Over the last decade Google has made huge progress in how it ranks websites and decides which to put first in the search results. Google’s new algorithms like RankBrain, an advanced artificial intelligence, means that old fashioned strategies like keyword stuffing, automated translations, or building hundreds of poor quality links no longer work. This development has in turn led to Google’s search results being more relevant and useful to its customers.
When looking specifically at French SEO, having the following factors are all essential in order to rank well:
- A professionally written (or translated) website that’s carefully proofread and include keywords occasionally, but not excessively. It's more important that you use correct spelling and grammar than including phrases exactly as they are, as when entering a phrase to search in Google, people often ignore accents or conjugations, but Google takes this into account for SEO.
- Metatag titles and descriptions that are localized for visitors in France, are the appropriate length, and which will encourage visitors to click them.
- A web design that’s tailored to your target audience.
- Quality links from other high authority, relevant French language websites.
While optimizing your website is obviously essential, building quality links is just as important, as Google place equal weighting on incoming links and on-page content. Building backlinks to your site in the form of content marketing will boost your position in Google and also helps raise awareness about your brand and present yourself as a subject matter expert.
Our SEO Agency
Our French SEO agency, will start each project with keyword research to identify the best keywords to target, then provide one or more of the following services:
- SEO consultation - Providing advice and training, and reviewing your website to determine how best to optimize it. We can also help improve the user-experience of your site, asking 10 or more French speakers to visit several pages of your site, add a product to the shopping cart on ecommerce sites, and complete a personalised questionnaire, from which we extract actionable feedback.
- English to French translation - If your site's not already been translated, we will translate it into French for you.
- On-Page SEO - Writing new content for your site (e.g. blog posts or product descriptions) or optimizing existing content (e.g. rewriting Metatags and URLs).
- French link building – Also called content marketing, we will boost your site’s position in Google by researching and writing high quality articles and placing them on related French sites, creating professional infographics and sharing these or other images, managing a social media campaign, and submitting your site to related directories.
- Web design - as well as translating content, we can create your entire site in French, ensure it looks great on mobiles, tablets and monitors and make it easy for you to edit and expand. (Clicking 'web design' will take you to our portfolio of French websites).
Choosing the Right Keywords
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We start each project by choosing the best keywords and phrases that will generate enquiries. We analyze how many people search for a particular phrase in Google each month and select the most frequently searched for phrases that are also likely to generate the highest return on investment (ROI). Our calculation is based on their relevance and their SEO competition (how good the SEO is on the top 20 sites for a particular keyword, which has very little correlation with PPC competition). We then focus our optimization on these keywords by using them the appropriate number of times in both on-site SEO and in the French articles and links going to your site.
SEO Consultation
We can either work with our own team, or if you have in-house content writers or your own web developer, we're happy to work with them to complete the high level SEO analysis that a site requires before completing the other work. We automate as much of this as possible, using software to generate reports showing frequent errors over the site as a whole, like whether pages have missing or duplicate Metatags. After the automated analysis, a fluent French speaking SEO expert will complete a detailed analysis of your site as a whole, focusing on the home page and other core pages (called landing pages) to provide detailed recommendations and new content that is unique to each site. View a sample website analysis.
On-site French SEO
Our on-site SEO service includes:
- Writing original content for your site (all content will be 100% original and written by fluent French speakers).
- Matching keywords with specific pages and optimizing existing content to ensure that each page is fully search engine optimized for one or two relevant keywords.
- Optimizing the Title and Description Metatags (Google actually ignores the 'Keywords' metatag, so we don't waste valuable time on this).
- Optimizing the main titles and sub-headings on a page, links between pages, URLs, general text, etc.
In all we consider over 20 different aspects of on-site SEO to help your website gain maximum online visibility.
That said, it's not all about counting keywords on different parts of each page; these days your site needs to offer something unique, be well researched and engaging in order to rank well with Google. We therefore only use content writers who have a flair for writing and who pay attention to the little things, as well as being able to communicate the overall message of your brand.
Guest Blogging with French Articles
We have fluent, native speakers to write high quality and original articles in French, or about France. All content will be 100% original, well researched and written to be engaging and informative.
Our French articles will be published on websites that accept guest posts and are related to your own site. Following the Google Panda and Google Penguin algorithm updates, we no longer recommend large volumes of submissions, but instead focus on adding each unique article to a single related site with a high domain authority.
As a result, in addition to the SEO benefit, you will receive a flow of highly targeted traffic to your website and will see both an immediate and a long term benefit.
Social Media and Image Marketing
Using Indigoextra's service gives you the advantage of having a talented graphic design team available in addition to content writers and link builders. This means that when we create your Twitter or Facebook page we will ensure that the profile and background pictures are beautifully designed and that we can create stunning infographics and other shareable social media images that when shared on your social media profiles and on infographic sharing sites help raise awareness of your brand and create organic links to your site.
Directory Submissions
Directory submissions were once the bread and butter of an SEO campaign, however it's now best to target a small number of the top web directories, rather than doing mass submissions, as Google will ignore duplicate content, or even penalise your site if you have too many links using identical descriptions. We therefore write unique descriptions of your company for each directory submission we complete and only include a handful of submissions in our French SEO campaigns to ensure that we can target the best directories. Where directories let us link to your Facebook or Twitter profile, we will include links to those too, to help improve your social media presence.
France Search Engine Marketing
One advantage SEO has over other marketing methods is that it helps you appear high with all the different French search engines, including Google.fr, fr.Yahoo.com, Bing.fr, etc. While each search engine has their own set of algorithms, each look at similar factors - relevant, high-quality content and links from high authority sites, therefore our approach works equally well for different search engines, though our main focus is on Google, as that currently dominates the market.
We can also help with other marketing campaigns, including managing PPC campaigns, submitting relevant posts to small ad sites, doing small, targeted forum posting campaigns, or finding other niche link building opportunities that might not fall under a standard SEO package.
Read more details of our French SEO Services, on our dedicated website, frenchseoteam.com, or to discuss your requirements with us and a free quote, please contact us today.
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