WaQ 2018: Our highlights

I went to the 2018 edition of the Web à Québec, the largest french-speaking digital event in North America. Here’s an overview of Rand Fishkin’s conference, The Search World in 2018.

Rand Fishkin is not only a half god in the eyes of our content marketing team, but also a one of the biggest personalities in marketing, more especially in SEO. He co-founded MOZ and more recently SparkToro.

This SEO guru clearly understood the importance of adapting a presentation to its audience. #poutine

He also presented a table showing the breakdown of searches on major web properties. Google Images represents nearly a quarter! Why don’t we pay more attention to it?

Other shared thought: have you ever wonder who owned the three most important search platforms, Google, Google Image and YouTube?

Another point on which he insisted was the “move from SERP Ranking (search engine result page) to the SERP Features.

He pointed that features have a huge impact on the CTR and that, although features may seem less effective from an SEO point of view, the possibilities in terms of functionalities are constantly multiplying.

He then addressed the issue of transferring results to responses, saying that now almost half of all searches receive no clicks.

But why would Google sacrifice revenues from clicks on highly profitable ads by offering responses?

Google’s willing to lose a lot of short-term revenue in exchange for addictive search behavior.

– Rand Fishkin

To Google, a better user experience (more responses) today means more long-term use of its services.

According to Rand Fishkin, here are 8 large fields that will remain important in 2018 for a good positioning on Google.

1. Content – Is your content relevant, of high quality, and answers to user’s intents?
2. Domain quality – A high authority domain can help positioning. What’s your DA score?
3. Links – Editorial links from domains with high authority are still very important for Google’s algorithm.
4. Query Satisfaction – Does Google receive signals that suggest your page answers (or not) user questions? #BounceRate
5. Keywords – The right use of keywords always counts. What tools do you use? Here’s one.
6. User Experience – Think fast, think easy and intuitive, on all platforms. How could it be improved?
7. Technical and crawl – And yes, accessibility to indexing robots is still important. But despite some progress, they still do not understand what is not HTML.
8. Personalization – Geolocation, device type, search history and time of querys can have an influence on the results.

Have we told you we have Rand tattooed on the heart? No need to imagine my excitement, just look at this photo!

If you found this article interesting, I highly recommends to watch Rand’s Whiteboard Friday.

Did you go to WaQ? What caught your attention the most?