On stage and in class
SEO talks: my conference sessions, slides and videos
I have spoken at events run by the French SEO Camp association, in 2018, 2019 and 2022. The principle is always the same: a topic I practise every day, real examples, numbers, and what I learned along the way.
I like the exercise because it forces you to go all the way on a subject. Preparing forty-five minutes on log analysis means spending weeks checking every figure before daring to show it on a giant screen. These talks were given in French, so the slides and the video are in French; the summaries below and the related articles are in English.
2022
SEO Campus Paris
Contents:
Building a dynamic SEO dashboard
In September 2022, at the Palais des congrès in Versailles, I showed how to build an SEO dashboard in Data Studio (now Looker Studio). The starting point is simple: each tool gives you its own figures, and you learn nothing more than by checking them one by one. The point of a home-made dashboard is to combine sources so you decide on up-to-date data.
I walked through a complete case on a sports news website. First the simple sources, Google Analytics and Search Console, with its Search, News and Discover results. Then external sources: a Screaming Frog crawl scheduled every week and exported automatically to Google Sheets, refreshed in the report within fifteen minutes, and rankings pulled from a rank tracker’s API. Finally the real topic, blended sources: up to five at once, to cross clicks, sessions, rankings, depth, internal links and word count in a single table.
The pitfall I had the audience guess: Google Analytics stores its data by URL path, not by full URL.
Until you create a field that puts the domain name back in front, nothing blends with the other sources. I closed with two more advanced uses: a Discover analysis to find out which day, what time and in which section to publish, and a semantic analysis tied to the day’s rankings.
2019
SEO Campus Paris
Log analysis, SEO actions and how Google reads them
On 29 March 2019 I had the great honour of presenting, at SEO Campus Paris, a subject I am passionate about: log analysis. I had studied the logs of 12 websites of different topics and sizes over 6 months, 200,000 URLs and 7 million Googlebot hits, with Oncrawl, SEOlyzer, Screaming Frog’s Log File Analyser and SEO Tools for Excel.
The first part answered one question: what makes Googlebot visit one page more than another? I measured the effect of word count, load time, depth, internal links, external links and existing rankings.
A home page is visited 112 times on average, a page beyond the sixth level of depth only 10 times.
The second part covered SEO actions themselves, changing or removing URLs, blocking indexing or crawling, and their effect on crawl budget; it was published in the French trade newsletter Réacteur by Abondance in May 2019.
2018
SEO Camp Day Lyon
Excel at the service of your SEO
My very first talk, on 8 June 2018, was about the tool I used most every day: Excel. I was a consultant at Korleon’Biz at the time, and half the team had made the trip to support me. In 45 minutes I started from the basics, CONCATENATE, VLOOKUP and pivot tables, and worked up to SEO Tools for Excel, my favourite formulas, and the almost unlimited possibilities of XPathOnUrl, which lets you scrape a site straight from a cell.
Looking back, that talk gave me a taste for the stage, and the conviction that you can do a lot of technical SEO with a tool everyone already has on their computer. Today I do the same cross-referencing in BigQuery, but the reasoning has not changed.
Since 2021
Teaching SEO and digital marketing
The stage is not the only place where I pass things on. Since September 2021 I have been teaching digital marketing and e-commerce to undergraduate and master’s students: Excel and Google Sheets for marketing, e-marketing, social media and SEO, building a WordPress site. Students work on real business cases, and I support them all the way to the final presentation.
It is a very different exercise from a talk, and I enjoy it just as much. In class there is time to let people practise, get it wrong, then try again. I often come away with ways of explaining things that I reuse in my articles.
SEO speaker
A question about one of these talks?
The topics I work on today: technical SEO at the scale of a network of websites, BigQuery for SEO, and AI in the daily life of an SEO team.