Testimonies

Bureau Veritas passes with flying colors search engines inspection

Because of a website presenting all of its services, SEO quicky became a vital process for Bureau Veritas in the development of online notoriety.

Bureau Veritas is an international group established in 140 countries, throughout a network of 700 agencies and laboratories. The company delivers evaluation services of conformity in various fields: quality, health, safety, environment and social responsibility.

To present its activities, the company has a corporate website which is managed from its headquarter in Paris and developed in the United States. Since 2002, the website is involved in SEO.

“At the launching of the third version of the website, in 2002, it became obvious for Bureau Veritas to get involved in a SEO process”, points out Patricia Le Goff, Bureau Veritas Communications manager.

Advised by the agency Web Ogilvy, the group chose Aposition, SEO specialist. “We wanted to be visible on search engines not only on our trademark, but also on strategic keywords”, reports Patricia Le Goff.

A first page in search engines not so easy to get: even if the number of competitors on a world scale is still limited, the group faces a multitude of local competitors.

Among the chosen keywords, we’ve been focusing on those related to unknown activities of Bureau Veritas.

After a technical audit bringing to the fore the website’s incompatibility with search engine spiders per some criteria, the pages were corrected by Bureau Veritas. Then, the semantic audit was launched. At that time, the two actors defined together the keywords to be positioned on.

Once these informations defined, the website content was optimized. Made in-house, the content was then improved by Aposition to fit the search engines needs.
A script to rebuild pages was implemented to let search engine spiders correctly access all the pages. Otherwise, only the top frame would have been indexed.

A change of URLs remains a perilous operation for SEO
 
With a new version launched in May 2007, Aposition’s work changed: an expert of the agency has been assisting Bureau Veritas in the writing of technical specifications. “Aposition’s work started in the very beginning. That way, meta-tags can be managed by the webmaster and can be adapted to each page”, say Patricia Le Goff.

Meanwhile, since the website URLs had changed, a redirecting system was implemented in order to avoid 404 pages in the search engine indexes. Thanks to it, there was no loss of traffic and spiders were redirected to the new pages.

A change of URLs remains a perilous operation for SEO and can jeopardize the work done previouly.
Certain rules must be followed , the use of 301 redirects in particular.

Today, Bureau Veritas is positioned on the first page of the search engine results for 90 % of the followed keywords. This success is partially linked with the improved website content.

Because of these data and the wesite development, new keywords have just been defined with Aposition to go forward in increasing visibility. This collaboration could concern other branches of the group, that is, no less than about sixty international websites: “we must still determine if it is better for our subsidiaries to take a local SEO agency, expert of the market, or - on the contrary – to gather expertise in only one provider”, underlines Patricia Le Goff.

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