For this week’s Fast Five interview, we met with Loïc Hélias, Head of SEO at Decathlon, the world’s largest sports retailer. With over 10 years experience in the SEO industry helping some of the biggest brands develop their SEO strategy and increase their growth, Loïc Hélias is a recognized SEO expert and seasonal speaker. During the interview, Loïc told us how he got started in SEO and shared with us the upcoming challenges in SEO and e-commerce.
- What was your first SEO project, and how did it go?
Following a career change about 12 years ago, I started in SEO. At the time, it was for an online shop selling hairdressing equipment. My mission was to unlock the company’s turnover.
- What will be the main challenges of SEO in 2022 ?
I have several challenges for 2022!
First of all, on a personal level, I would say that one of my priorities is to further strengthen the growth of the Decathlon marketplace. Another challenge would be to create synergies with the different branches of the Decathlon group worldwide and finally, to help Verbolia unleash its full potential!
In general, I think it would be very difficult to do editorial SEO in the same way as in the past. In fact, I am still quite sceptical about the new algorithms…
For example, the deployment of OpenAI GPT-3 is already reshaping the SEO game. With GPT-3, anyone is able to generate content simply by “copy and paste”. The value of GPT-3 lies in its ability to do the work of an editor so that it is no longer necessary to have an editor. Content generation will no longer be a differential criterion. Nonetheless, it will be necessary to evaluate the quality of the copywriting and see if it meets the desired goal.
- What is your favourite SEO software ?
I don’t rely so much on SEO software. However, for crawling, I would suggest ScreamingFrog. You can use Ahrefs for monitoring and yourtextguru for writing optimised content for SEO.
- What is the most common SEO mistake you see people making?
People don’t monitor technical regressions or often neglect the elements that are performing well! As a result, you can’t go seeking growth for the features that are actually generating revenues for your ecommerce brand.
- What is a typical low-hanging fruit optimization to make in SEO for e-commerce?
First, use the right seo meta tags for the right page. Secondly, establish the connection between the users and the product offering.
