Let’s look at the statistics. Type “élections USA” (French top query for “US elections”) and you see that tf1.lci.fr (news channel website, referred hereafter as “LCI”) hits the 1st rank in google.fr with a French IP (todays’s data). Great stuff indeed, because the query is currently bringing a lot of traffic on the French market.

The query “Obama” is as well, but LCI did not rank as high for it. Consequently LCI opts for sponsored links. The current adwords cost-per-click of “obama” query with a “broad ” match type is currently worth € 0.96 ($ 1.22) while “obama video” query hits € 2.22 ($ 2.83), a relatively expensive keyword. There are nevertheless very good opportunities in employing keywords such as “obama muslim” – currently worth € 0.05 – that in average has brought a heavy traffic in France in the past 12 months!

The stats show that LCI has been right to invest on the PPCs, but the most interesting part is how tough the competition is within the Google News ranking. Why’s that? Well, It’s been weeks that the Google News box appears as the 1st organic result for those top queries and it’s of course cheaper (it’s free) to get the traffic through Google News than Google Adwords…

This phenomenon is now happening for all queries. Type “pizza nyc” and you’ll see Google Maps on top. Google the name of your favourite actress and you’ll see Google Images or Google video on the top of the list. The boxes are actually not recent, yet you’ll notice that these boxes appear more and more on top of organic results. I’m not even yet talking about new boxes such as Google Transit (you’ll know what time the next bus is) or worse, the new Google products such as Google showtimes (so you know quickly enough where to go to see Quantum of solace close to your place).

What it means for seo:

• if your textual content appears on top of the other organic links in the seach engine result page, internet users might still have to scroll down in order to click on the link to your site. The top of the Google page is indeed full of PPCs and boxes.
• It is now more crucial than ever to make sure all your rich media content is fully optimised. Rich media means images, videos, news and, soon coming, audio documents, etc.
• It also means that Google is trying to push its own products using data it buys from authority websites. For instance Google would buy feeds of cinema showtimes and serve them on top of organic results in response to your query. So negociating partnerships with Google becomes increasingly important.

On-page SEO (vs. off-page SEO based on popularity and therefore on inlinks) is not dead yet in spite of the fact that search engines increasingly understand all computer languages and all technologies. e-marketing is going back to the basics and its related simple but noneless fundamental questions: what is your target audience? What content are they looking for? Under which format?