François Goube of OnCrawl Talks Data Science, SEO, & Other Non-Intuitive Marketing Strategies
By: Kage Spatz
Tags: Marketers, Business, Marketing, Data Science, SEO

With data science, marketing becomes more reliable and decisions can be made based on solid predictions.

As a part of my Marketing Strategy Series, I’m talking with my fellow marketing pros at the top of their game to give entrepreneurs and marketers an inside look at proven strategies you might also be able to leverage to grow your business. Today I had the pleasure of talking with François Goube.

François is the Founder and CEO at OnCrawl, an award-winning SEO platform. A serial entrepreneur, he has founded several companies and is actively involved in the startup ecosystem. He loves to analyze scientific Google publications and is a real enthusiast of semantic analysis and search engines.

Thank you so much for doing this! Can you tell us a story about what brought you to this specific career path?

Thank you for the opportunity. It’s a real pleasure to contribute to Authority Magazine! When I try to connect the dots, I think about two things.

First, as far as I can remember, there were computers in my home. So when I had the choice between working for a Fortune 500 company or joining a bunch of geeks developing things, the call for freedom and creativity was too strong and my appetite for technology too great, so I started my career in an IT company.

Next, my own parents were freelancers so I didn’t grow up with the idea of a “boss” in mind. Starting my own business was something very natural.

I have always wanted to build things on top of complex technology to ease the daily routine of people. This was one of the main goals when I started my first company, which was a job search engine now available in more than 15 countries.

Creating a search engine propelled me into the world of SEO. Naturally, I decided to create a second company, Propulseo, an SEO consulting agency. Since then, I have never left this industry.

In 2013, I decided to partner with one of my friends, Tanguy Moal, to create what was supposed to be a one-time data project. We developed a crawler technology specifically for the needs of the largest French e-commerce website, called Cdiscount. When we got the first results out of our own platform, we realized that we wanted to make these advanced search technologies accessible to the greatest number of SEO professionals. A few months later, OnCrawl was officially born! Again, when we built Oncrawl, we wanted to democratize Big Data technologies to all web players.

What industry are you in and what makes the company you are marketing different than others in your space?

OnCrawl is situated at the crossroads of SEO and Data Science. Our core business is to provide reliable and comprehensive data to help marketers open Google’s black box. We make SEO accessible and easy to use as well as making a technology formerly reserved for big players available to the greatest number.

But what differentiates us radically from other players in our industry is the technical nature of the platform and the implementation of artificial intelligence in our technology.

A year ago, we officially decided to orient our SEO platform towards data science. We are convinced that data science can prove to be a major advantage for SEO professionals. Not only in terms of saving time thanks to the automation provided by machine learning algorithms, but also thanks to the reliability of the reports and predictions produced.

Can you dive into why Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is an important part of any long-term marketing plan?

Yes, of course, I do believe that SEO is an important part of any long-term marketing strategy. Why? There is a simple reason: if your business aims to sell products/services online or needs visibility to make its business work, how can it succeed if it is not visible to its potential customers? In the long term, a good SEO strategy allows you to position your website organically on strategic keywords. It is always more reassuring for a user to click on a result that appears in search results thanks to its relevance rather than on an ad that may not meet their needs.

SEO is becoming more and more important in the marketing field. According to a recent Conductor survey, 66% of digital marketers say that organic search was their top-performing online channel in 2019. I believe that this channel will continue to grow in the next few years.

What “3 Non-Intuitive Marketing Strategies” have been most effective for you in that industry?

An often forgotten but extremely effective SEO strategy is the optimization of your crawl budget. Google has a budget allocated to analyze your website. Once this budget is exhausted, whether or not it has finished analyzing your pages, it will leave your site and move on to another one. It is therefore very important that Google spends its time on your important pages. For this, I advise you to spot your important pages and to optimize them to the maximum, both in their content and their technical health, and to direct a maximum of link juice to them. For example, one of our users managed to increase organic traffic by 70% in one year by improving Google crawl rate on important pages. Before SEO actions were taken on this website, it was wasting a large portion of its crawl budget on useless pages. After SEO revamping, conversions increased by 68%.

Then, as I mentioned earlier, I think that machine learning is still too little used in SEO. These algorithms can impress but with a few hours of training, it’s easy to master them and get reliable predictions like your SEO traffic a few months from now, or which keywords will bring you the most traffic in the next few weeks. It is also possible to automatically generate content already optimized for SEO.

Finally, this advice is not specifically directed at SEO but rather at SaaS entrepreneurs. We have found a real added value in the support we provide to our clients, whether it is an accompaniment by qualified experts or a conversational marketing strategy via the implementation of a chatbot. I think this factor is even more important with the period we are going through.

If you were only allowed to run paid ads on 1 platform (in your industry) over the next 12 months, what would it be and why?

Although our core business is SEO, we also have a multi-channel paid acquisition strategy. One of the channels that works best for us is LinkedIn. Our audience is very active and converses a lot on this social network. It is therefore one of the channels that allows us to generate not the greatest number of leads, but definitely the most qualitative leads.

How do you think data science will impact the future of marketing? Why should marketers use data science to build their strategy?

I think that data science is going to help solve many of the problems that marketers are facing today. How can you predict your online performances? How can you save time on low-value and repetitive tasks? How can you manipulate and understand big data volumes and share them with all departments within the company? Thanks to AI, we now have the answers to those questions.

Data science addresses these issues by removing multiple roadblocks. First of all, there is the problem of the mass of data that we have to deal with. We are receiving more and more data from more and more channels, so much that it is impossible to process it manually. Machine learning algorithms make it possible to process this data automatically and obtain reliable reports.

The second major aspect of data science coupled with marketing is prediction. We have already mentioned this element several times in this interview, but getting solid predictions regarding your traffic, sales or revenue is an undeniable competitive advantage.

I think that marketing teams will have to develop profiles such as Data Scientist, IT Director or Growth Analyst who can work together to cross-analyze a big volume of data and use them to find new ways to optimize their strategy and capture low-hanging fruits.

With data science, marketing becomes more reliable and decisions can be made based on solid predictions.

What quote would you say has inspired you the most in your life or career?

I can think of many examples but I find this quote from Mark Twain very inspiring: “Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines! Sail away from safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails.”

I like the idea of being able to take risks and think outside the box to build something you’re particularly proud of. In life in general and in entrepreneurship in particular, the fear of failure and its consequences too often take precedence over our ambitions and dreams. It is important to believe in yourself and in your projects and to always give your best so as to never have regrets.

One final question: As a professional marketer, you are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be?

One of the causes that I consider to be crucial is access to education for all. First of all, it’s an inherent value in our business as our primary objective was to democratize SEO. But beyond that, today there are more than 61 million children in the world who do not have access to primary education. As a father of two young children, this figure is particularly touching to me. We are currently preparing a marketing campaign to donate funds to Plan International. Education is extremely important to give all children equal opportunities and to enable them to fulfill their dreams.

Thank you so much for sharing these fantastic insights!