OnCrawl – Jérémy Querrec
Jérémy Querrec is an expert in web marketing and communication that currently works for the SEO platform OnCrawl. This tool, developed in France, was born to offer users a quick access to large amounts of data in a simple and understandable way. It allows them to analyze the information in the same way that Google bots do and offers to the clients the opportunity to implement their strategies to adapt them to Google demands.
In addition to his work at the head of the New Business department of OnCrawl, Jérémy has also been a teacher in several business schools for years. He explains us all the peculiarities about the tool, why it is necessary to do a good audit of our domain and offers us tips on how to use the SEO and SEM strategies correctly.
How do you get interested in working in Media and latter in SEO and SEM?
Well, good question! I should say that life brings surprises! After some studies in the Marketing and Advertising space, I’ve joined an European agency doing search, back in 2008 (bigmouthmedia). That company was leading the search industry in the most important markets and was a fabulous place to leverage my online marketing skills. Started by managing paid search campaigns for top european clients and naturally, engaged SEO in my clients strategy.
You have worked as a professor in several business schools. What are the most usual concerns of your students?
I’m still working as a professor in different business schools and the most usual concern of my students is to get concrete and applicable learnings instead of getting theoric lessons that they could get online or in different books. They like to get concrete feedbacks from the ground and to get some tricks to be smart and efficient.
Moreover, they are very keen to get a proper conversation with professional, still in activity and close to day to day clients topics.
When was OnCrawl created? How was the process from having the idea to actually launch the tool?
OnCrawl was edited in 2013 by the French company Cogniteev. François Goube, serial entrepreneur, and Tanguy Moal, NLP expert and data geek, decided to create this solution following an industrial consortium with the number one French e-commerce website called Cdiscount. Indeed, the e-commerce website was looking for a tool which could provide reliable and comprehensive SEO data at scale about its website.
By creating this tool, OnCrawl responded to the needs of two rising trends in the digital ecosystem: Big Data associated to Search and Semantic.
Cdiscount was looking for a mathematical and comprehensive ways to optimize their SEO performance on important data volume, but they were not the only one on the market. And because such technologies were previously held by big players, we decided to officially create OnCrawl in 2015.
Our main purpose was to evangelize technical SEO and to provide our users an easy access to the data they need. From 2013 to 2018, OnCrawl has won 10 prizes included two times in a row the Best SEO Tool award at the European Search Awards, opened offices in Bordeaux, Paris and Montreal, raised 4 million dollars, helped more than 800 customers worldwide and recruited 23 people. A great adventure far from over!
Could you tell us more about OnCrawl, what can be use it for?
OnCrawl is a technical SEO platform that helps search marketers open Google’s blackbox. Concretely, our solution is composed of a Crawler and a Log files Analyzer backed by tens of features and more than 600 metrics to help SEO experts to better optimize their website regarding Google’s guidelines.
OnCrawl’s SEO Crawler enables users to analyse their websites in the same way as Google’s bot does. We provide our customers with comprehensive reports based on reliable data which evaluate the quality of content, HTML code and architecture as well as their website’s performance.
Then, with the log files analysis, OnCrawl’s users are able to understand how the search engines behave on every part of their website. They receive clear and personalized insightful dashboards. We help our users to improve their crawl budget and to drive Google bots towards the strategic pages. It results in more qualitative organic traffic but also better conversions.
OnCrawl has many other features – including third-party integrations such as Google Search Console, Google Analytics or Majestic – which all have the same purpose: helping our customers to kick off their SEO strategies!
How can SEO and SEM help us to achieve more conversions?
I believe that SEO & SEM are allies, not enemies. Learning how to use SEO & SEM together can be a strong asset to increase the visibility of your website in the SERPs and your conversions.
First, they both rely on keywords and they both have the same goal: acquire traffic. SEM and SEO have their own pros and cons: SEO brings targeted qualified traffic but takes time to get results and SEM bring fast but costly results and is short-lived.
To generate more conversions, you need to make the most of their strengths. I suggest to favour SEO to organically secured your positions for your most important keywords. You can use SEM for the additional keywords or for specific campaigns on your important keywords.
Your SEO strategy will bring organic traffic and answer to Google’s requirements while your SEM strategy will help you to rank for keywords that don’t rank organically. Studies have shown that brands with both organic and paid search embraced 92 % of total clicks.
Why is important to do a good SEO audit of our domain?
Running regular and good SEO audits of your domain is inescapable if you are trying to improve your rankings and thus your conversions and revenues.
Indeed, conquer the Google’s top search results requires a website optimized for the search engines expectations. How can you do that if have no idea of what is really going on your website and how search engines interpret your data?
An SEO audit allows to get detailed insights and overview of your website and to have a specific idea of its health. Doing so, you will have the opportunity to analyse major components as content, architecture, performance, orphan pages or internal liking and to detect your strengths and weaknesses.
This indicators have a strong influence on how Google regards your website and how he is going to fetch, index and rank your web pages. From there, if you set up the right SEO strategy, you should be able to quickly increase your domain authority!
You are a SEM expert and speak three languages. How important is the language when we are planning a SEM strategy?
Language is very key when doing international campaigns. Any marketers needs to apply a Localization of content strategies instead of Translating content. Also, using English to reach a bigger audience, is a big mistake to avoid. You have to reach your audience with their local language! That’s key for conversion rate!
You have managed SEM, Media and SEO campaigns at European level. Have you seem many differences between european countries? Can the campaign that works in France do it as well in Spain, Germany or the UK?
For sure, markets are totally different. UK & Germany are very mature markets where Spain and Italy are smaller and not on the same education level. France is in the middle of those two segments. Also, some services / products won’t fit the country culture you like to reach so and as any marketing activity, you need first to realize a proper business plan before to launch any digital campaigns to any countries!
How is SEO done in France? What advice would you give us if we wanted to make a campaign in France?
I would say that the first answer is quite easy: better than elsewhere!
