For the tenth issue of its Fast Five interview series, Verbolia is pleased to welcome Alain Pezzoni. Passionate about digital marketing, Alain Pezzoni has built up a solid expertise in traffic acquisition, lead generation and global digital marketing strategies by running marketing and e-commerce operations for Air France for nearly 20 years.
Since January 2014, Alain is the CEO of BeOnPerf, a digital strategy consulting agency he founded. The firm is specialized in various areas of marketing, ranging from digital strategy and e-commerce to lead generation, traffic generation and mobile application development.
During the interview, Alain talked about his first SEO project, the main challenges of SEO and outlined the most common SEO mistakes he encounters regularly.
1) What was your first SEO project, and how did it go?
My first SEO project goes back to the early 2000s when keywords metatags were still useful…
I was in charge of marketing for Air France and search marketing was one of my duties. Time has flown and SEO rules have drastically changed since that era…
Of course in such a context, I am tempted to say SEO was pretty easy and definitely not as challenging as nowadays !
2) What are the main challenges of SEO in 2021 ?
The main challenges remain basically the same, namely to provide our clients with the best expertise to help them grow their business through SEO. This task is of course more complex each year due to the technological changes in the SEO environment. For example, Web Core Vitals are now a big part of the equation and we spend more time working on website structures and technologies than in the past.
However, that doesn’t mean that content is any less of a part of that equation, and so we struggle on both sides. We are also seeing a shift towards SXO (a comprehensive set of onsite and offsite SEO, CRO and UX activities aimed at getting the attention of as many users as possible through organic traffic) which is ultimately the merger between human behavior and bot expectations.
I am deeply convinced that the future of SEO – beyond the technical aspects – stands into our ability to match clients expectations and behaviors when browsing.
3) What is your favourite SEO software ?
I will not surprise you to name SEMRush or Screaming Frog but we also use a more recent and simpler tool called sitechecker.pro which gives clients a quick understanding of their challenges in terms of on-site optimization.
I particularly recommend this tool for website audits in the perspective of collecting clear and actionable insights.
4) What is the most common SEO mistake you see people making?
The most common mistake for years is to strictly focus on the most obvious and most typed keywords while underestimating the long tail.
Most clients only consider their performance based on top keywords and struggle to improve ranking within a very limited bundle of search terms. We try to make them considering the whole search traffic provided by all potential keywords and potential web pages.
Optimizing the home page is not the alpha and omega of SEO….
5) What is a typical low-hanging fruit optimization to make in SEO for e-commerce?
It is pretty hard to identify the best quick win among a complex set of possibilities but as already mentioned – and even more important in the e-commerce industry – I recommend to consider SEO from a global perspective by optimizing content based on a long tail approach.
Conversions are not only driven by a bunch of top keywords, for which competition is often bloody, but they’re the addition of all searches including those that generate very few occurrences but high rankings.
In that perspective, I believe that Verbolia has done a tremendous job to allow companies with large catalogues to optimize their long tail strategy thanks to its platform.
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