laurent Bourelly

If you take care of that in the afternoon, it is just not working. It’s because of the wine, I tell you, I mentioned.

Dixon Jones

Okay, brilliant. And-

Lydia Arzour

But when you have tools, it makes it consistent for director marketing. You have KPIs, you can explain things and blocking factors. So it’s interesting to have the proper view with power tools.

Dixon Jones

And if it goes wrong, they can blame the technology.

Laurent Bourelly

You’re using things that… or the tools stole from us. For example, what screaming frog has with the visualization of internal linking, that comes from… Okay, before we had Java, we were the first to do those very nice internal link visualization. Just how it corrects live the content, that was one for win. We did it first. So we do some real revolution on the technical aspect, but we don’t make so much money with it.

Dixon Jones

Jason, is Kalicube in French?

Jason Barnard

Oh dear. That’s-

Dixon Jones

Gosh.

Jason Barnard

There are two problems with Kalicube Pro is, one, it’s not in French and two, same problem as well, not making enough money. But I actually did develop it multilingual in terms of the interface and just gave up because there’s simply not enough interest in this particular technology. And it might be because the French community is much more used to the technical aspect, the technical tools. And this is very much a semantic brand management tool, ORM even, online reputation management, pretty close to that. So I actually dropped the duality of language in the front end because developing multilingual platforms is actually more than twice the work. It’s like having kids. They say, when you get the second kid, it’s more work than double the first one. And same with the multilinguality. So if they want to use the Kalicube process platform, you can use it in much any Latin character language, as long as you’re willing to use an English language interface.

Dixon Jones

Fair enough. That’s fair enough things and… Well, I’m going to say it’s fair enough, I have to.

Jason Barnard

I am all on my own developing it. So kind of, it’s fair enough.

Dixon Jones

It’s amazing what you can do on your own, isn’t it? So yes and no. Okay. Guys, we are nearly getting… Yeah, okay.

Laurent Bourelly

Just one moment, because I didn’t… Besides the fact that this whole topic of nesting is the number one strategy in France, that everybody is really up there about internal links. And there’s a lot more to do on your side of the pond.

Rebecca Berbel

We’ve seen that with internal links and the way people use internal links in OnCrawl. So we have a bunch of metrics. We even have some of the first metrics in the industry related to internal links and how we measure popularity throughout a website. And that is one of the first topics that I encountered in SEO in France. Not only Laurent’s cocon semantique, but also in-Links and internal linking meshes in my [crosstalk 004125].

Dixon Jones

Just for the benefit of our sponsor today, of course, Majestic’s Flow Metrics. Although they are looking at backlinks, they do do the maths through internal links as well. So if you’re listening and you are…

Laurent Bourelly

It’s even more than that. Everybody is going after all kind of metrics. The TTF, the topical page rank, Topical Trust Flow, is the key.

Dixon Jones

I think so.

Laurent Bourelly

That’s my starting point.

Dixon Jones

But we’re a bit bias here at Majestic.

Laurent Bourelly

No, but the topical page rank… Okay. Topical page rank.

Dixon Jones

Yeah.

Laurent Bourelly

We… Is the…

Dixon Jones

Maybe Topical Trust Flow is a simplification of topical page rank. But there we go. It’s a sorry attempt at it. Okay guys, we are nearly at time already. So just before I ask everybody how they can get in contact with you if they want to, David, why don’t you come on and tell us what’s happening on the next show.

David Bain

So next month’s episode will be broadcast live on Wednesday, the 4th of May at 500 PM, BST, 600 PM, French time. And that will be on Machine Learning for SEO, with Lazarina Stoy and Giovanna Angulo. That’s going to be, as I said, on the 4th of May 500 PM, BST. Just go to majestic.com/webinars to sign up for that one.

Dixon Jones

That’s going to be really interesting. So that’s fantastic. So guys, thank you very much for coming along today. It’s been fascinating. I couldn’t have thought of four better people to bring on for this subject. You guys have got such a good knowledge of both sides of the, I say the pond or about France and either the UK or the US markets. And so that’s been really powerful. If people want to get hold of you, how do they do that? Laurent, why don’t you go first.

Laurent Bourelly

Guys go to SEO’s Conspiracy Podcast and with Dixon Jones, we debunked all the SEO myth. But check it out in French. So we started out, a good thing then summer happen, and then I kind of stopped. But I’m going to reboot it.

Dixon Jones

We got a whole year’s supply of SEO conspiracies, so.

Laurent Bourelly

Yeah. And the topical mesh is in there, so it’s good.

Dixon Jones

Thank you.

Laurent Bourelly

SEO Conspiracy.

Dixon Jones

Dot com. Rebecca, how do they find you?

Rebecca Berbel

You can find me with OnCrawl. So rebecca@oncrawl.com. Or you can catch me on Twitter, which is RebBerbel.

Dixon Jones

And for those that haven’t got a screen in front of them, it’s Rebecca with double C. Jason, where do they find you?

Jason Barnard

Well, the whole point of brand SERPs is that when you search a brand name or a personal name, what should appear is the brand message, and also multiple ways that people can interact with business or the person. So if you search Jason Barnard, you’ll see my site, Twitter, videos, articles, the knowledge panel on the right hand side, you can pretty much tell my life story from it.

Laurent Bourelly

Your named entity now.

Dixon Jones

Pretty much. Yeah. Well, he’s more than a named entity, it’s pretty impressive actually, that brand SERP thing. Yeah.

Jason Barnard

But in fact, the important thing in that, sorry, is really the brand SERP, when you search my name or Kalicube. It gives you the person who’s interested in me or Kalicube, the choice of how you interact with us. And that’s the point to what Google’s trying to build with a brand SERP. Represent the entity, represent the brand and give the user who’s interested in that brand, the options of how they want to interact with that brand.

Dixon Jones

And I choose to interact with you on a webinar with Majestic, so today.

Jason Barnard

Great choice.

Dixon Jones

Lydia, how do they get ahold of you?

Lydia Arzour

Oh, you can find me on Google like Jason said. So just type my name and my surname, and you find first my LinkedIn page. I’m really present on LinkedIn or on Twitter. So it’s quite easy to find me.

Dixon Jones

For those who don’t have a screen, Lydia is spell with a Y. L-Y-D-I-A. And Arzour is a A-R-Z-O-U-R. See people say-

Lydia Arzour

Exactly.

Dixon Jones

… that and forget that they’re on a podcast. Okay, brilliant. Thank you very much, guys. Honestly, fantastic session, loved it. Got renewed interest in France, except I can’t get any customers to pay for stuff. But I guess I’m going to have to brush up on my affiliate marketing skills and make money for myself. So guys, thank you very much for coming along today.

Lydia Arzour

Thank you.

Dixon Jones

Thank you everybody out there in webinar land, and see you next time.

Jason Barnard

Thank you.

Rebecca Berbel

Thank you.

Previous Webinars

Follow our Twitter account @Majestic to hear about more upcoming webinars!

Or if you want to catch up with all of our webinars, you can find them on our Digital Marketing Webinars page.

Back