We are happy to present an interview with Jérôme Moussay who deals with SEO for BlaBlaCar. If his name seems familiar, you may have seen him in the first edition of WeLoveSEO. We are grateful to Jérôme for taking the time to answer these questions.
Here you will learn more about the day to day life of Jérôme and find out about BlaBlaCar.
Hello Jérôme, can you introduce yourself in 140 characters?
In SEO since 2006; I worked for 7 years in offices on many sites with high throughput and now I steer the SEO at BlaBlaCar.
Which company do you work for and what is the nature of your job?
I’ve worked at BlaBlaCar since August 2013 as the Head of SEO. So I take care of steering the international SEO strategy while formulating all of the technical and editorial recommendations for in house teams. There is a key evangelising function to my work, especially aimed at all those whose actions have an impact (whether direct or indirect) on SEO. Reporting back also represents a significant part of my work, especially in a company such as BlaBlaCar where data is really part of our DNA.
How many sites do you work on?
I am currently working on 16 international websites and this number will continue to increase given the speed of our expansion. Since early 2015, we have launched in five new countries: India, Hungary, Romania, Croatia and Serbia.
This dimension of international SEO throws up some very interesting issues. I had the opportunity to speak at the industry event “WeLoveSEO” where I used an example of Ukraine. This is quite unusual, since the majority of Ukrainians do their web search in Russian on google.com.ua. I always try to see if a local issue can be applied in any other countries, with a view to improving our entire platform.
What are the key performance indicators that you follow in your SEO / SEM strategy?
There can be a multitude of KPI, depending on the nature of the audience that is being addressed.
– As regards the KPI oriented SEO, I obviously monitor the positions and the evolution of our coverage in SERP. I also monitor all engine activity and the changing rate of active pages through Botify. The evolution of the number of referring domains is also an important indicator for me of our reputation and our ability to generate or acquire more links.
– Among the KPI traffic and conversion, I am changing several unique visits into repeats, with conversion objectives as defined by Google Analytics. I am also working on getting exposure for our mobile App.
What are your daily tasks?
As with many people who work in SEO, I would say that there is not a typical day, you never know what is around the corner.
Recurring tasks are obviously still there to be done, both in terms of monitoring and doing a little spade work here and there, but they are often punctuated by interactions with other jobs. These may include loan developments, moving products, optimisation with content editors, localisation issues etc. This is also an interesting aspect which is an integral part of many SEO projects.
On what occasions do you use myposeo?
I categorize it into two types of usage:
1. Monitoring the daily variations in the SERP rankings. Watching every day may seem unnecessary when working in agencies (at least that was my point of view), but this is important when you are in the heart of the action with advertisers. This can help identify problems that might have eluded you when using other tools.
2. Being able to do impromptu analysis on a sample of defined keywords, in particular with reference to the competition’s strategy and output.
Which are the top three tools you use every day?
It is difficult to limit it to just three, so i will do five: myposeo, Botify, Google Webmaster Tools, Google Analytics, Ahrefs.
What tools would be useful but don’t yet exist?
There are so many tools on the market that it is already difficult to test them all. I think it would be a tool capable of scanning all the pages that generate social activity on your site and your competitors, and one that would make suggestions of “smart” content creation.
Are you contactable on the various social media platforms?
Yes, mainly on LinkedIn and Twitter.
Thank you to Jérôme for giving us this interview which allowed us to learn more about the day to day life of a SEO expert.
If you also wish us to share your experience and have a dedicated article on your business, do not hesitate to contact us !
Carol-Ann
Marketing manager @myposeo, community manager and writer.
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